Seattle Was Selling Itself by the Lot
A correspondent finds a city crowded with renters, hotels turning travelers away, and speculative prices for even a Fifth Street mud puddle.
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The town is crowded with renters. Houses rent for high prices, and hotels turn away travelers for sheer lack of room. The Elder came in heavily loaded this week, having from 300 to 500 passengers, and the Mississippi is expected today with 200 more. My Laramie paper speaks of 16 car loads of emigrants passing through that place for Washington Territory. It is evident that the day for Washington has come, and I feel as much rejoiced at the prospect of your wheat fields as at the signs of our commercial center. Each needs the other and will prosper by the other's prosperity.
Whether this town can continue at its present rate for three years is questionable, but if it does there will be fortunes in real estate such as San Francisco never saw. Additions are made on every side; lots sell rapidly on Lake Washington, two miles back, for $100 to $150. It is reported that a surveyor was arrested in Victoria recently for laying out an addition to Seattle on H.B.M. grounds. I asked the price of two lots ten blocks from the bank and learned that the real estate agent had just paid $4,300 for the two. I saw a mud puddle on a corner of Fifth Street, and as water is plenty in this vicinity imagined it would be cheap at $500 for 50x120. Two lots were sold at the foot of Commercial Street the other day for $16,000 gold coin. A two-story brick building was contracted for April 14th for $17,000. The same day the contract for another building was made at $10,000. There is a large three-story building now approaching completion for $40,000. The city claims 7,508 people, an assessment roll of $5,000,000, a small debt, a clear school treasury and a school roll of 1,577 in 1882. So the clover blooms and the bees are lively and all is well. D. I. Pomeroy.
“Houses rent for high prices, and hotels turn away travelers for sheer lack of room.”
Seattle's 1883 boom—high rents, packed hotels, and frantic lot speculation—reads like a direct ancestor of today's housing crunch and real-estate frenzy. The correspondent's astonishment at a $500 mud puddle is a reminder that land values here have long been treated as a speculative game.
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