Tag Archives: media

Capitol Hill newspaper publisher still making its bucks off mortgage meltdown

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Screen Shot 2014-08-29 at 11.22.46 AMIt has been nearly three years since Bellevue-based RIM Publications and its parent company Northwest Trustee Services took over the remains of the weekly newspaper that covered Capitol Hill for decades and earned years of goodwill from the Hillers who remember their paper delivery routes and the nostalgia of simpler times. At the time, we called Northwest Trustee Services and RIM “a company built on the back of our region’s manifestations of the mortgage crisis.”

So, what are the people behind today’s Capitol Hill Times up to lately? Here is a recent piece posted by the Madison Park Times, another old-timey paper still making a go of it in the internet era:

This is how foreclosed Seattle homes are auctioned: in an underground parking garage setting more befitting drug deals. Northwest Trustee Services (NTS), which operates in eight Western states, handles 60 to 70 percent of all foreclosed homes in King County. Six years after the housing bubble burst, NTS still auctions 50 to 70 homes a month from Seattle alone.

Its building also houses Routh Crabtree Olsen, a legal firm that operates in the same eight states and represents both NTS and the banks that have seized the homes NTS auctions.

It’s a cozy, well-oiled machine for processing properties that, protesters allege, often have the same history of predatory practices and dubious paper trails that led to the 2008 bubble in the first place.

Full disclosure: The Madison Park paper is published by Pacific Publishing Co., the folks who sold off the Capitol Hill Times.

As the foreclosure business remains a profitable industry even with the late-payment rate in the nation dropping, some experts are predicting the country’s mortgage crisis is about to flare up again as “temporary relief measures and legacy issues from the crisis” come to a head in 2015. Expect a meatier free weekly in the future as the local foreclosure listings thicken up.

UPDATE: Here’s a business presentation passed along to us about the RIM structure:

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Capitol Hill’s NWFF hosts ‘community discussion about the macing of Raymond Wilford’

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The “Hands up, don’t shoot” protest over police violence and the slaying of teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has spread across the nation, around the world, and onto Capitol Hill. Thursday night, an incident that echoes with the themes of violence in the name of public safety, race, and the power and the role of media in protest will be the subject of a forum at Capitol Hill’s Northwest Film Forum.

Earlier this month, Seattle freelance photographer and frequent CHS contributor Alex Garland captured pictures and video of a disturbing incident outside the Westlake mall in which private security targeted a black man with pepper spray after a fracas broke out at a protest against violence in Gaza.

Garland will be on hand along with a panel for Thursday’s forum described as “a community discussion about what happened at Westlake, and what we can do as a community beyond recognizing events like these as unjust.”

More details on Thursday night’s free event are below. Continue reading →

Stranger publisher: Seattle can ‘raise the minimum wage and keep our independent business alive’

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The 15 Now organization's District 3 group met for the first time on Saturday at Caffe Vita (Image via 15 Now on Facebook)

The 15 Now organization’s District 3 group met for the first time on Saturday at Caffe Vita (Image via 15 Now on Facebook)

Last week, CHS reported on the national drive to address income inequality arriving on our Capitol Hill as Senator Patty Murray spoke about an increase in the federal minimum wage at the Capitol Hill headquarters of local Seattle ice cream chain, Molly Moon’s. The local inequality debate has also been underway as a contest of words — and increasingly, actions to organize — with a push for a $15 minimum in Seattle driven by City Council member Kshama Sawant and a more moderate support for the ideal from Mayor Ed Murray who has promised community-forged recommendations by April for raising the minimum.

As several Capitol Hill business owners and representatives from area organizations met in a closed door session last week with the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce to begin discussing strategies for shaping the climb to a $15 minimum wage in the city, one of the neighborhood’s most prominent business leaders — and publisher of the Seattle media outlet that has thus far been the biggest champion of Sawant and the $15/hour wage — has thrown his $0.02 in with a call for a phased-in approach that protects Seattle’s “small, independent businesses.

Here’s what Stranger publisher Tim Keck — inspired, apparently, by this Seattle Times essay, of all things — had to say Monday morning about raising the minimum wage in his city:

It would be a huge loss to the city if we lost local, independently owned businesses that can’t absorb a 60 percent wage hike the way that chain businesses can. We can raise the minimum wage and keep our independent business alive if we do this correctly. Small and independent businesses need time to manage the financial impact of a wage increase as large as this. Otherwise, big chains who can leverage their labor and supplies nationally and internationally will have an unfair advantage.

We have questions out to Keck about the timing of his post and what ideas he would like to see discussed by the Mayor’s income inequality task force. UPDATE 12:50 PM: Keck tells us the minimum wage debate is “the city’s most important issue” and to watch for more rounded coverage from his paper:

The minimum wage topic is the city’s most important issue and The Stranger is going to be weighing in from many different perspectives. This is a big deal and there needs to be a big discussion. Personally, I’m optimistic. I think people see the need for an increase in the minimum wage while preserving small business.

In the meanwhile, CHS is talking with neighborhood businesses about the best ways to get to the higher wage in Seattle without permanently damaging the small and local economy. Here are some of the early ideas we heard when we talked with food and drink business owners about the debate late last year. In addition to concepts like tip credit, some are pointing to solutions that helped smooth the way for paid sick leave in the city as a model for reaching a $15 minimum wage in Seattle. If you would like to talk with us about the wage, drop us a line.