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In Midst of a Tech Boom, Seattle Tries To Keep Its Soul
HughPickens.com writes: Nick Wingfield has an interesting article in the NYT about how Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Portland, and other tech hubs around the country are seeking not to emulate San Francisco where wealth has created a widely envied economy, but housing costs have skyrocketed, and the region's economic divisions have deepened with rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco at more than $3,500 a month, the highest in the country. "Seattle has wanted to be San Francisco for so long," says Knute Berger. "Now it's figuring out maybe that it isn't what we want to be." The core of the debate is over affordable housing and the worry that San Francisco is losing artists, teachers and its once-vibrant counterculture. "It's not that we don't want to be a thriving tech center — we do," says Alan Durning. "It's that the San Francisco and Silicon Valley communities have gotten themselves into a trap where preservationists and local politics have basically guaranteed buying a house will cost at least $1 million. Already in Seattle, it costs half-a-million, so we're well on our way."
Seattle mayor Ed Murray says he wants to keep the working-class roots of Seattle, a city with a major port, fishing fleet and even a steel mill. After taking office last year, Murray made the minimum-wage increase a priority, reassured representatives of the city's manufacturing and maritime industries that Seattle needed them., and has set a goal of creating 50,000 homes — 40 percent of them affordable for low-income residents — over the next decade. "We can hopefully create enough affordable housing so we don't find ourselves as skewed by who lives in the city as San Francisco is," says Murray. "We're at a crossroads," says Roger Valdez. "One path leads to San Francisco, where you have an incredibly regulated and stagnant housing economy that can't keep up with demand. The other path is something different, the Seattle way."
Seattle mayor Ed Murray says he wants to keep the working-class roots of Seattle, a city with a major port, fishing fleet and even a steel mill. After taking office last year, Murray made the minimum-wage increase a priority, reassured representatives of the city's manufacturing and maritime industries that Seattle needed them., and has set a goal of creating 50,000 homes — 40 percent of them affordable for low-income residents — over the next decade. "We can hopefully create enough affordable housing so we don't find ourselves as skewed by who lives in the city as San Francisco is," says Murray. "We're at a crossroads," says Roger Valdez. "One path leads to San Francisco, where you have an incredibly regulated and stagnant housing economy that can't keep up with demand. The other path is something different, the Seattle way."
Putting "light rail" at-grade wasn't a very smart move. Neither is using rail in a city with grades that cannot be climbed by rail. Bus Rapid Transit with dedicated lanes would have been the smart move: lower cost, faster to roll out, and when the next big one hits (and it will) you can route buses around damaged lines - not so easy to do with tunnels hundreds of feet underground. But Seattle wanted to be a "world class city" and were blinded by rail (to the tune of nearly $200,000,000 per mile).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
After living in Seattle for 40+ years, I can tell you that this place lost its "soul" a long time ago.
There are still remnants here and there but they're being cleaned up as quickly as possible.
And as bad as it is in many ways, it's still one of the better places to live on the west coast.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You're doing something wrong. If you don't have any income, you should qualify for Medicaid. ObamaCare is for people who actually have an income.
The irony is that many of the products under development are expected to be used in every corner of the world.
But somehow they can only be developed by bringing people all together in one place.
????
You can't really get a decent place for $500k in Seattle.
Now if only we would permit Tiny Houses in the driveways of retired SFH zoned properties, so they could keep their house, and rent/lease the land, people could easily buy a Tiny House for $30k and have equity in the actual house. This would double population but allow people to keep their older giant houses with unused garages that they no longer use.
Most of use use transit, bike, or walk to work here. Car driving is something the suburbanites do.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --