Records indicate that 94-year-old house at 8447 Delridge Way SW has been vacant for a while. New today in the city’s online files, a plan to replace it with eight townhouses. The site plan shows two 4-unit buildings, with five offstreet-parking spaces on the alley behind them. The 6,700-square-foot property was sold earlier this month for $450,000.
More awesome news for Delridge! Did the city streamline the process of replacing derelict buildings with new construction, or is it just by chance that we’re seeing more of these projects now than in years past?
I saw roses above the roofline last summer. They either grew up from the back yard or a rose bush migrated to roof on the back of the house. SMH. Sad. Houses should not be allowed to degrade like this or be unoccupied for years. The city is too lax on this sort of thing. Yeah the city will do something eventually but not before squatters, graffiti, drug dens, etc. I ve seen it on local new stations. Believe me, you don’t want one on your block. I’m sure this was a lovely home at one time. Don’t like developers or development but in this case it’s better than looking at a tenement every day.
Finally. This place has been vacant and gradually being taken over by the earth for more than a decade.
I’ve wondered what was the deal with that house for years. Glad to see something happening there. Why doesn’t the city charge a tax on empty buildings? It seems like a vacancy tax could help incentivize owners to avoid letting properties become blighted.
Interestingly, the adjacent property to the south, a similar house that seems to have had similar problems (past complaints about multiple vehicles on the property, etc.) is listed as the same owners who sold this one a few weeks ago, but does not have a sale or development proposal on file.
I don’t know anything about this particular property, but south Delridge had been an affordable area from at least the mid-1970s until relatively recently.Edith Macefield in south Ballard gained worldwide attention after she turned down an offer to sell her house to a developer, so the developer built a large concrete building around Ms. Macefield’s lot.I remember seeing a distinctive UW outdoor maintenance worker / landscaper / gardener (very tall, sorta reminded me of the Lurch character from the Addams Family TV show, and I assumed the UW landscaper owned a house very near to that address) working in his front yard among a multitude of tiny trees that looked like miniature Christmas trees.Perhaps someone like Edith Macefield wanted to spend his/her last days in his/her beloved home, and then whoever inherited the property was not necessarily a go-getter when it comes to flipping properties. Many homeowners would like their house to increase in value, but not everyone looks at his/her house as an investment to be sold after its value has increased; some people just want to be able to keep living in their house as long as they can.Think of them as helping to keep your property taxes from increasing even more. :)
The way property taxes are calculated, abandoned properties raise your taxes, not lower them, because their value stays comparably low. THEIR taxes will stay lower. But yours will compensate. The new houses there will have a much higher assessed value and those will lower your taxes.
LOL…Sorry but that is not the way property taxes are assessed.
If the new development increases the value of the neighborhood, which increases the assessed value of each and every home, then ALL property taxes of those homes in the neighborhood will go up.
This isn’t a situation where there is an assessed value of a neighborhood, and the taxes are divided among the residents, so if one house increases in value, and pays higher taxes, it does not decreases the value or lowers the taxes of surrounding homes. In fact, the opposite is what actually happens; a home will be remodeled, or a new homes built, and the desirability of the neighborhood goes up, which in turn increases the value of the surrounding properties, driving property taxes up because the assessed value goes up.
The total that needs to be collected by a taxing district is divided by the total value of property in the taxing district (not the neighborhood). The less your house is valued by comparison, the smaller your piece of that pie is (relatively). The assessed value of your home can go up without a corresponding increase in your taxes (that happened to us with this year’s assessment) if the total value of property goes up by more. New homes add more to the “total property value” end of the equation than your corresponding increase in value. Derelict homes add less to the “total property value” end of the equation than the appreciation of your house. The tax rate in Seattle is down to 8.29 this year, when it has been over 9 forever. That’s not due to new policies with tax cuts. It’s because the new housing is spreading out the tax burden.You can find out more about how taxes are assessed on the King County Assessor’s website: https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/assessor/How-Assessments-Work/Residential.aspx
I live about two blocks away and walk and drive by the two houses almost daily. Sad it has been unoccupied so long. I think it’s a beautiful little house though and that rose bush was amazing to see!They are unique little houses – maybe they weren’t so unique when built but certainly no others remain along Delridge today. The high density, likely cookie-cutter townhouse units to be built there will reduce the variety of architecture in this area. And sometime 50-90 years from now, the town-homes to be built, where the white house with rounded roofline and arch gateway once stood for 90+ years, will be sold: the new townhouse owners will have seen their kids off to live their adult lives and someone similar to myself will feel a bit sad when the new property owners repeat this cycle and scrape away the buildings for the next new living plan the city will have. Maybe a single family home with a small foot print, near shopping and schools, on a bus line with a huge rose bush and an arched side gate with soft roof-lines and a fresh white paint exterior. Some homage to the house there today? I’d rather see this derelict house repaired and once again lived in than the stacked box units that every corner of the city seems to now be getting. (Even worse are the mixed use structures with retail ground floor, 300 small apartments above and 50 parking spaces below – tenements of the future.) The sad truth is the developers are in it for the money and so follow the trend in their industry; buy, scrape, stack- the- boxes, sell, take the profit and run. No unique, interesting or engaging design elements. Nothing but 8 new units with parking for 4 – each selling for twice the initial cost of the land purchase. The profit is higher the faster they raze the old and the cheaperthey build the new. It’s a money grab – and before those $850k town homes get scraped in the future, they will have been tenements, drug dens, squatted in and become derelict. Probably with multiple complaints of electric bike batteries scattered around, abandoned Teslas and piles of old 5g electric meters. Some people just want to have a home to live in, others a place to live as long as they can and other people see a place to make money off 8 new transplants who want a home that’s new to live in….then take the profits and build themselves a huge, unique home with architectural elements in a low density, wooded, gated area, not near the eyesore developments they built along busy corridors, without parking or trees – or rose bushes.
Whoa! Those are some imaginatively dystopian projections of Delridge. Yes, this end of year (and TIME) postulation caught me off…remember, this is a strip of Delridge long abused. To see its past so exalted and its present/future so derided. Ironic love of the past even those these “unique little boxes” may well have been ordered from Sears Roebuck Co. and were the cookie cutter fav of the flappers.
Yes, it’s sad, and I firmly believe that Seattle will eventually be the new Digital Detroit (which was once the Paris of North America). Nothing stands still. While the house seems to be a quaint rose covered ruin, it isn’t providing shelter or home to anyone. I hate the faux mid-century shoe books too but they are a place for a family to live, provided they can afford the astronomical price tag. I lived in a house just a couple blocks away, built at the same time, and I can say there were some elements to it that were the 1919 equivalent of the 2020 slap-it-together-get-rich-quick to it’s construction too. People don’t change so much, there are just so many more of us now. Seattle used to be a place you were from, like Baltimore or Pittsburgh. Now it’s a place you got a cool job and will live a couple of years. The inevitable cost of that will come due someday.
I always thought “what story’s that home could tell” every time I drove by it… yes it is an eye sore but just imagine the people who built it and more than likely lived in it their whole lives or at least most of it.
Yes! Great news for SoDel! A few blocks up the street on Cloverdale, new home is finally replacing a decrepit and disgusting property that was vacant for 40 years! Can’t wait until all these wastes of space are replaced by some nice looking, new and useful.
Nostalgia is one thing. Keeping houses up that are a blight on the neighborhood is another. Cities change. I’m glad to see the density where it should be. Not everyone wants a picket fence.
Well this is actually one that needs to be torn down and replaced!
Save the roses! Someone with a yard should dig up the roses described above and transplant them. What a lovely old home, great roof line, too bad it can’t be rehabilitated.
Two four-unit buildings and only five parking spaces? There should be at least one space per unit and a few visitor spaces. South Delridge is only “somewhat walkable” and tenants will own cars. I believe in building up urban areas versus suburban sprawl but until communities have a high walkable score, off-street parking should be provided in new developments. It would also be good to see a bit more square footage reserved for green space. It seems like the amount of real estate and lot sizes in W Seattle could accommodate the above.
This location is one block from a 120 (soon to be RapidRide) bus stop. That is frequent transit almost all day, every day already and is only going to get better. It’s equally close to the 22, which is not amazing, but is an additional connection to the Junction and Westwood Village. Two blocks to the south and they can catch the 60 and 128. The 128 is a great route that gets you directly to the Admiral District, the Junction, Southcenter, Morgan Junction, etc. The 60 is a direct bus to the hospitals and clinics on First Hill, Broadway, Georgetown, and the International District. A half block further and you get the 125 which is a straight shot to South Seattle College (and another option to get downtown in addition to the 120). It is literally four blocks from Westwood Village so there are a lot of things the residents will be able to get to without even catching a bus. Less than half a mile away is downtown White Center, with a ton of places to eat, drink, and be merry. Plus two more buses, the 113 peak-hour express to downtown and the 560, which gives you a direct bus to the airport and to Bellevue. That’s a long way of saying I don’t think you know this area at all if you think someone has to drive to live here. This will be a great opportunity for someone who doesn’t own a vehicle. People who own cars should buy homes that include storage for their vehicles, period. If the streets are too full of parked cars, the problem is the people that chose that housing despite their car storage needs, not the developers. (Although, if you’re at all familiar with this stretch of Delridge, you know that there will be a mishap with their cars within a year tops if it’s exclusively parked on the street, so it’s kind of self-punishing anyway.)
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