Scarecrow Video, the beloved University District nonprofit video store, has purchased its longtime building on Roosevelt Way Northeast.
King County records indicate the building was purchased for $5.575 million, signed on Jan. 13 and recorded on Jan 16.
The purchase marks “a transformative turning point for the organization and the city’s creative ecosystem,” Scarecrow said in its announcement Monday. “In an era when cultural spaces are routinely priced out of the cities they help to define, Scarecrow’s acquisition represents long-term stability, preservation and renewed possibility.”
Scarecrow Executive Director Jonathan Marlow said the building purchase was funded by multiple personal loans from close Scarecrow supporters — a consortium of more than two dozen people in all. The purchasing effort was organized quickly after the building’s previous owners notified the organization in early 2025 that they were putting the property on the market.
“It seemed maybe foolhardy to try to put this much money together,” Marlow said, “but the alternative was that it would get sold to a developer and it would get torn down.” A capital campaign to pay the balance of the purchase (“more than half” has been paid down, Marlow said) will begin later this year.
Operations Manager Jamie Han said the success of the store’s earlier, ambitious “Save Our Scarecrow” campaign — which reached its fundraising goal of $1.8 million this month — “put us in a place to make this kind of decision.”
Funds raised by the S.O.S. campaign, Marlow and Han said, are not going toward the building purchase. Rather, they went toward operations of the store — “to keep our doors open, to help us day to day, to keep operating so we could actually be in a position to eventually one day buy the building,” Han said — and to expand the staff.
Despite some unexpected curveballs — such as a multiday closure last summer after part of the building’s facade fell down — the campaign goal was finally reached, “because of everybody caring so much,” Han said. “Whether it’s staff, whether it’s our community, whether it’s people who cared enough to send us a buck or two, everyone came through exactly when we needed it.”
Scarecrow Video opened in a small storefront in the Latona neighborhood in 1988, moving to its current location in 1993 and becoming a nonprofit in 2014. Its inventory currently consists of nearly 155,000 titles, representing 138 countries and 126 languages — one of the largest publicly accessible video collections in the country.
Seattle Times researcher Miyoko Wolf contributed to this report.
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