Results tagged “housing”

Seattle Bubble has the story in all its depressing details: King County foreclosures up 180 percent year-over-year.

The Seattle Times discusses how the planned Senate budget cuts "roll back much of the party's agenda." Publicola has four "angry press releases" on behalf of service workers, NARAL, low income housing, and childen's health. And Schmudget lays out the cuts in the areas of education and health, pointing out that some cuts are so deep, they effectively cut twice, by losing access to federal recovery funds.

• Finally, some good news on the horizon with regards to housing in Seattle! Seattle Bubble has the story.
• Real estate on Beacon Hill is looking promising, too, reports Beacon Hill Blog, thanks to light rail plans.
• Ballard has a lot to discuss about how the viaduct will affect their neighborhood, and My Ballard hosts the conversation. (My Ballard has an unusually active comments section, we're noticing today.)

Our first thought on reading that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation had granted $1 million to Seattle and Washington to preserve affordable house was of the first movie, where Dr. Evil tries to hold the world for ransom for the same amount of money. A million dollars, huh? Talk about a drop in the pond.

In 1964, most of Fort Lawton's land on the Magnolia Bluff was declared surplus by the U.S. military. That's when locals first banded together to voice their concerns over the future use of the area, forming a group called Citizens For a Fort Lawton Park and ultimately attracting the attention and support of a U.S. Senator in their efforts to prevent the government from turning the land into an ABM base. By 1971, the land was in the hands of the City of Seattle, and Discovery Park was formed.

The latest Case-Schiller numbers are out, and they're...not great. Seattle area housing values are down "8.8 percent from August 2007," says the P-I, and they quote an economist who says that "as bad as the latest Case-Shiller numbers appear to be, they are bound to get much worse." We were having lunch with a friend of ours who was reminiscing how, in the mid-80s, he and his wife bought a teensy bungalow for a price also in the mid-80s. He was making about $30,000 a year. Not quite ten years later, they sold for over $300,000, and the property kept appreciating. However, to this day, his old job pays around $30,000 a year. "I don't understand," he said, shaking his head. "We couldn't get started here, today."

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."

"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.]

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.

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.

'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 compared to a year prior and is the benchmark index for real estate performance.

Tonight, the nation's hardcore gamblers' eyes will be on Seattle as our fair burgh hosts Monday Night Football.

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.

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.)

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 much free ink available?)

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, his career is toast." Declaring any careers toast might be a bit premature, but it's clear the situation isn't good for either McIver right now. His wife is recanting, to some extent, but the initial impression that he allegedly "repeatedly grabbed his wife by the throat and arm during a profane, drunken tirade in their South Seattle home early Wednesday," seems to be sticking.

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 it a go in this weekend's paper, but nobody's going to lay it out for you like the blog itself does. Click through to the source for this one.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 public dressed like a convicted sex offender or a homeless person, and no one looks at you askew. It's lush and green. Housing is affordable, especially compared with Seattle or San Francisco. The people are nice. The food is good. Creativity is the highest law. For young, hip Portlanders, financial success is a barista job that subsidizes your Romanian-space-folk band or your collages of cartoon unicorns.

"Neighbors fear development" has become the Seattle equivalent of "dog bites man." Of course neighbors fear development. That's what they do.

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.

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, who has completely covered her house in mosaic tiles.

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 announced plans to build instead a non-union Marriott hotel.

Ichiro got a bunch of fantastic goodies along with his $90 million Mariner contract, according to the AP, including:

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 would be better than affordable housing is a 250-unit Marriott hotel! People who work stay in hotels a lot, so it's not even a big difference when you look at it."

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.