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09/14/1999 Even with two Porsches in his garage, Mike Zubko feels he can't compete with his new neighbors. The 55-year-old former Weyerhaeuser Co. executive spends endless hours working on his baby-blue 1970 Porsche 911T but says he has been greatly outspent by the new breed of young software multimillionaires. As a result, he has dropped out of the weekend races sponsored by the local chapter of the Porsche Club of America. "Looking at what other people were doing, I just said, `No, I'm not going to go to the next level,'" Mr. Zubko says. "Those other cars have massive brakes, high-tech engines, electronic fuel injection, onboard computers. Mine is just a basic car." Mr. Zubko stops himself. "I'm sounding like an old man," he says. "It's not bad. Just different." Indeed, things just haven't been the same since the A-list of the Seattle area's new-money crowd descended on Medina and the nearby towns of Hunts Point and Yarrow Point, replacing the postwar generation of doctors, engineers, lawyers and corporate executives who themselves replaced the turn-of-the century gentry who took the ferry from Seattle to their summer cottages here. The arrival of the nouveaux very riches has put membership in the Overlake Golf and Country Club in the center of Medina out of reach for all but the most affluent locals. The market price for one of 550 coveted golfing spots has soared to nearly $100,000, four times what they cost a decade ago. Skyrocketing real-estate prices mean property-tax boosts of more than 40% a year for some. The public-library portion of the tax got so high that residents of Hunts Point several years ago opted out of the King County library system. Medina, which has more young families with children, voted to stay in. As a result, Medina residents Bill and Melinda Gates, who have two small children, paid about $29,500 of their 1999 tax bill of $615,588 for the right to get a library card. Another new resident, saxophonist Kenny G, annoyed his neighbors by taking off in his 1953 DeHaviland Beaver seaplane right from Cozy Cove, which separates Hunts Point from Yarrow Point. The heck with the neighbors, Mr. G says he thought, still angry over local opposition that thwarted his plans to build an even bigger house than the 12,000-square-foot English manor he constructed next door to Microsoft President Steve Ballmer's place. His flight instructor warned that the neighbors could ban seaplanes altogether; Mr. G moved his takeoffs farther out into the lake. And then there are the construction cranes. "Those are the status symbols," says one former member of the Medina city council. "How thick your mitigation plan is and how big your crane is." The mitigation plans are needed to deal with the environmental effects of removing trees, regrading hillsides and creating construction dust. But it's more difficult to mitigate lost memories. Thornton "Tommy" Thomas stood in the rain during a recent summer thunderstorm and surveyed a muddy lot filled with heavy earthmoving equipment. Mr. Thomas, a former mayor and retired insurance executive, and his wife, Claire, moved to Medina in 1950 and raised five children in a rambling house on the lake, down a long staircase from the road at the top of the bluff. The bluff is now a clear-cut lot after the new owners, to avoid the descent to the lake, decided to build closer to the road and chopped down dozens of majestic firs and cedars. "Right there was a lovely cone-shaped cedar," says Mr. Thomas, who a few years ago moved to a smaller house in town. "We had our own nature park." The Thomases' longtime neighbors are philosophical about their lost quietude. "I knew it would happen someday," says L'louise DeButts, who moved to Medina with her husband, Bob, 40 years ago. The newcomers have brought positive changes as well. Donors ponied up $21,000 this year to transform the town's annual Medina Days festival from a sleepy community fair into last month's weeklong extravaganza. It included an evening concert by the 45-piece Washington Wind Symphony that drew 1,100 people, a kids' parade and beach party and chartered buses to ferry residents between neighborhood potluck dinners. An auction for Medina's elementary school in March raised $140,000. "If you were here 10 years ago, you wouldn't have seen any kids," says Joe Brazen, a real-estate agent with daughters in the second, fourth and fifth grades, who organized Medina Days and the school auction. Mr. Brazen invited one of the dinner parties into his garage when a late-afternoon thundershower chased people from the park across the street. As Mr. Brazen talked, a van from HomeGrocer.com, an online grocery service, rolled up with 500 hotdogs donated for the next day's barbecue; Terry Drayton, HomeGrocer's chief executive, just moved into the neighborhood. And some locals are making a good living off the wretched excess. Dennis Lindsay, who took over his uncle's moving and rigging company, now charges $50,000 to load intact old houses onto barges. Sometimes he accepts a lovely old house as payment, turning a profit by selling it to owners of waterfront lots elsewhere in the Puget Sound area. "The houses are gorgeous, but they don't fit the taste of the people moving in," Mr. Lindsay says. "They don't want someone else's dream house. They want their own dream." Indeed they do. Former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold -- now on a long term leave -- barged away the old house to make way for the $8 million, 20,000-plus square-foot mansion now under construction, according to building documents filed with the city. The round, three-story structure boasts 120-degree windows that open onto the lake plus a wine room, a media room, a hydroponics room and a gym with a basketball court. With waterfront lots selling for $3 million and more, nearly all the family homes and summer cottages of old Medina are targeted as "tear-downs." And they're hardly ramshackle bungalows. Locals considered Mr. Gates's old house, a Cape Cod-style with roses covering graceful trellises, one of the prettiest homes in town. He sold it for more than $8 million to Gerald Grinstein, now chairman of Agilent Corp. and Delta Air Lines, who razed it to make way for an Irish country style house built with imported stone. Some residents worry about what will happen to the neighborhood when the superrich tire of their digs and move, leaving monuments like that behind. Flying the 4.6 miles between Hunts Point and his favorite sushi restaurant on Lake Union one day last year, Kenny G scouted the magnificent pool surrounded by terraced lawns at the house of Costco Wholesale Corp. chairman Jeffrey Brotman and the six-bedroom house on 5.4 waterfront acres owned by contact-lens entrepreneur Peter LaHaye, which is on the market for $45 million. Across the lake, he buzzed the lots owned by his friend Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, right behind the red-roofe d, 25,000-square-foot baronial estate of Keith McCaw, one of the cell-phone billionaire brothers. "I like to look at everybody's houses from the air," Mr. G said. "You can get ideas." The idea he got, however, was to move to Malibu. Mr. G put his dream house on the market. A few days ago, he agreed to sell it for $18 million. Copyright © 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights
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