Tim Schlecht
Stix brewmaster Tom Munoz’s business has taken a hit since construction began on the city’s 2.6-mile trolley route.
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The party starts today for the opening of Seattle's new toy, the South Lake Union Streetcar. But a number of business owners along the route aren't feeling so festive, still smarting from more than a year of construction and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales.
"They've crushed our business, especially our lunch business, and it's still happening," says Jay Farias, owner of Stix Pizza & Brewing Co., located on Lake Union near the northern terminus of the route.
"You can't print what I have to say," adds Brian Still, general manager of nearby Daniel's Broiler. "It was pretty traumatic as far as the construction itself. They put a fence up around my whole building; it had a pretty severe impact for business."
Still wouldn't say how much business has been down, but he said it's starting to come back and adds that he's hopeful for the future. But Farias, who says Stix's receipts were down 35 percent to 40 percent during the height of construction, notes that his business is only back up 10 percent now that the dust has started to settle.
"We're still struggling; we have to see a dramatic increase from this transit system," he says. "The [city's] feeling is that it's short-term pain for long-term gain. That may be so, but I hope that we're still here after the trolley's up and running."
Buoyed by what they perceive as developers' decision to change the neighborhood's name from Cascade to South Lake Union, and amused by the unfortunate acronym that's created if one refers to the line as the South Lake Union Trolley, some business owners prefer to call the streetcar the "S.L.U.T."—and have been buying "Ride the S.L.U.T." T-shirts from Kapow! Coffee.
But whatever you want to call it, the streetcar, which shares a lane with traffic, runs in a 2.6-mile loop from the southern tip of Lake Union to Westlake Center, stopping 11 times along the way. It took about 15 months to complete construction, and though the crayon-colored, boxy, Czech-made cars have been doing practice runs for the past couple of weeks, there have still been construction-related street closures.
Less than two weeks before today's opening, BluWater Bistro owner Bart Evans says he was still charting new ways to work due to blocked-off streets and intermittent fencing. While he understands the promise of living through the mess is that his business will get a boost once the streetcar starts carrying carloads of customers past his restaurant, he remains skeptical.
"Honestly, in the long run, the net effect is going to be zero," he says. "I don't know if you've looked at a map of it, but it doesn't really go anywhere. I just can't imagine someone living on Eastlake taking the trolley to freakin' where?"
Bruce Miller, manager of the boating supply mecca West Marine, notes that his business is still off by 20 percent, and that the problem is that people have a "long memory." "We had 100,000 cars going by everyday that couldn't get in," Miller says. "That hurts us badly. We're a destination-based store. Because of that, customers are choosing other locales."
Though he thinks West Marine will benefit little from tourists riding the streetcar, Miller's hopeful that people staying on boats on Lake Union will find it a convenient way to get to the store. "But we're going to have to do a great deal of promotion to make that happen," he says.
If it wasn't bad enough that they struggled to keep their doors open this summer, Stix brewmaster Tom Munoz says the real rub came when he received a sponsorship pitch in the mail from the city to spend thousands of dollars for ad space related to the new transit toy. "I find it ironic that first you stifle our business, then you ask for money," he says. "There was no bargaining."
"You'd think the city would come forth with some sort of partnership with business owners [instead]," adds BluWater's Evans. "It's a little annoying."
But Michael Mann, deputy director of the Office of Policy and Management and the mayor's lead on the streetcar project, says sponsorships are necessary to make the project pencil out: 25 percent of the streetcar's $2 million annual operating expenses are slated to come from these advertisements, so discounts were not an option.
"The City Council set high expectations that we build and operate without tapping into general funds," says Mann. "We have had to be entrepreneurial to accomplish that."
Evans says BluWater grudgingly paid $2,000 for a yearlong spot in the glossy brochure that will be available inside the streetcar and at businesses along the line. "It was about keeping up with the Joneses," he says. (According to the mayor's office, 26 businesses have signed up to be in the brochure. All told, the city has collected about 85 percent of its sponsorship goal to date, which includes bigger-ticket sponsorships for entire streetcars and stations.)
Property owners also helped pay for about half of the $52 million it cost to finance the S.L.U.T. by agreeing to an increase of about 2 percent in property taxes. Evans says this has already translated into an annual increase of about $6,000 in rent for BluWater. Ditto for Stix, says Farias, to the tune of about $1,000 per month.
