In the shadows of soaring Capitol Hill rents so high even Stranger employees are being forced off the Hill, Capitol Hill Housing’s Michael Seiwerath taps out this CityArts essay somehow mixing a meditation on the state of the neighborhood with observations from a piss-soaked floor of a Belltown bar in celebration of the newly ground-broken 12th Ave Arts project.
It’s a good read.
CityArts: Young Waiters in Old Buildings
The other day I was standing outside of Oddfellows Café on Capitol Hill talking to a recent transplant from small-town Pennsylvania.“You know the difference between my hometown and Seattle?” he asked. “The age of the waiters. Where I’m from, waiters are way over 60 years old. Here they’re all in their 20s.”
Seattle does not make many babies; kids move here. And they seem to be attracted to the neighborhoods with old buildings. You find them on Ballard Avenue, Airport Way, Pike/Pine, in Columbia City and Pioneer Square. They’re spending their time in old Ford assembly plants, breweries, vaudeville theatres and assayer’s offices.
Are they known to be well-paid? I thought quite the opposite.
My upstairs neighbor is renting his place, with the same square footage and amenities, for $550 more a month than we pay, and he’s not even on a top floor. The rents ARE ridiculously high now. My husband and I are comfortably middle class with good jobs and no kids, and they’re even becoming too high for us. Luckily our landlord hasn’t raised our rent in a few years. We’ve been considering one of these old buildings again, but unfortunately they usually are fully of loud, young people. We really want to stay on the hill, but soon it might not be an option. The hipsters certainly all seem to have disappeared, which some may think is a good thing. But I miss the character of a few years ago. It’s changed so quickly.
As Capitol Hill continues its march as the “it” neighborhood, the primary beneficiaries of the gentrification of the neighborhood are existing building and land owners. If you are fortunate enough to own your home, you are golden. But if you are like the majority of Capitol Hill residents and rent, then you are SOL. The recent comp-sci college grads that Amazon and Microsoft are importing from the MidWest and elsewhere all over the country may be able to afford the Hill (at least for the couple of years they will live here before moving on), but even the middle class are getting squeezed out.
My partner and I are by any sense of the word within the “middle class” – but we are looking at having to move off Hill – which is unfortunate as it will likely mean having to be car-owners (and thus contribute negatively to climate change). We’ve been in our current apartment little over a year now, and are facing a rent increase of several hundred dollar a month – and that’s on top of a base rent that was at market when we moved in. And we are not living in a fancy apartment, but rather your typical modest sized brick apartment building of the type that is dotted all over the neigborhood.
Its sad and frustrating to see Capitol Hill turn into a hollow playground for the well-to-do and their privileged offspring.
I didn’t own a car when I lived on the border of Cap Hill and the CD and I don’t now that I moved to the Rainier Valley. You don’t need a car just because you don’t live on the hill.