Like a solid majority of Puget Sound's residents, I wasn't born and raised here. As such, I suspect my first experiences of Seattle weren't unusual.

Actually, there were three sets of them, all centered on the University District: first, when my closest high school friend attended UW and I'd come visit Seattle, staying at his tiny quad (four student rooms connected by a common kitchen); next, when a friend of his offered me a summer job; finally, when I moved here permanently, into a U-District apartment whose closet-sized notions of "bedrooms" was designed to squeeze in as many students as possible.

Not that many years later, all three scenarios are essentially nostalgia. The rest of Seattle is no longer an affordable place for most young adults to live on their own. Last month, without much fanfare, a city council rewrite of how the University District is managed took a major step toward turning UW into a commuter school.

Abolition of the neighborhood's "lease-lid" program has long been desired by both developers and UW itself. The program limited the amount of real estate UW could control in areas near its campus, so as to preserve at least some of the fast-dwindling supply of housing affordable to young adults.

The number of student-affordable apartments within walking distance of campus is much lower than in the days of the quads (say, 20 years ago); rentable houses are virtually gone. Why? Consider last week's telling quote from city councilwoman Jan Drago, who hailed lease-lid abolition as allowing UW to "remain competitive."

Well, now. Who, exactly, does the state's largest land-grant university compete against?

(No football jokes, please.)

Drago inadvertently nailed the problem: for years, educating students, especially undergraduates, has been an afterthought at UW. Its cancerous lower campus expansion has been driven almost entirely by corporate and military research contracts; meanwhile, with the state legislature continuously raising tuition, and housing costs a cruel joke, the notion of UW as a student's first experience living away from home is becoming increasingly quaint.

Which brings us to the University District. Here, if anywhere in the city, students' needs should count for something. And for decades, this neighborhood has been a magnet for non-student youth from around the region. Yet, as with the loss of very low income housing stock on downtown's edges in the past two decades, commerce has once again trumped social need. It seems to be a mantra of Mayor Greg Nickels' vision for the city. Ask anyone in Northgate, or South Lake Union.

Once off its land-grant campus, UW mostly leases, rather than owns, the property on which its offices sit. What landlord wouldn't rather have UW at along-term tenant, rather than a dilapidated house or even six stories of tiny, high-turnover apartments?

Meanwhile, for over a year, the city has been spending money in an ill- conceived plan to remodel the University District's commercial strip -- University Way NE, a.k.a. "The Ave" -- by tearing up the street a few blocks at a time. Landlords anticipating lease-lid's death were already leaving storefronts vacant (by demanding exorbitant rents and unworkable leases) and squeezing remaining small businesses. Ave construction has further crippled many of them, all so that sidewalks can be widened in places, new lighting fixtures can (eventually) be installed, and street parking can be reduced. And UW-related offices can turn a one-vibrant neighborhood into 25 square blocks of Safecos, plus the lunch-hour businesses that cater to them.

Yet the single aspect that would make The Ave more commercially viable is to have its student-oriented businesses lie directly between students' homes and where they study. If nobody lives in the University District, far fewer people will have reason to shop there, especially at night. And the new offices replacing the housing will make already-awful traffic that much worse.

Encouraging housing in commercial areas has become a central vision for downtown planning; the entire reason a decade's worth of public money was poured into downtown was to create an urban core that wasn't dead at night and on weekends. But in the case of lease-lid, Mayor Nickels and a majority of the city council -- including "tenant's champion" Judy Nicastro -- were more interested in deferring to developers and a major civic institution. In doing so, they steamrolled other considerations -- drowning them out with the short-sighted, automatic mantra of "this will create jobs."

One such consideration is self-evident -- the need of society at large, not just students, to have affordable places for people to live. But since civic Seattle long ago established that it could not care less about affordable housing, consider the particular role of student-friendly housing in bringing bright, ambitious adults to live in the Seattle area.

Any number of large employers -- Microsoft, for example -- wouldn't be in this region without its base of people drawn here by attending UW. That -- not just its jobs, or its football team -- is why UW itself is considered a civic asset.

Increasingly, unless mom and dad already live within commuting distance, young adult students at UW will need the same sort of access to cash required by any exclusive private college. Fewer and fewer will move to this area, and the city will have done its part in killing the dream of accessible higher education.

And it didn't have to be that way.