Planning

Shadle District Center Plan

LOCATION

Spokane, WA

CLIENT

City of Spokane

INVOLVEMENT

Prime Consultant

Spokane’s Shadle neighborhood hosts one of the City’s oldest shopping centers, a community park and library, and Shadle Park High School and Franklin Middle School. In Spokane’s northwestern quadrant, the Shadle neighborhoods remain an example of 1950s-era development, with singlestory and split-level homes, broad streets, grassy lawns and parks, scattered churches, and a strong emphasis on vehicle mobility. The district center plan responded to changing economics influencing the shopping center, increased pressure for housing availability, school district plans to rebuild the middle school, and community calls to make the place safer for pedestrians and cyclists. We coordinated closely with the two neighborhood associations in Shadle to create a grass-roots planning process, producing recommendations to transform development types along the busy transit corridors and take immediate action to improve pedestrian safety and enhance the quality of non-motorized travel experience. The district center plan also created policy recommendations to accommodate incremental change in the commercial district, encouraging provision of residential uses and enhancing the streetscape along Wellesley Ave. Both neighborhood councils unanimously endorsed the plan, underscoring community support for the type and character of change the plan foresees.