We agree with the Property Owners. It is their choice to allow it if they choose. Every city should have a designated place for street art of all kinds. When someone can take their time with it you get much better looking art every time.
After someone complained about the loud scribbles on Russell Johanson's property, the city told him in July he had to clean it up. Johanson ignored the warning. A graffiti patroller visited his building, on a small, weed-choked lot, three more times and found the tags still there.
The city sent more notices. It offered Johanson paint and volunteers to help him to clean things up. It threatened him with hefty fines.
All to no avail. In a decision published Friday, a hearing examiner declared Johanson's building a "graffiti nuisance property" and fined him $2,000. That represented $100 a day, from the time he got the civil-violation notice to the day of the hearing.
This week, Johanson, who runs his Ravenna Rare Books from the property, was still defiant.
"I would like to expose the absurdity of the code," he said. "It's not anybody's business but mine."
"This comes perilously close to the government saying, 'We get to tell you what color to paint your house. We tell you how to dress, what to do.'"
Seattle's graffiti ordinance requires property owners to paint out graffiti if someone has complained about it. But owners can escape the requirement if they say the graffiti is "authorized" on their building.
That loophole has led to arguably Seattle's most famous graffiti wall, the old Tubs building, a few blocks from Johanson. Once a hot tub business, the abandoned structure, at prominent corner of 50th and Roosevelt, is coated with layers of garish spraypaint.
But despite years of neighborhood complaints, the city is powerless to clean it up, because the owner says he likes the graffiti there. He called it an "evolving piece" of art. It has since become a well-known "freewall."
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