Spring is here and with it my annual calculations regarding housing. Do I stay another year in this charming but dilapidated apartment, whose location places me within walking distance of work for the first time in decades, and affords me a hilltop view, and a wide covered porch, and a setting largely unchanged from what it has been for decades? Or do I make that leap to a place of my own, but likely with a painful workday commute? It’s the ever-present quality-of-life versus convenience-and-affordability equation I balance and weigh each day and especially each year at lease renewal season. No matter how I figure it, the numbers don’t “pencil out.” I manage to keep myself sheltered and to scout out comforting vestiges of the old Seattle I recall, now vanished in the construction dust of the towering new developments that have come to characterize the neighborhoods around me. But I have no grasp on where I’ll be come September 1, the start of a new lease should I decide to go another round here. Unlike most, I am not enthralled and enthused and inspired by density, or at least not when it precludes respect for history, for life lived simply for the living and not gamed for maximum gain. So maybe I’ll stay another year. After all, my landlord is admittedly negligent, but still, he remains, in his own words, “just some guy who wants to own an apartment building,” and that’s a rare thing these days. The new breed of owner is all too happy to squeeze our money and block our sky, chop down the graceful trees that whispered and shaded us all those years as we stumbled home from the neighborhood local. I won’t be swayed that this new way is better. I remember the way it used to be and how I thought it would be when I was grown.
Above: Glacier Park Getaway, July 2018, Lake MacDonald shoreline.