Well. Let's start with the big one, because sixty-two homes on under five acres is the kind of number that makes you put down your coffee and stare at the wall for a minute — and I did exactly that, and my coffee got cold, and I want that acknowledged. Mulberry II, they're calling it, which means there was a Mulberry I, which means this has been going on longer than some of us were paying attention, and I will simply say that I have been paying attention, and I wrote about exactly this kind of thing back in April when I talked about how development has a way of getting normalized before the people who actually live here have had a chance to form a single coherent thought about it. Zero-lot-line homes, private roads, 4.78 acres — that is not a neighborhood, that is a math problem someone solved and then called a subdivision. I am not saying it is wrong. I am saying it is fast, and fast and I have a complicated relationship.
And another thing — while we are on the subject of square footage and what it means — Dove Dental over on 39th Avenue SW is more than tripling its size, and I want to be clear that I have nothing against dentists, I have in fact been going to one for my entire adult life, and there was a wonderful office on Meridian back in the day where Dr. Whoever-It-Was had a fish tank in the waiting room that I thought about more than I probably should have — but the point is, a 4,000-square-foot dental office including a full basement is not a small expansion, and when you start building basements you are making a statement about how permanent you intend to be, and I respect that, I genuinely do, it is the rest of us who are still figuring out if we have time to catch up. The applicant name on the filing is Tracy, which is close enough to my name that I noticed it and I am choosing to interpret it as a sign, though of what I am not entirely sure, and I will circle back on that.
Now. The parking lot on Inter Avenue. Sixty-two stalls plus semitruck parking, no new buildings, just — parking. For a corporation. And I know, I know, I have said before and I will say again that I remember when parking was something that just existed, you pulled up, you got out, nobody filed anything with anybody — but the reason I bring it up here is not to relitigate the parking situation generally, it is to say that this week we have sixty-two homes going up and sixty-two parking stalls going in and I do not think that is a coincidence so much as it is a portrait of where we are right now, which is: more of everything, all at once, filed with the city on a Tuesday. And somewhere in there, the people who actually live here are still getting letters about their court debt going to a new collections agency they have never heard of because Pierce County switched vendors in March and apparently a postcard was considered sufficient notice — I have thoughts about that postcard, and about what sufficient notice means, and I will tell you that it does not mean what certain decision-makers seem to think it means. That's all for this week. You know where to find me.