A little about the Herd mentality, so to speak...
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Monday, January 8, 2007
Downtown mainly a male domain
Pricier area doesn't follow city demographic trend
By AUBREY COHEN
P-I REPORTER
Men are from downtown and women are from Queen Anne.
Although, in general, single women easily outpace single men as home buyers in Seattle, the opposite is true downtown, according to Williams Marketing President Leslie Williams, whose Seattle firm works with condo developers.
"Out of the singles, it's more men than women downtown," she said. "In these small, little buildings we're doing in Ballard, Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, Eastlake, we tend to get more women."
Indeed, the 2000 Census showed that nearly 61 percent of single-person households downtown, including owners and renters, were male, compared with 44 percent in Queen Anne and 47 percent in Seattle as a whole. Newer numbers are not available for Seattle neighborhoods.
It's because downtown condos are more expensive, Williams said.
Men still tend to get married a little later, giving them more time to move up the income ladder as singles. And women tend to keep the house in a divorce -- creating newly single men in their peak earning years, Williams said. "The guy's going to be the one in the condo with the extra bedroom for when the kids come over on weekends."
Seattle has roughly twice as many single women living with children as single men doing so, according to census estimates.
And it may be that men, generally speaking, are more interested in living downtown.
"I've always wanted to live in a high-rise," said Casey Herd, 29, who reserved a condo in Mosler Lofts, a building going up at Third Avenue and Vine Street. "I'm ready for the downtown lifestyle."
Herd, a dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet, said he wanted to be within walking distance of work. He now rents on Queen Anne, but he said downtown has more going on, including stores and restaurants open late.
"Sometimes our shows don't get out until 10 or 10:30 (p.m.), then you want to go out to dinner," he said.
Larry Kasoff, a 26-year-old lawyer whose office is in Columbia Center, had practical reasons for reserving a condo in a new building going up at Fifth Avenue and Madison Street.
"I wanted to make my commute short to work," he said.
Another plus is that, despite being two blocks from the iconic office tower, Kasoff won't be able to see it from his condo.
"That was intentional," he said.
Women seem to see downtown as a nicer place to visit than to live.
Kristel Leow lived in a Belltown apartment for a year but is buying on Capitol Hill.
"I got a little tired of the bar and club scene down there," she said.
Jade Nguyen, 35, looked downtown before buying her Queen Anne condo but didn't like the big buildings and traffic.
"It's the whole living with 100 to 200 other units," she said. "It just felt too big, less of a neighborhood."
Tjada D'Oyen, 30, said Belltown was noisier and more expensive than Queen Anne, but still not quite New York, which she recently left for a job in Seattle.
"I didn't move to Seattle just to have a lesser version of what I had before," she said.
P-I reporter Aubrey Cohen can be reached at 206-448-8362 or
aubreycohen@seattlepi.com.
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