Children’s Hospital and Laurelhurst Agree Life’s Better Together

After three years of dispute, Seattle Children’s Hospital and the Laurelhurst Community Club presented an agreement to the Committee on the Built Environment at City Hall today. The upshot is that Children’s gets to add the 350 beds it was looking for (for a total of 600), while accepting stricter limits on its development.

Now, the Master Plan approval is in the City Council’s court, and with the LCC on the sidelines, it should be an easy lay-in. Final deliberation should take place beginning February 25.

To get LCC buy-in, Children’s agreed to limit the main campus’s total square footage to 2.125 million square feet, with a maximum building height of 140 feet (also limited to a percentage of the footprint). Children’s property on the other side of Sand Point Way will not be developed, and in fact, the hospital agreed not to expand into residential areas for 50 years.

Much of this looks like actual compromise. Maybe we can get Children’s and the LCC to weigh in on 520 and the Viaduct replacement.