Slumurban

Recent posts on Sweet Digs Seattle:

• Go Home for Lunch from the Microsoft Office
• Still More Drops…Eastside Price Reductions
• Disconnected: Unrealistic Sellers and Unwilling Buyers
• Making Peace with Seattle
• Get Ready for Seattle’s Northwest Flower and Garden Show

Are white picket fences and “Leave it to Beaver” suburban utopias popularized post World War II deteriorating into crime ridden slums? Will Subprime mortgages and increasing gas prices be the doom of Pleasantville? It seems a trend is sweeping some suburban areas – vacancy, crime and chaos.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

Can you imagine a 2/3 foreclosure rate in Redmond? Or chatting with your new neighbors in Newcastle about their favorite heroin dealer? Hard to picture. I wouldn’t be too quick to link the foreclosure rate to Subprime mortgages. The microeconomics of the area and job market may have more to do with the vacancies in Windy Ridge. As long as Microsoft, Boeing, Starbucks, and Amazon are still going strong I don’t think we have to worry about the ‘burbs going bust around here.

Pent-up demand for urban living is evident in housing prices. Twenty years ago, urban housing was a bargain in most central cities. Today, it carries an enormous price premium. Per square foot, urban residential neighborhood space goes for 40 percent to 200 percent more than traditional suburban space in areas as diverse as New York City; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.

Sprawling, large-lot suburbs become less attractive as they become more densely built, but urban areas—especially those well served by public transit—become more appealing as they are filled in and built up. Crowded sidewalks tend to be safe and lively, and bigger crowds can support more shops, restaurants, art galleries.

Seattle doesn’t fit in the “well served by public transit” bucket in my opinion but none the less, gentrification of urban areas like Belltown and Pioneer Square are amazing to watch. When I first moved to Seattle 6 years ago and was searching for my first digs, friends said “Belltown? Are you crazy? At the very least stay far away from the park on 3rd and Bell.” Now those same friends have condos there. Pioneer Square has a long and interesting history which is now a selling point for the condos for sale in many of the converted old brick buildings.