Downtown Bellevue's "little houses are slowly disappearing"

In a 50-year-old house surrounded by high-rises, Roger Haynes has a unique operation. He runs an auto-detailing shop out of a space that also serves as his living room and bedroom. His desk sits next to an 80-inch TV and across from a black couch covered with bed sheets. He services the cars in his back yard.

Haynes is one of only a handful of people still living in single-family homes in Bellevue's downtown core. While thousands of people have moved into the city's sleek new condo towers and upscale apartments, the little wood-frame house on Northeast Third Place is an endangered species, a fragile remnant of a long-gone era.

"Little houses are slowly disappearing," said Haynes, who has rented homes downtown for 15 years. "I wish I could keep this one forever because it's in a good location and it's a good house."

The next houses to go may be a trio just off Northeast Eighth Street, which are slated for demolition to make way for a five-story residential building. One of the homes hosts a puppy store, but the other two are abandoned and dilapidated, with broken windows and inoperable cars parked outside.

The lot with the three homes sold last spring for $4.6 million.

About two dozen single-family homes remain downtown, mostly in the northeast and southeast corners. They are the remnants of subdivisions built during the postwar boom of the early 1950s, right around the time the city incorporated. Most of the homes — built in subdivisions called Ashwood and Evans Addition — have been torn down over the past two decades.

The houses that remain are wedged between much larger and newer developments. Some are boarded up, while others house businesses, including a nail salon, blood bank, Christmas store and Mexican restaurant.

It wasn't that long ago that downtown Bellevue had a significant population living in single-family homes. Their children filled Bellevue Junior High and Ashwood Elementary until both downtown schools closed in the late 1970s. Even after the neighborhood was zoned commercial in 1981, many renters lived in the remaining homes for years.

Bellevue Planning Director Dan Stroh remembers walking around downtown 15 years ago and seeing people out washing their cars.

Nowadays, public domesticity in the downtown core is a strange sight. When Craig Lewis rolls out a lawnmower, he gets strange looks from the apartment dwellers above. He's an associate at an architecture firm renting an old home on 111th Avenue Northeast, complete with a small backyard.

"There's nothing like smelling cut grass in downtown," he said.

Less than a block away, Arnold Wisbeck and his partner operated their architecture and engineering firm out of an old home for almost 30 years. Wisbeck died a year ago and his daughter, Nina Patera, works in real estate there now, with a kitchen, fireplace and a bathtub that used to be piled high with her father's books.

Patera said she will probably start renting out the place next year. "It's a lot of space for just me."

In 1988, Ron and Linda McCully bought a home on Northeast Second Street and immediately converted it into The Diamond Banque, a pawn and jewelry shop. With high-rises sprouting around the store, some longtime customers have trouble finding the place, the couple says, but otherwise the site has benefits.

"People like the fact that we're not a chain store and you're dealing with the owners in a little cozy home setting," Ron McCully said.

Still, the McCullys may not be around much longer. They and several neighbors agreed last fall to sell their land to make way for a 10-story residential building. The deal fell through, but other offers for the property — a dramatically underdeveloped chunk in the middle of downtown — will surely come.

Most of the old houses are appraised at several hundred thousand dollars but could sell for more given Bellevue's booming downtown real-estate market. A few, like those off Northeast Eighth, are in the heart of downtown and are worth in the millions. Las Margaritas restaurant, operating in a 1943 home on 108th Avenue Northeast, is appraised at $2.8 million.

Some homes may not be worth much to developers because a single lot probably isn't big enough to host a large, mixed-use development with several stories of housing or offices and retail below. Combining multiple homes is much more lucrative, said Steve Schwartz, a principal at Pacific Real Estate Partners in Bellevue.

Brokers and city officials say all single-family homes downtown probably will be gone in 10 or 20 years.

Even so, the commercial district is surrounded by residential communities on three sides, and city officials have a "very strong policy" to not expand the downtown core, Stroh said. The city's vision is a dense, towering center of business and urban living — and more residents than ever. Already 4,500 people live there in apartments or condos, and that will hit 14,000 by 2020, according to city planners.

But in the new neighborhood, old houses with driveways and front porches just won't fit.

"It's sad," said Haynes, one of the last single-family-home residents. "Some of these houses are nice."

Ashley Bach: 206-464-2567 or abach@seattletimes.com