The Younger Generation, Living in Sequim!

by Jim Washburn

Affordable Housing comes to Valhalla

During the Second World War, my New York-born Uncle Bob was stationed on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. He once showed me the bunkers and gun emplacements from which they’d guarded the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a name that begs for a question mark. The Strait is also what links the Pacific with Port of Seattle, so it was teeming with prime submarine chow for the Japanese.

Bob relocated to the Peninsula after the war, marrying and settling in Port Angeles. By the 1960s, Japanese cargo ships were docking there, loading up on lumber and paper from the pulp mill. It was a comfy little town, buoyed by the union jobs on the docks. The town sporting goods store sold high-end McIntosh hi-fi gear alongside its waders and moose calls, while Japanese crewmen supplemented their pay by selling the latest Nikons and Sonys to cash-laden locals.

I first visited my uncle there in 1968. The whole town smelled like the paper mill, and you really had to look out for the loaded lumber trucks lumbering through town. The A&W made great root beer floats, and I bought the first Spirit album (one of the great debuts of the psychedelic era) in the town’s general store.

My mom and stepdad retired to the peninsula two decades ago, to Sequim, some 15 miles from Port Angeles. (Sequim, by the way, is the local Clallam tribe’s word for “ludicrous name to tell the white people we call this place.”) I’ve been up for several visits a year ever since, each time being a snapshot of the town as it’s changed.

all photos: Leslie Smith

Idyllic, it was. And kind of tedious, like some Nordic Xanadu where bliss meant sanguine cows in the pasture and a broasted chicken shop in town.  Two decades ago, Sequim seemed not overmuch changed from the 1890s: a dairy and farming community with more than its share of taciturn Swedish types. (In the 2000 census, the population was still nearly 94 percent white.) Most people shopped at the family-run market that had been on the main drag for generations; the police blotter was largely filled with callers reporting dogs getting into the trash or cows with overfull udders. If you rolled a bowling ball down the main street after 8 pm, that would probably make the police blotter, too.

The market’s long gone, driven under by supermarkets, Costco and Wal-Mart. Sequim’s now home to such quaint names as Home Depot, Office Depot, Pet Depot, PetCo, Starbucks, Staples, and other American clutter, from Arby’s to Subway. The great old junk shops are junked, replaced, at best, by new age bookstores and wine and cheese shops. Much of the farmland has sprouted housing, in drab tracts that have nothing to say to the local landscape. Other farms gave up on raising that food stuff, instead growing lavender now. Pack your sachets! There’s a Sequim Lavender Festival, held July 17-19 this year. And don’t ever claim to be the “Lavender Capitol of North America.” Sequim’s already trademarked that. They haven’t trademarked this one yet: “If I’m Growing Lavender, I Must Be Wearing Panties.”

So much change. Over in Port Angeles the economy has gone to hell, and somewhat back. Much if it was based in timber; that dried up when the Spotted Owl’s habitat gained federal protection. You still see owl-hatin’ bumper stickers on cars, though for those who see the long run, the owl’s tenuous hold on this world is a harbinger that clear-cutting forests won’t sustain any of us critters for long.

But as Harry Hopkins said back in the Depression, “People don’t eat in the long run, they eat corndogs. They’re 48-per-box or so from Costco. Come home with those, and with that mammoth mustard container into which your head you could dunk, and you’ll be eating three-square for sixteen days.”

PA has rebounded by harvesting and milling other woods, such as alder, now. Down at the port, some folks service freighters while others build luxury yachts to ply richer waters. You’ll find PA-made Westport yachts at some of the better docks in Newport Harbor.

One of the biggest businesses in the Sequim/Port Angeles area is health care. That’s because, along with its aging farmers, Sequim has long been touted as one of the best retirement destinations in the U.S. My parents were in the second wave of that, and the tsunami signs are up now.

Folks there aren’t just 94 percent white, they’re about 45 percent old, meaning over the age of 65. That was in the 2000 census; I’m guessing it’s over 60 percent now, since everyone’s eight years older, and the population’s believed to have grown by a third as thousands more retirees have moved in. About another 20 percent are aged 45 to 64. That leaves maybe 20 percent for life’s other 44 years to squeeze into.

The biggest squeeze is getting into housing. The influx of retirees drove housing prices up past what many locals could afford. Most of the new housing has been pricey single-unit homes aimed at that market.

My wife and I flew to Sequim in late January to surprise my mom on her birthday. She’s of an age where we figured jumping out of a closet might not elicit the desired response—happy, conscious and vertical—from her. So we just arrived quietly and sat in the living room with my sister, who lives there, until Mom happened out of her room.

The phone rang, so she came out almost immediately. Her surprise was, I think, a bit confounded by there being a phone in her hand; she was worried the person on the other end might herself be confounded by the Surprised Mom Sounds on our end.

It was Costco on the phone, wanting to tell my sister some thing or other—“Hey, we’ve got another stratum of stuff in! It’s like Troy in here!” “We’d like to deliver an inflatable swimming pool full of mussels to you!” “We’re selling flat-panel TVs so big you’ll have to put doors and windows in them!” “Did you know that all our prescriptions come with a funnel?”

My mom did indeed feel it was only polite to explain things to the Costco lady, so she could input the info to their database, the one that feeds from that tube in the back of Neo’s skull. You knew that about Costco, didn’t you?

After the grand surprise we went out to dinner. I’ve got to say the town has had some fine restaurants in recent years. Driving on the 101 to the current best one, Cedar Creek, we passed by the newest change in Sequim’s squat skyline.

“What is that remarkably horrid thing?” I asked, trying to remember the field that had once been where this three-story complex now stood, in muted two-tones of crème and mocha, ochre and Easter egg, with all the charm of a Ralphs wedding cake.

“That’s affordable housing apartments. Elk Creek,” I was told.

Elk Creek. Cedar Creek. Unlike my Southern California home, where places’ cozy nature names are seemingly generated by a computer, Sequim has actual creeks.  There is a real Elk Creek up in the hills. Not only that, the creek is named for real elk, a herd of Roosevelt elk that still roam nearby, named for President Theodore Roosevelt, who was named for his dad. The grand Olympic National Forest adjacent to Sequim and PA exists only because President Roosevelt created it to preserve the habitat of the elk, back when conservatives conserved things.            

And the Elk Creek apartments? The buildings really don’t look bad—they’re just a slightly more corrugated version of what you see in Irvine and about. But they make Sequim look more like everywhere else. And since I live right in the heart of everywhere else, I’d rather Sequim looked like Sequim.

From another perspective—for example, that of someone who lives in Sequim but can’t afford to—the apartments must look like a godsend. For one thing, Elk Creek and its sister complex for seniors, Vintage at Sequim, are the only new apartments—affordable or otherwise—to be built in Sequim within recent memory.

Ever mindful for excuses to write off my travel expenses, I decided to look into these apartments a bit. Both properties are run by the Vintage Housing Group, which has similar properties all over the west coast. Vintage built the apartments with a mix of partners, which is typical with low-income tax-credit driven housing. (See our spiffy primer on low-income housing to learn more.)

The 118-unit Vintage at Sequim opened in April of 2006; the 138-unit Elk Creek in April of 2008. According to Betty Handly, who manages both properties, Vintage at Sequim is at 98 percent occupancy, while Elk Creek is at 93 percent.

“It was at 100 percent last year, but we’ve had a little attrition lately,” she said. “We were turning people away, but it looks like we’ll have several vacancies a month. Things are changing in people’s lives because of the economy. Kids are losing their jobs or having their hours cut. That’s going to have some impact on the area.”

As in other places, to qualify to rent, you must make 60 percent or less of the county’s median income. In Sequim, that translates to an annual income limit of $22,380 for an individual, $25,560 for two persons, or $31,980 for a four-person family. A 653-square-foot one-bedroom rents for $555, a 969-square-foot two-bedroom for $655, and a 1106-square-foot three-bedroom for $733.

That’s fabulous compared with rents in my none-too-special SoCal neighborhood, where a place the size of Elk Creek’s two-bedroom can go for over $2,000 a month. Rents aren’t nearly so high in Sequim, but they also aren’t nearly as available.

“Most of our tenants in Elk Creek are younger, working people, who have jobs at places like Wal-Mart, Home Depot and the casino. This has made a huge difference for them. Until they were able to move here, quite a few were living with mom or dad or renting houses they couldn’t really afford, because there was nothing else,” Handly said.

Handly has gone to bat for her young renters in the local press. When some residents, city council members and the chief of police had voiced concerns that Elk Creek might attract a criminal element to town, Handly last June retorted in the Sequim Gazette, “First of all, Sequim’s not a high-crime area, so I just have to laugh when I hear that. It’s not these residents that are going to bring crime into the area. They’re just working kids.”

Sequim has seen an increase in crime over the years. Dogs still get into the trash, but the police blotter is now spiced with the occasional grisly murder or sex crime. When we were up there, two men were apprehended for having put up two runaway 14-year-old girls in their home, and for repeatedly banging them. “We’re kind of engaged,” was one suspect’s excuse to the police.

As with most affordable housing, there’s no more crime or other problems at Elk Creek than in the area at large. (They don’t accept applicants with a criminal record.) “If anything, the tenants appreciate what they have here more. It’s a nice place and there just aren’t many rentals in the area. People are happy here,” Elk Creek’s Barbara Owen told me as she showed us around the property.

There’s a fitness room, business center/computer room, clubhouse and playgrounds. The units still have that new-apartment smell, which is far better than old-apartment smell. They’re specious, well laid out, and very well equipped, with lighting and appliances aplenty and enough electrical outlets for modern plugged-in living. Each one has a patio or deck. The units are well insulated, with double-paned windows that also keep out the highway noise from nearby Highway 101.

Sequim Bay

Let’s compare things briefly with the 53-year-old three-bedroom house we rent in Costa Mesa: Elk Creek’s three-bedroom unit is bigger, a half-century newer, with modern wiring instead of the sparse two-prong outlets that have put me on a first-name basis with our circuit breaker box; our house has no insulation whatever, with one whimsical heater way off in the living room, while Elk Creek has heating throughout; Elk Creek has more closet space, and two full bathrooms, compared to the ancient pipes in our cramped one-and-a half. Have you ever tried taking half a bath?

Step outside up there and you’ve got the awesome Olympic Mountains to one side, and trees, fresh air and the occasional elk. Granted, when I step outside there at this time of year, it’s with seven layers of clothing and I’m still cold. Plus, if we lived there, it would hardly be any surprise at all for my mom to see us on her birthday.

Comments

Comments closed.