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A Visual Walk Through Amazon's Impact On One Seattle Neighborhood
reifman writes: If you live in Seattle, it's easy to see Amazon.com's impact on downtown construction and growth but not everyone sees what's happening in neighborhoods like formerly sleepy Ballard. One by one, traditional Seattle homes are being razed and replaced by 3 1/2 story behemoths without regard for aesthetics of any kind. The new townhomes offer 12 foot wide living spaces for Amazon's brogrammer class. Take a walk with me down my friend's street to see what it's like to live amongst the returns of e-commerce success. Ballard is also home of the late octogenarian Edith Macefield, who refused to sell her house to developers as construction went up around her.
Because with MS most of the Developers bought shiny new McMansions built in Redmond, Issaquah, Bellevue and Mercer Island -- new development that expanded communities in the Eastside rather than tearing down historic neighborhoods that didn't need "revitalizing".
She's sexist. Not classist.
Seattle has zoning out the ying-yang, and the streets specifically need to be zoned to townhouse height to build the townhouses. That designation has been spreading over the last decade+.
As far as aesthetics, just go to a neighborhood Design Review Board meeting, where the dozen or so busybodies in each neighborhood go and throw rotten vegetables at developers for hours, ruthlessly hounding them to get their designs more in line with the aesthetics of the busybody junta.
(A sufficiently small townhouse project can evade the board, much to the chagrin of the busybodies).
The problem with the townhouses is not that they're ugly or don't "fit in" but that too many of them get build without parking, as the anti-car elements on design boards and in the gummint browbeat developers into not offering parking.
I looked at a lot of the new Ballard construction when house shopping in 2013, before buying a condo in another 'hood, they're not bad, the kitchens especially are generally being done very nicely, but you can't please everyone with how they look from the outside, I guess.
People are leaving jobs and town because they can't get high speed internet? Color me skeptical. Plus, though I live across the water on the peninsula, I have many friends who live in Seattle and I've heard not once complaint about lack of broadband access - ever.
On top of which, we just had a report here on Slashdot of broadband access being lost (temporarily) because a fiber was cut. Searching around a bit shows pretty much no significant complaints about lack of faster-than-dialup internet connections. (Many complaints that broadband isn't as fast as it should be... though it's hard to sort out the actual complaints from the unrealistic assumptions about what the service should be.)
So, I'm moving beyond skeptical right to not buying it.
Sorry, angry millenials, but "brogrammer" is not a real thing. It's a made up word that means nothing, these days it's just something angry feminists call male programmers.