(This sponsored post provided by Wallingford realtors Kris Murphy & Daniela Dombrowski of Keller Williams Greater Seattle)

Seattle – #1 in Appreciation and 2^nd Tightest Housing Market in the US – 2016 Wallingford & Tangletown Real Estate in Review

For the last few years when writing our annual review of the neighborhood real estate market we have been talking about rising prices, bidding wars and the shortage of inventory. Well, 2016 was no different, if anything, there are even fewer homes for sale and the competition among buyers has intensified. According to a recent Seattle Times article, Seattle is …

I received a (paper) letter from Dunn Lumber last week inviting me (and everyone else within 1200′ of their headquarters location down by Lake Union) to an open house:

Dunn Lumber has been family run and owned since 1907. We have operated and headquartered out of the same lower Wallingford location since 1930. Our legacy and commitment to our neighborhood our neighbors is the integral reason four present, and, hopefully, future success!

To remain in the same location, we are contemplating the expansion of our Dunn staging area and warehouse, with the possible addition of amenities such as grocery, restaurant, …

Lorenzo writes:

In the (very!) wee hours of last night’s snowstorm, an honorable neighbor intercepted a woman with two bikes north of our QFC. Nice bikes. Stolen bikes. Bikes now in my possession, and eager to return to their owners. (I know my bike would be eager to return to me.) So I’d be pleased to facilitate, if you can describe your steeds in sufficient detail, of course. One is blue, the other black. One seems like “his,” the other “hers.” Matching? Maybe–you tell me.

But seriously, as a victim of this kind of crime, I’m happy to help and …

This is a bit dated, but a few weeks back, I came down that little bit of 5th Ave NE that runs alongside I-5 and passed a backhoe clearing out the homeless encampment and the bushes that were hiding it. I went by a few days later and snapped a few pictures of the cleared area.

There was a bit of debris, including an old wifi router, a hypodermic needle and other odds and ends where the bushes and tents used to be, but it was mostly bare dirt. Someone has scraped out a little cave / shelf for a …

It’s a whopper of a power outage, according to Seattle City Light’s outage map, from Green Lake up to Capitol Hill and from Fremont over to Laurelhurst, impacting over 20,000 people. According to the city, the power is likely to stay off until around 6 pm tonight. I haven’t heard word on the cause, yet, but folks all of Wallingford reported hearing a loud boom just as the power went out, so likely a transformer blowout.

Update: Anita Elder says: “Komo news sent me a msg…We just heard “equipment failure” caused the outages. Seattle City Light hopes to have …

It was absolutely the oddest thing I’ve seen: there’s a man with a yellow reflective jacket, walking back and forth across the street jabbing the asphalt with a long blue pole with what appears to be a toilet plunger on the end. At his side, the blue pole was hooked up to what looked like a geiger counter, if Ryobi made geiger counters, and a spray bottle of blue liquid.

Now, obviously, you can see the picture here, so the fun and mystery is all gone, but I asked the man if I could take his picture for the blog, …

I would like to apologize for recently reposting a story from a Wallingford Facebook page regarding an incident between an African-American teenager and an employee of a local business. According to the story as posted by the young man’s mother, the employee had used a racial slur, which led to altercation and the police being called.

When I originally posted the story, I reposted the account provided by young man’s mother along with a note pleading with people NOT to take their anger out on the company the man worked for, since they had not been given a chance to …