1521 Breaks Ground
Driving through downtown today I saw a group a people in a parking lot on 2nd Avenue. My first thought was who got shot. It was the ground breaking ceremony for 1521.
Escala – work recently started on the lot.
Brix – the old Safeway is now being demolished. Completion date has been pushed to 1st quarter of 2008.
What a piece of crap. The developer should try to live in 296 sq ft. It’s projects like this that degrade the Seattle way of life. Want New York living? Move to New York!
I think you meant to put it under the Moda Condo post. Yeah, it’s pretty small. Not defending the builder, but it does fill a gap in the area since most other new projects start at $500,000+. There aren’t many options for a place under $200,000 in the city core neighborhoods. Montreux has done well, their studios are slightly larger at approx 350 sq ft. Hopefully, since the range is from 300 to over 1,000 sq ft, they will focus on decent, liveable sized units.
As much as I love NY, Seattle’s not really in a comparable space. Maybe the downtown will be so “lively” in 10-20 years that young people with money will be happy to live in tiny spaces just for the night-life. But for right now, I can’t imagine this appealing to anything but a tiny niche of transplanted residents from NY or SF.
If you’re a Seattleite and all (can’t believe I’m saying this) you can afford is $200,000 or $300,000 you’re far more likely to find something you like in Capitol Hill, Ballard, Greenlake, Greenwood, Columbia City, etc. Not likely anything huge, but probably double the square footage and with more appreciation potential (due to the wider audience for normal size places).
Again, I’m happy to see all the new condos and hopefully apartment buildings being built downtown and Capitol Hill (where I live), but I wish there were some non-luxury buildings going up, and some more affordable/below-market-rate housing as well. I think Seattle will be pretty crappy if it’s all higher-end housing, restaurants, etc.