Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as \u2018view property\u2019.\u00a0 You look around and times haven\u2019t changed too much.\u00a0 Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken ranches of Mabana sold between 1910 and 1950.<\/p>\n
Folks wonder why it took so long to discover\u2019 the island you can drive to\u2019 never knew our history as an exploited backwash.\u00a0 The developers didn\u2019t worry about zoning here.\u00a0 Blast a bluff down with hydraulic hoses and call it Tyee or Tillicum.\u00a0 Sluice down Summerland and build a rock jetty around it out into the bay.\u00a0 Dig out a canal at the country club and double the waterfront.\u00a0 It was wild west stuff, all right, where a man and his bulldozer could cut a wide swath without fear of government regulation or horrified neighbors.<\/p>\n
Nowadays we look askance at dynamiting bluffs to make waterfront or dredging a lagoon to create lakeside gated communities or draining the wetlands to make quality 18 hole golf courses.\u00a0 Judging by the agonized screams of the developers, you\u2019d expect growth would reverse, forests woulde expand, housing starts would sit half finished, abandoned and rotting.\u00a0 Oddly the juggernaut of gated communities and developments with names like South End Estates, Elger Bay Meadows, Tyee Vista all seem to be doing just fine with more on the way, thank you very much.<\/p>\n
Clear Cut Cul-de-Sac, Blast Zone Barrio and D-9 Trailer Court are going to struggle, but the South End is gentrifying now that some of the trees have grown back and the chicken farms are broke and the Dot.com retirees are priming the pumps.\u00a0 Won\u2019t be long before we South Enders celebrate Back Wash Days and the rough and tumble no-holds-barred pioneers who carved out our civilization over the past century.\u00a0 Thank you boys!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Historically the South End has been a place where the lumber companies cut down the forests and the developers sold off the scrub and slash that was left as \u2018view property\u2019.\u00a0 You look around and times haven\u2019t changed too much.\u00a0 Except the price of a lot now is more than all the five acre chicken […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[4369,4368,4367],"class_list":["post-14918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-cut-it-burn-it-and-pave-it","tag-rape-pillage-and-plunder","tag-south-end-wild-wild-west"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14918"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14919,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14918\/revisions\/14919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}