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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".
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.