Working class priced out

My first house, which I bought in Seattle back in 1995, seemed impossibly expensive at the time.

It was far enough out of reach I had to pool funds with two friends. I was 30, making $30,000 as a reporter in this paper's south suburban bureau. By splitting the down payment, we scraped our way into a neglected, but habitable, 1,600-square-foot fixer with brown asphalt siding on a busy West Seattle street. A crabby lady used to walk by and shout at us that the house was rotten. The grass in the lumpy yard was a foot tall. Still, the first time I mowed it I welled up with irrational feelings of pride and belonging.

I'm a Seattleite now, I remember thinking. This is my first stake in the world.

The price? $98,000.

This month, the median Seattle home price passed $400,000. It got me wondering: What does that number mean? What if I were 30 today, and just setting out to tap my roots into Seattle? Would I be able to?

Adjusted for inflation, $98,000 in 1995 is about $130,000 today. So I began a search for the $130,000 Seattle house — the same house I barely afforded eleven years ago.

I found it. There was only one. It's shown in the photograph above.

It's no charming bungalow, that's for sure. The city has barred anyone from entering the property.

What's left of the burned-out shell sits on a car-strewn lot in one of the Seattle area's most crime-ridden neighborhoods, near Roxbury in White Center.

It sold recently for $125,500, making it the cheapest house with a Seattle address in at least a year.

"We had six or seven offers," recalls Ken Knoke, the agent who sold it for Prudential Northwest Realty. "They were buying it for the dirt. You can't usually get dirt around here for that price."

He added that my search for anything resembling 1995 Seattle, even adjusted for inflation, was futile. No way I'd find even a mobile home parked on a postage-stamp patch for $130,000.

He was right. A dingy, single-wide manufactured home in Boulevard Park with no street frontage goes for $160,000. A double-wide near the charred house is $177,000.

There is a three-bedroom for $125,000 on the plateau east of Renton. But it comes with a warning: "Please stay out! This home is unsafe to enter. Call agent for help."

I was forced to broaden my search. To include houses that are still standing.

The cheapest one of those in recent months, in the Highland Park area of West Seattle, about a mile from White Center, had a list price of $179,950.

I drove out and looked inside.

"West Seattle Cutie Needs Help!" read the flier.

In real-estate speak, "cutie" means "cramped." This one is 580 square feet — one-third the house I bought in '95. It's filthy inside, with grease-stained walls, peeling paint, torn linoleum floors and mice scurrying in the dank kitchen. Out back, the gravel yard is lined with yellow caution tape due to a crumbling retaining wall.

But this house needn't be torn down. Which made it a hot property, said the listing agent, Carol Holland of RE/MAX Northwest.

"We had seven offers, and it went for well above the asking price," she said. She wouldn't say the final price, but it must have been near $200,000.

Which is now the minimum entry fee for even the grubbiest stake in our corner of the world. Two hundred grand. Realtors say there's not much point in looking for a free-standing house unless you can pay at least $250,000.

And who can pay that? No way I could have when I was 30. Not even close.

Seattle has always been a working-class city. It still sort of is, with a huge center for industrial jobs south of downtown. But how can it remain so?

As I went around the poorer parts of town from West Seattle to White Center to South Park, I was struck by what a struggle it would be to buy any of them if I was just starting out now.

I'm not sure what can be done about it. It seems like an unstoppable force that's altering the makeup of Seattle forever. Will the last working-class family leaving Seattle turn out the lights?

On the other hand, we have fretted about this very issue before.

"There is no disputing that many people who would have remained in Seattle have moved away because they could not afford to stay," read an editorial in the old Seattle Star. "It is becoming a serious question with everybody who is not wealthy, where this thing is to end. For end it must.

"The breaking point is not far away."

That was printed more than a century ago, in 1901. Shortly after the gold rush.

So cities can ebb, too. Before Seattle does again, we face a paradoxical challenge: How to keep the extraordinary surge in prosperity from destroying what made this city so inviting in the first place.

In the meantime, I did see what looked like a converted construction trailer wedged up against Highway 99 in South Park. Two beds, two baths, 1,200 square feet. A steal at only $204,000.

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.