Oh, okay, next year I can get a season pass to the pool for $87. There are only like 4 front doors closer to that pool than mine. (Might actually be back doors, though – on the south side there are houses with backyard gates opening directly into the park.)
It’s not just that you don’t see students walking down the woodchip path to/from school in the summer, you don’t see moms pushing strollers to the park as much.
…or maybe my neighborhood turned over to a lot of young families in the last few years and their first kids are past stroller age now (the one next door is!)
Alright, waited to see it wasn’t gonna be too hot, then put out a yard and a half of topsoil, then went to the pool and now pleasantly water-worn. I was happy to move close to this park as an amenity, now that I’m happy being shirtless in crowds of strangers should make a regular thing of it.
In the last two weeks talked to three neighbors who were here before me and even one who showed up after who seemed earnestly surprised that the neighborhood was getting nice and young people were showing up, making me realize it was not in fact universal knowledge that this would happen a decade after I bought Karafuto
Sure enough, with the anxiety at normal I have an assessment of neighborhood future hitting between the golden glory I do at zero anxiety and the miserable outcomes with the anxiety disorder, that the neighborhood continues to develop but none of it is particularly for me and when I examine that – “Why are you scoffing at this restaurant for 35-year-old yuppies? You’re 45 and rich. What do you want? What do you want?” dont really have a sense of what would be, at least I have a house I can walk to a few places to eat from that’s appreciated well – in a way swamped by everything else I inherit – but honestly if that’s my criteria I should maybe go somewhere with taller buildings
Tumblr ad regarding a frequent bus line between downtown and specifically my neighborhood starting up, that’s nice targeting.
Also further confirmation that this neighborhood is going to be like, the neighborhood for the next two decades and Karafuto is in specifically the best 3-block radius for transit access.
Like, the way it turns out I correctly predicted and positioned for everything in the 2010s would leave me well-placed going forward but be a little eerie weird even if not for the whole bizarre miraculous total transformation that at some level I kind of understand as my reward for the otherwise “wait what do I get out of this?” task of reading the zeitgeist right all the way.
Definitely some small businesses and probably even a few small property owners over the last few years who’ve put a good deal of time and energy into making a go of things along the main drag here as the neighborhood comes up before bowing out whose efforts ultimately went not towards producing wealth or social influence for themselves but, by lifting up the neighborhood in general, for the larger property owners, developers, and realtors of the area.
Mathing it out if those neighbors leave and combine the adjacent lot for multifamily construction when their kids move out in a decade or so, depending on number of units feasible (and basement units/extended family compounds already here) the new building would suddenly constitute from 40% to 75% of all the households living on the block. Which is both the promise and cost of residential densification, I suppose.
I mean depending on the market it could feasibly become only 4 townhouses.
The multiple work crew circus building my neighbor’s retaining wall finished out with African immigrants doing final cleanup and then Mexican teenagers laying a course of bricks on top
Neighborhood has exactly the right mix of small properties to open things in, medium properties to adaptively reuse for a decade then turn over, and big auto-service or for-construction-crews-to-pick-up-going-to-the-job retail (tile, carpet, plumbing fixtures, countertops, landscaping) that can turn over big intact plots for 4-over-1s, this area is really gonna be the future, won’t stall out like the closer Eastside like Belmont and Hawthorne where you’ve got to go narrow plot-by-plot cause there’s like one store in the middle with 4 apartments on the 2nd floor whose owner juuuust doesn’t find selling out worth it vs. that rent
Yeah so gentrification turns out to basically take exactly the paths I expected just first-time homeowners show up 7 years before young cool kid renters, apparently
Neighbor’s new retaining wall, replacing rotting railroad ties.
Me: looking much better!
Also me: you know you caused this
Me: naw, the area’s been coming up in general!
Also me: and the specific mechanism of that here is you moved in and weeded and cleaned up this block every week for years so it doesn’t look like a goddamn wasteland
Think the older guy in the house behind me was a little standoffish at first because people in this house hadn’t had the best reputation before and here I was a young guy and now the fence is falling down, but then we had to end up dealing with the trees in the right-of-way in the bit between where it parallels my yard and his, and he’s from an old-stock Cascadian family where they all ended up working with trees and wood, he was some sort of technician with the Forest Service, so we’ve really been brought together talking over tree care and local plant life and growing conditions, it’s sweet
