The Year of the Tear Down

This isn't our house, but it could be. This one will be torn down soon, along with many others just like it across the city.  There are thousands of these in West Seattle: medium-sized craftsman bungalows, built at the beginning of the last century and a modest family home for almost a hundred years.  Like ours, it has original siding, lathe and plaster walls, clear fir (old growth!) molding and real hardwood floors.

Sure, the bedrooms are pokey, the closets pretty useless and the yard is larger than anyone wants to keep up these days. In fact, that lawn is nothing but a wasted footprint. This charming little house will probably be replaced by several townhouses or "modern box" that covers every foot of the valuable lot. You see these now on nearly every block in Seattle, looming over the neighbors. 

Seattle is experiencing the greatest building boom since the Great Fire of 1889.  Go up the Space Needle on a clear day, and there are more construction cranes on the horizon than you can count.  The West Seattle Blog is calling 2015 "The Year of the Tear Down."

And of course, it isn't just Seattle. With economic prosperity and rising real estate prices, this is happening everywhere.  About 15 years ago, savvy developers snapped up many of the cute Spanish-style bungalows on the fringes of Beverly Hills and replaced them with the biggest new boxes allowed under code.

In Hollywood, these are known (sarcastically) as "Persian Palaces."

Well, we don't have that kind of festooned architecture in West Seattle, but our urban village has plenty of steel and glass, multistory apartment buildings with retail space (and no parking.)

Above is an artist's drawing of a new development going up a short distance from our house.  The block is being demolished now.  I guess you could say that tearing down a couple of cute beauty parlors, a mom and pop insurance office and an old-fashioned brick apartment building isn't that much of a loss to the neighborhood.  But then again, you don't know what you've lost till it's gone.
Which in our case, might be the ability to park in front of our house.