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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.
This was not an overnight problem. Amazon is growing, they are buying space where they can. There is no crime there. If Seattle wants to preserve the look of its older neighborhoods, it's had ample time to legislate the building codes.
The real question is: When do we cross the line when legislating aesthetics. If someone buys the residential land, is it within the rights of the city
To give them 4 floor plans they choose from? 8? Five outward shapes they can pick? Does the city pick the colors? The plants?
Nearly everyone knows what looks ugly after the fact, but without building codes unrelated to safety and yet of draconian precision, how to you keep someone from building something ugly in advance?
1) Complaining about new homes replacing shitty old 1950's houses.
2) Complaining about modern architecture which is surely a personal preference, not some objective standard meaning "ugly and bad".
3) Complaining about "brogrammers" simply with a cite of "lots of dudes at Amazon" as supporting evidence for a 'brogrammer' culture.
Yep, Seattle hipster detected. You should probably move to Portland, where you can keep the dream of the 90's alive.
People have to live somewhere. As Seattle grows, if not from Amazon's expansion from other economic growth, the people moving in will need places to live. Placing those people in townhouses replacing low-rise bungalows is a good thing, in my opinion. The alternative is to expand the city ever outward, creating more suburbs. Instead what seems to be happening is that previously suburban neighbourhoods are becoming urbanized. Increased densification of these neighbourhoods makes public transport more viable, and will likely increase local commerce, making it a more walkable neighbourhood. I might have chosen a different architectural style for those townhouses, but overall I don't see how this is anything but a positive direction of urban development.
People are building houses they want on property they own?
The infamy!
I wonder how the whiners felt about the people who lived in the area as the whiners' houses were being built. What, no retroactive self-shaming guilt trips? I am shocked, shocked! to discover egocentric whining.
Infuriate left and right