This may be an exaggerated memory. But I swear there used to be blocks in Montlake where every single car parked on the curb was a Volvo. Without exception.
Of course, that was back when University of Washington professors could afford to buy houses there-even professors from the liberal-arts college, that prime Volvo-buying constituency.
Those days have passed much like the days of MS-DOS computers.
All over town, Seattle's housing hyperinflation has turned fixer-uppers into tear-downs, and modest family homes into semi-precious gems. Montlake's housing stock was already, for the most part, pretty spiffy; so those homes have appreciated even higher.
Still, the neighborhood has scores of what might be called "legacy residents"-i.e., people who bought in while they still could, back in the 1990s or earlier.
They're holding on, despite property taxes based on rising valuations.
Some of these homeowners have been looking at the latest industry trends with a sigh of relief. Any day now, the local housing market may cool down, as it already has elsewhere around the country. Then, these homeowners can relax in the knowledge that they'll be able to keep their abodes for years to come.
Unless some other price-appreciating condition arises.
Or, in one case, descends.
I speak of the idea, currently being bandied about within the civic-planning bureaucracy, to replace the Seattle end of SR-520 with a tunnel.
Just a billion bucks or more, plus three to four years of noisy construction, and BAM! No more Montlake Mess, at least no longer one that can be seen and heard from street level.
It would all be so much nicer than the state's current Plan A, a new four-lane or even six-lane surface highway and viaduct. The six-lane option could be 419 feet wide and rise 110 feet high.Many Montlake residents don't like the sound of that plan, not at all. At a community hearing in October, speakers said they had no interest in paying that kind of price just to give Eastsiders an easier commute.
But some Montlake residents just might approve of it, or at least tolerate it.
Because, if a severely enlarged, above-ground 520 terminus sufficiently depresses home prices in the surrounding blocks, these current residents can look forward to staying put in their current homes, living out the rest of their lives in peace and noise.
But a tunnel? Why, that would be the ultimate community beautification project. Especially if it's accompanied by the removal of overpasses and bridges-to-nowhere from the Washington Park Arboretum grounds. (The UW Botanic Gardens Directors Guild has issued a written statement, requesting that this removal be part of any 520 solution.)
Yet it would have to be paid for, somehow.
As it is, the Roads and Transit plan (whose fate with regional voters was unknown at our press time) would only pay about 40 percent of the cost of a new floating bridge plus a surface highway at the bridge's Seattle end.
A Danish engineering firm, currently studying the feasibility of various tunnel technologies, won't have a report ready until the end of November at the earliest. Depending on how many tunnel lanes are involved and how much distance they'd traverse (perhaps from Union Bay to I-5), a tunnel could cost more than a surface road, perhaps a lot more.
Where would the state find the means to pay that differential?
Perhaps with bonds, to be paid by tax assessments in what Roads and Transit proposition supporters called "the areas affected" by the improvement?
And who would benefit most from a tunnel, as opposed to a surface highway?
It wouldn't necessarily be the commuters from (and, increasingly, to) the Eastside. Their drives will be made easier by either option.
If Montlake wants the west end of 520 placed out of sight, Montlake just might be asked to foot a big part of the bill.
And if that happens, expect higher tax assessments to neighborhood homeowners, no matter what happens to the resale prices of neighborhood homes.
But then, if a tunnel leads to a quieter, less congested, less smoggy Montlake, there's only one direction for home prices to go.
