Philip Thiel stands out in the hall, alone, shaking his head. "They're arranging deck chairs on the Titanic!," he grumbles.

The occasion, in the adjoining room, is the deliberations of the Northwest Design Review Board, at the end of yet another public hearing, on Dec. 12, on the fate of a controversial new building at the corner of NE 42nd Ave. and 15th Ave. NE in the University District. Thiel, a retired professor at the UW School of Architecture, and the groups he represents--the University District Community Council, the Roosevelt Neighbors' Alliance, the University Park Community Club, the Seattle Community Council Federation, Café Allegro, and Magus Books--have been trying fruitlessly for the last 18 months to stop the project: a six story mixed use building, being developed by Unico Properties of Seattle, that would fill the entire space now occupied by the parking lot across from Café Allegro.

Later, Thiel minced no words: "This is the worst project--the most damaging project--I've seen in 40 years." He reels off his objections: The big box design is incongruous with the adjoining, gothic mass of the University Temple United Methodist Church; the bulk would loom over and destroy the ambience and views of the historic Café Allegro; it would disrupt a heavily trafficked pedestrian network; the high-end housing residents of the new building are likely to clash with the seven-night-a-week shelter for young homeless adults in the church's basement. But mostly, Thiel says, "It's just too big."

Thiel's groups have collected over 2,500 petition signatures for an alternative plan, one which calls for an open plaza next to Café Allegro and a building half the size of the one Unico proposes. It has never been seriously considered. Unico rejects the proposal as not economically viable, and, as even Thiel notes, "[the Review Board] has been prejudiced from the start, but they have a very limited scope. They're not concerned with major things like height and bulk ... Their remedies are very limited."

The Unico property is not the only controversial development in the University District these days. On the Ave., north of NE 47th Ave., half a block of small businesses has already mostly vacated in anticipation of a massive expansion of the Wilsonian apartments. At NE 45th Ave. and Brooklyn Ave. NE, Safeco is laying plans to build a second office tower. Across 45th, a potential location for Sound Transit's new light rail station would take out still more businesses. A row of old houses on 12th Ave. NE between 47th and 50th is gone, now becoming fancy new housing and mixed use buildings. Roosevelt Way NE, from 45th Ave. south to the University Bridge, is now a canyonland of massive new buildings; the street is dead after 6 PM. And, each year, there are fewer and fewer housing units in this student neighborhood that actual students can afford to rent.

And it's not just U-District residents who are feeling like the city isn't listening. City plans for greater density, stretching from Norm Rice's "urban villages" to the developer-friendly policies of Greg Nickels, are beginning to bear fruit, and community groups are up in arms. On Queen Anne on Dec. 19, 300 angry neighbors crowded into a Queen Anne Community Council Land Use Review Committee to object to a proposed, massive new QFC development that would replace Metropolitan Market and the low-income Elfreida Apartments. In Wallingford, neighbors are alarmed by city plans to use Gas Works Park to host a series of summer concerts drawing upwards of 3,000 people each; Gas Works is accessible by only one two-lane road, and the stage will be left up permanently all summer, closing off a significant chunk of the highly popular park.

In the U-District, neighborhood activists like the Seattle Displacement Coalition's John Fox have fought gentrification of the U-District for years. But Fox says that the top-down, developer-driven agenda of Mayor Greg Nickels, and the lifting of the UW lease lid (which prevented UW from leasing more than 550,000 square feet in the neighborhood) in 2003, have accelerated the pace of change dramatically--often with little meaningful resident input. Unless such changes are mitigated, Fox says, "The existing character of the district will give way. Affordable housing will give way."

Social service providers are also worried. Several mainline Protestant churches in the neighborhood provide shelter, food banks, and other services to runaways and homeless young adults that aren't available anywhere else in the city without such youth mixing with at times predatory older populations. In other cities, as more and more of what Unico and UW call "market rate" (that is, high end) housing supplanted lower income housing, neighborhoods' new residents have often forced out social services that catered to "less desirable" constituents. The U-District's young adult programs fear that's exactly what may happen here.

The university--which plans to lease a full floor of office space in the new Unico building--has been a driving force behind plans to increase the U-District's density. So has the University District Chamber of Commerce. They, and the mayor's office, argue that higher density prevents urban sprawl and gets people out of their cars. That's very true. But one has to ask who is providing the higher density. In the case of the project at 15th and 42nd, Unico plans to market its residential units to UW faculty and staff. They--and Safeco's workers--can afford such luxury. Students cannot.

Where are UW students supposed to live? It's a subset of a question relevant to the entire city these days, as our area's semi-affordable housing migrates to the South County, and Seattle development is devoted almost entirely to "market rate" developments. Where are the poor supposed to go? And is a city unaffordable to a sizable chunk of our area's residents really the city Seattle wants to become?