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Michelle Labra and her daughter, Daphne, live in an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in their landlord's backyard. Portland has among the most permissive rules for ADUs in the country. Last year, the city issued building permits for about one a day. Amelia Templeton/OPB hide caption toggle caption Amelia Templeton/OPB Michelle Labra and her daughter, Daphne, live in an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in their landlord's backyard. Portland has among the most permissive rules for ADUs in the country. Last year, the city issued building permits for about one a day. Amelia Templeton/OPB Earlier this year, Michelle Labra got a notice that the rent on her family's two-bedroom apartment was doubling, from around $620 a month to more than $1,300. She worried she was being priced out of Portland and would have to move to the suburbs. But Labra, her husband and their two children didn't get pushed out of Cully, their North Portland neighborhood . They were able to stay by m...

As housing prices in Western Washington continue through the roof, some Bellingham millennials have saved money by becoming “boom-mates” with empty-nest couples with space to rent. Baby boomers have been taking the blame recently for many of society’s ills, but research by the real estate firm Trulia could put this “worst generation” at the cutting edge of a way to ease the housing crunch in Whatcom County. My current landlord is very responsive to things like maintenance requests. Stephanie Allen, Bellingham “I used to do this for a few years,” said Michael Godwin of Bellingham in response to a social media inquiry . “I rented a mother-in-law suite from an older couple whose kids were old enough to be out of the house.” Godwin said he paid about $550 a month including utilities for a room in the Geneva- Sudden Valley area from 2013-2016. “I feel like it saved me money insofar as it was the cheapest way for me to live by myself,” Godwin said. “Had I opted for an apartment with room...

Everyone is freaking out over San Francisco astronomically high rent prices right now when Seattle real-estate isn’t that far behind. I was walking down the street once in the university district around the University of Washington when I saw construction being built. And then more construction. And then MORE construction down the block. Ridiculous. Looking at a half-torn up flyer, the prices for these new apartments coming out in 2015 were around 1300 per bedroom for a two bedroom apartment ! I quickly went home and started trying to figure out how fast rent was rising in Seattle. One fun way to do this was by working on a project that I have since put off for school back in November. Since reliably the best place to find apartments has been on Craigslist, I created a script using Scrapy to grab listings of apartments on Seattle craigslist and filtered them for the zipcodes within the Seattle boundaries . I manually ran the script for about a week and after filtering out duplicate p...

On a blue- sky summer day , three 12-year-old kids run into an ancient forest adjoining a housing estate. Two of the children are never seen again. The third is found near the centre of the forest, his back and the palms of his hands pressed against a large oak tree . He has blood inside his shoes and no memory of what happened. Much later, when the boy has grown up and become a detective, he is assigned to investigate the murder of a child close to the spot where his friends disappeared . This is the starting point of In the Woods, the first of six related novels that have won a cultish following for Irish writer Tana French . All six books, together known as the Dublin Murder Squad series , are beautifully written. All are hefty. " Big long bastards ," as French puts it when we meet in a Dublin hotel. And all are addictive. I was given the series for Christmas last year, and spent the next few months – annoyingly interrupted by work and, you know, life – reading one volum...

We get it — in 2017, dating can suck. It doesn't matter if you're a serial swiper or seeing one person regularly, all the think pieces and second-hand (or first-hand!) horror stories sometimes make us seem like a post official -relationship society. But Hinge, which markets itself as “the relationship app,” is committed to making us all believe in love and romance again. "The world of dating and the way in which people meet for sure has changed, and there’s probably no going back," says Olivia Abramowitz, Hinge’s VP of Marketing. "But that doesn’t mean that meaningful relationships can’t be formed through more modern means." And they've got the receipts, ladies and gentlemen. Today, Hinge launches its "Power Couples" list, a roster of 25 partners who met on Hinge, built long-term relationships , and aren't afraid to call them that. (Hinge says the pairs were selected based on two criteria: When they were single their Hinge profiles received...