OTHELLO - My family and I just moved from the Mount Baker neighborhood to Rainier and Othello and all our friends assume that we must have made a killing with what they politely avoid referring to as the "negative lifestyle exchange." And if we owned the Mount Baker residence we've called "home" for the last two and a half years, they might be right.
But my husband and I moved here from out-of-state during the height of Seattle's real estate insanity and have always been the types to eschew trends, so we rented instead. We got a clean, 1,000-square foot bungalow in what was clearly a relatively safe and family-friendly community just a few blocks from a little playground and the shores of Lake Washington. Life was good, even if we were on what one neighbor sarcastically referred to as the "wrong" side of McClellan - I'm sure she wasn't referring to Cascadia Avenue South.
Thirty months later, we just didn't feel comfortable there anymore and couldn't escape fast enough.
Why?
It may have had something to do with the couple from the "right" side of McClellan who owned our rental that - with two kids, a garden and a Subaru - could have been friends of ours in another life, had they not treated us like second-class citizens because we were renters.
It may have had something to do with the ridiculously inflated home costs in Mount Baker that, for a while, had us thinking we'd be lucky to afford even the most ramshackle fixer in that neighborhood.
It may have had something to do with the mobs of stay-at-home parents in the area (not that there's anything wrong with that - some of my best friends are stay-at-home moms) who can afford the kids, the mortgage, the nanny, the co-op preschool, the gardener, the occasional house cleaner and a dog and a stroller that each cost more than my family's monthly food budget.
It definitely has something to do with the fact that my husband and kids - with their beautiful brown skin - were looking less and less like our Mount Baker neighbors every year. This, despite the fact that the area was once known as a haven for biracial couples back when it was illegal for people of different races to marry.
So we headed south, where the neighborhood playground is still known as "the park where that guy got shot," residents are afraid the corner car wash is a drug-front and middle-class people can still (barely) afford to own a home.
"Isn't that area sort of rough?" asked a friend from Green Lake.
Maybe, but we were drawn to Othello - an area where there's more than two people of color on our block, where residents take ownership of their neighborhood with regular safety walks and other community-building efforts and the Rainier/Skyway parents' Yahoo group isn't clogging the information super highway with inane posts like "Amsterdam, Paris or London - 5 or so days with a 5-year-old girl? All suggestions welcome!" I swear I did not make that up.
That said, we did just pay $350,000 for a 1,600-square foot, beautifully renovated 1922 house in the 'hood, and I can't help but fear that we're part of the problem. After all, gentrification - the same one that's already swallowed up Mount Baker and Columbia City and is currently positioned to move squarely south - is defined as "the restoration and upgrading of deteriorated urban property by middle-class or affluent people, often resulting in displacement of lower-income people."
Now, we're not affluent by any stretch of the imagination (just ask my in-laws), but we do consider ourselves middle-class and we are severely tightening our belts to be able to afford the new mortgage. We also feared that if we waited until light rail came, we'd surely be priced out of Seattle all together.
So what's the answer? Should we have continued renting? Should we have followed my husband's cousins to Bothell where the schools are supposedly better, but after 10 years they're still the only Black people on the block?
Should we have purchased a less expensive home in a lesser neighborhood? I don't know, but somehow those don't seem like better options.
Either way, I definitely won't be starting any "Mommy and Me" yoga classes in my new 'hood.
Othello writer Amber Campbell may be reached at this link. Go ahead, drop her a line or two.
