Is it 'to hell with the rest of you?'

By Jennifer Hall

It's Sunday afternoon. My husband and daughter are out of the house and I'm at my usual weekend station: at the kitchen sink, by the kitchen window hurriedly scouring the dishes. Housework has once again become a sporadic task, now that school has started.

A small Sunday crew, a contractor and two teenaged young men pull up in an extended cab truck, and proceed to do some work around the monolith still under construction across the street. Then, a mid-size silver late model car drives by on my side of the street.

It slows in front of my house. A middle-aged woman is looking my house over. The car proceeds up the hill, turns around, comes down for a second pass, turns again and comes back up for a third. The car stops in front of my daughter's pumpkin patch, and the woman gets out of the car.

I think, "Oh, great. Probably a real estate speculator, coming to tell me that she's looking for a `fixer upper' for her kids." This has happened before, and I expect that the offers may increase, now that a more-than-a-million dollar monster house is being plunked down right across the street from us.

Developers in regular guy's clothing look at our modest home with bulldozers in their eyes. "Fixer-upper," my foot! Fix your own damn upper, that's what I want to tell them!

Sure, our house isn't in the most primo condition at the moment. That's because I'm married to a carpenter, and his poor house is like a cobbler's shoeless child. But this is our fixer-upper that we'll fix up ourselves. Eventually. In the meantime, I am prepared to read this lady the riot act if she steps on my kid's pumpkins.

The woman smiles uncertainly at me as she steps gingerly around the gourds. She walks toward my house and I see that she is on the late side of middle age. She has a kind face. I rush out to warn her not to trip over the hose. She stumbles and catches herself. "Hello," she says. "I read about the house going up across the street from you, and I wanted to meet you. My husband and I live in Ballard. The same thing happened to us."

The woman and her husband had decided to drive around West Seattle until they found my address. They are private people who don't like to wear their hearts on their sleeves. In the interest of maintaining their privacy, I'll call the woman "Doris", and I'll call her husband "Jim".

I invite Jim and Doris into my house to exchange e-mail addresses. Doris tells me that she and Jim had a particularly trying time with a McMansion next door to them. "Are your neighbors as disappointed as you are with the house across the street?" she asks. I tell her yes, and I tell her that one neighbor who lives up the street and around the corner was angry with me. The neighbor had asked me, "Jennifer, why didn't you stop this thing before it got started? We would have backed you up!"

Being a natural guilt sponge, I wondered if I could have done anything about it. What if my husband and I had exercised our right to go downtown and look at the plans? What if we had anticipated the impact of the new construction? Could we have convinced the new owner/builders to build further back on the lot, not as high up, or to actually consider their impact on the neighborhood?

"Well, I looked at the plans," says Doris. "I started a petition and a letter writing campaign in my neighborhood. We contacted the City Council and the Department of Planning and Development. We presented the new neighbor our letters asking him to please limit the size of the new house."

The new owner had thrown the letters down in front of them and proceeded to do mean things like cutting down trees that Doris and Jim had nurtured from twigs. The house next door, a single family dwelling twice the size of the other houses in their neighborhood, now looks down into their once-private backyard. Doris and Jim are still hurt about those trees.

You can call us view-obstructed folks over-privileged whiners. You can post nasty comments about us on web sites; call us "anti-progress" and say we're living in the past. The simple fact is that changing anyone's environment creates stress.

When people feel that they have little or no input over how their environments change, well, that creates more stress. A social climate is created that is socially inappropriate, even socially harmful. Sometimes people get nasty. Or they just get plain depressed.

Doris and Jim seem so sad, thinking about the neighbors they lost and the good times they once had. Thinking that the replacement for those neighbors and good times is just plain unpleasant. I can commiserate.

Seeing my old friends' house torn down brought back the pain of their demise. We supposedly live in a social democracy, composed "of the people, by the people, and for the people". Our mayor, our city and county councils are part of this social democracy, but the lure of inflated tax revenues easily outbids the interests of lower income property tax payers.

Regulations for building on expensive lots are very liberal at this point. People with enough money can build on most of their lot space. They can build three story houses that cast shadows into streets and tower over neighborhoods. They can, as another neighbor put it, "drop their wallets on the neighborhood and say, `To hell with the rest of you!'"

I can't help but think that we need to claim a voice here.

Jennifer Hall is a sometimes "over-privileged whiner" who lives in West Seattle.