Bellevue resident Lobsang Dargey has Kirkland in a near frenzy.
Dargey, 37, wants to build a place called Potala Village, a four-story project with 143 units and 316 underground parking stalls, along the Kirkland waterfront at 10th Avenue South and Lake Street South.
City files are filled with letters and emails protesting the project. It’s criticized as too big, too dense, not fitting the neighborhood, and likely to cause traffic problems.
Just another developer focused only on himself? It hardly seems so.
It’s almost impossible to overstate how unusual Dargey’s life has been.
He’s from Tibet. He studied to be a monk. He didn’t come to the United States until 1997. He didn’t speak English.
By 2004, he was married. His wife, Tami, is the sister of Andre Agassi, the famous tennis player. His wife is a cancer survivor. They live modestly, in a 1954 rambler on Northeast 28th Place off Bellevue Way. He works modestly, in an office above a food co-op in downtown Everett. where Dargey wants to build. It’s now mostly a dirt lot. The Kirkland Kiwanis used to sell Christmas trees there.
Dargey says the uproar of citizens’ complaints aren’t true.
“We’re building it within code. We’re not asking for a variance,” he said.
The property has been for sale for years, he adds, and many other developers tried to buy it, but none were successful.
Dargey says that the building will be the first on the Eastside to be built to full environmental standards known as LEED, including being completely nonsmoking, and won’t be targeted at low-income occupants, with rents starting at $1,500 a month.
In fact, Dargey says, a Potala Village already exists in Everett, and others are under development in such locations as West Seattle. All of them are named after Potala Palace, the traditional Tibetan home of the Dalai Lama, and symbolizing peace and harmony, Dargey said.
That’s not to say that Dargey operates entirely on a philosophy of altruism, and real-estate offering statements for Potala Village in Kirkland suggest returns of as much as 10 percent.
“Of course,” says Dargey, explaining that he expects to make a profit. “I have investors all over the world.”
However, he added, he now is anticipating the Kirkland project will be financed without investors, at a cost of about $32 million, through straightforward bank loans.
How has Dargey been able to undertake, and complete, such projects as Potala Village in Everett or Kirkland, given that countless other developers have crashed in the economic downturn that began in 2008?
Dargey says that’s because of the values he’s adopted in his life, which include disdaining many of the trappings of wealth, such as big houses and fancy cars.
“We live in one of the best places on earth,” he says of the United States. “We have no appreciation of what we have. Before I think of myself, I think of others first. Why do we need five or six cars to live? We don’t need 6,000 square feet for one person. I do this work because of what I like. I’m not interested in making huge money, I just want people employed.”
As for the objections to the proposal, Dargey says the real concerns are based on fear.
“They don’t like change,” he said. “It’s not just me. Every Eastside developer has been trying to get that property for years now.”
Dargey says he’s planning for a construction start next summer.
