Both Wedgwood and View Ridge are considered extremely safe neighborhoods. But there’s one neighborhood — and it includes a portion of Sand Point Country Club — that has them both beat: Lavilla.
Never heard of it? Neither had our partners at the Seattle Times, so when the screaming title of “America’s Safest Neighborhoods” came across their desk (with Lavilla topping the Seattle area), they had to investigate.
What they found was pretty comical, including that nobody at city hall or the police department had heard of the neighborhood. The WedgwoodView had never heard of it referenced as a neighborhood but curiosity recently was piqued when the name turned up amid a few Google map searches of Northeast Seattle.
This Google map shows Lavilla (and to the east Pontiac Bay, which sometimes comes up when retrieving weather reports via a Google phone from View Ridge. For the record, the weather at Pontiac Bay was cloudy and rainy this morning, just like the rest of the city).
Without telling you the full story about how the map-makers and crime statisticians came up with Lavilla (read the Seattle Times story for that), we can tell you that it involves the Geographic Names Information System and, of course, the federal government.
In any case, the fine residents of Lavilla, Wash., no doubt are sleeping well tonight. As usual.
