So remember ages ago when I mentioned that, once Dre and I moved back to Seattle, we were going to start looking at buying a house or something? Well, it’s sort of true. We won’t have the money to purchase until the beginning of next year, but we’ve been slowly sniffing around trying to get an idea for what we even want.
The answer? We still have no fucking clue. Sometimes we say things like “How could we ever leave the hill? WE LOVE CAPITOL HILL! …Even if that means buying a tiny 1 bedroom co-op apartment.” Other times it’s more like, “Oh hey: West Seattle wasn’t so bad. We could get a little house, and our friends told us that they have lesbian neighbors in West Seattle, so it can’t be TOO bad.” (For Dre and I, “Gay = Tolerant, liberal, happy place to live”) Sometimes we have moments of looking online and going, “Holy shit! We could easily afford a four-bedroom bungalow with a water view in Bremerton! Easy!!,” before the reality of “Oh yeah: Bremerton,” sinks in.
In other words: we have no fucking clue.
- Previous: Licensed
- Next: Custom.dic
- Tags: realestate
3 Responses to “Real(i)ty”
Leave a reply
Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
You're reading a page from the archives. Check the homepage for current content.
nanirolls
July 2nd, 2004 at 11:45 pm
For those of us not from the Washington/Seattle area, clue us in on Bremerton. What makes it un-ideal?
Ariel
July 3rd, 2004 at 9:40 am
Bremerton is a small working class city a 60 minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. It’s home to a Navy shipyard, and in the late-’80s the town was economically destroyed by a mall built 15 miles away. For a while, downtown Bremerton had a commercial space vacancy rate of something like 80%. When I was growing up on Bainbridge, Bremerton was known for being full of navy boys and hicks, girls with big hair, and guys with gun racks on their trucks. These days I think it’s better known for meth labs.
For a lot of these reasons, housing their is very very inexpensive. Supposedly the city is undergoing some economic rehabilitation, but it’s at the beginning stages of that recovery — definitely NOT a thriving community just yet. Which of course is why buying property there would be smart…and why living their would be hard. Here’s some more info, iff’n you’re really interested.
nanirolls
July 4th, 2004 at 12:56 pm
Thanks for the link. I just finished an economic revitalization analysis for a senator here in Brooklyn so similar projects in other cities are always interesting for me to read!