Renton’s 300-seat Carco Theatre was flooded in December, after Renton leaders initially downplayed the NOAA forecast that predicted we could see the worst flooding ever (see screenshots below). Nearly a year after the flooding of Carco, nothing has been done to reopen the theater. A local non-profit that leased space from Renton and helped community groups prepare programs for public access TV, Puget Sound Access Television, has also been displaced by the flooding.
After more than two years of amassing fines and complaint letters, ION Renton presented Renton officials with a peace offering this past holiday season. In November they let the City know they were serious about getting started with the demolition of the smaller of the two abandoned buildings, and they offered preliminary concepts for a first phase of redevelopment of the site. Residents and nearby businesses have been glad to see the three-story derelict 500 Park Avenue building finally coming down.
ION Renton’s proposed replacement is still preliminary, and has not been widely advertised. I only learned these details from reviewing public records regarding potential upcoming Renton projects. ION Renton’s proposal was prepared for a pre-application meeting, which is a fact-finding introductory meeting where a developer gets advanced input from the city. It would not be fair to be overly judgemental at this early stage, but helpful input is valuable.
From my experience, I think their mixed-use (mostly apartment) proposal fits the existing zoning and could possibly work at this location, but I am concerned that ION Renton has significantly underestimated the costs of construction. I also have some design suggestions and want them to keep more trees.
ION Renton is proposing a 165,000 square foot project with an estimated construction cost of $30.6 million, which works out to be about $185 per square foot. Apartment construction can easily cost $300-$500 per square foot in our area, potentially double the estimate they submitted. Looked at another way, they hope to build 161 apartment units ranging from 1-3 bedrooms for about $190,000 per unit (based on $30.6 million construction, plus about $4 million for the land, minus about $4 million to be spent on retail space instead of apartments) . Building apartments for $190,000 each would be an amazing achievement, and it doesn’t seem possible these days. For comparison, Renton Housing Authority’s 2021 Sunset Oak project created 60 units for $26.6 million, a per-apartment cost of $443,000. ION Renton will currently need to pay mitigation to Renton for Transportation, Parks, Fire, and Schools, and utilities which could add up to $20,000 per unit just in fees.
And the construction costs could go much higher depending on the environmental cleanup effort that would be required. The Department of Ecology had determined this previously-polluted site had been sufficiently cleaned up to support office use by their 1970s-1980s standards. But Ecology’s residential pollution standards are more rigorous than office standards, and their 2026 standards are more strenuous than they were four decades ago.
Renton’s staff review at the pre-application conference addressed this with a broad brush by simply noting the project was “pending environmental review.” My experience says any significant soil cleanup could add millions in costs and years of flowtime to the project.
Hopefully ION Renton is just coming in optimistically about these low costs while preparing for potentially more realistic costs. Who doesn’t like an optimist, right?
Aside from my concerns about costs, their proposal to build multifamily housing seems like a reasonable use, with a few comments/suggestions of my own: demolish the 7-story building before they construct any new apartments to avoid dropping glass and concrete on the work site; add details to the final proposal that create nice street frontages and sidewalk connections (which is required by the zoning); save more of the trees, and find a location on the broader site to replant the trees they are removing.
In conclusion, I’m glad ION Renton is finally getting some of the demolition completed, and kudos to them for bringing a proposal forward for more needed housing. While ION Renton should have kept the office buildings in operational condition until the company was prepared to demolish and rebuild, I wish them success in achieving their vision for mixed use on their site. It will still be a long process for them to achieve approval and a viable financial plan, so they must remain focussed on completing the demolition of the seven-story building and making their property safe and presentable until building permits are issued.
Demolition is well underway on the smaller of the two derelict Garden Plaza buildings on Park Avenue. This building, sold by Boeing to ION Renton in 2021, was once known as the 10-13 building. I used to enjoy having a bright, convenient office in this building and I was sad to see it unnecessarily fall into ruin.
Major demolition has not yet begun on the seven story building. It’s height and reinforced concrete structure will make it significantly more difficult to bring down.
There are no approved plans for new construction on this site. Ecological concerns will complicate construction of any future use, particularly residential uses.
For further background on these buildings click here.
Renton Municipal Code:
“301.3.11.1 Abatement: A building or structure accessory thereto that remains vacant and open to entry after the required compliance date is found and declared to be a public nuisance. The code official is hereby authorized to summarily abate the violation by closing the building to unauthorized entry. The costs of abatement shall be a lien against the real property and may be collected from the owner in the manner provided by law.”
I wish Renton’s top officials would read the Renton Municipal Code. It may take them a few weeks, but it will dramatically help them better understand their options when faced with problems.
This week’s Renton Reporter quotes our Mayor as saying (incorrectly) that the city had two choices for dealing with the abandoned Park Avenue buildings; buying the buildings, or just waiting years for the owners to do something.
But there was always a third option, the best one, that is perfectly clear in Renton’s Code: correcting the nuisance and billing the owner. I’ve been advocating for this option all along. This option would have saved these buildings, giving the owners an asset worth about $30 million dollars in today’s market, and saving North Renton from years of blight and crime.
By ignoring this preferred option, Renton achieved the following outcomes: the buildings are now in ruin; threats from fire, falling and other hazards grow worse by the day; the demolition permit, if it’s ever used, will leave a hazardous and unusable parking garage in place; barbed wire will soon frame the blighted site; the building ownership appears to be in a state of stalled foreclosure; and the process to get back to a healthy occupancy of this space might require environmental cleanup costs (per the Mayor’s estimate) in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Since the land value is assessed at $7 million, no one will want to spend $100 million cleaning it.
The Mayor is also quoted in the Renton Reporter as holding back on fines, even though the city regularly threatens residents with prompt $100-per-day fines for minor issues like not mowing grass or not scrubbing someone else’s graffiti off their fence. Regarding the Southern California firm that owns the deathtrap Park Avenue buildings, the Mayor is quoted as saying the city was “not fining them because we don’t normally fine businesses that in good faith are going to be building in Renton.”
If reading through Renton’s code was too hard, Renton’s leaders could have done a 30-second google search to get the advice from an organization that Renton helps fund just for such guidance, the Municipal Research Service Center. The MRSC suggests immediate repair of hazards by the city followed by billing the owner, and does not discuss buying the offending building as the Mayor suggested.
The City should still act to abate the hazards in this building before someone gets seriously injured or killed, although the City has already squandered the opportunity to save stakeholders tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. And the next time one of these buildings goes vacant, Renton leaders should treat our ordinances as the law, and not a “pirate code” that can be arbitrarily altered at will.
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The MRSC guidance, Mayor’s full quotes, and the City’s Property Maintenance Code are all shown below, for reference. (Background on these buildings can be found here.)
I received a link to an Instagram Post which shows the inside of the dilapidated Park Avenue (Garden Plaza) buildings. The owner of the Instagram account states in one of the comments that the photos were sent to him, so the time of the photos is unknown.
I also stumbled upon a youtube video from August 17, with thousands of views, showing the hazardous state of the inside of the buildings. It was obvious that no steps had been taken by the building owner to remediate interior hazards as of the time these images were captured.
The photos and video underscore the danger to anyone moving about within these buildings, and the fire danger these buildings represent to the community. Recently, even Renton’s firefighters and police officers have been instructed not to go into these buildings unless there is a critical life-saving emergency need. No one from the public should enter them. I’ve only included a few sample screenshots from the Instagram post in this blog entry.
The link to the photos was sent to me after this six-minute television news story was broadcast about these dangerous buildings and the negative impact the buildings are having on the community.
For background on the history of these vacant buildings, see more related blog posts here.
The buildings still could have been saved when I wrote my first blog post on the topic in June of 2023, here.
I’ve written several posts about the derelict office buildings on Park Avenue, including how they got to this condition, what is currently being done about them, and what the future may hold for them.
To help residents and businesses better understand this issue, “For a Better Renton” has asked me to host one or more conversation walking tours around the outside of these buildings (staying in the public space outside the fence, so no personal protective equipment is required). Since I used to work in these buildings, and I also served on City Council from 1994-2021, I bring some unique experience to this discussion.
I want to keep the walk to a manageable group size to support a conversation, so we’re asking people to RSVP to 4aBetterRenton@gmail.com and let us know if you would like to participate. We’ll add additional times if we get more interest than we can reasonably accommodate in this first session.
The walk will begin at Park Avenue and North 6th Street, at 2:00 this coming Sunday, September 7, and last for about one hour. There’s not any parking on these block of Park Ave or North 6th, and nearby lots are private or blocked off, so if you are driving I recommend you look for parking a couple blocks west, on Pelly, Wells or Williams.
The following Saturday there will be a second walk around the neighborhood impacted by the Renton High School eminent-domain expansion, another subject I’ve written extensively about. That walk will be hosted by Sarah Becker.
Below is the official announcement for both walks by “For a Better Renton,” which includes additional details:
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For A Better Renton (www.4aBetterRenton.com) is hosting its first two “Field Trips” on September 7th and 13th. The purpose of these field trips is to give Renton residents a clear first-hand understanding of some of the issues facing our city, our neighbors, and the direct impact on our taxes, health, future, ability to draw new businesses and residents to our city, growth, and pride in where we live and work.
PARK AVENUE DERELICT OFFICE BUILDING
We’ve asked Randy Corman, who served on Renton City Council for 28 years, 1994-2021 (with six years as Renton Council President) to lead the field trip and discussion at the derelict Park Avenue Building. Randy was also with Boeing, as a mechanical engineer and manager, for 33 years, and worked in the building we will ‘touring’.
Date: September 7th
Time: 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Meeting location: Park Ave & 6th (directly across the street from Mighty Mugs Coffee Stand)
We will commence walking the entire block, around the external of the building. We will start at the old main entrance and then work our way along Park first, then to 5th and then around the backside of the building. We will be joined by a business owner who has been directly impacted by the activities at this derelict building since it’s abandonment by the owner and property manager, ION Renton and AAA Management. We will share information on what the Mayor and City Council has/has not done regarding addressing this building, the current state, the potential future state, and Department of Ecology reports.
Please RSVP at 4aBetterRenton@gmail.com. We look forward to seeing you there.
RENTON HIGH SCHOOL EXPANSION/EMINENT DOMAIN
Date: September 13th
Time: 10:30 – 11:30 (with the potential to extend to 12 noon)
Meeting location: Ikea Performing Arts Center parking lot – right next to Renton High School.
We will commence the field trip by walking clockwise down 2nd , take a right at Tobin, and continue on Logan. We will likely turn left on Logan and walk to the corner of Logan and Airport, then backtrack down Logan to 2nd.
We have asked Sarah to lead this field trip. She has spent a significant amount of time speaking at both City Council meetings and Renton School Board meetings. She was an active leader on helping secure over 500 signatures on a petition, along with 20+ businesses, and 3 associations – and the petition was presented to the school board and City Council and Mayor. She continues to stay abreast of all actions by the school board and city (the city owns Tobin Street).
We will also be joined by John Houston who has vivid memories of the trauma caused by the Renton School Board who used eminent domain to get his families property under the pretense of building a school – which they never did – and instead sold his families property to a developer. John, along with the support of Senator Hasegawa, got SB 5142 unanimously passed this year and signed into law by Governor Ferguson – though it does not help John and his family, it will help others whose property is taken under eminent domain. (Unfortunately it does not impact the 20+ homes (owners and renters) and 8+ businesses who are being displaced by the Renton School Board – again!) Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We will be joined by at least one, if not several, homeowners who are being displaced under this most recent ’eminent domain’ tactic by the Renton School Board.
Please rsvp at 4aBetterRenton@gmail.com
And a few other gentle reminders: RSVP’ing is important as we will have handouts/information for you to take home. And John will have a few of his recently published books on hand for sale. Please dress accordingly as we will be hosting these field trips regardless of weather. And wear comfortable shoes!
Renton’s former Red Lion Hotel and Convention Center, once a vital anchor of our Renton Village Shopping Center before it got destroyed during use as a pandemic-era shelter, continues to cost Renton taxpayers money. As of this week the hotel will cost Renton taxpayers another $600,000, and will cost Renton’s insurance carrier another $900,000, for a total of $1.5 million. The money settles a lawsuit that the hotel owners filed against Renton asserting that Renton’s 2020 zoning changes, which restricted the size of homeless shelters, lessened their opportunities and profits on the property.
While I have not been party to the legal negotiations and won’t comment to the validity of any of their specific claims, I will point out that the public record shows they purchased the hotel for about $8.8 million, and sold it to King County less than ten years later for $36.2 million. This represents more than 400 % return, or about 40% per year on their investment. They also reportedly rented the property to King County for $330,000 per month for several years, for an additional payoff of somewhere between 6-10 million dollars.
The deathtrap buildings on Park Avenue may potentially be falling into foreclosure according to the King County Taxpayer website. A foreclosure, whether for tax or lending reasons, would further complicate resolution of the dire safety issues that have gone on much too long with these buildings.
The website also shows that the owners, ION Renton, have been hit-and-miss with tax payments in recent years, although they appear to be caught up now.
The data can be found at the King County website here. When you access the site, the parcel number is 7564600055.
This evening there has been another fire call to the abandoned Park Avenue Buildings. Christopher Krystofiak, a firefighter with the Renton Fire Authority who helps with online media communication gave me the following details at 9:00 PM:
“Randy, it was black smoke from the roof. We have determined that all fire responses to this building will be defensive only due to the open elevator shafts and damage/hazards inside the building. Crews eventually located a small fire, quickly extinguished it and are releasing most of the apparatus as we speak.”
These buildings require an urgent fire response every time they catch on fire, as they lack the code required fire suppression systems. The systems were mined out of the buildings by metal thieves after lax security invited trespassers. If a fire spreads from floor to floor through the open elevator shafts it could turn into an inferno.
I had published my most recent article on these abandoned buildings ten days ago here, and that article includes links to earlier stories on documents concerning these buildings.
Renton’s 4-5-060 code is clear. If Renton’s building official determines that a building is an immediate danger to occupants or those nearby, the official should post it with a message that says “This Structure Is Unsafe and Its Occupancy Has Been Prohibited by the Code Official.” It is then unlawful for anyone to enter unless they are officially repairing it. This is commonly known as the city putting a “red tag” on a building. The building official should then order the work to be done to bring the building up to code. If the danger is imminent, the code official is allowed to make emergency repairs to prevent imminent danger. The cost of the emergency repairs will be temporarily covered by the jurisdiction, but billed to the owner of the building.
The buildings on Park Avenue reached an unsafe condition two years ago, with unabated fire damage, disabled fire protection that could cause a seven-story inferno, blocked fire exits, broken windows falling from 7 stories up, open elevator shafts, mold build-up from rain and fire hose water, biohazards from human occupancy without sanitation, and the attractive nuisance of being a dystopian former aerospace office that looks like it belongs in the game “Fallout.”
It took a year and a half, and much cajoling from residents, to finally get the city to follow the code-prescribed procedures to visibly “red-tag” the building. For months the city effectively just kept writing letters to the building owner threatening that an even more firm letter would be coming if they didn’t take action.
Just two weeks ago a teen in Colorado was convicted of murder for throwing a rock which punctured a car windshield and killed the driver. Thrown objects from Renton’s derelict Park Avenue buildings could readily cause a similar death.
Four months after Renton’s Public Safety Chair assured the public that she was taking the safety of of the Park Avenue buildings very seriously, a social media post now shows evidence of office furniture being hurled from the taller of the two buildings onto Park Avenue below.
This is not the first time that objects have been thrown from high up in this building, but I have not previously seen photographic evidence of objects being thrown into the traffic lanes.
Renton’s Public Safety Chair, Carmen Rivera, shared an entry on several social media sites on January 13 stating “We remain committed to ensuring the property is secured and that we can move toward a resolution that benefits the community.” In the same post she assured the public the property would be secured and patrolled.
A month later, I documented here that the property had not in fact been adequately secured. Please see that post for complete background on this topic.
These buildings are desperately out of compliance, and the City of Renton has every right to go onto the property and physically abate them, and bill the out-of-state ownership group for the cost. To meet code, the deathtrap buildings need to be emptied of occupants, and all doors and windows secured with either the originally designed glazing or architectural panels that match the building. Cleanup should occur around the buildings to eliminate blight. The buildings should then be surveilled, with electronic means and perhaps an occupant residing in a trailer onsight, until the buildings can demolished per an approved permit. I would also like to see water service restored to the buildings, with at least temporary fire protective equipment, so that the open-elevator-shaft, waterless building does not turn into an inferno that threatens our entire city.
If the City had conducted emergency physical abatement when many of us had first recommended it, these buildings could still be valuable and serviceable, and could continue to support thousands of jobs in Renton.
A month ago the North Renton Neighborhood turned out in force at a Renton council meeting, to beg for action in resolving the hazards and blight caused by the dystopian Park Avenue Buildings. These formerly beautiful office buildings were allowed to swiftly fall into ruin over the past 18 months.
When the damage begun in 2023, many of us encouraged the city to save the multi-million dollar building complex by repairing the property at owner expense through the enforcement and abatement process defined Renton’s Code Section 4-5-130 . To meet code, the buildings needed some windows replaced, water dried out, some lights left on, and ideally (with owner coordination) a caretaker or non-profit tenant to keep the buildings looking occupied…the precise steps any good homeowner would take before an extended trip away from home. The City could take the action to abate the building, and the expense could be billed to the owner and/or placed as a lien on the property. The money would also come back to the city through property taxes many times over (as opposed to losing all property tax associated with the building, which is ultimately what happened).
Those of us who worked for Boeing have great memories of the sprawling company office campus in North Renton, with some of the nicest buildings being 535 N 6th street and 500 Park Avenue North. Both buildings, built in the 1980s, offered excellent work spaces and conference rooms, easy parking, and nice views. Thousands of us either worked-in or visited these warm, inviting engineering and logistics centers, sometime around the clock when big projects were in-work, letting ourselves in using our badges that functioned like key-cards. Boeing always cared for them meticulously, the way the company oversees all of its properties. Company employees affectionately referred to the buildings by their company codes; the larger one was the 10-16 and the smaller one the 10-13.
These buildings were sold by Boeing to an LLC owned by a San Diego Company in 2021 as part of a property consolidation , and unfortunately the buildings have been vacant ever since. During that time Renton started seeing worsening crime problems throughout the area. Renton also saw dramatic increases in the number of people experiencing homelessness in Renton, a challenge actually made worse by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. The agency bussed hundreds of chronically homeless individuals from downtown Seattle to Renton hotels, and when an individual broke too many rules, the Authority would evict them out of their hotel space and onto Renton streets.
While Boeing never would have let it happen under their watch, the buildings under new ownership are beginning to look abandoned, with broken windows on all sides, doors that appear boarded up and barricaded, metal gratings and fixtures stolen for scrap, and HVAC and electric service stripped of parts.
Two weeks ago there was a fire on the first floor of the taller building, and the Renton Fire Authority extinguished the flames and rescued two people and a dog from the roof. It’s obvious that people have been entering these buildings without authorization. Broken windows have been covered with wood to block intruders, but it does not appear that anyone is currently doing fire repair and remediation work, like drying out the interior before mold sets in. The other building, the 10-13, is missing some of it’s upper windows, letting the elements get in.
