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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.
There was a lot of complaining when the city I live in rezoned some neighborhoods along what years previously had been the main thoroughfare (before the freeway was built and the highway designation was pulled) and the collections of old just-post-war homes and motels and businesses were sold off, razed, and the land rebuilt with three to five storey buildings of mixed commercial and residential use. Another part of town will probably follow suit, as recent changes in law will force landlords to bring their properties up to code compliance if they want to continue renting them out.
Thing of it is, the strip that has already been redeveloped was in such poor shape that there really wasn't much of value lost in its redevelopment. It wasn't a quaint little neighborhood of chabby-chic bungalos with old landscaping, it was a neighborhood of falling-down buildings, many with real structural faults that would require significantly more than a facelift remodel, with unmaintained grounds or gravel-coated yards so that the maintenance was nothing. The area is also close to the college and to the popular downtown, and is along a major mass-transit corridor that leads to the big city downtown too. In short, the area was simply worth a lot more than its existing use could justify, and most of the occupants were renters, not owners.
Some call the new buildings ugly. I will agree that some of the new buildings are not to my tastes. What I won't agree on though, is that the new buildings are worse for the area, or that the project was worse for the culture of the area. The old area was a slum. The new area has more residents, has more businesses, and isn't dangerous. Given that eminent domain can't be used in my state to take private land away from private owners to provide to other private owners, if the city had any strong-arming tactics they were probably based on actual infractions on the part of the existing owners (like building and fire code violations) which I can't really fault them for enforcing.
Simply, if neighborhoods fall into blight and become slums they're ripe for this to happen. It's hard to really call it wrong when that happens.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Ok, so lets recap the article, Amazon needs to lead on diversity, assist low income in the area, change tax codes to be more "fair" in Seattle and Washington state.
And the article says how horrible interviews are at amazon, but only for a woman. As if people around here don’t realize its a sweatshop, and everyone has to be oncall 24/x and work insane hours. They are burning people to make products, they pay great, sign on bonuses, moving costs, but life sucks there. There is a reason people are leaving after a year in droves.
Crazy article, ignores many facets of working at amazon and concentrates on social reform outside the company. Agenda much?
I really think you don't get that our population will DOUBLE by 2025.
Not 2040.
But 2025.
Time to rezone all arterial blocks to 6-8 stories and stop "preserving" overpriced Single Family Housing that drives all but the Upper Middle Class out of Seattle.
(caveat - I own my house)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Every article listed, except for Wikipedia, is from reifman. Jeff Reifman has been on a tirade against Amazon for some time. At this point, we should all just ignore him.
No, that's a contemporary, high density housing style. You might not like it, but there is regard for aesthetics. You just don't agree with the aesthetic value.
sig: sauer
I live in Seattle.
I am all for the rebuild and densification of my city.
The city can't sprawl, and sprawl is wasteful and ugly.
Seattle was a company-town shithole for most of it's history, and only relatively recently has the nasty streetcrime and the worst of the corruption been mostly eliminated. (Most of the last bits of the bad poltical corruption left when a number of the the 40 year career party apparatchiks were invited to move to DC by their national party) The city is now ok-ish decently-ish well managed and has a thriving multi-centered economy, and so people want to live here. And I welcome them. As long as they are not from California and bring California's social and government pathologies with them.
99% of the people complaining about people moving here, are either people who moved here themselves, or are the children of people who moved here. You don't get to move someplace, and then start bitching that people should stop moving here after you move here yourself.
And I look at the buildings that are being demolished, and they made of old dried wood, and brick held together by crumbling mortar. A major earthquake, and they where going to fall down and catch fire. We need to demolish more of them faster, and build more denser buildings that are better able to resist the constant damp and moss, save water and sunlight and energy, made from steel not wood and sand.
Perfectly fine? If they were perfectly fine, why didn't people just buy the existing houses and move into them? Perhaps because they weren't perfectly fine for the people moving in? Nobody's tearing down houses and putting up new houses "just because."
What is this hard-on you have for preserving something "built and designed at the turn of the 19th century"? A lot of that old housing is shitty, drafty, inefficient, poorly laid out, and full of toxic materials. New housing will be more energy efficient, better laid out, made of better (and less-toxic) materials, and as durable (if not MORE durable) than the kit houses they're tearing down. They're not tearing down the fucking Parthenon - these houses aren't "precious historical artifacts that need preserving."
And as far as middle class - if Seattle wanted to preserve living space for middle income families, then they should change the zoning to encourage higher-density apartments and condos (yes, high-rises to replace your precious kit houses), so that plenty of housing could be built, which would keep prices affordable even in the more "desirable" areas. The only way to keep pricing stable in a desirable area is to allow (and encourage) developers to build *up*. Otherwise, you're starting a bidding war for open acreage.
in SF
I think I found the problem.
Granted it isn't just SF but the whole general area. My wife's grandmother who is 88 still lives in the house they bought out there shortly after WWII in Marin county and it is more cost effective to continue to live in the house and pay people to come and take care of everything than to move into a senior living place. A friend of the family that worked for HP near the beginning until he retired likes to joke that he always wanted to live in a multimillion dollar home, he just didn't think it would be the home he bought when he started at HP a 2 block walk to work. Even in far away places that aren't CA suffer from these things as there was a recent case in St. Paul, Minnesota where a demo permit was issued and then retracted the same day and the owner had to sue the city to demolish his own property.
As someone who leans fairly libertarian my answer to these people who complain about new development is that if they don't like it they should buy the property. I also believe that people like Edith Macefield should be able to tell a developer to piss off and there isn't anything thing the government can do to force her to give up her property.
Time to offend someone
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