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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.
I don't recall people of Seattle complaining about how Bill Gates ravaged their city in the 90's...
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
And "brogrammer"? Seriously? Submitter is an entitled, classist jackass.
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.
She's sexist. Not classist.
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
Seriously, welcome to every single desirable, thriving metropolitan area in the country right now. Every single one of them.
The following is a dramatic representation of a conversation in Seattle.
Scene: an artesian coffee shop, a late-forties white person is talking to another late-forties white person
Person 1: When I cashed in my Microsoft shares in 1998 and I bought a house here it was a quiet residential street.
Person 2: Yeah, I thought it would always be a quiet residential street, but then THOSE people moved in and I can't find parking.
Person 1: This is the single worst thing that has happened in the history of human existence. You know the first thing the Nazis did when they invaded Poland... took all the parking.
Person 2: I know, right? I have $500k in equity in my house but I can't find parking. If I sold my house to cash in my equity I'd probably have to move to Lynnwood or Rainier Valley.
Person 1: I heard there's a new locally grown, gluten free, Vietnamese Banh Mi restaurant in Rainier Valley now.
Person 2: Really? I heard they have quiet residential streets and plenty of parking. Maybe I should move there.
Person 1: Good idea. I can cash in some of my Microsoft shares and start a new shade grown coffee shop. Get off the rat race, you know?
Person 2: Yay! The people of Rainier Valley will really appreciate it. Let's go talk to our brokers.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
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
Oh no, *change* is happening, and it's not in a direction that supports my almost-entirely-unrealistic vision of an affordable bucolic urban hipster paradise.
SOMEONE STOP IT NOW!
This part I read with almost glee:
"...I admit Iâ(TM)m part of the problem. Not only did I come to Seattle for the opportunity to work at a large technology company, but it made me wealthy, as well. Iâ(TM)m not saying that Amazon shouldnâ(TM)t grow and that others shouldnâ(TM)t benefit from the opportunity, I just believe the companyâ(TM)s growing irresponsibly and beginning to have an irrevocably damaging impact on Seattleâ(TM)s character and quality of life..."
In short, you're a fucking hypocrite. I got mine, so the rest of you stop trying to do what I did because it's just so not want I want.
Yeah, well, life is change even in the land of non-chain coffee shops, horn-rimmed glasses, and experimental music.
-Styopa
And "brogrammer"? Seriously? Submitter is an entitled, classist jackass.
I have never, not once, heard a programmer use the word "brogrammer". I have only heard it used by SJWs when denigrating programmers, and the companies they work for (Amazon in this case).
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.
Born & raised in Seattle. Sure, I'd love the good old days of the 80's before Seattle started to get crowded, but whatever, life goes on. We have a bunch more people here in Seattle these days then we ever did. We need space for the people that are here. Ballard has been a little home owning community. People would buy homes, start families there. Well, family homes are not what is needed anymore. You have young single professionals looking for places to work, not young married couples looking for places to start a family. Does it suck because the Ballard I & you remember is changing? Nope, this has been going on all over Seattle. We are NOT the little community we used to be anymore.
Seattle has grown up and it's time to get it new clothes that fit.
Be seeing you...
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.
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