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A.3. LAND USE AND DEVELOPMENT <br />Southcenter has become a commercial center for the City and the region. Development in the <br />Southcenter area is exclusively commercial, with retail, office, lodging, warehouse and industrial uses. <br />There is minimal residential development. Existing development patterns are primarily single- story, <br />auto oriented, commercial development. The northern portion of Southcenter is dominated by the <br />super regional Westfield shopping mall (the largest covered mall in Washington state See photo 3 <br />surrounded by parking lots and rings of associated smaller scale, surface parked commercial buildings. <br />The southern portion is primarily a warehouse and distribution center that takes advantage of the area's <br />highway and railroad infrastructure, with some retail outlets and office buildings. <br />Major destinations include the Mall, the retail "power" centers liming Southcenter Parkway (see Photo <br />4) and portions of Strander Boulevard, and big -box retail along Andover Park East in the southeastern <br />portion of Southcenter (see Photo 5). In addition, many chains that draw on a regional audience, such <br />as Office Depot, Home Depot and Target, have located within Southcenter's boundaries. <br />A large proportion of Tukwila's jobs are located in the Southcenter area. More than half of these jobs <br />are in retail, with the remainder primarily oriented towards manufacturing and industrial work. <br />Boeing's Longacres campus, located just outside of the Southcenter area and directly to the east of <br />Sounder's Tukwila Longacres station, is forecasted to provide over 10,000 jobs for the region. <br />As a result of Southcenter's role as a popular commercial center, land values in Southcenter are <br />expected to rise over time. The lower value office and warehouse uses (see Photo 6) that make up a <br />large part of Southcenter's land area are potential locations for higher -value uses, and various sites have <br />transitioned to retail use. As a testament to the rising land values, the owners of Westfield Southcenter <br />Mall intensified their property site with an expansion that increased its size by another 500,000 square <br />feet, including a cinema, an expanded food court, additional smaller retail stores, new restaurants and <br />the first structured parking garages serving retail to appear in the Southcenter area. <br />A market analysis conducted in 2002 showed that the development potential for the Southcenter study <br />area for the near future was projected to include demand for more retail, more restaurants, and more <br />industrial uses, with more office and lodging to follow in the long term. Market analysis of land <br />constraints and demand pressures in the area pointed to the possibility of denser development and <br />structured parking, justified by rising land values. Since that time, due to the downturn in the economy, <br />many of the stakeholders in the Southcenter area have expressed concern that much of the draft Plan is <br />based on a market analysis that is now outdated. The City's consultants agreed that the 2002 analysis is <br />not adequate now for use as a short-run analysis. Instead, the consultant's conclusions are that the <br />W: Long Range Projects Southcenter Plan PC REVIEW 922.11 attach C Esistin.g Cond Sununary.docs 9/14/201 1 <br />17 <br />Photo 2. Location at freeway crossroads <br />