The minipalace dreams of the hordes to come

Rising interest rates have cooled the housing explosion around much of the country, but in the Puget Sound region, real estate remains king.

And the queen is the over-the-top but never disappointing model home.

I'm not referring to the minipalaces laid out in the Seattle Street of Dreams — although a step through the annual event's custom doors begs the question of whether affordable housing exists anymore.

I'm talking about the model homes showcasing the miles and miles of new housing developments springing up along the Interstate 90 and Interstate 5 corridors. From Seattle to Puyallup to North Bend and back, developers are building for the hordes to come.

And they're coming. This region remains desirable for jobs and livability. And despite the jaw-dropping housing prices, on sunny weekends throngs of home shoppers wander in and out of model homes like they're touring art galleries.

Expect this trend to continue as Sound Transit and the possibility of light rail turns the suburbs into attractive urban-like enclaves.

What a stark duality: the growing unaffordability of home ownership and the continued demand for luxury homes. The gulf widens between those trading years of equity in existing abodes for their dream home, and those for whom any home would be a dream.

Model homes are where the twain meet. It is where moderate-income families go to dream and others go to buy their dream.

I'm in this dizzying game along with newcomers from areas other than equity-rich California. Ditto for families new to real estate, struggling to set aside a down payment large enough to keep their mortgages out of the stratosphere.

A Sunday centerpiece in The Seattle Times warned that there are only nine areas left in King County where middle-income families can find a home. The region's dwindling land supply has driven real-estate prices skyward, yet newly built McMansions march up the Cascades and homebuyers are following.

Prospective homebuyers are a schizophrenic lot. We wring our hands and call for affordable housing and later rub our hands in glee and call our real-estate agents as we tour show-stopping model homes.

One house perched on a steep hill features a master bathroom with a fireplace above a deep tub. My complaints about the home's steep price are washed away in a dream of being transported from some future damp Northwest afternoon to a Calgon-soaked, fireplace-warmed ambience. Another home boasts an industrial-style Thermador stove and I wonder if cooking my son's pancakes is worthy of such an impressive machine.

The modern-era staircases featured in many homes initially snag and then repel me. It is impressive, I admit, to walk through double doors and peer up a large, meandering staircase. But such pretension reminds me of Carol Burnett's parody of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone with the Wind." Burnett, as Scarlett, glides down winding stairs wearing a gown made of draperies with the curtain rod still attached. She looks both elegant and quite mad.

If cars evoke who we are today — SUV's for the hip and fertile, Buicks for the conservatives and mini-Coopers for the aspiring gazillionaires — houses are being built to reflect who we aspire to be. We hope someday to be the hobbyist puttering around the hobby room or the fitness buff splayed on a yoga mat in the garden room. We want to be the grande dame gliding down the winding staircase to greet a guest in the two-story foyer.

And thanks to the miracle growth of real estate, many of us can. The aphorism that a rising tide lifts all boats is a principle at work here. People are using equity in existing homes to move up. Median home prices in King County shot up 16 percent last year. Try to mimic that on Wall Street.

There are drawbacks. Any gold rush inevitably leaves someone in the dust. The future may be rosy for some but for others it may consist of laboring underneath zero-down, interest-only, short-term ARMs, one of many creative and scary mortgage packages out there.

One of the glorious homes I tour will become mine. I'm only hoping my first soak in the tub is not marred by the nagging worry of a real-estate bust and a day when houses are hawked in the newspaper classified section like the Foosball tables jettisoned by bankrupted dot-coms.

I don't think even the most splendid model home could get me out of that nightmare.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com