Turkeys aren't the only birds causing a ruckus on Spokane's South Hill.
For more than a year and a half, developers have been trying to build a Chick-fil-A on East 29th Avenue in Spokane's Lincoln Heights neighborhood. Some neighbors aren't happy about it. The stretch of road has long struggled with poor traffic safety, and some residents worry that the proposed high-volume drive-thru will make matters worse.
"It will endanger our pedestrians and cyclists," says Carol Tomsic, chair of the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council.
On Monday, in response to Tomsic and other neighbors' longstanding concerns about pedestrian safety, the Spokane City Council voted to officially designate a 0.66-mile stretch of 29th between Martin and Fiske streets as a "Pedestrian Street."
The pedestrian zoning designation doesn't ban cars or come with new funding for safety improvements. It does come with several code changes — like a requirement that building entrances face the sidewalk and have human-scale signage — designed to promote a "pleasant and safe environment" for pedestrians.
The biggest change by far is a ban on new drive-thrus.
The council members who pushed for the new pedestrian designation say it wasn't intended to target a specific business. But the timing was still notable.
Last week, just five days before the scheduled vote, Chick-fil-A refiled an application for permits to build a new drive-thru restaurant on the corner of 29th and South Regal Street. The parcel of land — which sits across the street from a KFC — is owned by the estate of Harlan Douglass, a prominent Spokane real estate mogul who died in November.
Chris Bell, a real estate broker acting on behalf of the Douglass estate, thinks the new law seems to specifically target Chick-fil-A.
"Chick-fil-A has bent over backwards multiple times for the city, each time they move the bar," Bell said while testifying against the new law during a city Plan Commission meeting earlier this month.
Council member Paul Dillon, who sponsored the new law, disagrees. He says the neighborhood has been asking for enhanced traffic safety measures for years, and that the new law is intended to help guide the district toward a more pedestrian-friendly future.
Dillon adds that the recent rise in pedestrian fatalities — in Spokane and across the country — only underscores the urgency.
"A large drive-thru is counter to a lot of our ultimate goals for planning and development," Dillon says. "This really is leading to bigger structural change with how we do our centers and corridors and how we look at pedestrian safety."
DRIVE-THRU NATION
Bell argues that many people do want more drive-thru dining opportunities and that the neighborhood council's opposition to the Chick-fil-A isn't representative.
"You have a vocal minority of radical zealots who are trying to shape Lincoln Heights into their microscopic viewpoint of a utopian society," Bell says.
Bell also notes that, since the pandemic, more people are using drive-thrus. Forward-thinking developers, he says, are looking to build more drive-thru lanes — not fewer. In the U.S, drive-thru traffic rose 30% from 2019 to 2022, according to a report from Technomic, a food service research company.
When Spokane's first and only Chick-fil-A opened in 2020 in North Spokane, the opening day line stretched around the block, and some customers waited for several hours. Six Spokane police officers were on hand to manage the traffic.
"We're now seeing double-decker quick service restaurants with four drive-thru lanes underneath and the restaurants up above," Bell says. "That's the vision because of the demand. People's habits are changing."
The 0.66-mile stretch of 29th is a stark example of America's drive-thru obsession.
In a single afternoon, you can grab coffee at Legal Addiction; deposit a check at Bank of America or U.S Bank; refill a prescription at the Rosauers Pharmacy; and grab food at McDonalds, Taco Bell, KFC or A&W — all without leaving your car. Crosswalks are few and far between, while parking lots and speeding cars are abundant.
It's a hostile stretch of land for people on foot. While testifying in favor of the pedestrian designation Monday, local artist Karen Mobley described the Lincoln Heights Shopping Center as the place she feels most likely to be "squished like Wile E. Coyote."
The existing drive-thrus will be allowed to continue operating under the new law. But new drive-thrus are banned. It's unclear how or if this will impact the proposed Chick-fil-A, since the permit application was filed before the new law passed.
Bell thinks the Chick-fil-A will be able to move forward. He notes that Washington state has what's known as "vested rights doctrine," which means land use applications shall be considered "only under the land use statutes and ordinances in effect at the time of the application's submission."
The law passed by council members is an emergency ordinance and has a subsection that says the law will go into effect immediately to prevent applications from being processed "under regulations that are inconsistent with the city's legitimate policy of encouraging a pedestrian friendly and walkable center in the Lincoln Heights area."
The new law also cites a 2014 study that found that driveways for drive-thru businesses have the highest crash rate of any studied driveway type, and notes that other studies have shown that drive-thrus discourage walking and make drivers less alert.
"You have a vocal minority of radical zealots who are trying to shape Lincoln Heights into their microscopic viewpoint of a utopian society."
NO SPRING CHICKEN
When Chick-fil-A first applied for building permits in July 2022, it asked the city for an exemption that would allow 113 parking spaces instead of the usually allowed 21. The city rejected the request in December 2022.
The Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council celebrated the city's decision and decided to prioritize figuring out how to avoid any future 50-car, two-lane drive-thrus, Tomsic says.
But Chick-fil-A wasn't deterred and returned with a new building plan that has only 21 parking spaces.
In July 2023, at the request of the city's Plan Commission, Bell attended the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council's monthly meeting to give a presentation on the updated plans for the store. It didn't go smoothly.
"Oh, that was a disaster," Bell says.
The meeting was held at the Southside Community Center, a few blocks north of the planned 29th Avenue location. Before Bell started his presentation, Tomsic had a statement to read.
"Our council is extremely grateful the city denied the Chick-fil-A request," she read. "The denial aligns with our district center plan and the center and corridor intent for a safe pedestrian environment."
According to meeting minutes, Bell then told the skeptical neighbors that Chick-fil-A "serves the best chicken in the country" and that the proposed store would hire 35 employees and "bring economic growth and jobs to the neighborhood." (The neighborhood council's notetaker noted pointedly that Bell "did not say whether the jobs created would pay a living wage.")
Bell told the group that Chick-fil-A had been working with the city to mitigate neighborhood concerns by reducing the number of parking spaces. He said the new plan would have bike racks and walking paths.
It wasn't enough. Attendees voiced concern about increased traffic and pollution from idling cars. The neighborhood council's minutes say there was "no support voiced for the project."
Bell, on the other hand, says he received a "mixed bag of feedback."
This isn't the first time neighbors have objected to car-centric development in Spokane. In 2009, the Southgate Neighborhood Council waged a lengthy — and ultimately unsuccessful — legal battle to stop a zoning change that allowed the Target to be built on Regal Street in 2014.
Also in 2014, state Sen. Andy Billig and then-City Council member Amber Waldref (who is now a county commissioner) sided with Logan neighborhood residents outraged over construction of a new McDonald's with a drive-thru, which was only able to obtain permits because the Gonzaga University neighborhood's new pedestrian-focused zoning standards had yet to be adopted by City Council.
'DON'T FEEL SAFE'
On Aug. 13, several weeks after the meeting with Bell, the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council sent a letter to City Council members formally asking them to designate a section of 29th as a "Pedestrian Priority Zone."
The letter didn't mention Chick-fil-A by name. But it did note that "a business that has a two-lane, fifty-car drive-thru" is not a "not a neighborhood scale business" — even if it adheres to parking space limits.
"It is an auto-oriented business," the letter continued. "It will attract community and regional traffic to our district center. It will inadvertently make our district center auto-oriented."
Tomsic says the letter wasn't prompted by the meeting with Bell. She says traffic calming on 29th has been a goal of the neighborhood for a very long time. It's listed as a priority in the current district plan and was mentioned as far back as the neighborhood's "Specific Plan" adopted by the City Council in 1990.
"For years we have spent everything just trying to make it easy for our residents to cross back and forth on 29th," Tomsic says. "Our residents don't feel safe there."
In October, City Council members passed a resolution directing the city's Plan Commission to look into the neighborhood council's request.
In Spokane, stretches of North Monroe Street, West Garland Avenue, South Grand Boulevard and South Perry Street are already designated as pedestrian streets. In addition to banning drive-thrus, the designation prohibits parking lots built between a building and the street; reduces curb cuts; and requires that buildings larger than 10,000 square feet provide streetscape elements like benches, tables and bike racks.
Dillon stresses that the goal of the pedestrian designation is not to target Chick-fil-A.
"I understand it's hard to untie the two. However, this applies to any drive-thru," Dillon says. "It's not about any specific development, no matter how hard some folks are trying to make it that way."
Bell has doubts.
"The timeline is very suspect," he says.
Bell also argues that the City Council's actions have sent "shock waves" through the business community.
"If they can create an emergency ordinance to try to prohibit one user from going in, what will they do next?" Bell says. "It creates uneasiness which forces people to question whether or not they can invest in the city of Spokane."
When discussing the proposal on Monday, City Council President Betsy Wilkerson, who previously represented south Spokane's District 2, said pedestrian safety is an especially big concern for residents of the Lincoln Heights Garden-Terrace, a senior living apartment complex on 29th Avenue that lies within the proposed pedestrian safety zone.
In 2019, an 80-year-old resident of the apartment complex was killed by a motorist while trying to cross the street near Rosauers.
On Sunday afternoon, Seth Sundin was sitting outside the Terrace and watching the cars zip by on a rare warm and sunny winter day. He's lived there for a couple years now and has multiple stories of crashes outside his apartment.
To get to the Rosauers across the street, Sundin has to cross four lanes of traffic at a crosswalk that doesn't have lights. There's a small pedestrian "refuge" island in the middle. On Sunday, an elderly man with a walker waited at the crosswalk for close to a minute before cars finally stopped to let him cross.
"There's too much exit and access off these," Sundin says, pointing to the numerous driverways that break up the sidewalk. "If they dropped the speed limit to 20 and enforced it, that would eliminate a lot of problems."
Sundin wasn't sure how much of an impact banning drive-thrus would have, but agreed that something needed to be done about the traffic.
"I've seen motorcycles tearing up the street," Sundin says. "They're doing wheelies coming through here. Come on, man." ♦
