Haller Lake lots. (City of Seattle)

Puget Sound’s strangest property lines.

While researching how subdivision screws around with Seattle’s growth, we’ve found some pretty convoluted property lines. Can you find crazier ones? There is money involved.

While these are pretty crazed, we are certain that you can find better ones. Winner gets a $25 gift card from Skål Beer Hall.

Go to one of the region’s on-line property viewers.
King County Parcel Viewer
Pierce County ATIP or Public GIS
Snohomish County SCOPI

Zoom into a level where you can see the property lines (it helps to turn off the address dots). And just start looking around. Screen capture your favorites. Please include enough surrounding info so we can understand the location of the lot.

Submissions will be judged on how convoluted, contorted, discombobulated, and generally not square the lots are. Special consideration will be given for solid titles.

$25 is enough Viking beer to start making sense of some of these property lines.

Send your screen caps to ray@theurbanist.org. Deadline is Friday, August 28th at noon PDT.

Article Author

Ray Dubicki is a stay-at-home dad and parent-on-call for taking care of general school and neighborhood tasks around Ballard. This lets him see how urbanism works (or doesn’t) during the hours most people are locked in their office. He is an attorney and urbanist by training, with soup-to-nuts planning experience from code enforcement to university development to writing zoning ordinances. He enjoys using PowerPoint, but only because it’s no longer a weekly obligation.