Can your Seattle neighborhood pass the ice cream test? The goal of a 15-minute city

The idea of a 15-minute city is pretty straightforward — a city designed in a way that allows people to easily get to a store, a barber, a café, a restaurant, or wherever they need without having to jump into a car.

Or, to put it simply, a 15-minute city is anywhere people can live close to a source of ice cream.

“We put a lot of the stores next to a lot of the libraries and schools, because sometimes, after school, you want to go get ice cream or go shopping,” middle schooler Mila Fedorchenko told KUOW at a design festival in Seattle last summer. “It would be really fun because after you go to school, again, you could go get ice cream. And then, you could easily walk to your school, or to a park, or to your home again.”

RELATED: Corner stores are the cornerstone of Seattle's quest to become a walkable city

At the design festival, kids like Mila were designing their own cities, placing residences, schools, stores, and ice cream where they thought it made most sense.

Listen to this story, and additional reporting, on KUOW's "Booming" podcast.

While kids can easily design a city that passes the ice cream test, placing what you need within walking distance, this goes against how urban planners have thought cities should be laid since the rise of car suburbs in the 1950s and '60s — with homes built over here, and grocery stores over there.

Zoning codes became increasingly strict and phased many small businesses out of residential areas. New ones could no longer be built, and older stores that had been repurposed as apartments could not be changed back into stores again. The result has had people hopping into cars to get everything from groceries to coffee.

But today, cities like Seattle are attempting to correct course and retrofit their communities into 15-minute neighborhoods.

Georgetown, for example

To understand what it would take to turn a current neighborhood into such a 15-minute neighborhood, consider Georgetown in Seattle. Surrounded by industrial areas, this old neighborhood has been heavily associated with artists. It's currently being targeted for growth.

Walking through Georgetown's main stretch, Airport Way South, you will find a clothing store, a hotel, a coffee shop, a soccer field, plenty of restaurants, a record store and comic shop, and even a trailer park mall. And yes, you will also find an ice cream shop (phew!). Within a 15-minute bus ride, there is an elementary, middle, and high school. A little bit down the road is Boeing and industrial jobs, like metal work.

RELATED: Will Seattle's new growth plan produce enough housing for newcomers?

What you won't find around Georgetown is a grocery store. That's a pretty big gap in a community. It's one reason why Seattle has targeted Georgetown, and 23 other neighborhoods, for considerable growth in the coming years.

These neighborhoods would be classified as "neighborhood centers." This is a new designation, with different zoning rules. Basically, think of it like a supersized main street — a few blocks wide with apartment buildings at the core and plenty of businesses on the ground floor (and ample room for ice cream shops).

City planners hope that this new approach will spread out growth and development throughout Seattle, instead of focusing it in one spot. Over the last 10 years, 83% of the city's growth was concentrated in regional centers and urban centers, which used to be called "urban villages." The result is that some neighborhoods, like Ballard, for example, changed rapidly. If more corners of the city were allowed such growth, the effect would be diffused.

Corner stores

There's a second strategy that city leaders are considering, that would give everyone in Seattle a taste of what it means to live in a 15-minute neighborhood — even people who don't live in the new neighborhood centers.

On a sleepy residential street outside the core business area, there's a big green craftsman-style home. Looking closer, however, you'll notice the ground floor is a bit different. It's built to house a business below and people up top. Historically, this was the neighborhood's grocery store. Then, it became a cake shop. While zoning evolved around it, banning such businesses in residential corners of the city, this building maintained a shop and therefore has been allowed to continually operate. And now, this shop space will be converted back into a small grocery store for Georgetown.

"This neighborhood, Georgetown, has been known as a food desert for forever," said community organizer and food entrepreneur Marisa Figueroa, who intends to remodel the space into Bloom Bistro and Grocery.

"We have a lot of amazing bars and restaurants, but a grocery store, a small neighborhood grocery store? You talk to anybody that lives here, it's what everybody thinks is the last missing piece for this neighborhood," Figueroa said. "So, this was always kind of my vision, this kind of small, neighborhood grocery store with a little cafe. ... When I saw this space open, it just clicked. I was like, 'This is where I need to open my business.'"

Under Seattle's current draft comprehensive plan — which maps out development over the coming 20 years — corner store locations like this would be primed to make a comeback (the current proposal requires corner stores to provide three parking spaces). They could house other kinds of businesses, too, like restaurants or day care centers, for example.

There's a catch

While developing corners of Seattle into a 15-minute model may sound appealing, there is a catch. Making space for more buildings and more people means destroying some of the buildings that are already there. And a neighborhood like Georgetown has some pretty interesting old buildings that contribute to its charm.

Old brick buildings with a lot of deferred maintenance that are suddenly sitting on valuable land could be knocked down to make way for new buildings. Older apartment buildings that don't include modern amenities, like bike rooms, rooftop decks, and restaurants on the street level, could be pulled down to make room for larger ones that do. That can mean people get pushed out from apartments where they've found some semblance of affordability.

Aside from that, more people could add up to more noise and tighter parking.

The key to driving down housing prices is to build much more of it, and that's one thing the new neighborhood centers will help do. But until the housing supply comes close to meeting pent-up demand, new housing will be more expensive than the old, in part, simply because it's new.

In the end, the hope is that if growth happens gradually enough, the people whose homes are torn down can move into a new place in the same neighborhood.

"I think this neighborhood has always been one to embrace change," Figueroa said. "This is like a very divided neighborhood, even into three parts where we have this neighborhood area, then we have the more commercial area on Airport Way with all the bars and restaurants, and then we have the industrial area over by Marginal [Way] and it has been fairly divided."

"It's nice to build everything into one community rather than having kind of three separate areas where we can all work together. So I'm excited to see what happens, what it may be," she added. "And, you know, Georgetown's always been a little self-sufficient bubble inside Seattle. ... Everyone in this neighborhood loves to support the local businesses. I mean, when you live in Georgetown, you spend a lot of your times going to the local places."

Listen to the full version of this reporting on KUOW's "Booming" podcast.

What would be your ideal 15-minute neighborhood? We asked KUOW listeners to tell us what they'd include. Listen to what they told us in the guessing game at the end of the episode.