Seattle houseboats date back more than 100 years, to a time when they were workers’ convenient dwellings, shacks on old log rafts tied up along shores where work was nearby, aquatic house trailers.  Eventually they coalesced into blue-collar and bohemian clusters of floating homes tied to rickety docks or just to each other.  We had rum-runners and Wobblies and longshoremen and prostitutes.  The Seattle Communist Party held regular meetings on a houseboat within our co-op.  These ramshackle houseboats were discovered by hippies and U.W. grad students in the late 1960s as cheap accommodations, and since then have ever escalated in value — and thus changing demographics — as demand to live on the water greatly exceeded supply.  Most of us still float on the 100+ year old cedar logs that form our floats, while newer remodels have moved to concrete floats.

We formed The Log Foundation as a co-operative in 1983 to buy-out three docks housing 52 houseboats from previous owners who kept increasing the rent.  It sure was expensive at the time — $1Million per dock for three docks on the Eastlake side of Lake Union in Seattle, over $3M per dock in today’s dollars — but the foresight of the houseboaters at that time shines brightly today as values ever increase.  We underwrote long-time houseboaters who couldn’t afford this transition so they could stay in the community until they passed on, a clear signal that we were not your usual HOA, but rather a co-op of committed water rats who love the community we share on and over Lake Union.

Today, The Log Foundation is an ever-evolving cooperative of the same 52 houseboat slips on three co-owned docks.  We manage our community affairs through dock representatives and a board of directors, and continue to create a unique personality on each of our three docks, while working together on common issues.  

Always a work in progress, co-op living on the lake asks more than a normal on-land attitude regarding ownership and neighbors.  We live close together, really close.  We respect each resident’s privacy, while offering a true community where we watch out for each other, regularly gather for summer grilling or winter soup-nights, and otherwise form the tightest, best neighborhood you could find anywhere in the city.

I always tell those asking the “why” question that Mary Sue and I moved here for the water, but stayed these now 37 years for the community.  This is far-and-away the best, most caring neighborhood we’ve ever lived in, and the reason why we are here.  Sure we enjoy being able to swim off the back deck and kayak to work, things people on land can’t usually do from their property, but when it comes down to it, The Log Foundation is not a park or summer camp or cul-de-sac, it’s a 52-unit community of neighbors who care for each other as well as the water environment, who really want to be here as part of a close neighborhood community, and who thus are willing to compromise and engage with each other in a floating community unlike anything anywhere.

- Dave Galvin, resident since 1983, owner since 1986