by Kirby Lindsay, posted 23 August 2013
In July 2013, Fremocentrist.com ran a column about new, retroactive rules and regulations the City of Seattle Department of Planning & Development (DPD) has proposed. That column came after eight months of talking to affected residents who feared speaking on the record. “Most of my neighbors don’t want to step forward,” explained Greg Baumann, “because they don’t want a target on their back.”
Since then, other residents have contacted Fremocentrist.com to speak on the record, and take the risk, in hopes that Fremonsters, and Seattlites, will help save their homes. As Baumann, and his neighbor Matt Pontious, freely acknowledged, if the Seattle City Council and the Office of the Mayor don’t stop DPD, and the new regulations put their homes in violation of new regulations, they can move out of the City – and will. But they do not want to.
‘Living In Limbo’
Baumann, a pilot for Southwest Airlines, can relocate full-time to the base of operations for his job – in Oakland – but, he noted, “I still feel like an outsider in California.” He moved to Seattle from Arizona seven years ago after seeing the iconic house boats from I-5. “I fell in love with Lake Union the first time I saw it,” he recalled, “It was my dream to live on a house boat. Ironically, I ended up living here, on that body of water that gave me that, ‘Oh My God’ feeling!”
Irony? Not exactly. Baumann worked hard, and sacrificed, to achieve his dream. He had ‘Limbo’, his vessel, built to his specifications – and to fit a moorage slip he purchased at the North East of the Lake. “I actually made some of the stupidest financial decisions to be here,” he admitted. “I’d have more free time, and more square footage,” living on land, Baumann observed, “It doesn’t make a person’s life easier.”
He had ‘Limbo’ built to the highest standards of safety. “I went to extreme measures to protect myself,” he said, “I overbuilt this boat.” The 55’ house boat has the comforts of home, “I wanted it to be like a condo,” he said, but “it’s every bit as much of a boat as an Ocean Alexander yacht.”
His vessel, like every house boat, cannot discharge its black water (sewage) into the water – black water must be pumped out, and Baumann has his preferences among the three pump-out providers on the Lake. He also has full fire protection, a generator, a firewall between the living quarters and the engines, and two bridges from which he can navigate the boat. “Today, my boat would pass,” current regulations proposed by DPD, “but other house boats are more green than mine because they don’t cruise around with twin engine motors running. Sitting tied up to a dock is the greenest way to live on a boat.”
“I up-rooted myself just on the enchantment of that ideal,” he said, “the ambiance of seeing the kayaks, and the sea craft, go by.” He has picked up the fight for his right to live on his boat – and for the heritage of his adopted City. “I want my granddaughters to grow up with good memories of grandpa’s life on the water,” he mused. Yet, without some intervention, “we will be gone before anyone realizes it,” he warned, and this chapter of Seattle charm will soon be faded stories told to the future generations. “If the house boats have got to go, what is next?” he asked.
‘We Don’t Do Vessels’
Pontious, and his wife, live near Baumann – on an 800 sq. ft. foot print boat they designed and had built to their environmentally-friendly specifications, including use of reclaimed wood and a 1-liter toilet. Pontious, a former home builder, went to DPD six years ago, before he contracted construction of his dream home. He took in his plans for a building permit, and was told he did not need one since the City doesn’t regulate boats. “I did all the due diligence,” he recalled, “and was told, ‘we don’t do vessels.’ I should have gotten something in writing,” he realizes now, “I don’t know who else I was supposed to talk to.”
“I’m a business owner,” Pontious said, with 40 full-time employees who work for his restaurant. His wife serves as a police officer. They feel connected and involved in the City, and their community, and stressed out not knowing if the City will make them leave – and cause them to lose all their equity. “I paid top dollar for this,” he said of the slip, an investment he will lose even when he moves the house boat to Tacoma or Portland. “I can’t believe the City Council would see this as credible,” Pontious said of DPD proposals to retroactively regulate house boats. “I’m not putting anything into the water,” he observed, “I don’t work the motor,” and he has the black water pumped out regularly.
“The City is trying to re-write what constitutes a vessel,” Pontious observed, “we spent hours and hours of meetings and meetings,” among stake holders’ groups, “and the City Council said, ‘we’ll put it back on DPD.’” And, according to Pontious, Baumann, and the Bagleys (previously profiled in a column dated August 21, 2013,) the DPD threw out stakeholder recommendations and started over with provisions so restrictive that many existing house boats would have to be relocated – or dragged on land to serve as historic landmarks of Seattle’s once colorful, maritime past?
An Easy Target?
“When you pay as much taxes as I pay, you expect your city is going to help you,” Pontious stated, “not go after you. On any level, none of it makes any sense.”
“No one gave it to me,” Baumann said of his house boat, and the life style he enjoys living on the lake, “I pay property tax every year.” He also must work exhaustively to maintain ‘Limbo’, inside and out – lately even conscripting his son-in-law to help. “I don’t have any problem at all with the City going after the dilapidated boats,” he said.
Pontious observed, “they chose an easy target.” With roughly 114 house boats on Lake Union, the City may be able to remove them – and pay the resulting law suits – before citizens take notice. He hopes Seattlites do notice, however, before it is too late.
The Lake Union Liveaboard Association (Baumann recently joined its Board,) has heard that DPD has begun generating a ‘Director’s Rule’ on the house boats – restrictions developed without public comment or input, and only reversible by the Office of the Mayor.
Those who want a chance to comment, even with a request for public information and input meetings, can contact Seattle City Council Land Use Chairperson Richard Conlin.
As Baumann acknowledged, “I’m now living in limbo, literally.”
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©2013 Kirby Lindsay. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Reproduction, adaptation or distribution without permission is prohibited.