On a Tear
New homes stick out where Seattle’s modestly sized residences once stood

By ADAM HYLA
Editor

Its sheer walls soar three stories skyward. In front, levels two and three are clad in floor-to-ceiling glass. Its upper floors cantilever over the front stoop, where a nine-foot door announces that either Gargantua will be moving in soon, or people who like living large will make this big, unapologetically modern house a home.

On a Mt. Baker neighborhood block occupied mostly by one- and two-story mid- to early-20th-century homes, it’s hard to ignore.

There are plenty of domiciles like these being built in Seattle: more capacious, but forecast to shelter fewer occupants than their modest neighbors. The first-ever Seattle Housing Inventory report charts 492 homes in single-family zones demolished from 2003 to 2006.

Nearly as many single-family homes have been toppled in multi-family areas during the same period, according to the report. In the multi-family zones, says Alan Justad, spokesperson for the city’s Department of Planning and Development, virtually all the old homes are being replaced with apartments or attached townhomes.

But in the single-family areas, those homes are being torn down to make way for new single-family structures.

Smaller households living in bigger houses has been the national trajectory since the 1950s, when the average square footage of a single-family home was half what it is today, and the average size of a family was 3.7, not today’s 2.6 people.

The city’s report shows clusters of teardowns across the city, from newly “discovered” neighborhoods like the Central District to staid domains like Laurelhurst where wealthy buyers discard older structures like yesterday’s newspaper. Views accelerate the trend: The map shows a great number of teardowns along shorelines or on the sides of ridges. Old homes are disappearing in Green Lake, where new residents may have found the early-20th-century architecture too small.

The replacements, says architect Tony Case, are “really destructive of the scale of the neighborhood, and it’s destructive of the social fabric as well. You get a different demographic.”

Case’s firm builds only on vacant land, as close to downtown as possible. One typical home in Rainier Valley is 1,700 square feet. That’s not the 800 square feet of yesterday’s nests; neither is it the six-year-old, 3,850-square-foot residence up for sale for three-quarters of a million dollars nearby.

“Most of us don’t really feel we need that much space,” says Case. “I’d rather have more of a quality of space than a quantity.”

Small could come back any time, says Seattle Planning Commission chair Jerry Finrow. Boston’s Back Bay mansions were subdivided into row houses and apartments, and something similar happened to create the rooming houses and multiplexes of Capitol Hill and the University District.

Super-big houses are wrought by “growing affluence and more investment in the housing market,” he says. “It’s important to point out that things get smaller too.”

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Links to not-so-big architects and contractors: notsobighouse.com.