Home › Forums › West Seattle Rants & Raves › Rents become a disgrace here in WS
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May 11, 2008 at 2:01 am #586947
JiggersMemberI’ve lived here in WS for over 10 years now, and its just mind boggling what they are charging you for rent now. Most buildings in WS are old, decripid and they want to charge you $850 a month to live in that piece of crap. I rememeber when I was renting five blocks from the junction in 1998 for just under $325 which included the bells and whistles. I just checked that same building a few months back and they want $800 for that place now. Ok, I guess you can always say if you don’t like it, you can move out of WS. But that’s the point, I don’t want to move out. They have changed WS too fast if you ask me. I hope a year from now, condo developers will struggle to get new tenants in to rent and will have to start decreasing their prices and give concessions once again if they want to fill there vacancy’s. The recession isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and it will hit owners were it should, below the belt.
May 11, 2008 at 2:16 am #624372
WesMemberI agree with Jiggers. This is awful.
May 11, 2008 at 2:37 am #624373
AnonymousInactiveUnfortunately, because of the real estate market, more people are renting instead of buying. This makes rents go up and causes landlords to be more selective.
May 11, 2008 at 2:45 am #624374
ShibaguyzMemberOr it will just go the way of the Capitol Hill & Queen Anne neighborhoods where they will drive the rents up with the intent of driving out the renters, turn the whole thing into condo units and sell them off at a profit. That will, in turn, drive the renters further out or they will start looking to buy and move to West Seattle!! Oh wait… that last part was just us… and well over a dozen other people we know come to think of it.
We hardly go a week without seeing someone who used to be our neighbor on Capitol Hill living here in West Seattle. All of us figured out that if we could afford rent over there, we could buy over here.
May 11, 2008 at 3:34 am #624375
JanSParticipantShibaguyz…I have a friend who is the live-in manager of an apartment bldg. on Cap. Hill. He gets his apt. rent free, but I’m appalled at what the going rate in his bldg. is…and it ain’t that great. I pay about 200-300 less for my 2 bedroom apartment in the Admiral District…but then, I have the best kept secret in town, cheaper than most…shhhhhhh!!!
May 11, 2008 at 3:08 pm #624376
ShibaguyzMemberYeah… it’s nuts over there. We are paying about the same here for our home as we were over there for a one-bedroom apartment.
We’re definitely happy we’re here!
May 11, 2008 at 9:09 pm #624377
JoBParticipantit’s even worse if you have pets… especially dogs…
everyone assumes they are going to be a liability…
May 12, 2008 at 12:12 am #624378
TheHouseMemberBuy and you don’t have to worry about rent prices going up.
I just saw a house in the Belvidere(sp?) area pretty close to the Junction going for $299,999 and you could probably haggle to get it a bit cheaper.
You can always live in Detroit, Dallas or Florida and find rentals cheaper.
May 12, 2008 at 12:34 am #624379
ShibaguyzMemberGood point… that’s certainly why we finally bought and stopped renting.
May 12, 2008 at 2:45 am #624380
JoBParticipantTheHouse…
we will be buying eventually.. but first we are going to make sure we know the area well enough to buy a house that will suit our retirement as well as our current lifestyle…
May 12, 2008 at 3:16 am #624381
JanSParticipanthey…House…299,999 isn’t too bad…down payment would only be what? 30K? gonna float me a loan? oh, and…my rent…in the Admiral District is 695/mo for a 2 bdr. apt…what do I have to put down so my house payments would be about equal?
while we love the idea…sometimes the means simply isn’t there.
Yes…owning can be a lot better than renting…if you have the means to do it with…
May 12, 2008 at 3:19 am #624382
JanSParticipantand I will say one more time…there’s more to life than the building you live in. I’ve been in West Seattle for 33 years…this is my community , where my family is…where my business, my established clients are. Why in God’s name would I want to live in G-dforsaken Dallas, Detroit, or Florida…starting over at the age of 61? Tell me how that makes sense?
May 12, 2008 at 3:20 am #624383
JanSParticipantand if the life there is soooo much cheaper, why the he!! don’t you take your family there?
May 12, 2008 at 3:28 am #624384
JimmyGMemberRents are a reflection of the market. If there isn’t anyone willing to pay the advertised rates, rents will go down or stabilize.
So there must be tenants in WS willing to pay those prices.
May 12, 2008 at 6:44 am #624385
AlkiParticipantWell, I own a rental and I can speak from the OTHER side. The housing prices are so high that just to meet our mortgage payment, we have to charge $1000 per month. And renters are willing to pay it because it’s a great place. So, it doesn’t stop with us, it goes back to housing prices. Housing prices drive up rentals, too, especially in desirable areas like West Seattle. There are a lot of factors when you look at it. Supplies, shopping for new fixtuers, etc is all more expensive. So, all around, it costs us a lot more now than it would have if we had owned a rental back then.
May 12, 2008 at 1:17 pm #624386
SueParticipantI guess everything is relative. I moved here 4 years ago from the NYC area and I find the rents here pretty cheap – for what I pay to rent our house here in WS, we’d be lucky to get a small 1 bedroom back there, in a marginal neighborhood. And I paid $300 a month to commute the 25 miles from an apartment in northern NJ to Manhattan (3 trains and 2 hours each way) compared to my $63 bus pass now. My salary wasn’t that much higher there, and most of the extra money (compared to my salary here) was taken away by state and city income tax.
May 12, 2008 at 3:50 pm #624387
ShibaguyzMemberJanS – WOW… what kind of a rant did you go off on?? I thought this post was about non-affordable rental costs here in WS. It sounds like you don’t have that issue with your rent so you’re not one of the ones feeling the crunch and that’s great.
We were run out of our neighborhood and have had MANY other friends run out of their neighborhood and done as TheHouse said, they moved to other cities because the cost of living here was just too high.
We are some of the fortunate ones that found a good balance with our rent and a mortgage that wasn’t all that different so we took the option of buying a house vs. renting.
I think that’s all that was being said. Don’t think it was anyone telling you to move.
May 12, 2008 at 4:16 pm #624388
TheHouseMemberIt’s ok. I’m used to people on here taking offense to some of my comments. My comments make them reflect on how they have made poor life/financial decisions and then they take their frustrations out on me.
The good news is that these people still have time to correct these issues, but they’d rather yell at me instead. I hate to tell you, but living in Dallas, Detroit or Florida would improve your financial situation. I could delve deeper, but I will show an uncharacteristic side of me and shut up since some people are recovering from surgery.
And I’m not the one complaining about rent going up. I don’t have a need or desire to move and quite frankly haven’t been impacted by this so called “housing meltdown” because I own a home with a 30 year fixed mortgage. It doesn’t take a genius to fortify your finances!
May 12, 2008 at 4:46 pm #624389
ShibaguyzMemberwow… guess there’s more going on here under the surface than I know about… think I’ve said my piece. Maybe I’ll just go find another conversation without all the “history” involved. LOL
Play nice!! ;)
May 12, 2008 at 4:56 pm #624390
JanSParticipantdear Mr. House…you had to throw that zing in there about poor life/financial decisions. You don’t know my history, so I’ll forgive you. It’s sometime not all black and white the way you see it, there are sometimes gray areas. You are planning wisely for your family…you’re what…35? When I was your age, I was married, a home owner – 30 year fixed mortgage, a small child like you, a partner, making decisions together for our future, feeling just like you do. We were the first among our friends to buy a house (and our mortgage payments were $350/mo then). You never know when that can all change in an instant. Sometimes it’s circumstances, not poor decisions, that change things. I’m sure you’ll find that out during your life.
Shibaguyz, he’s suggested this before..that we’re all just poor planners, and move if you can’t buy here. Easy for him to say. It’s a cold approach…and that’s why I brought up that’s it just not all that easy to leave everything and go where you don’t have a business/family, friends/community. Those things are important, too, and help you decide where you want to live. Yes, my rent is much better than some here. I get by, I’m lucky.
Sue is right…all things are relative. New York has atrociously high rents for not much of anything. Don’t really know why people put up with it to live there, but they do. East coast is not my cup of tea. Just like gas prices…we complain about how high they are here…but go live in London, and you’ll be paying at least twice as much as here.
I predict that in the next few years, as they start construction on the Spokane Street corridor, and then the Viaduct, that those things will impact rents/house prices on this side..
sorry about the rant above, Shibaguys….I simply don’t like holier than thou attitudes..:)
and, dear, dear House…surgery is tomorrow morning…not recovering yet…:)
May 12, 2008 at 5:08 pm #624391
TheHouseMemberThanks for the clarification…I have 18 hours to be brutally honest.
May 12, 2008 at 5:29 pm #624392
SueParticipantTheHouse writes: “I hate to tell you, but living in Dallas, Detroit or Florida would improve your financial situation.”
That’s not necessarily true of everyone. Salaries are almost always lower in those areas as well, and jobs not necessarily available, so moving may simply put you in the same situation with a similar ratio of salary to income as where you came from. Not to mention that when I moved from the east coast to here, the movers alone cost me $5,000. That didn’t include the time/gas/hotels to drive my car here, nor all the deposits on a new place, and the month looking for a job. So while I’m doing slightly better financially by moving to a lower cost of living place, there was a significant outlay of money to do it. Also, I almost moved to Detroit about 15 years ago and things weren’t that much cheaper there. In fact, a quick bit of internet research shows that today I would make about the same salary as I make here and pay a similar rent. So that would be a lateral move, not an improvement. Especially when you factor in that you’d be living in Detroit. ;)
May 12, 2008 at 6:35 pm #624393
JenVMemberSome people have a hard time seeing beyond their nose…and if you don’t have the same circumstances as they do, you are unworthy of their respect.
It would be nice if we could all afford to buy a house here…but a lot of us can’t do that. Just becuse The House can, he must be SO much better than the rest of us…and the rest of us should be banished to Detroit.
May 12, 2008 at 8:03 pm #624394
AnonymousInactiveTheHouse, JanS is going to have the internet in her hospital room. Just for my personal entertainment, could you save your best for when she’s on morphine:-)
May 12, 2008 at 8:57 pm #624395
JanSParticipantlol…JT..yes…who knows what we might get into ;-) gotta love that morphine…
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