I would say that your conclusion that this project takes us one step closer to sustainability brings the concept of sustainability to new levels of meaninglessness.

1. The parking garage is too big. The reality is that very few people can survive in Seattle without a car, and no retail tenant will sign a lease without adequate parking, so if we want urban retail (which we say we do) we need parking garages. The great thing about parking is that they are land banks, if Seattle ever gets around to providing a transit system, then that garage can be redeveloped. Anytime the City doesn’t have to pay for the construction of a parking garage, we (as citizens and taxpayers) win. That means fewer public resources are squandered on an unsustainable investment.
2. Big box stores are evil. You shop at Target, IKEA Home Depot, etc., and so do I. If you can afford to shop at the downtown boutique stores for your everyday necessities, then bully for you, but the rest of the city can’t. Besides, these stores are tenants; if the economy shifts to make them less desirable, then they will close and be replaced by smaller stores. This argument is irrelevant to the discussion.
3. This development will hurt local businesses. This is contrary to just about everything I know about retail. The new development will draw thousands of new customers to the area from the adjacent, wealthy neighborhoods of Capitol Hill, Madison Park, Madrona, and Mt Baker, as well as middle income residents of the Rainier Valley and the central district. Once they are in the area, they are more likely to spend money at other businesses. The businesses around the center will benefit tremendously from the development; not the reverse. This argument is unequivocally false.

Fundamentally, this project takes a dilapidated, ugly site, that serves a fairly small population and turns it into something that contributes to the community, and accomplishes many of our goals as a city, and takes us one step closer to sustainability.

Your comparison regarding trips to Renton makes sense only if you assume that it is necessary for people to shop at big box stores. It is quite possible that the big box model will not survive in the world of peak oil and GHG gas emissions regulation. As I argued in a previous post, big box is unsustainable on many levels.

http://noisetank.com/hugeasscity/2008/03/09/ban-big-box/

Not like now, I’m sure, but we still will be, even after oil becomes expensive:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3ASeatrans.blogspot.com+coal&rls=com.microsoft:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

Depends on whether the garage is designed for easy adaptation to another use.

I am interested in understanding why our economic and political system isn’t doing a better job of enabling development that better suits the needs of the future, primarily with respect to global warming and peak oil.

As I’ve said and commenters have noted, the Goodwill project is good in some ways, bad in others. I can’t help critiquing a project that sacrifices good urban design for parking, especially when considering the heightening need for us to reduce car dependence in the future.

How smart a use of land and resources will those 2300 parking stalls seem in 20 years? Maybe the homeless will live in them.

But here’s the real question, since a Fry’s is going in there, are (absolute max-end) 10,000 trips a day better than 5,000 trips from the city to Renton each day?

It’s pretty obvious.

I see people deriding the aesthetics of the design here, and I don’t understand. You get the feeling that a field of weeds, garbage, and god knows what is more desirable. Are they maybe expecting the Riviera with 25 parking stalls and 400 bike racks?

I wonder how they discuss the GHG emissions resulting from the 17,000 additional trips/day this project will generate in their SEPA docs…

Good thing for this project that the State is still a couple years off from mandated GHG mitigation…