This one personal, about Magnolia
The invasion of Magnolia by the land snatchers was not a “shock and awe” campaign. Initially, it was gradual — a house demolished here, another there, to be replaced by three- and four-story McMansions. The neighborhood was changing, as all neighborhoods will over time.
I didn’t like it, but I told myself [...]
Trulia hindsight is a neat little mashup between maps and building data, it animates over time showing when houses were built over the last hundred years. (it turns out that most of Capital Hill here in Seattle was filled in by 1930, for example).
Megahomes multiplying, but how big is too big?
In an area with little land to build new houses, residents are fighting the megahome — McMansions that balloon to the edges of their properties, three-story giants that block views from quaint craftsman bungalows.
Seattle is considering new laws to limit the size of houses replacing those torn down [...]
Las Vegas is growing significantly faster than the puget sound region, but that didn’t prevent a huge slide in prices due, in a big way, to flippers.
“We had seen real evidence of what was possible in this crazy, inflated market, and we just wanted to get a piece of that investment equity,” Schwartz said.
But when [...]
’cause they show you the last sales date and price of any house you are looking for. What do I see? That about 3/4 of the houses coming on the market in central Seattle over $600,000 were purchased within the last 24 months and have been marked up 30%-50% over their last sales price. Now [...]
Hot market woes:
Tactics in place to deter buyers from flipping (Seattle Times)
Finding an apartment is harder — and pricier (Seattle Times)
If flippers can still flip then people must be willing to pay for flipped properties and if it is getting harder to find rentals, then it is still paying off for those apartment-to-condo conversions.
Or is [...]
Average Seattle worker cant afford to live here
Geez, how long have I been saying exactly this?
Tony To, a Seattle Planning Commission member and director of the housing agency HomeSight, said developers could take some steps without incentives. He lauded Belltowns moda condos, which got prices as low as $149,950 by cutting unit size to as [...]
The Geography of Nowhere (The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape), by James Howard Kunstler
I am a city planning geek. When I was first working on virtual worlds stuff in the mid-90s, I started reading it for work and I got hooked: Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Robert Venturi, Lewis Mumford and all their kin. [...]
According to a city study, workers must earn $38 an hour to afford the median-priced Seattle condo and $50 an hour to afford the median priced in-city single-family home. (Median means half sell for more, half for less.)
But with housing prices surging ahead of wage gains, many workers can’t afford either. Among those priced out [...]
The rest of the country is seeing the bubble deflate in very real terms. All across the country, the weird mortgages that people got in irrational exuberance are now producing record percentages of defaults.
Here it Seattle, it is a little bit different. The pyramid scheme hasn’t collapsed, but it is definitely slowing down. Tear-downs on [...]
