Here’s a great article on the vacant condo situation in Seattle in general and Ballard specifically from The Stranger’s Dominic Holden: Nobody’s Home “I think that there was some overanticipated demand that was probably not real,” says Matthew Gardner, a land-use economist and principal of real-estate analysis firm Gardner Johnson. He notes that, given the…
Local Unemployment Nearly on Par with National Rate
Washington State’s latest unemployment statistics came out yesterday, and King County came in with a staggering 8.0% unemployment rate. To put this in context, I created the following graph, which charts local unemployment back to 1990 (as far as I can locate data), and compares it to the nationwide unemployment rate as well as “official”…
Queen Anne Condo Conversion Checkup: 2 Years Later
I was looking through some old posts on here and came across one from November 2006 by Synthetik titled God Save the Queen. In it, he linked to an Aubrey Cohen piece about a developer converting two apartment buildings on lower Queen Anne to condos. Let’s check in and see how those conversions are doing,…
State Senate and House Pass “New Home Warranty” Bills
Although the state legislature hasn’t yet made the time to figure out what to do about the $8.5 billion budget deficit, they did make the time last week to pass a “consumer protection” bill mandating warranties on new home construction. House Bill 1393 also creates an “office of consumer education for home construction” as a…
Poll: Will you miss the (printed) P-I?
See the forums for a related discussion: What’s so great about daily print newspapers? Update 03.16.09: Via Monica Guzman at the P-I: Publisher Roger Oglesby just announced in the P-I newsroom: Tomorrow will be our last print edition, but seattlepi.com will live on. Update 2: Aubrey Cohen will be staying on with the online-only P-I….