NCW Real Estate Blog

This is the type of fun that everyone in the county can still have.  Admittedly, I am a geek about this kind of stuff.  Regardless, the first workshop in Chelan was well attended, lively, and productive.  For those of you who like to do your homework and have useful information at these events, I even have a link to the list of questions that will be asked by the moderators!

As public meetings go that impact our lives, these are important and well run events that even stayed on schedule!  I’ll probably even go to a second one!  The shorelines (usually considered 200 feet from the water) under regulation by the Shorelines Management Act in the county can be found in the Draft Shoreline Inventory.

The first few questions in the session included, and there are many more:

1. Are there adequate areas for residential, business, recreation, public access, [Read more →]

Tags: General Interest, Land Use, Local by Al Lorenz
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Chelan County and the City of Wenatchee together are inviting citizens interested in municipal sewer in the Olds Station and Sunnyslope areas to a public open house.  Both the City and County have information to share and will be available for questions regarding sewer service north of the Wenatchee River. 

Topics are to include:

1. A summary of infrastructure needs based on the City’s comprehensive plan;
2. Information for significant industrial users in the Olds Station Area;
3. Financing improvements through Local Improvement [Read more →]

Tags: Land Use, Local by Al Lorenz
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The Shoreline Master Planning program currently underway with Chelan County, the cities of Chelan, Cashmere, Entiat, Leavenworth and Wenatchee is looking for public input.  They have a series of public workshops scheduled throughout the county.  Also, available here, is the Draft Shoreline Inventory which you can comment on in writing by Friday October 31st by sending comments to:

Erin Fonville
SMP Project Manager/Natural Resource Specialist
Chelan County Natural Resources
316 Washington St. Suite 401
Wenatchee, WA  98801

Office:  (509) 667-6324
E-mail:  erin.fonville@co.chelan.wa.us

The schedule for the workshops:

City Workshop Schedule:

Tuesday, October 21st, 6-8 p.m., City of Chelan, City Hall
135 E Johnson Avenue, Chelan [Read more →]

Tags: General Interest, Land Use, Local by Al Lorenz
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The City of Wenatchee has released a Request for Proposals, Mixed Income, Affordable Housing Development.  The available sites for the project are shown here, on land currently used as public parking.  The City is offering to discuss incentives such as density bonuses, required parking reductions, fast track permitting, tax abatements, permit fee wavers/reductions and/or publicy financed infrastructure.  Wenatchee is asking respondents to the RFP to identify the incentives they think may make the project feasible.

Those are all costs to normal development.  Why everybody can’t get “fast track” permitting I have no idea.  [Read more →]

Tags: General Interest, Land Use, Local by Al Lorenz
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Chelan County is hosting public open houses in Wenatchee and Chelan, with a third meeting being hosted by the City of Leavenworth. The purpose of these meetings will be to confirm priority transportation improvement projects for Chelan County and City of Leavenworth Transportation Plans with community members. Decisions established by this effort will influence the future of all modes of transportation in the County and City.

 Information will be the same for the events in Wenatchee and Chelan, but the Leavenworth event will focus [Read more →]

Tags: General Interest, Land Use, Local by Al Lorenz
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The Spanish Castle resort between Rock Island and Trinidad is still progressing according to its developer.  Wade Entezar, president of Entazar Development Group of Bellevue, plans to have an Open House on the property September 20th with Windermere of Wenatchee for prospective buyers.  He also hopes to build a model home on the property by the end of the year.

Spanish Castle is to be built over seven years and is estimated to be a 300 to 400 million dollar project that eventually could site 1340 residential units.

The Wenatchee World has a story on the resort here.  A link to a video from Entezar development is here: Entezar Development

Tags: General Interest, Land Use, Local by Al Lorenz
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According to a post in Crosscut today, Seattle is one of the most extreme cities in the USA.  How extreme?  Seattle has few families, is highly educated and very gentrified.  The big number is that Seattle averages only 2.08 occupants per household.  The closest rivals of major cities are San Francisco and Portland at 2.24 and the national average is 2.61.  A local Community Housing Steering Committee I am serving on shows a trend towards similar demographics in certain parts of North Central Washington.

Here’s an excerpt from the article and a link:

A related statistic is the share of households that are families with children; the Seattle share is 19 percent, San Francisco 18 (lowest in the country), and Portland 24. (The U.S. average is 31 percent share of families with children.) Conversely, the share of non-family households (singles, unmarried partners) is 55 percent (33 for the U.S.). Seattle is only slightly behind the winner, San Francisco, in the share of adults never [Read more →]

Tags: General Interest, Land Use, Northwest by Al Lorenz
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Back in early July, I posted about the a court reversal of the King County Critical Areas Ordinance being overturned on appeal.  The issue is that King County’s ordinance required huge areas, up to 65%, of rural properties, be left undisturbed.  That was successfully argued as being an illegal taking by property rights activists who had challenged the ordinance.

There is a detailed posting in Crosscut today, Paying for our Growing Pains, that goes into much more detail of the history of the King County critical areas ordinance and the issues surrounding it.  Apparently, part of what the ordinance is trying to accomplish [Read more →]

Tags: General Interest, Land Use, Northwest by Al Lorenz
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I attended the first part of the joint Chelan County and City of Chelan planning study last night.  Four different possible visions of how development might happen in the Chelan Valley were presented on maps.  It was sort of a 20,000 foot estimate of what might happen.  It is early in the process and the differing visions are as much to generate feedback as anything else.  You can link to the County’s information page on the process with additional information here.

Michelle McNeil at the Wenatchee World has an article in today’s paper about the issues that the local governments and citizens are wrestling with.

The Vision Options Were:

1. UGA Extension    

   This vision protects farmland and additional residents are mainly accomodated in [Read more →]

Tags: Land Use, Local by Al Lorenz
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There are areas in this country where housing is affordable that offer an astonishingly high standard of living to ordinary Americans.  Four of the fastest growing cities in the nation, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix all provide an ample supply of homes which keeps costs low.  I’ve talked about Dallas in earlier posts.

A posting in Crosscut on the low housing prices in Chicago goes on:

The answer, according to this interview with Glaeser, director of Harvard’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, is that Chicago is extremely pro-growth. Instead of layering on more and more land-use and design controls, Chicago has a pro-growth environment, and all those new housing units help keep the prices down. – Crosscut

Or, we can continue to make housing even less affordable with layers of regulations, impact fees and restricting the supply of land.  Then, as we lament the cost of housing, we can simply tax ourselves to create a very small amount of subsidized affordable housing at the highest possible cost to society.  At least we have choices…

Tags: General Interest, Land Use by Al Lorenz
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