MISCmedia for 7/21/00
Misadventures in the Housing Market

YESTERDAY, I began a series of installments on my private life with a flashback to a lonely childhood in what was, at the time, rural Snohomish County.

That country, in case you haven't looked out at it from northbound I-5 in recent years, has since become thoroughly suburbanized. Where cows once broke fences and strawberry farms once kept surly teenagers on their knees during picking season, big ugly Aspen-style houses now rule from the Snohomish River delta up into the Cascade foothills.

This sprawl includes the ten acres where my childhood self once spent many an afternoon chopping down weeds.

My parents wisely invested the proceeds from that land sale, and have now donated some of that income to help me put a down payment on a home of my own. This was the only way I could escape Seattle's insane rent inflation without ending up in the far, far suburbs (such as the formerly-rural parts of Snohomish County.)

Despite this good fortune, the home hunt still proved quite difficult. Especially as a full-time freelancer and publishing-company proprietor (professions not considered the most stable by the lending industry.)

After several months of half-hearted looking around at places I could never afford, I got wise and obtained a real-estate agent. She sent me around to several places, before I decided on an "Old World Charm" (read: pre-prefab) unit in a co-op building.

Co-ops are significantly cheaper than real condominiums, because they're much harder to buy your way into or sell your way out of. You're not buying the specific apartment, but a share in the non-profit corporation that owns the whole building. Therefore, only one bank in the whole country (which has only one local mortgage firm representing it) will lend money for them.

After nearly two months spent trying to reshuffle my finances to meet this bank's stringent requirements, the deal fell through.

Finally, a real condo unit became open in a "Classic Modern" (read: built with real concrete, not that fake-stucco crap that quickly deteriorates) building in the Pike-Pine Corridor. It was smaller than the co-op unit, and even slightly smaller than my current Belltown apartment. But it was a solid unit in a solid building, with a view and a rec room and a "business center."

After more than a month of signing hundreds of papers, paying various deposits, and wading through the multiple bureaucracies of mortgage lending, credit checks, title, escrow, insurance, etc., etc., it was finally time to move.

I'd been in the ol' Ellis Court building on Western Avenue for nearly nine years. (In contrast, during my struggling post-collegiate years I'd moved nine times in 34 months.) Boxing and carting the vast collection of cultural ephemera I'd collected during the '90s was a daunting task indeed.

MONDAY: A little more of this.

ELSEWHERE:

• Many people collect old LP covers, but it takes a select few to adore 45 picture sleeves....
• The ingenuity of vending-machine operators....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Thoughts on driving and intelligence.
• The 'clueless look' in designer men's fashions.
• Nostalgia for gender relations past.
• Parts one and two of the confessions of a lonely 16-year-old girl during the Bicentennial summer.
• Nostalgia for gender relations past.
• A bad night on the town.
• A Kozmo quiz.
• Will "open media" necessarily mean closed wallets for journalists?
• Whatever happened to dystopian fantasies?
• Who needs industry anymore?
• What the heck is Microsoft.NET anyway?
• The state of the American politick.
• Another local landmark gets defaced by its owners.
• Parts one and two of a random rumination about the Experience Music Project.
• A few buildings refitted for dot-commers' work and/or play.
• As the tech stocks churn, a fantasy about a potential post-dot-com society.
• Parts one and two of an appreciation of the great Irish wit Flann O'Brien.
• Will the real Idiots please stand up?
• Mulling a possible new format for this site.
• Differences between the real world and the world of movies.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• The origin and future of MISCmedia