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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.
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.
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".
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.
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
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.
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.