Recent Stories in News

The King Conservation District promotes conservation in rural King County. Of course, in rural King County, "conservation" and can be a fighting word. The KCD encourages farmers and landowners to use best practices with incentives and programs, among other things fish and wildlife-y.

This Tuesday, you have the chance to vote for an open position on its five-member board. (It's a three-year term.) The catch is, you've got to vote in person at the library. Per Publicola: "Seattle residents can vote at the downtown public library (1000 Fourth Ave.) between 10:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m." [Other King county locations] It's likely a hassle for most people, but on the other hand, it makes a good reason for a trip to the library if you haven't been in a while.

Your candidates are listed here: Cascade Harvest Coalition Director Mary Embleton, farmer Mara Heiman, realtor Teri Herrera, ecologist and environmental planner Kirk Prindle, and conservationist Max Prinsen. Here and there you get a sense of the underlying tensions, thanks to code words like "property rights" and concerns like water resource management. Choose wisely.

Gun-free summer theatre at Volunteer Park.

U.S. District Court Judge Marsha J. Pechman ruled in favor of the City of Seattle against plaintiff Robert Warden, of Kent, and dismissed his case. Warden had brought suit against the city and Mayor Greg Nickels for banning guns in parks, arguing that the state constitution expressly prevented that limitation. The King Co. Superior Court agreed in February, calling the ban illegal.

But here's where it gets interesting: Warden's success in that case rendered his complaint moot in U.S. District Court. So he couldn't argue the more straightforward claim that the state constitution preempted local law. ("The court was presented only with the issue of state law preemption, and here Plaintiff expressly removed his preemption claim from his complaint," wrote Pecham in her decision. )

So Warden was left arguing Second and Fourteenth Amendment issues. Pechman countered that the Second Amendment does not (yet, there's a case coming before the Supreme Court) constrain the actions of municipalities like Seattle, only Congress. And she did not find Warden discriminated against. Warden was able to cite no inalienable right to carry a gun in a park.

Pechman moved on, though, to give her thoughts as to the legitimacy of the preemption argument anyway. In her view, there's precedent for a parks gun ban:...

As of June 9, 2010, pending Governor Gregoire's signature, talking or texting on a cell phone while driving will be a primary offense. (A headset is okay, and there are multiple provisions for emergencies.) The House passed a stricter bill than they initially presented, making it align with the Senate version. Now police will be able to write a $124 ticket to anyone not using a headset on that basis alone. The HeraldNet quotes Sen. Tracey Eide, D-Federal Way, the bill's sponsor, saying:

I've fought for this for 10 years, and sometimes I thought this day would never come. Maybe now people will pay attention to their driving instead of their conversations.

Parents who want to get a jump on helping their teens quit the texting-while-driving habit have an assortment of smart phone apps available to them. All cost less than that $124.

So the latest hullabaloo is over the Wright family proposal to build a Chihuly glass house where the Fun Forest once misspent idle youth--the news made the USA Today, for heaven's sake. The lesson seems to be that if you say you'll pay for construction, you can build whatever you like at Seattle Center.

A glorified Chihuly gift shop/restaurant was on no one's top ten list for the Center--well, except for Dale Chihuly and the Wrights, apparently, where it was number one with a putti.

Mossback crawled out from beneath a seed log to make the point that the Center has never been all that high-toned--that was in defense of Chihuly, by the way. On the City Council, Sally Bagshaw said, What about our Central Park plan? Mayor McGinn said, It makes money? And Council President Richard Conlin plumped squarely for a Central-Parkesque open space with a glass house in it.

Here and there, Seattle Center is sporting more and more the handiwork of Owen Richards Architects. A principal with LMN on the McCaw Hall renovation, Owen Richards has since come back twice to make improvements on the Hall's cafe and to create SIFF Cinema. It's also the firm chosen for the SIFF Group Film Center on Center campus.

Now the firm has been tapped for the glass house project. I'd rather see someone tackle the real white elephant on Center grounds, the hulking ex-armory Center House, which has the effect of making any cultural celebration held there feel vaguely Stalinesque. It's the heart of the campus, and what everything else relates to. It seems odd simply to plunk things down around it, in the hope that when something is finally done with it, it will "work" with everything else.

Steve Broback of the Parnassus Group, at 140TC: Seattle. Photo by Brian Westbrook.

This was Monday early afternoon, and Sagolla and I were making up for not having been able to connect face-to-face earlier in the day, while I was down at the Bell Harbor Conference Center at Pier 66 for 140: The Twitter Conference, a commerce-meets-culture confab digging into nitty-gritty of how to maximize whatever benefit you're trying to get from your 140-characters-at-a-time online presence.

While the audience was decidedly business-y, and most of the presentations oriented towards marketing and branding opportunities via Twitter, the subjects of politics, pop culture, philanthropy, and privacy kept popping up. On the last subject in that list, Ben Parr of Mashable pretty much summed up the prevailing philosophy when he explained: "Privacy is dead." So there's that....

Flickr pool member abosco adds a sense of mystery to real estate.

February's MLS report shows Seattle residential real estate has got a little tiger back in its tank, with pending sales up 35 percent from February '09. (I direct you to the Seattle Bubble for a grain of pending sales salt.) More convincingly, closed sales are up 34 percent as well, with 459 closed compared to 342 same month last year.

The safe conclusion we can draw from this is that some people want to sell and some people want to buy (though total "activity" was actually down almost eight percent). But speculating about the health of the market seems premature. It might be good news that the median price jumped $10,000, to $390,000, but then again it might not.

For one thing, that's very much in the ballpark of the $8,000 homebuyer credit. For another, the median doesn't tell you about short sales.

But that's Seattle--Seattle Bubble points out that except for Seattle and the Eastside, home prices around King County took a dive, year-over-year. And even so, while Seattle's median price for homes was up almost four percent, the condo median was down over six percent. UPDATE: The Bubble gets granular, and finds the median affected most by sales of Eastside homes.

First came the announcement that the Wallingford Community Senior Center would have to close. But then people said nuts to that and held a "soup line" fundraiser.

The community's show of support brought a matching challenge grant of $25,000 from an anonymous Wallingfordian, so now the Board of Directors feel confident about their decision to keep the Center open, and begin to rebuild its services and strengthen its financial footing.

To commemorate turning the corner, the Center plans to hold a community pancake breakfast on Sunday, April 25, from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The "New Start Celebration" will be open to the public.

It'll also be a chance to learn about services and programs for seniors, like a senior nutritional lunch program and social activities and groups. (Other area senior programs have had to close, and just three senior centers are left north of the ship canal.) WCSC itself operates on a cost-saving, 4-day week. This April, the Center wants to begin adding back programs. Anyone who wants to help in the effort should call (206) 461-7825.

You know how when you see a flood-prone area hit yet again, and hear it declared a state of emergency? That's not just to attract TV cameras--the declaration means state and federal monies can be made available for home repair, legal services, medical care, and so forth. Depending on the size and frequency of the floods, that can add up to a large bill.

It's also, in part, an answer to the question, "Why do people build in a flood plain?" For one thing, the land is often cheaper than land that doesn't flood. But for another, we help people rebuild. So while there's a risk, you're not paying full freight.

To rectify that last part, FEMA has, for the last five years, been working on developing updated Flood Insurance Rate Maps, which try to assess the risk both in places that flood often, and in places that could flood disastrously. They've created 100,000 individual digital flood insurance rate maps, and, to the chagrin of people who live and work in areas at risk, they don't put a lot of faith in levees or dams.

Insurance is required in some instances where it wasn't before (some money can be saved through a "grandfathering" rule) and new development in a high-risk area is more strictly regulated. The Seattle Times has a story on the outcry across western Washington, even from areas like Chehalis:...

In which is this line more likely to be found: "Experts say there is nothing unusual about the latest spate of earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Turkey...." Roland Emmerich's 2012? Or KING 5's website?

Courtesy WSDOT

California has two bridges that are magnets for jumpers, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, and the Coronado in San Diego. Seattle's Aurora Bridge may be second or third in this tragic popularity contest, says the Los Angeles Times, but it has its own distinction in that so many miss the water:

That dubious honor ["despairing jumpers in danger of becoming deadly missiles"] is reserved for Seattle, where the 78-year-old Aurora Bridge runs 167 feet above the west end of Lake Union--half of it over land.

The story, "In Seattle, a suicide barrier for a deadly bridge," charts the difficult process of the city getting around to doing something about a bridge where over 230 have ended their lives. Since 1995 alone, Kim Murphy notes, there have been almost 50 jumpers, with over half hitting the ground outside of Fremont offices. Seattle FRIENDS says on average, there is a suicide every three months.

After more than a decade of discussion--how about banning pedestrians? How about building a caged walkway?--the utility of a suicide barrier finally overcame the barrier of aesthetics. For $4.6 million, "a series of thin, closely spaced vertical posts 8 feet, 9 inches high" is being installed, which we're getting at almost 50 percent off, thanks to the recession.

Gig Harbor's Massana Construction will be installing the fence this summer, and finish by fall. Lane closures (double lanes at night, single lanes during rush hour) will occur, but WSDOT thinks there may be fewer than they estimated.

A late February snow from 2009.

Some cold and wet is sneaking past our nice El Niño pre-spring this week. Cliff Mass says it'll bring snow in the mountains by tonight and through the early part of the week. Depending upon the mysterious workings of our Puget Sound convergence zone, lowland areas may see snow showers on Monday morning and Tuesday. Later in the week, temperatures will pop back up a bit, but it's going to be more like real March weather out there.

The view from the deck at Ivar's on Lake Union

ABC News: Rudy Guede's cell mate claims Guede told him Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito weren't at the house when Meredith Kercher was killed--another man was. Guede says he never said that. Who do you trust, the convicted child killer or the convicted murderer? Once again, Andrea Vogt has all the details.

Here on The SunBreak, Jeremy has been covering Oregon's response to declining state revenues; now Washington Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown has unveiled her idea for a high earner's income tax referendum--letting the public vote on it in November. The initial reaction from the legislature is that they won't be rushed into anything--except of course deep cuts to basic services and health care for the working poor, and increases in the regressive sales tax that will hit the working poor hardest.

An income tax of 4.5 percent would be assessed on any income over $200,000 for an individual, $400,000 for a married couple. The state sales tax would drop to six cents. For instance, the Port of Seattle CEO makes $319,000. If he were single, he'd pay 4.5 percent of $119,000, or $5,355 in income taxes.

TechFlash reported on Google's acquisition of Picnik, the hometown photo editing service. Starbucks tried to defuse the uproar over its handgun-agnostic position. Tom Douglas can't wait to feed the Amazonian masses down in South Lake Union....

Washington's House of Representatives has responded to a Senate bill making cell phone use a primary offense (that is, you could be ticketed just for that) by reassuring teens that their status as second-class citizens is secure. The Seattle Times summarizes the House bill, saying it:

...makes texting a primary offense, but use of a handheld phone by a driver 18 or over would remain a secondary offense. Teens would be barred from any phone use.

Now, it's true, teens are in general terrible drivers. For one thing, they're sleepy all the time. On NurtureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write that "young adults are involved in 55% of the 100,000 fall-asleep crashes annually, even though they aren't even close to being half of the driving population."

Rep. Dan Roach

Senate Minority Leader Mike Hewitt said, "I don't like the government being in all aspects of our business." Just teens' business. That is fine. Now the House and Senate have to come together on either the Senate's "That's it, no one gets to hold the cell phone!" ban or the House's "Meddling teenagers!" version.

It's tough out there for a teen. They're sleep-deprived, and they're broke. As Jon Talton points out, teenage unemployment has risen to a "scary 25 percent." Now they might have to sit in the car and watch mom and dad yap away on the cell phone, knowing if they did the same thing, it'd be one more thing that they could get busted for.

You can see the light rail power lines in the distance. Photo: WSDOT

Buses that use the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel are in service, but due to construction, Link light rail won't be making stops at the Stadium or Downtown stations, starting tonight at 10 p.m. and finishing up at 5 a.m. on Monday, March 8. You can still pick up a Route 97 Link Shuttle bus from Westlake to the SODO station. They depart every 15 to 20 minutes. (Here's the Sound Transit alert.)

The construction, just so you know why you're being inconvenienced, is part of WSDOT's SR 519 - South Seattle intermodal access project. Crews are taking down falsework (temporary supports) for the off-ramp to Atlantic Street, and there's a danger of electrocution from the light rail's power lines. So the power's being cut.

See, it's like the bus is rising health care costs. And we're all on it.

I was watching this and eating lunch at my desk --> Obama healthcare speech <--

when I got a call from the "pre-collections" team at [local hospital] because my insurance company took 6 months to decide that they would not cover the expense associated with removing 6 stitches from my son's hand.

There's a visual joke here--watching me try to take notes with my broken hand [snowboard accident]. I'm waiting to get a CAT scan because my insurance will apparently pass on the full price of the procedure to me.

I couldn't even watch the rest of the Obama speech. Let me know how it turns out.

They want to give me 2 CAT scans. One for the hand and another for the wrist. I guess these two body parts are far enough apart as to require separate billable procedures.

"Did we already pass the funny part?" I wrote back....

Seattlepi.com's correspondent in Italy for the Amanda Knox trial(s), Andrea Vogt, has just filed a story on the 427-page ("front and back") judge's opinion, which sheds light on the jury's verdict. Vogt says Judge Giancarlo Massei's document "leaves ample room for a number of criticisms that will likely feature prominently in her upcoming appeal." For her defenders, that day can't come soon enough.

Though the jury came to the conclusion that Knox was involved in the murder, they "disagreed with the murder dynamic that prosecutors put forth," reports Vogt. They believed Guede started the sexual violence and that Knox aided in it to some degree. The forensic evidence against Knox was compelling for the jury.

ABC News says that Massei wrote that Knox "killed her roommate 'without any animosity or feeling of resentment,' and that the grisly homicide was the result of 'casual contingencies.'" That puts the judge in disagreement with the prosecution's theory that Amanda Knox murdered Meredith Kercher because of differing hygienic standards. For Massei, the best explanation is that things got out of hand.

Despite arriving at a substantially different accounting of events, the judge wrote that the prosecution "presents a comprehensive and coherent picture, without holes or inconsistencies."

As much as I like to rail about government bureaucracy--come on, who doesn't?--I often see signs that our government is populated by hard-working, competent people. (Whoops, there go our eastern Washington readers.)

Yesterday I wondered aloud at the seeming discrepancy between a report that the state added 12,000 jobs in January, and another report that indicated our unemployment rate had either stayed the same or edged up imperceptibly.

Sheryl Hutchison, the state's Employment Security Department communications director, wrote in to explain, in refreshingly clear terms:

On the surface, it seems illogical that the unemployment rate could increase at the same time jobs are increasing. The answer lies in the definition of "labor force."

As the economy starts to improve and more jobs become available, discouraged workers will start looking for work again--thus increasing the total size of the work force. Since these individuals haven't found a job yet, it causes the unemployment rate to increase.

For several months now, our economists have been predicting this phenomenon would occur as the economy starts to pick up--and it appears that it's starting to happen. As illogical as it seems, it's actually a positive sign that the economy is starting to move again.

The question of whether an unemployment rate is what it says it is, if it doesn't count all the ready-to-work unemployed, aside, at least it makes sense. If and when the job market starts to get back to its feet, the news that people are hiring will draw thousands back to the labor force. The Seattle Times economy reporter Jon Talton vouches for this reading in his post today:...

Mayor McGinn

Yesterday, Mayor McGinn sent the City Council his proposal for a $243-million seawall bond measure on a special May ballot. Said McGinn:

We have a responsibility to address basic public safety risks. I have directed SDOT to accelerate replacement of the seawall. I look forward to working with the Council on the financing for this critical work.

To up the ante, the Mayor's office also noted that the accelerated schedule would create a "funding gap of nearly $20 million in 2011 for the Seawall Replacement Project." If work on the seawall is to accelerate in an uninterrupted fashion, the money would need to be scrounged up this year.

Said the Council: "How's never? Will never work for you?"

Richard Conlin

Publicola quotes Council president Richard Conlin as saying:

When you come up with these big projects, you can’t just say one day, "Hey, we’re going to do this," then the next day say, "No, wait, now we’re going to do something else." Our voters have been very willing to vote for things in the past, but we think that’s been the case because we’ve prepared the groundwork first.

I'm sympathetic to Conlin's position, but it should in no way be confused with reality. Should that be case, we might well imagine Conlin having giving his quote from the voter-approved Monorail, perhaps looking out over an expanse where two voter-unapproved stadiums do not sit.

In any event, the earliest the Council could get around to getting something on the ballot is likely November, adds Conlin.

Now I need to leave off writing this post to read Jordan Royer's Crosscut article, "City Council: Does process still outrank product?"

If you're not a working artist in King County, or some sort of moneyed arts patron, you may well have no idea what 4Culture is. But if you make art in or around Seattle, or work on cultural preservation projects, you definitely do, because 4Culture forms a crucial component of the funding process for local artists, cultural centers, and arts organizations, and currently, they're under threat.

Here's how it works--the state levies a 6.5-percent tax on hotel and lodging. Back in the 1970s, when King County was looking for ways to fund building the Kingdome, the state agreed to give the county a 2-percent credit against the tax collected in King County to service the debt. Over the years, the amount collected exceeded that necessary to fund the debt, and so 4Culture came to exist, using part of the money to fund arts and heritage projects in King County, with the rest dedicated to the Kingdome debt and supporting youth sports and tourism advancement.

But here's the catch--in 2012, the program expires when the Kingdome debt gets paid off, so a group called Advocate4Culture has formed to press the legislature to pass bills to continue the funding. Currently, there are bills that have made it out of committee and are waiting for floor votes, so time is of the essence. Here are some important facts:

• The bills have nothing to do with taxes. Whether or not 4Culture continues to receive a credit on taxes collected, the state will continue to levy them; they won't go away. The only change will be that in 2012, a major revenue stream to support culture, arts, heritage, and youth sports in King County will be lost.
• This is not just a King County issue. Many counties in the state have followed suit and receive a credit to support tourism activities and other local priorities.
• This is not just an arts issue. Rep. Frank Chopp, whose bill in the House is the main hope for preserving funding, has tied arts and heritage funding to increased funding for affordable housing, making it a win-win if it's passed.
• 4Culture will not be able to continue funding at the same level if funding isn't extended. Strictly speaking, 4Culture won't go away in 2012; 40 percent of the money they receive has been put into an endowment to support their mission after 2012. But the endowment isn't large enough to continue funding at the same level--nearly $5.2 million in 2008. Also, a lack of long-term funding will prevent them from helping other organizations with capital funding projects--such as the effort that is restoring Washington Hall....
(more)

Despite the PSBJ headline, "Washington unemployment rate rises to 9.3 percent," there's been no substantial change in unemployment. January's unemployment splits the difference between December's estimated percentage (9.5) and revised downward final (9.2).

What's slightly confusing is that the state claims to have added over 12,000 jobs in January. The Tacoma News Tribune says "job gains occurred in retail trade, educational and health services, leisure and hospitality, professional and business services, manufacturing and aerospace and parts manufacturing."

That would be three percent of the approximately 395,000 Washingtonians who are unemployed.

Statements were issued: "This is a positive sign for Washington state," said Gov. Chris Gregoire. "It’s encouraging to see jobs finally coming back," said ESD Commissioner Karen Lee. No one addressed the question of how 12,000 new hires would completely fail to impact unemployment. It's as if the two measurements had been somehow decoupled for the benefit of political press releases.

Jonathan Raban

Raban's Tea Party piece in The New York Review of Books is delightful reading not just for the chutzpah employed in sending an Englishman to a Tea Party, but also because Raban resists the urge to add one wingnut lump or two: his Tea Party survey explores the way all sorts of people with inflamed passions have gathered together, only to discover that the hobbyhorses that brought them don't necessarily like the close quarters.

For Raban, author of Surveillance, a libertarian lean against government intrusion into private life was calling card enough that he could chat sociably with the gamut of Tea Partyers he met: the ones who vacationed in Amalfi and Tuscany, the ones with the second home in Torquay, the red-headed, sixtyish Virginian with two special-needs adopted daughters.

Only one man went public, even in a presumably "friendly" crowd, with overt racism. A table of Tea Partyers was recounting the public's hoodwinking by the Obama campaign.

Obama was an unknown quantity when he was elected. He had no record, no experience; he was an empty suit about whom we knew nothing.

"Well," said the alpha male, producing his ace of trumps, "we knew he was black."

Later, one of Raban's fellow conventioneers would tell him that "being here has made me realize that I am a liberal conservative."

After all the invective heaped on Tea Party heads--and the attention focused on those mugging for TV coverage--it's a relief to have at least one reporter not succumb to the temptation to caricature poorly, but to do it with Rabelaisian naturalism and zest. Diminishment is what creates a Tea Party in the first place.

February 28, 2001, at 10:54 a.m., a 6.8 "intraslab" earthquake shook the Puget Sound region for about 45 seconds. The Nisqually quake's focus was some 32 miles deep, in the Cascadia subduction zone. It might seem like things have been quiet since then, but as the graphic from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network illustrates, we live with minor quakes almost daily.

It's the effects of major earthquakes that are on everyone's mind recently, though. Andrew Rivkin, writing for the New York Times' Dot Earth, emphasizes that the news from Chile should spur preparations in the Northwest. "The Pacific 'ring of fire' doesn't stop at the equator," he writes. In this or the next generation, the Northwest will likely experience a megathrust quake similar to Chile's, which tend to generate tsunamis.

We tend to consider the averages of megathrust quakes over the centuries as their periodicity, but Chile's last megathrust quake was only 50 years ago.

As much as we talk about the "Big One" on the way, there are still troubling lapses. King County's emergency preparedness page specifically mentions bioterrorism, floods, and flu...not earthquakes.

The Seattle Channel has earthquake safety videos, and the city offers ongoing training programs, but when you search on "earthquake kit," the first page with the elements of a disaster kit was last updated in 1999. The pdf on "How to Prepare for Earthquakes" has a total of four bullet points on things you can do beforehand, including one sentence about keeping supplies in the home. Another piece of advice is to stop driving in an earthquake.

Here's SFGate's extensive earthquake kit suggestions. Trust the Californians. UPDATE: Or, trust the Red Cross.

Ocean Shores, as of 12:30 p.m.

A tsunami advisory is in effect for the Washington coast, with larger waves expected Westport around 3 p.m. this afternoon.

A POWERFUL 8.8 MAGNITUDE EARTHQUAKE OCCURRED AT 1034 PM PDT FRIDAY NEAR THE CENTRAL COAST OF CHILE. IT HAS GENERATED A TSUNAMI WAVE...WHICH IS NOW SPREADING OUT ACROSS THE PACIFIC OCEAN.

It's an advisory, the National Weather Services emphasizes, not a watch or warning. The waves aren't expected to be large enough to cause coastal flooding. (Ocean Shores webcam)

Yesterday afternoon, Rainier Pacific Bank was seized by regulators and sold to Oregon's Umpqua Bank. The PSBJ also notes that Rainier Pacific foundered primarily on bad CDO investments, not real estate loans, as has been more often the case. Rainier Pacific operated for about 70 years as a credit union, and just nine as a bank. (That said, even credit unions are seeking merger shelter against the storm, and with 15 percent of area mortgages under water, more foreclosures are undoubtedly on the way.)

The economic climate and the prospect of natural disaster were forefront in Seattle this week, which began with Microsoft urging an ASAP replacement for the 520 bridge before it founders in a storm or quake, and a group of heavyweight politicos, summoned by their Montlake donors, pushing back against an A+ design option light on transit. The elderly Seattle Times op-ed page is so myopic all they can make out is Mayor McGinn in a gathering that includes Sen. Ed Murray, House Speaker Frank Chopp, and Rep. Jamie Pedersen....

Something interesting happens in a number of stories about Seattle's downtown safety crisis yesterday. See if you can spot it in this KOMO story, "Downtown street crime scaring away visitors":

A survey by the Downtown Seattle Association found that panhandling is a concern among 66 percent of those polled, while open-air drug sales are a concern to 75 percent. Nearly 40 percent said they simply do not feel safe downtown.

And statistics show their fears are not misplaced. Police records show a 22 percent increase in major crimes in downtown and South Lake Union from 2008 to 2009.

See how concerns about panhandling and open-air drug sales are pretty much the same thing? And note that to KOMO reporter Melody Mendez these "fears are not misplaced": major crimes have gone up. So panhandling (not specified as aggressive) is lumped in there with homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft.

Or, here, in this Seattle Times story on a packed forum on public safety:

Burgess said felony crimes increased 22 percent in 2009 over the previous year from the South Lake Union neighborhood to Pioneer Square, according to Seattle Police Department crime data. Much of that increase is the result of robberies and thefts "in our downtown core," he said.

Burgess, who is championing a new initiative to crack down on aggressive panhandlers...

It happened again! Panhandling keeps sneaking in there, along with major crimes.

It's not that Downtown doesn't have a crime and safety problem. It certainly does. If I were asked if I felt safe late at night in Downtown, I'd say no, and given a chance to specify the area, certainly not. If I'm catching the bus after a show, I don't wait anywhere near Third Avenue....

Someone needs to invent a way of leveraging negative equity, and then name it a SNORKEL. The PSBJ reported yesterday that 15 percent of mortgages in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett area are under water (it's 16 percent statewide, 24 percent nationally).

This is based on First American CoreLogic's Negative Equity Report, covering 85 percent of all U.S. mortgages. Their chief economist, Mark Fleming, notes that millions of people owning a home worth less than they owe on it tends to drives up foreclosures. For one thing, not being able to sell your house limits your ability to move to find a job if you've been laid off.

Seattle Bubble has an assortment of graphs based on the latest numbers from Case-Schiller; the C-S data breaks out the "Seattle" market (King, Snohomish, Pierce counties) into high, mid-level, and low cost tiers based on sales volume, which is interesting. "Low" at the moment is under $266,000. The Tim casts a cold eye on the last ten months of flat house values--despite the stimulus.

Former Seattle Times real estate editor Tom Kelly quotes Edward Pinto, former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, as saying, "All we are doing is kicking the can down the street." Writes Kelly, who once offered to sell me a huge old Capitol Hill home on 17th Avenue East for $220,000 and I didn't jump at it, which is why I have trouble sleeping:

Basically, Pinto believes the extra cash the government is tossing into the housing market is simply adding fuel to the fire by depressing prices while foreclosures continue to flood the market.

RealtyTrac shows 3,495 foreclosure filings in Washington this year. This ain't over yet.