Justin Carder Wants You! (To Save the Summit & John Park)

Seattlest is instituting a new guest editorial thing on the grounds that our readers get tired of hearing the usual suspects snark about things and would like to hear new snarky voices. Last week it was Proposition 8. This week, we have Justin Carder--chair of the Capitol Hill Community Council, vice president of business development for Instivate, and founder of the Web site CHS Capitol Hill Seattle--and his plea for a park's existence.

By Justin Carder

Slackers, hipsters and burnt-out hippies should never be put in charge of saving a park. Saving a park is the kind of thing best left to hybrid SUV minivan armies of field hockey moms and dads with longtime family connections to clubs named after animals like elk, eagles and, um, the wild shriner. Those people know how to save a park. Slackers, hipsters, and burnt-out hippies are busy just getting by. And reading Seattlest. It's wrong to put this in their hands. But this wrong thing is exactly what is happening with the Summit & John park.

The park planned for the lower edge of Capitol Hill is a small kind of thing you might judge a city by. While the region busies itself providing asymmetrical levels of public resources to the suburbs, the project to create this patch of open space (currently a parking lot) in the middle of the most densely populated ZIP in Seattle is out of cash.

Here's how it works. The city's parks department makes a grand plan for a park and gets the city to pony up the cash to buy the land. Enough money is budgeted for park basics--that is, clean dirt and grass. The rest of the grand plan's budget needs to be raised by the community.

And, by the community, I mean Starbucks. Back in simpler times, Starbucks could have hooked us up and saved the day by raising the global price of their caramel macchiatos by $0.03. But in this gloom of Depression 2.0, SBUX can't help us. We need to raise that 130 grand on our own. So far, we have 700 bucks. We are 0.5% of the way there. We have six months to raise the rest. And by we, I mean you and me.

Some may say bah! Capitol Hill doesn't need a fancy park--the dirt and grass will do. People can just lay here and wallow in it! That's hard to argue with in these non-simpler times. But lack of support for the park could mean more than just losing the p-patches and the angled paths. With the budget issues the city is facing, there is a real risk the plan for the park stays in permanent limbo without a community push.

The park needs that push in a part of the city populated by people on the move and in a world where the corporate titans are battered and bruised. Summit at John likely won't be saved by corporate cash. People power? Many of the apartment dwellers who live nearby won't be there in two years to enjoy the park. They'll move on through their phases of Capitol Hill residency (CHR). Can these people have some sense of the generations to come? Can they imagine the inheritors of Pike/Pine and the I-5 Shores?

This is serious. So, what's going to work?