Today in two-newspaper town coincidences: real estate made the front page of both the Seattle Times and the P-I. "King County home sales edge up in June," says the Times, while the P-I makes a stronger claim for temperature-based sales, "Local housing market warming up with the weather." Both are referencing an insignificant increase from last month--compared to a year ago, sales are still down almost 34% and listings are up about 42%. That has......

"Home buyers, it's time to haggle," admits the P-I, going on to point out that King County's median house-sales price has dropped 6.2% from a year ago. Seattle is down 2.7%. [Caveat: Discussions of market valuation don't directly relate to the particular house you are thinking about buying. Any specific house can be over- or under-valued in a given market. So take all of this with a grain of salt.] On his blog, but not......

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels either loves condos or he hates renters. The Mayor's Office has indefinitely frozen a $350,000 fund created to compensate Seattle area renters who'd been forced out of housing due to condo-conversions. Mayor Nickels wants to wait and see if the legislature passes a statewide bail-out funded by developers this winter. Because it makes perfect sense to rely on the people who are profiting most off of Seattle renter's misery. If......

How about opening your big yap in person for a change? Join the panel discussion about how to keep a healthy arts community on Capitol Hill. Meet up at CHAC next Wednesday, the 16th, at 5:30pm and plot next moves over a martini. As hosts the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce put it:In 2007, the Urban Land Institute named Seattle the #2 real estate market in the nation (after Manhattan), and Americans for the Arts......

It's become fairly commonplace for the brighter real estate bloggers, like Timothy "The Tim" Ellis over at SeattleBubble, to mock P-I reporter Aubrey Cohen once a month. See Cohen--the P-I's lead real estate reporter--writes an article about the state of the national housing market once a month when the industry standard Case-Shiller numbers are released. The Case-Shiller index (from S&P) tracks the changes in home prices for 20 US metropolitan areas each month as......

Tonight, the nation's hardcore gamblers' eyes will be on Seattle as our fair burgh hosts Monday Night Football. The Hawks' opponent is the San Francisco 49ers, the team that was everyone's trendy pick to be a darkhorse contender in the NFC, with the eminently predictable result that they've started 2-6. Here's how ESPN's The Sports Guy saw it in his season preview:Call it the Winston Wolf "Let's Not Start Sucking Each Other's Popsicles Yet"......

We really don't feel it's the day after an election until we overhear people talking about how they forgot to vote, didn't know there was an election, and how they'll definitely vote next time. If they had been paying attention from August through this morning, they would have learned that Seattle voters will not let you drive 50mph down Market Street after a few drinks, but they will let you work for an anti-gay organization,......

According to his blog, NYTimes Op-Ed columnist and Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman is "sick as a dog" today, right before his visit to Town Hall tomorrow night. Krugman, like Bill Greider at Rolling Stone in the Reagan years, has taken up columnistic arms against the flow of disinformation from the White House. Who will tell the people? Krugman, that's who. (Actually Greider will too.) Sick or not, Krugman will be at Town Hall to......

Did you know that there's only one credible real-estate industry voice in Seattle? It's a marketing firm in town that works with real estate developers. We've learned this from reading Aubrey Cohen's real estate reporting in the Seattle P-I. Here's a search on articles containing the exact phrase "Williams Marketing" -- they're quoted in at least one article per month since last November. (Who are the schmoes paying the P-I for ads when there's so......

We failed to notice yesterday, among all the hubub over Councilman Richard McIver's arrest on domestic violence charges, a post from Seattle Weekly political reporter Aimee Curl. McIver remains in jail and has claimed he'll be pleading "not guilty" to the charges. Columnist Robert Jamieson Jr. is taking him to task in today's P-I stating, "For his sake, that stance had better just be a legal formality before coming clean -- or a typo. Otherwise,......

Rich vs. Poor, Renters vs. Homeowners, developers vs. locals, Kenny G. vs. Afropop: this blog from High Point has got every one of Seattle's little conflicts all crammed into one tiny teacup. High Point in West Seattle was redeveloped recently to include some moderately priced homes along with a bunch of rent-control-type lower-income housing. We all get along when we live on the same street, right? Well, not quite, of course. Danny Westneat gave......

Foul weather holds off until Sunday afternoon, leaving plenty of time under cool gray skies for Seattlest & friends to launch a Flexcar and sail out to the farm. Once we get past Redmond, the familiar trappings fall off: shopping malls, housing developments, the last Whole Foods, the last gas station & mini-mart. We ford the Tolt River at Carnation and sail into a vast theme park called Remlinger Farms. Indoors, a country market......

It’s been hard for us to admit this, greenie that we are, but a vote for Prop. 1 is in order, at least from this Seattlest's perspective. This has been hard because we're as environmentally friendly as they come. We ride our bike; compost; and we reduce, we reuse and leave the recycling as only as the last step of a long process. So the news we saw when we opened our e-mail this morning,......

It's a big, bad world out there, and there are plenty of reasons to be mad as hell. An undisclosed conflict of interest? Well, depends on the circumstances: whose conflict, whose interest? Used to be, reporters of all stripes were treated to trips, tickets, meals, drinks. Then came a wave of holier-than-thou moralizing and publishers began to insist on paying reporters expenses. Granted, Seattlest gets an occasional free beer, but big whoop. More of an......

The past two days, contributors Jeremy "The Seattle Samurai" Barker and Katie "The Kalama Quickdraw" Tiehen debated the age-old question of whether Seattle or Portland is better. Both Jeremy and Katie raised some excellent points, but that's what rebuttals are for. Katie rebuts Jeremy: [ED: Jeremy, writing for Seattle, alleged that Portland's ascension to Green-ness and "hipster paradise"-dom was not without social and economic cost--most notably, higher housing prices in the urban core, which pushed......

Seattle. Portland. Which one's better? You may say: "How can you choose? Each has their good points. It's like asking which religion is better." Guess what, asshole, that Negative Nellie attitude is the reason nobody ever asks for your fucking opinion. Jerk. To the debate! First up, it's a pro-Seattle opinion. Seattle is better than Portland, by Jeremy "The Seatown Samurai" Barker When I tell people that I think Portland's gone down the wrong road......

In Slate today, Taylor Clark declared our -Ist-less neighbor to the south "America's indie rock Mecca," then spent several paragraphs dropping names and figuring out why. His conclusion? It's easy to live here. In the words of a friend of mine who used to be the music editor at the local alt-weekly, Portland is like a resort community for indie rockers who spend half the year working themselves ragged on tour. You can venture into......

"Neighbors fear development" has become the Seattle equivalent of "dog bites man." Of course neighbors fear development. That's what they do. The latest brouhaha: Wedgwood is getting a four-story condo/retail complex in the middle of their one-story residential neighborhood. Hands are being wrung, meetings are being called, nimbyism is being denied, blogs are being written. We wouldn't have it any other way, really. It's Seattle. Neighbors fret. Since we left Wedgwood, we don't really have......

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt,......

The story so far: Two years ago, amid trumpets and fanfare, the City of Seattle sold the 15-story Alaska Building to developer Kent Angier, to be used for "affordable workforce housing." The selling price was $8.5 million dollars -- $500,000 to $1 million less than offers from developers interested in turning it into office space. The City says it had an unwritten understanding with Angier that the building would be used for housing. Recently, Angier......

Ichiro got a bunch of fantastic goodies along with his $90 million Mariner contract, according to the AP, including: --A housing allowance, which will be $32,000 next year. --Either a new Jeep or Mercedes SUV each year. --Four first-class plane tickets to Japan for his family. He also deferred $25 million of the $90 million contract, so the Mariners will be paying Ichiro until 2032, when Francis Bean Cobain is 40 years old. Yowza. Ichiro......

End of May, we posted about how the city sold the Alaska Building to a developer, with the understanding that it would be turned into affordable "workforce" housing. The city took a loss of somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million because of that stipulation, Mayor Nickels was able to gesture grandly at his affordable housing gesture, and then Kauri Investments Ltd. and Ariel Development got to thinking and they were all, "Hey, you know what......

For over 100 years, pisswater cheap beer was produced at Tumwater’s Olympia Brewery. In 2003, then-owner Miller Brewing Co. shut the place down and since then, according to locals, the city’s been a “ghost town.” (Supporting evidence: Tumwater’s front page lists Tumwater TV as an "Emerging Issue.") But the artesian water may begin flowing again. Seattle-based Benaroya Company is poised to purchase the historic facility for $45 million. The property’s current owner, All American......

We knew Bremerton residents were the step-chilins of the Washington State Ferry System, but now that wireless access for the 55-minute run has been delayed again we're starting to suspect a conspiracy. Bainbridge has been happily browsing away on their 30-minute jog since like the mid-nineties or something, but can Bremerton catch any of that wifi gold? Hell no. At least not until July at the earliest. Of course, the Rich Passage is the......

Saturday we ran into Philip Dawdy sitting in front of Liberty. We were all blah blah affordable housing, blah blah CHHIP, but Dawdy was unimpressed. "What is that, 40 units?" he asked. "Why aren't you talking about what's happening with the Alaska Building?" Alaska Building? We looked up Dawdy's 2005 Seattle Weekly story:The mayor pointed due west of his City Hall office to the city-owned Alaska and Loman buildings. The Alaska Building currently houses some......

No longer do harried Capitol Hill denizens have to brave the typically non-working escalator to get to Bartell's above the QFC, a block south. A Walgreens is the "Now Open" tenant of the first-floor retail space in the 44-unit apartment complex Broadway Crossing at Broadway and Pine, across the street from Seattle Central Community College. Yes, apartments, not condominiums. Broadway Crossing is a Capitol Hill Housing project, a tax credit-financed property for renters earning from......

Down on phony farms, up for the real thing. Disturbing news in the New York Times: a middle-class family raising chickens in Manhattan. Disturbing news in the Wall Street Journal: developing suburban housing tracts as pseudo-farms. Whatever happened to real farms? Well, close to home, one of Washington's foremost producers of goat cheese, Quillisascut Farms is offering farm-stays to beginning chefs. What a great way for to start out: seeing the food grow, getting close......

Over at newbie blog Crosscut, Knute "Mossback" Berger has slipped right back into his prickly, contrarian stream of things with a post about "density (the horror, the horror)." In it he calls out Sightline, Mayor Nickels, greens and progressives, and San Francisco as skipping merrily toward a density Rapture. We're a little freaked out to admit this, but he's got a point when he asks what's the rush. (Some statements, like "We know that......

Austinist gets arty with an interactive guide to SXSW, loved some local art galleries and a new art exhibit and lamented the possible loss of "Friday Night Lights" production to New Mexico. Bostonist was happy they finally found an Anna Nicole Smith connection to their fair city and that an Apple Store was opening up. They were less happy that new rules have been established limiting underage shows and that their Governor is spending......