Allentown, WA

SIX HOMES, ONE FOOTBALL stadium, a 400-foot yacht, and a 10-seat submarine on order. What's left to get for the man who has everything? A whole Seattle lakefront neighborhood, maybe?

Keep thinking. Paul Allen's been there, getting that, too.

Known officially as the South Lake Union Seaport Park redevelopment—and unofficially as Son of the Commons—the city of Seattle is turning the former Naval Reserve base and armory on the lakefront into a 12-acre, $35 million park. In concert, Allen will expand his already considerable investment in the area in hopes of spawning an interconnected marine mecca of boating, dining, tourism, offices, and residences. Allen, through his powerhouse Seattle corporation, Vulcan Northwest, owns more than a million square feet of property in the Lake Union neighborhood. If he strikes a pending deal for 10 more city-owned parcels, he'll add another 223,000 square feet of buildable land. A hotel may also be in the works. Property experts estimate his initial development costs at $400 million.

The project will complete what has become a wide ribbon of Allen developments meandering through the heart of Seattle, from the International District to Pioneer Square to the Regrade to Seattle Center and now to the shores of the busy in-city lake and its uplands. It's another indicator of Allen's remarkable local influence. Unlike his pal and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, who has remained focused on the high-tech industry, Allen not only has become a global communications, entertainment, and sports mogul but also is now Seattle's preeminent new developer and landowner.

Through partnerships with the taxpayer and through his own vast resources, he's reshaping the city's southern portals with trendy office buildings, historic renovations, condominiums, and the football stadium complex. At Seattle Center, Experience Music Project competes with the nearby Space Needle as one of the region's most recognized landmarks. With his big bucks, he rescued the venerable Cinerama, the 845-seat Regrade theater, and is embarking, partly with taxpayer funds, on a 68-acre office park and retail development, Quendall Landing, on the southeastern shore of Lake Washington in Renton.

With Allen's deep pockets—$28 billion—it might be an unnatural act for public officials not to love him. He seems to get zoning and construction permits in record time and carries a big stick politically. In Renton, city officials have pressured a private landowner to sell his Quendall Landing property to Allen and have joined the billionaire in asking the state Legislature to construct a freeway interchange for the massive project.

Renton's leaders, like many local and state officials, are eager to share costs with private partners and get their civic designs off the boards. And Allen often gets laudatory results—the Union Station renovation, for example, earned a top national award for historical preservation and "revitalizing Seattle's transportation system." Likewise, he didn't simply save the Cinerama, he turned it into one of America's cutting-edge high-tech movie houses.

He also gets a good return on investment, sometimes aided substantially by taxpayers. Since 1997, Allen's enterprises have directly and indirectly inked deals that will bring Allen at least $1.04 billion in public funds, plus millions more in property enhancements and other benefits. From his lease at Seattle Center to the billion-dollar Seattle football stadium taxpayers are building with him, the corporate Allen holds a half-dozen partnerships with the public. In return, he has constructed at least $600 million in related private projects with millions more to come, slowly reshaping the regional topography into what figures to be a kind of Allentown. Many of the public and private developments greatly benefit taxpayers, and all richly benefit him and his company (see Paul & the Public, Parts 1 & 2).

But what's the ultimate effect of Allentown? "We're getting lots of goodies, cherries with the fruit cake," says University of Washington urban design expert Folke Nyberg. But "the whole city process at this point has been bent over backwards to get these projects through," he observes. "We're getting something of a hodgepodge. These projects don't seem well coordinated with the city overall.

"There's nothing evil about this. It's progress. But there's a question of who really owns what. What is private, and what is public?"

THAT QUESTION RISES anew along the slumbering southern shores of Lake Union, where Allen and the taxpayers are embarking on their latest venture. It may become another sizable partnership or, in the words of Seattle City Council member Richard Conlin, merely "matching and complimentary projects." But taxpayers have a stake.

The Lake Union Seaport Park is still in the planning stage, and the city only recently took title of the property from the Navy—paying a below-market $3.4 million. Mayor Paul Schell has accepted a $1 million grant from the Kreielsheimer Foundation to help construct a historic ship moorage on the site. Community groups are hoping to raise millions to renovate the armory. The park project also includes a maritime museum, Native American canoe center, and the Center for Wooden Boats.

Besides the development costs, public money may be used for an assortment of joint projects, including a skybridge from the park to an Allen-owned mixed-use building and parking garage across Valley Street, and several planned pedestrian underpasses—one below Aurora Avenue that would connect, among other things, Allen's lake project with EMP.