In 2012, the Bill Pierre automobile dealership family engaged the community in a visioning exercise for the properties they own along Lake City Way. At last month’s Lake City Neighborhood Alliance meeting, we got an update. Here are notes from it:
” Don Moody: Status of Pierre Properties Development.
LA Fitness property is one of the first sites that they would like to develop. The question is how to do that without disturbing the automotive business. Hope to have something on the drawing board in about a year.
The shuffle challenge is to move the automotive business and keep everything going while re-developing some properties.
Another early property to develop will be the property around, and including, the post office, which Pierre owns. They have 2 years left on their lease. They are notorious for not renewing or negotiating until the last minute. Pierre would really like to build a new location for them. They will try to accommodate them. Building for post offices is very expensive. The Pierres want to retain ownership of the property and lease it with long-term leases.
There is discussion of working with the Japanese restaurant to allow them to expand the restaurant.
This development work will also require acquiring some property. A piece of property closer to the freeway will be sold to help fund some of the redevelopment.
There is acknowledgement that the car industry is moving to electric cars, and the large service centers won’t be needed as much in the future, which will enable some building over the dealerships and some underground parking.
One of the members of the Pierre family, who owned most of the property, passed away in the last year. Settling the estate is taking some time.
The former statuary business behind the Verizon building (which is also a site that the Pierre family owns) will need to have soil removal for hazardous waste cleanup.
Financing in Lake City is difficult. There is little office and little retail, and they bring in lower rents as a result.
There has been interest from PCC Markets, but no interest from large grocery chains, as they would need all unground parking. Trader Joe’s flatly doesn’t want to talk about development in Lake City. “
The Pierre family is vicious. They should be run out of the community. They closed their Dodge dealer and gave technicians ZERO WARNING. they came into work and found building locked.
When they moved Chevy store into Ford bodyshop, they drove half the employees into bankruptcy, because instead of paying them… they, they used the state of Wa against employees. Technicians were flat rate… but no work equals no pay, and… if we “voluntarily quit” we would not receive unemployment. I frankly would like to see ever single one of their properties burn to the ground.
Thank you for posting this Nancy.
I had some trouble with the resolution map image above and found an equivalent map in google. Sharing in case someone else wants to have another reference for where these sites are:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7158184,-122.2988326,1327m/data=!3m1!1e3
(This link has no property boundaries drawn, but is just about the same area)