Thank god there's still a place for people like that in Ballard.

Though I suppose I should mention that my buddy eventually moved to a trailer park out on the rez where he could raise his two little half-crazy-bitch babies on the stipend the tribe pulled off their casino. So maybe gentrification got them in the end, after all.

Damn you gentrification! *shakes fist at sky*

I'm sorry if you equate "Affordable Housing" with crack smoking tenants; but the vast majority of people who are in need of affordable housing are people like me. No criminal record. Volunteers at the library. Just wants to live their life in peace. Thank God I live within walking distance of the hospitals.

I used to wash dishes at the Lockspot Cafe back in 1990. We had this junkie prep cook who got hep from slamming with her teenage daughter and then didn't tell anyone about it so she could keep working. And we had this bartender who used to turn tricks off our customers of a slow weekday night. That was always good for a laugh, to just have the bartender disappear and come back 20 minutes later with her clothes all fucked up.

We used to store all our ingredients in the basement of that place, but there was a terrible rat problem down there so the management used powder-form rat poison, scattered in little boxes on the floor. Then about once a month we'd get a heavy rain and the whole basement would flood, so the potatoes we made our fries out of were soaked in rat-poison-contaminated floodwater. Didn't seem to affect the flavor much.

About 5 years after I quit working there the place got bought up, put under new management, and totally cleaned up. They stopped hiring homeless people, so I wouldn't've been able to get a job there anymore, and they started requiring everyone to show up for work and not use drugs on the premises and such. They don't even use rat poison in the basement anymore! Evidently they used their big rich person money to hire an exterminator instead! Now the authentic feel of the place is totally ruined.

Damn you gentrification! *continues to shake fist at sky*

There's over 3,000 condos on the market in King County. In the slow inventory month of -January-.

Ain't no one buying no mo'.

What are these law abiding poor people you speak of? I've never heard of such a thing.

And are you actually telling me that it's possible to find a 10X6.5 apartment on Capitol Hill? That's awesome! We should build a bunch more of those. Those are a great idea.

The Lockspot is awesome, and so are the Lock Vista apartments. I don't recognize your picture of them at all. Maybe you need to widen your circle of acquaintances.

Or maybe you don't recognize it because you didn't work bottom-rung service industry jobs in North Seattle in the late '80s and early '90s -- just to, you know, float another theory on that.

Funny, I thought Judah was making a point just about blindly demonizing gentrification without context.

I didn't have to. They've all been priced out of the city. Economics took care of it for me.

I'm glad they're being kept as apartments.

Yeah, no.

Are you at all familiar with the PTA effect? That's when, for example, the yuppie community of Phinney Ridge and East Ballard use the spare time and resources their white collar jobs afford them to rally community support to have West Woodland Elementary School torn down and rebuilt at a cost of about $1.5 million dollars above what the school district was willing to pay -- while parents in the Central District and West Seattle, who don't have the time for that kind of shit because of their economic circumstances, are cramming their kids into the same shitty schools from the Urban Renewal push.

Big sweeping laws are about providing equal protection to all groups in a given jurisdiction, regardless of their ability to plant a phone tree or email a city council member.

@15 and that housing slump wasn't planned but it was inevitable.

That whistling sound you just heard was my argument flying over your head.

The transaction just didn't pencil out for the Northlake Group after the condo market started to stall. That's it, plain and simple, and the good residents of the Lock Vista were saved by a deus ex machina.

There were undoubtedly renters who moved out of Lock Vista when they were told it was going condo. Is there anything being offered to those people? First dibs on their old unit maybe? The unit shouldn't have been rented again if the owners were planning on going condo...