Liberal Talk Radio

If you paid a million bucks for a snazzy new downtown condo, you’d be worried if it was built like a cheap Mexican hotel, right? Me too:

O’Leary, who never moved into his condo, says some of the problems include irreparably damaged door and window frames; a poured concrete deck that sloped toward his apartment, causing leaks in the unit below; mounting construction delays; and unmet expectations. O’Leary filed suit asking for the return of his deposit and attorney fees. Are these just the complaints of an unsatisfied yuppie? Maybe, but O’Leary is not the only person to encounter problems with 2200.

According to resident Jim Dierst and another condo owner who wished to remain anonymous, tenants have dealt with minor annoyances such as low water pressure and leaky shower doors and pipes, as well as major design flaws like incorrectly positioned halogen lights that threatened to ignite kitchen cabinets.

More importantly, if you were a Mayor who’d bet his city’s future on downtown re-development, and many of those condos were built by a company to which you had uncomfortably close ties, you might be getting a bit nervious, no?

One lawsuit does not a catastrophe make. But it is important to keep in mind that we’ve hitched the future of a large swath of our Emerald City to the guy who brought us this.

Will South Lake Union be Mayor Nickels’ Katrina? If so, I’ll have to eat a lot of crow and admit that maybe Knute Berger had a point. I hope it doesn’t come to that!