Who Is Greg Smith?

Commenter Simonian brings up an excellent point: who, exactly, is this Greg Smith who may or may not be running for mayor against Greg Nickels? Here's what we dug up:

He's the head honcho at Urban Visions, a real estate and development firm with lots of reassuring greenspeak on its website: the phrases "sustainable practices," "community," "energy-efficient," "increased density" and "future generations" all make an appearance on their Beliefs page. The company has spearheaded projects like bringing that Hard Rock Cafe downtown; here's a map of Urban Vision's current properties.

Before Smith founded Urban Visions, he worked for a division of his father's company, Martin Smith Development Corporation. He's also on the board of directors of the Seattle's Convention and Visitor's Bureau [pdf], a member of Nickels' Green Ribbon Commission [pdf], and has been working fairly closely with Mayor Nickels up until recently.

Why the seeming split? Crosscut's David Brewster says it's because of the viaduct and some disagreements over zoning in SoDo, the neighborhood where Urban Vision has announced mixed-use development plans to the tune of over $1 billion. Smith clearly has a gift for rhetoric, telling the P-I's Kathy Mulleady that he would rather be a leader than a politician and that it's "time to have a healthy debate about Seattle."

All of this sounds... well, it sounds like the world doesn't know enough yet about Greg Smith to tell if he'd be a good mayor for our city. The sustainability keywords make us happy, and it would be a nice change to have someone who has a proven track record of publicly caring about urban density and the environment. But we're also wondering if we can trust Smith when he says he's not in this to make money, and we're interested in that SoDo deal. (Anyone have more info on that?) Call us cynical, but isn't everyone in it to make money? Especially wealthy developers?

Greg Smith photo courtesy of the City of Seattle.