Seattle is known as a city of neighborhoods and houses. The last census, however, shows that sometime in the 1990s single-family detached houses slipped to less than 50% of all dwelling units in the city. Construction since then has shifted the balance even more toward multi-family dwellings. Nevertheless, nearly 70% of all Seattle dwellings are still in buildings with fewer than 10 units.

Residential structures by units per building

Data derived from 2000 U.S. Census

Seattle is also a Twentieth Century city. Only about 1500 of the city’s 130,000 houses were built before 1900.

Seattle houses by period built

Data derived from King County Assessor’s records

In spite of the fact that the sold price for single family homes went down by 18% over the past 15 months, Seattle real estate is not cheap. The average sales price of a single family home is $480,000 and the median sales price is $396,000.

Fortunately, over the past 30 years the supply of owner-occupied housing has been steadily increased by the addition of condominium homes. While the lifestyle is very different, condominiums are less expensive than houses: the average sale price this year is $300,000 and the median is $269,000.

Seattle’s topography divides the city into natural neighborhoods with their own distinctive characters. Most neighborhoods offer a wide range of housing styles and prices, and the choices available to a purchaser are immense. Neighborhood Information is available to help you identify where in the city you might wish to locate. You will also find information on the styles of houses in Seattle and on current market conditions.

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What does a condominium look like?

A residential condominium is not a building. It is one form of shared property ownership. In a condominium, an owner is deeded exclusive ownership of a specific space together with a percentage ownership of common spaces, such as hallways, lobbies, outdoor spaces, walls surrounding the individual spaces, garage and storage areas, and the ground on which the condominium stands.

A Condominium Is Not a Single Family Home

The greatest difference between a condominium home and a single family residence is not that the condominium probably looks like an apartment instead of a house. (The properties in the two photos in this section are condominiums, not single family homes.) The greatest difference is that the owner of a condominium becomes a member of a Home Owners’ Association (an HOA).

Anyone purchasing a condominium should be prepared to participate actively in the operations of the HOA. The association, through a board of directors elected by the members, manages the common elements of the building. Its fundamental responsibility is to preserve the value for all owners by maintaining the building. Most boards employ professional managers to assist them.

A condominium purchaser should also be prepared to pay a fair share of the expenses of managing the property. HOAs are run on homeowners’ dues which are generally paid monthly to cover shared expenses such as water, sewer and garbage bills, insurance on the building, cleaning, maintenance of common areas, gardening. A well-managed condominium association plans for long term expenses like roofs and painting. The HOA budget should include reserves that will be sufficient to pay for such projects when they become necessary.

Condominiums: Newcomers in American Housing

Condominiums are relative newcomers to American housing. They were rare before 1961, when Congress enabled the FHA to insure purchase loans for condominiums. They became possible in Washington State in 1963, when the legislature passed the Horizontal Regimes Act. In the late 1970s growing interest in condominiums spurred the first major period of condominium creation in the Seattle area.

The creation of a condominium does not depend on new construction. Since a condominium is a legal structure, existing apartment buildings can be transformed into condominiums. A significant number of the better Seattle apartments built in the 1920s have been converted to condominium ownership.

Condominiums were preceded in Seattle by co-operative apartments. Because of rent controls imposed during World War II, many owners of apartment buildings found it more profitable to sell their buildings to the tenants rather than maintain them as rentals. A co-operative is a corporation which owns the building and issues “proprietary leases” for individual units to those who own shares in the corporation. There are two practical differences between a condominium and a co-operative. First, because there is only one lender who will finance co-op sales, co-ops are slightly more expensive to finance. Second, because the buyer of a co-op owns shares in a corporation rather than the individual unit, it remains common practice for the boards of co-ops to retain the right to refuse to sell to anyone for any reason — remember that Richard Nixon was famously turned down by a co-op on Manhattan.

Because of shared ownership of basic systems like plumbing and the roof, the purchaser of a condominium is legally entitled to receive either a Public Offering Statement (for new construction or conversion) or a Re-Sale Certificate (for re-sales). These documents include the basic rules which owners must live by — pets or no pets, rental restrictions, aesthetic controls, modification of units — and financial information. A purchaser should ask to have included 2 years’ worth of minutes of HOA meetings to gain information about any pending problems.

Condominiums in Seattle

Condominium homes can be found throughout the city, but there is a significant concentration at the center. Nearly 60% of Seattle’s condominium homes lie in the belt from Lake Washington to Puget Sound between the Ship Canal and I-90. About 15% are located in the northwest quarter of the city, especially in Fremont and Ballard. Another 11% are found in West Seattle. Most of the remaining 14% are in the northeast quarter. Southeast Seattle has only 3% of the city’s condominiums.

There are now about 25,000 condominium homes in Seattle. The ownership of buildings can be converted to condominiums, and about 6,000 of Seattle’s condominiums were built before the Horizontal Regimes Act. About 2,000 of these were built before 1930, and among those are some of the most sought-after units in the city; the best-known of these are buildings developed by Fred Anhalt. Since 1970 the addition of condominiums to Seattle’s housing has been steady: 5,000 in the 1970s, 6,000 in the 1980s, and 6,000 in the 1990s.

Since 2000 the rate of condominium development has nearly doubled. Through the end of 2006, nearly 5,000 new condominiums had been sold, and a substantial number of conversions have added to that total. At least 2,000-3,000 additional condominiums are under construction as of early 2007, including a large number of expensive units in the Downtown-Belltown-Lake Union area. The conversion of existing apartments to condominiums also continues.

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BEFORE 1900: Victorian styles

Less than 1% of Seattle’s existing homes were built before 1900. In the building boom that followed the Gold Rush, commercial structures replaced most of the larger Victorians as the new trolley lines allowed people to build their homes on top of Queen Anne Hill, on Capitol Hill, in Madison Park or Leschi. Most of Seattle’s surviving homes from the 1890’s were built away from the center of the city as modest farm houses or workers’ homes, such as this one of a group of five remaining together near Garfield High School.

Of the many Queen Anne Victorian homes that gave Queen Anne Hill its name, few recognizable Victorians remain. Some of the best examples of Victorian homes date from shortly after the turn of the century and are not on Queen Anne.

1900-1920: Bungalows, Boxes, Craftsmen, and Traditional Styles

The Bungalow, the Box, and the Craftsman were the contemporary designs of the first decades of the century. The Bungalow, a California invention, was a modest one- or 1.5-story home which provided the minimum spaces for polite middle class living. Almost always frame structures, bungalows have low-pitched roofs. The bungalow could be developed into a spacious house, and some examples were enhanced with a variety of exterior detail. The style is associated especially with Montlake, Wallingford, and Green Lake.

The Box style, associated with Capitol Hill and parts of Queen Anne, was a more pretentious 2-story home. In its classic form it has four corner bedrooms upstairs with corner windows projecting about a foot beyond the walls supported by exposed braces. Other decorative elements were used, most frequently an ornate window at the center of the upstairs portion of the facade.

The term Craftsman is used both for a style of interior detailing and for exterior styling. The Craftsman interior is characterized by box-beam ceilings, built-in bookcases flanking the fireplace, and simple door framing; details frequently show elements of mission styling. For the exterior, the Craftsman was essentially a free-hand style. Usually of 1.5 or 2 stories, the Craftsman exterior can be identified as a comfortable, homey design characterized by shingled siding and simple, straightforward detailing.

Several Traditional Styles were popular on into the twenties. Probably the most common traditional style, the Tudor, is distinguished by the steep pitch of its roof and a cross-gable which usually faces the street. Tudors are available in all sizes and quality, from very simple frame homes to mansions with exquisite detailing.

 

True Colonials are always two-story homes, frequently in brick, with little eave over-hang. Purists will distinguish among colonials on the basis of detailing–a Georgian colonial, a Federal colonial, etc.

One of the most distinctive designs is the unassuming Dutch Colonial. Its gambrel roof is unmistakable. Almost always a frame house, the Dutch colonial works well on narrow lots with the entrance on the side.

Styles associated with stucco exteriors are less common, for stucco is designed for drier climates than Seattle’s. Nevertheless some good examples of Mediterranean and Italianate homes can be found, some complete with red tile roofs.

1920-1940

The 1920s and 1930s were not decades of innovation. For the most part homes of these years continued the styles of the previous decades, especially the traditional styles. The contemporary design of this period came from Europe, the Modernistic house. Modernistic houses tended to be severe, horizontally accented buildings with smooth stucco walls and flat roofs. They introduced such features as windows that wrapped around corners, pipe railings, glass block, open decks on the upper level. The exterior of the modernistic house was usually undecorated; when decorations were added, they were usually in the Art Deco mode, relatively vertical, mostly geometrical patterns. In Seattle art deco is more common on commercial buildings than on homes.

1940-1960: Boeing Bungalows, Cape Cods, Ramblers, Split-Levels

Homes built during World War II were minimalist versions of traditional styles–suggesting the popular traditional forms but both small in size and without ornamentation. The classic of the period is the “Boeing Bungalow,” built in large numbers in West Seattle to house the workers flooding Seattle to build airplanes.

After the war the pent-up demand led to a tremendous building boom. Most homes built during the 1940s and 1950s were no-nonsense, straightforward efficient housing. The only traditional style built in any numbers was the Cape Cod, which had been very rare in the earlier periods; with its steep-pitched roof without cross-gabling, the Cape Cod provided a lot of living space at modest cost. The most important builder of Cape Cods was Albert Balch, who developed Wedgwood in northeast Seattle.

Apart from the Cape Cod, most homes of the era were in the contemporary designs of the period: ramblers and split-levels. They were built by the thousands in neighborhoods at both the north and south ends of the city. As implied by the name used elsewhere in the country, the rambler or ranch-style house was associated with the plains, not the hills of Seattle. The true ranch style was a single level home built on grade.

On Seattle’s wet hills the rambler usually acquired a basement; where the slope was steep enough this led to the daylight rambler, where one side of the basement opened out on ground level, providing plentiful daylight to the lower level.

The split-level is less common than the rambler. The split-level combines a one-story and a two-story element; the roof-lines of the two parts are perpendicular to each other, and the floor of the one-story part lies half-way between the two floors of the other.

1960-1980: End of Large Developments

By the end of the 1960s most large parcels of land within the city had been developed. Large residential developments became suburban projects, especially after the Evergreen Point Bridge made the near Eastside readily accessible. City projects were small, and the styles of the 50s and 60s–ramblers and split-levels continued to be most common.

A new design was the mid-entry home, in which the entry was positioned mid-way between lower and upper levels–a blend of the rambler and the split-level. The design was not elegant but it was practical. On sloping lots this design provided a lower level with a minimum of excavation; in this way relatively spacious houses could be built with limited expense in foundation work.

A variety of homes began to appear during this period which are simply called “contemporary.” Contemporary homes abandoned all effort to remind people of traditional styles and relied on such elements as large floor-to-ceiling windows, exposed structural beams, and wooden ceilings finished with a clear sealer. Living space extended visually beyond the walls with decks or patios reached through sliding doors or French doors.

During this period a distinctive regional design–the “Northwest Contemporary”–became an unmistakable tradition. The Northwest Contemporary reflected local materials and conditions as well as a strong Asian influence. Often adapted to steep hillside lots, the Northwest Contemporary frequently has several stories and emphasizes vertical lines rather than the horizontal lines of the rambler; siding, for example, was frequently installed vertically rather than in the horizontal pattern of traditional styles.

1980–Present: In-fill Building

For the past 25-30 years most single family homes in Seattle have been constructed as in-fill building–building on parcels with 1-4 building sites that got left over in the larger developments of early days. In the older neighborhoods in-fill buildings appeared on what had been side yards of older homes.

The only distinctive style emerging from recent in-fill building has been the “skinny house,” a design developed to exploit narrow (25’-30’ wide) sites. In some areas older homes built on two were demolished and two new homes built where one had been before.

For the most part, however, in-fill homes reflect a wide range of designs. In some cases new homes built in older neighborhoods were carefully designed to fit in with existing houses.

In others various contemporary designs were used, ranging from architect designed custom homes to versions of current eclectic suburban building designs.

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