Edith Macefield was offered $1 million to sell her house in 2006. She said no, so the five-story building going up around her got built around her instead.
Macefield had lived in the small farmhouse at 1438 NW 46th Street in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood since 1952, when she bought it from her mother. The house itself dated back to 1900. By the time a developer came calling in 2006, she was 84 years old and had no interest in moving out of her hundred-year-old home, according to a 2006 Seattle Times report.
The developer’s first offer was worth roughly $750,000, and included a new, wheelchair-accessible home built elsewhere, plus coverage of her healthcare costs for life. When she still turned it down, the offer grew to $1 million, according to HistoryLink.org, a Washington state history nonprofit. Macefield wasn’t moved by the number either way.
“I don’t care about money,” she told the Seattle Times at the time. “I’m 84. I’m perfectly happy here. And I don’t want to move.” Asked what she’d even do with a million dollars, she had a simple answer: “What would I do with that kind of money anyway?”
Woman rejects $1M offer and forces developers to construct a mall around her home instead.
In 2006, 84-year-old Edith Macefield gained worldwide attention after refusing a $1 million buyout from developers seeking to demolish her small Seattle home in the Ballard neighborhood.… pic.twitter.com/8UeGqawbni
— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) June 20, 2026
Friends in the neighborhood backed her up. Mike Semandiris, part owner of the nearby Mike’s Chili Parlor, said Macefield “gets nothing but respect” from regulars who supported her decision to stay put.
The developers built their retail complex, known as Ballard Blocks, on the surrounding lots anyway, wrapping the new construction around three sides of Macefield’s tiny house and leaving her farmhouse looking like it had been dropped into the middle of a shopping center.
Macefield died on June 15, 2008, at 86. She willed the house to Barry Martin, the construction superintendent overseeing the very project that had been built around her, after the two became close during the years of construction next door.
What followed was a rockier stretch for the house. Martin sold it in 2009, it later went into foreclosure, and a local land trust’s effort to raise enough money to relocate the place to safety fell short of its goal. Regency Centers, the company that owns the Ballard Blocks complex, ended up acquiring the property in 2015 and kept it standing rather than tearing it down.
An architect filed plans to renovate the house in 2023, and by May 2024 it was listed for lease at roughly $48 per square foot a year, with brokers picturing a coffee shop or cafe eventually moving in. “Something to make use of the quaint feel of the building,” broker John Chelico told local outlet My Ballard.
The house has taken on a life well beyond Ballard. It’s widely believed to have helped inspire the balloon-lifted home in Pixar’s 2009 film “Up,” a connection the studio has leaned into over the years, including with its newest theme park ride based on the movie. Locally, it’s inspired an annual music festival and become enough of a symbol of stubborn independence that people have gotten the word “Steadfast” tattooed in its honor.