Our public hearing on new housing choices clarified the obvious, 90 percent of the homes in the three neighborhoods targeted for the small-lot 4,800-square-foot overlay are old; they were built before 1960. Despite what is implied, over 80 percent are also owner-occupied. News flash — people are still buying and living in smaller homes in the city’s oldest neighborhoods.
What could possibly get them to buy what staff calls rundown housing? They are the closest thing going to affordable housing. These two- or three-bedroom block or frame houses on 7,200-square-foot lots sell for less, a lot less, than the newer, larger homes built on smaller lots here and elsewhere. Newer homes on smaller lots start at $400,000.
Staff says the older rundown homes are near the end of their useful life. That ignores young families who continue to buy and remodel them. They have affordable mortgages and our older neighborhoods are re-energized by an entire new generation of young working-class families.
Despite what council preaches, what they practice is not affordable housing. What they care about is that enterprising investors can now buy two contiguous homes in rundown conditions to tear them down and put up three larger homes on much smaller lots at much higher prices. No, they won’t be old, but they also won’t be affordable.
Density is the new planning commandment; neighborhoods accept your fate. Quality of life receives much lip service, but no sincere concern. We are spending $67,000 for a study of sustainability; maybe that could address sustaining the quality of life which attracts these families. If there is a diminishing resource in our community which gets virtually no attention, that is it.
Leonard French
Mountlake Terrace
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