Everett benefiting
from new college in town

While everyone has been busy listening to talk about a four-year university solution coming to Everett, Puget Sound Christian College has crept quietly into its downtown.

On March 2, at his first official address in his new adopted city, Puget Sound Christian College’s dynamic president and the visionary behind the move, Dr. Randy Bridges, made it clear the college is in Everett and is there to stay.

While this may be new news to many, the impact on business and the benefits to the commercial real estate market in downtown Everett have been felt — and known — since the day the college moved in during summer 2004.

Puget Sound Christian College is a private Bible-based college that has been in operation since the 1950s. In the course of three weeks during the summer of 2004, the college boldly moved from its spacious campus setting in Mountlake Terrace into a smattering of leased space in downtown Everett, bringing with it 25 full-time faculty and administrators and 150 full-time students.

Dr. Bridges, an imposing 6-foot-8-inch former college football player with a goatee and a passion for Christian education that’s even bigger, stood in the hallway in the college’s former campus and announced to the students with some force, “We’re moving.” Much to his surprise, the students and faculty embraced the notion — even before they knew where they were going. A leap of faith for sure.

The move to downtown Everett is part of a vision to create a more stimulating atmosphere for students while integrating and interacting with the community. It’s part of a broader trend for smaller private colleges to replace the more monastic grassy campus setting with a creative and, apparently, successful immersion into an urban environment. Fortunately for Everett, Puget Sound Christian College landed there.

With a student center on Wetmore Avenue, a library on Grand Avenue, classes in shared space in between and faculty headquarters on Hewitt Avenue, it’s no wonder downtown Everett sees students throughout the day and reaps the benefit of their retail spending and positive cultural influence. Their timing couldn’t have been better, as they have helped to back-fill some of the vacant space left behind when Snohomish County government contracted back into its new administration building.

“I love seeing the baristas when I’m walking to class. They’re our buddies,” remarked junior Sharon Cook during the college’s March 2 “housewarming” celebration. “Our students are in Starbucks all the time.”

The positive impact on the local economy and, by extension, commercial real estate brought about as a byproduct of the college’s vision, is remarkable. Student housing needs led to the purchase of an apartment complex on Rucker Avenue last summer, and the college benefited from the gift of a property on Hewitt and Grand avenues where Dr. Bridges hopes to build a student center. Last year’s home basketball schedule was played at the North Everett Boys & Girls Club under a lease agreement established there where, in addition to the home-game activity, college athletes and youth are meeting each other and forging meaningful relationships.

It’s no wonder it’s working. In business terms, Puget Sound Christian College is tapping an underserved market niche. What Everett gets is the opportunity to capture and, perhaps more importantly from an economic and real estate perspective, import bright young adults who would otherwise not have a reason to be in its downtown core.

Imagining a better type of business to drop into a downtown is hard. The captured market of college students who study and live within a five-block radius is a lot like the captured market you and I represent when we’re hungry and stuck at the airport.

Even after college, it takes little creative thinking to picture a certain percentage of these imported young folks, now armed with a quality education, seeding new businesses, seeking jobs or generally integrating into the local economy in positive ways. Those benefits, and the opportunity to offer a higher-education option to our own home-grown youth, mean a net gain for the local community in economic, and so many other, terms.

Puget Sound Christian College entered its second academic year in downtown Everett in 2005. Currently, it boasts the strongest — and earliest — applicant pool for its 2006 fall semester.

While there may be a role for both public and private four-year programs, the community already is benefiting from the nimbleness that the private sector often brings in any business venture. Downtown Everett businesses and the commercial real estate community there haven’t missed this fact and have embraced Puget Sound Christian College for all the right reasons.

Tom Hoban is CEO of Coast Real Estate Services, a commercial sales, leasing, investment and property management company with offices in Everett, Tacoma, Spokane, and Boise, Idaho. He can be reached at 425-339-3638 or send e-mail to tomhoban@coastmgt.com.

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