Seattle, in Midst of Tech Boom, Tries to Keep Its Soul | Hacker News Reader

Seattle, in Midst of Tech Boom, Tries to Keep Its Soul

nytimes.com

177 pointsvanderfluge295 comments

Took a job in Bellevue in April and moved from Philadelphia to Seattle. So far it's a been an interesting experience. I've encountered many people hostile to software engineers in general. A bunch of people immediately ask if I work for Amazon with a hint of disdain after I state my occupation. So it hasn't felt super welcoming so far.

I get it, even in some neighborhoods in Philadelphia the same thing is happening. Although to a much lesser extent, but there is tension between locals and newcomers. I was initially sympathetic to the locals, but now it just seems people will complain about the change no matter what.

But you have no right to complain about this gentrification when you are operating newly built apartment complexes, charging a premium to tech workers. And then go on to say you have Amazon prime. Screw you, Owen.

Owen is the worst.

A brief elaboration on "many people hostile to software engineers in general": the major source of this are the employers who have done a deal with the apartment owners to all but exclude anyone who doesn't work in the tech industry. The apartment owner simply doesn't rent to anyone who doesn't work for Amazon, Microsoft etc[1]. This makes people grumpy at the folks who apparently do the deal with the devil for this advantage. By the bye, there is a difference, at least politically, between Seattle and Bellevue, much like between San Francisco and Oakland

[1] http://www.thestranger.com/news/feature/2015/09/09/22831041/...

Oh, I wasn't aware this was happening. Totally makes sense, although this is not the case in my instance.

Reading this, the employers have nothing to do with it. The apartment owner/managers are deciding who is a "preferred" tenant on their own and should take the heat rather than some arbitrary employer.

I guess I understand the idea that someone might want to live in a building filled entirely with people in their own industry... but I never liked the idea. They asked me in college "Do you want to live in a building that's composed only of engineers?" No, no I don't. How am I suppose to expand my mind talking only to people who do the same things I do? I'm suppose to sacrifice the expansion of my mind because English majors party or something?

And that is the primary reason I'm in NYC now instead of Silicon Valley. Of course there is proximity to family and my love of this city in general, but the main reason is that at the end of the day, I go back to my block in Bushwick and spend hours almost every day just sitting with my Puerto Rican neighbors who have lived vastly different lives from mine. And I love it.

The other option would have been to be a in a heavily white and asian male dominated situation with a bunch of people just like me, and i understand the appeal of not having to deal with things that are "different", but for me that's the best part of life.

I'm happy to have lived with whites, blacks, latinos, asians, men, women, straight and gay people throughout my life. And I'm much more comfortable in working class neighborhoods than middle and upper class neighborhoods.

So to me, it sounds like Seattle has a helluva uphill battle if it has to compete with the likes of entirely tech worker dominated buildings and wants to maintain any sort of culture at all besides whatever uniform culture that situation imposes upon an area.

You've nailed the weirdest thing about tech to me. The insularity is horrible. I had the same question posed to me in college and even then I was like "but...tech people are mostly boring." English majors party? Good. Means I'll get out of the house.

I'm lucky in that a lot of my social circle is non-tech right now, but a lot of the keep-to-yourself aspects of Boston's culture don't sit really well with me. I've thought about NYC more and more lately. Might be worth another look, if I can figure out how to generate a client base down there before I make a jump. =)

The only break I ever got from one of these programs (I work at Microsoft) was that of the various payments required on move-in (fee, refundable deposit, first month's rent) I was exempted from the refundable deposit. I didn't really get why that was the case, because I was still liable for damages, but I'm surprised that there are more aggressive versions of this and I'd agree that even the break I got wasn't really deserved.

This is most likely a form of "credit-check" on the part of the landlords... They see stable, well-paying job, and trust that you'll stick around, pay on time, and generally not be a hassle. Has nothing do do with the apartment owners "sponsoring" employees of a certain company.

people always complain about change! especially old people!

Seattle has never been particularly welcoming to newcomers; people there tend to be insular and it can be hard to make friends if you don't already know people (even before the amazon/tech stuff -- plenty of articles about 'the seattle freeze' that predate it). Being from there helps. Not being in tech helps -- there are so many new software engineers meeting one just isn't very interesting. You can hardly blame people; if every single new person you meet is a software engineer you get real sick of hearing that real fast. You appear like you're a dime a dozen, because as a software engineer transplant in Seattle you are and to anyone not in tech your work is utterly boring; if you can, try talking about hobbies instead and avoiding talking about work entirely. That might help, but it's definitely an uphill battle in that city.

Also everyone hates amazon. So if you don't work there, be outwardly and explicitly proud that you don't -- that's a huge selling point when it comes to making friends. Partly because of the white collar sweatshops (people in seattle generally liberal and pro-labor), partly because of the blue-collar sweatshops, partly because 'large corporation = evil', partly because the countless new techbros with no respect for Seattle culture who spend 11hrs/day at work and don't have time to develop a personality romping around town give it a real bad reputation.

Yeah, I'm not all that concerned with making friends with people that are hostile about my profession. That's so petty.

>partly because the countless new techbros with no respect for Seattle culture who spend 11hrs/day at work and don't have time to develop a personality romping around town give it a real bad reputation

What does that even mean? I hear this all the time and I honestly have no idea how to "respect Seattle Culture". I'm nice to people and I enjoy everything Seattle has to offer. If you want a pat on the back for living in Seattle longer, sorry. I don't care.

I'd also point out that this hasn't been my experience at all. Everyone here has been very nice, welcoming, and helpful. I feel like Seattle natives really sell themselves short. It has been a great experience.

I'm glad you're having a good time, but people in central Seattle are sensitive to the fact that the neighborhood that has been a cradle for so much culture is being made into the party district for nearby corporate villages - Amazon being the biggest offender. I have plenty of friends who've worked there (though many leave because it's so horrible) and plenty of friends in tech. It's not the profession, it's the people - they're easy to spot in real life. We don't want your approval - we're the ones who don't care. We want to know you're on the same side of the culture battle we've been losing for the last 5 or 10 years.

Well I'm new to the city and I'd feel like it would be plainly disingenuous of me to pretend I know what's going on. I'm here to support my family, learn, and experience this incredible area. I'm aware of the arguments in the culture battle and I am, of course, against gentrification and the loss of cultural identity. I will vote accordingly to try and fight that. However, I have a similar attitude as you (and the 'we' you're referring to) - I don't want or need your approval.

And it bears repeating, I haven't experienced any of this at all. I have only encountered nice people.

Yes indeed, and sorry if my comment sounded confrontational. I only meant that the "doesn't need approval" is an integral part of the Seattle mindset.

I didn't take it as a confrontation. I know exactly what you mean and I admire that quality.

As someone who has lived in a few cities filled with counter-culture types, they can be incredibly insular, superficial, and tribal. Ironically, they end up being a different looking, but similar acting version of the wealthy elite they claim to hate.

It seems like everyone in these places is just trying to re-invent a "cooler than thou" image, looking down on others who don't prize their typically temporary life-style choices. The gleeful embrace of self-imposed bohemian poverty, and the hatred of anyone who wants material possessions, is particularly annoying. As someone who grew up in poverty, I really hate getting lectured on how meaningless money is by a dread-locked trust fund kid who is waxing poetic about how great of an experience it is to "live simply." They don't seem to get the fact that for some of us, a "tiny house" is exactly what we fucking grew up in, except it wasn't considered cool, and was stuck next to a bunch of other tiny houses called trailers in a community called a trailer park.

The point is that the people in Seattle that act like assholes to you almost certainly fall into this category of idiot.

Well, sure, posturing is posturing, whatever posture you adopt.

That's not been my experience of Seattle though. But then again, I'm pretty unconventional myself.

There is a point to "living simply". That's not necessarily counter-culture. Some folks eschew materialism as a self-image thing. But some folks have already been on the extremes of material wealth, have already found that it wasn't what it was cracked up to be, and choosing to live simply comes from wisdom and experience.

I hope you're able to find out for yourself whether the material possessions actually makes you happy -- and that you do find happiness, whatever form that takes for you.

> counter-culture types, they can be incredibly insular, superficial, and tribal

This applies to all types of people, rich, poor, conservative, progressive and the stuff in between. On a meta-scale it would be the way a country might react to immigrants, and like a self-similar fractal the sentiment works at smaller and smaller scales like seaboard, North/South, state, county, town etc. I guess the underlying mentality is, hey we made this area for people like us, not people like you. Now you're ruining it by changing what it is...

Using the counter-culture area as an example, if large numbers of people move to an edgy place shaped by artists, musicians, bums, gender/sexual aberrations and people who generally reject what other areas have to offer, and they don't want to be part of the existing social fabric then they're treated in a way analogous to how an immune system would antagonize a foreign body. It could just as easily be old money getting shitty with new money flooding their uppity neighborhood with unacceptable values or garish sensibilities.

IOW: people generally don't like change. Especially if it's not in their favor or to their taste.

> looking down on others who don't prize their typically temporary life-style choices

It's easy to judge groups of people with generalizations - they're doing the same to you. The funny thing is most people would get along fine if they put that kind of mentality away and just spoke to each other with a common respect.

I grew up in a trailer park too, and look forward to the day I can afford to go back to a life that simple.

When you move to a new place, that place has a culture. If you want locals to like or accept you, you should try to at the very least understand if not adopt part of that culture. It works the same everywhere. In a small town it's much more pressing and obvious -- watch how fast you get ostracized when you dump on their culture; in a big city you can kind of get away with doing your own thing and ignoring most of the people/culture/tradition if you want.

People in Seattle have worked very hard for years to build a community and a culture that they enjoy and on the whole represents them and is different from any other city in the country. That hard work is one of the biggest reasons people consider Seattle such a great place to live. Dumping a million rich young people who are there to work themselves to death at amazon for a year before they jump ship and work at a real company somewhere else into the middle of it isn't particularly good for that community or culture.

If you don't know what respecting the culture of a place means then I don't really know what to tell you. If you "hear it all the time" that means people are saying it all the time and it means something; I'd try to understand what they mean rather than being hostile to the idea.

I meant "read it all the time", as I only see this on the internet.

Fairly sure I'm fitting in just fine. As I said, I don't have a bad word to say about anyone I've met. Apparently asking you what "respect the culture" means gets me a negative response where you berate for me not already know what it means and telling me I should "try to understand".

So asking you directly isn't good enough. I think I'll just pass, I'm doing fine and Seattle has been nothing but kind. But good luck with your approach, I'm sure making someone feel bad for moving to a new place works on someone.

I keep reading all these scary stories about how unwelcoming people from Seattle is; I moved here back in February and my experience until now have been completely the opposite: almost every Seattleite I meet is super friendly and talkative, at the point that it feels almost like being in a small town.

Maybe I am just lucky? but I think Seattle is one of the coolest cities in the US, except of course for the traffic.

The traffic. Ugh. ...I remember, even twenty years ago, having to slog along under 40 mph from SeaTac to Seattle on a Saturday - early in the afternoon.

I visit Seattle often and find the traffic to be wonderful! Of course, I live in Beijing, so my perspective is a bit unusual.

Having a giant lake dividing Seattle from the rest of the area has a really negative impact on traffic.

I lived in Seattle for 4 years and I generally found people cold and distant, my wife did too.

That might be part of it too. I worked from home. I lived in Capitol Hill, parked my car in the garage, and I think I drove it maybe once the entire year I lived there. I walked everywhere. Folks were pretty friendly.

would you say your experience with seattleites was limited due to your staying in a small pocket of the city?

Well, that's turn that around: how would not staying in a small pocket of the city expose me other types of Seattleites?

Or better yet: How would typecasting what Seattle folks are like give me insight into myself, or into the city, or improve my life?

After fifteen years of living here, I've concluded that a large part of the traffic woes are brought on by the general driving habits of the residents themselves. Can't properly merge (speed up to the flow of traffic, please), can't stay out of the left lane, and huge gaps are often left because a driver can't be bothered to push the accelerator (exacerbating the jerky stop-and-go). Seattle doesn't need more roads, Seattle needs to learn to operate their vehicles (though Seattlites will tell you it's the immigrant Californians; talk about denial). Contrast to, say, NYC where it appears to me that everybody just wants it to work and if you're screwing it up for everyone else you get a horn and a finger. Which, despite stereotypes, doesn't seem to happen all that often (disclaimer: never lived there, visited lots) because everyone else wants it to work, too.

That, and they should have said "yes" to federal light rail dollars forty years ago. Now we're stuck with a tunnel that I'm becoming increasing convinced is never going to get finished.

I think it depends greatly on your personality, how you spend your free time, what part of the city you're in, and how your first few experiences shapes you perception.

I find Seattle to be unwelcoming, personally, but it's not that people aren't friendly when you can get them to talk. It's the pervasive avoidance of eye contact and general desire not to engage with strangers that can make it a lonely place.

I had only lived in big cities before (Buenos Aires and NYC) where is very unusual to have any kind of interaction with strangers. In my experience here people starts conversations all the time in almost any public space (grocery stores, parks, buses, etc.) and I have to say that I'm not used to that haha but I really enjoy it. I wonder if this is a neighborhood thing maybe?

Yes. I grew up in Seattle and people rarely make eye contact. It's terrible. It wasn't until I visited other areas that I realized that it wasn't just me.

People here do want to be forced out of their shell though. If you don't require the slightest bit of affirmation in your personality, you'll do fine in Seattle. If not you'll most certainly get the blues. I do fine on some days and then sometimes it's just a chore.

Sounds like Finland/Scandinavia. Well, they were the ones to supposedly settle Ballard, I guess.

I dunno, Pera. That's been my experience of Seattle too.

I mean, sure, I remembered the street protests that lead to the minimum wage laws; and people getting angry about one thing or another. But by and large, I don't get the cold shoulder or hostile looks.

Maybe it is because people in Seattle are sensitive to being judged, and are aggressive about political correctness? I'm OK with that.

Seattle is a beautiful city. I'm glad I had the chance to live there :-)

My experience was the same as yours. Frankly I've never lived anywhere where I felt like I made more beyond the surface connections with people than the Seattle area. I never experienced any hostility for being in the software industry, nor any for being an outsider not from the pnw. IMO Seattle has something that I've missed since leaving quite a lot - a high % of thoughtful, intelligent, down to earth people.

It very much depends on if you fit the Seattle type. The reality is that Seattle and the Northwest in general is very hostile to people who are different from the norm there. If you happen to line up with that it's a great place to be. If not it can be uncomfortable.

> and avoiding talking about work entirely

fuck, is this not SOP for everyone?

conversation order of operations: work < people < things < ideas

Here in the DC metro area, pretty much the first question you get upon meeting someone is: "So, what do you do?"

Unfortunately, it's not SOP everywhere.

I've never understood the problem with that question. It's been a normal thing to talk about everywhere I've ever been. Work is a defining feature of one's life, the single activity people spend more time on than any other; what's wrong with asking about it when you want to get to know someone?

Your job can imply your socioeconomic status. When it's the first thing you ask, it can come across as deciding whether you're worthwhile or not. Maybe you're not worth the connection because you're a fry cook at McDonalds, but the doctor over there in the corner is.

Learning what someone does for a living is, to me anyways, far less important than learning what they like to do, what interests they have, etc. I can be friends with anyone where there's common ground, not just fellow software folks.

Talking with work is fine, it just can be interpreted as rude if it's one of the first things you ask.

I think the difference is if you like your job or not. If you don't, then you don't like talking about work and you act like it's rude. If work is your passion, then you do like talking about it.

I realize that it can be interpreted as rude, I just don't understand why. It's not a question about socioeconomic status, it's a question about "what [you] like to do, what interests [you] have, etc.," as those characteristics are expressed in the activity you've chosen to spend at least half your waking hours on.

You're replying to someone who explained to you that that question is, in many quarters, a question about socioeconomic status, and your reply is "I don't understand why it's rude, it's not a question about socioeconomic status." Yes, it is about socioeconomic status. You may not think it should be, you may not like that it is, but it is, otherwise people would not take it as such. The reasons are historical and cultural, and if you study the (American, though not exclusively) relationship between work and sociological sense of self of the 20th century you are surely more than capable of divining the details, but it exists, and your further confusion about rudeness will probably continue until you accept that the measuring tools of rudeness are not yours to calibrate.

A large fraction of people in the "developed" world (perhaps a majority?) work as something like a cashier, for an employer they don't really care about. And they are all aware that most other people they meet are working similar jobs. So they don't ask, because they know they'll probably get a reply like "I stock shelves in a department store", which isn't going to lead anywhere interesting.

Because of this, if someone does ask them what they do, they can be pretty sure right away that that person does something "better" than what they do, and (wrongly or rightly) it can make the situation uncomfortable for them.

Obviously the extent to which this is relevant depends on the demographic of the group in which you're socializing at a particular moment.

The #1 dating horror story among women I've dated in SF is the introverted engineer who could only talk about work, engineering, or video games and otherwise required Charlie Rose levels of questioning to engage on other topics. I'm wondering if I can get funding for a Personality-as-a-Service startup in SF.

I wonder how many of those engineers have horror stories about women who can only talk about <insert bland, socially approved topic here> and refuse to discuss anything interesting, like engineering or video games.

Are you saying that all women want to talk about is bland socially-approved topics, or that everything other than engineering and video games is bland and socially-approved? I like talking about work and videogames sometimes but if that's all you can talk about without getting bored, it's pretty bad.

I read this the other way. That the post you're replying to here was saying 'flip the table around and try to read the experience from the other side'. Are the engineers really flat and without life, or is it that the venn diagram of their mutual interests has a very small overlap and neither is particularly good at figuring out how to engage the other?

I meant more what mjevans said. Sometimes two people just don't have anything in common, and that's too bad, but too often blame is placed 100% on the nerdy guy for having the "wrong" interests, when really it's nobody's fault.

Remember a while back when someone wrote an entire awful clickbait article about the horror of discovering that the guy she was on a date with played Magic: The Gathering? Not that he was unpleasantly obsessed with it, not that he couldn't talk about anything else, just that he was a frequent player.

To clarify, an important part of these date horror stories is literally "I could not get him to talk." Like long, awkward pauses until his interlocutor asks him about work/engineering. The problem is not "having the wrong interests", it's not being able to communicate your interests to female humans unless presented with a direct question that can be answered with a factual response, like "What do you do at [Company]?"

Not for me. Work is interesting. Attempting to build some dogmatic hierarchy of which things are OK to talk about is silly.

>> Also everyone hates amazon.

Odd, compared to Bentonville where everyone loves Wal-mart.

To be fair, Amazon doesn't directly or indirectly employ half the population of Seattle like Walmart does in northwest Arkansas.

Plus, it's apples and oranges. Seattle attracts counter-culture folks, and has for a long time. They tend to be assholes in general in my opinion.

That's an interesting use of the word "asshole".

There is this philosopher who picked apart the word "asshole" to try gain insight into what it means. I liked his definition of it -- someone acting out of entitled superiority.

There are lots of folks who are like that. I don't generally distinguish people along the lines of "mainstream" and "counter-culture" in my head. It's more of whether someone is superficial, or someone is impeccable or has integrity. So sure, I've met asshole counter-culture "types". I've also met some very interesting people too.

Have you read that article about the philosophy of jerks?

Plenty of people in NW Arkansas, particularly Fayetteville and Eureka Springs, aren't huge Walmart/Tyson/JB Hunt fans.

Have you ever tried traveling anywhere around South Lake Union at the end of a work day? It's an absolute nightmare, and doesn't do anything to ingratiate Amazon to the rest of the city.

Was there ever a reason to travel around South Lake Union at the end of a work day before? Other than to exit 99 for the Mercer Street industrial wasteland pothole-dodge on the way to I-5, of course.

Queen Anne <-> Capitol Hill

Glazer's Camera

Downtown to Eastlake

yeah.

When I lived in Seattle, I walk and sometimes take the bus. Queen Anne's is just a bit further than I am willing to walk. I miss the walking; where I'm living now, things are far apart enough that it's more practical to ride a bike if I didn't want to drive.

Downtown to Eastlake

Head up to the REI and hang a left, you can bypass the cluster fuck of SLU traffic.

Huh, that explains some things. I never really noticed it. I had a few friends I already knew in Seattle that were very welcoming. On the other hand, when I'm out walking and wandering around by myself, I don't get a sense a hostile or coldness to people. If anything, I felt that I fit in better in Seattle than when I lived in Atlanta. I've met a lot of interesting people from different walks of life -- artists, yes, and engineers, and street folks. Some hipsters, some hippies, some yuppies. I really enjoyed the diversity.

I was wondering why Seattle did not have as vibrant of a tech meetup community as Atlanta. I chalked it up to that, in Atlanta, everyone has to drive to get to the meetup. But now I see, it might be something else.

I'm not sure about bonding and making friendships with people with mutual dislike for one company or another. It's in my experience, those affiliations makes for good acquaintances. But friends? A friend is someone who, if I knocked on their door at 3AM and said I need help, they might be cranky, but they'll let me in. A friend is someone who, if I get a call from them saying they need me to bail them out of jail, I'd do it.

People who are proud of hating Amazon, or upset that I am neutral about it -- I think I will just walk away. That's one of the shadow sides I notice, living in Capitol Hill back in year of 2013: people are aggressively politically-correct, many are passionate about liberal stance, or being tolerant of people. It's a big contrast from living in Atlanta.

I moved to Seattle from Atlanta 8 months ago and I haven't managed to make any friends. This place is rough.

It's crazy how insular Seattle is. My wife--whose family came to Oregon on the wagon trains--once interviewed at a law firm in Seattle. They asked her: "so I see you have ties to the PNW, but what are your ties to Western Washington?"

I'm a Seattle transplant from the east coast and I work for a big scary tech company and I haven't had any of these problems. The main difference between east and west coast culture is on the east coast the biggest opener is "so what do you do?" which in west coast culture translates to "i don't care who you are."

Which is why getting and talking about hobbies is a better choice. Who is most likely to screw this up? East coast or mid-western kids coming to work at Microsoft and Amazon.

A better opener for new-comers to Seattle is: "So what is your favorite brunch place?" or "what do you like to do on the weekends? I like going to Bainbridge", etc.

What you do matters way, way less initially.

This is so strange to hear. I moved here in 2006 and made friends without any unusual effort. The idea that someone is going to be non-interested in talking to you because of your profession is... strange.

No one here that I've ever met hates Amazon (though some are bummed by the economic effect on the city). I've never worked there, but I have friends who have-- some of them didn't like it (and left), others really love it. Like any big company, depends on your team and your boss.

I moved to Seattle in 2011 and left in 2013. It was a little difficult to make friends at first because (1) people are generally standoffish and (2) the whole 'I work at Microsoft' thing really turns people off for whatever reason.

What I learned after a while was you can't really do anything about #1; thats just the NW culture. To deal with #2...just don't bring it up and don't be a stereotype and get to know Seattle and all it's good for. Music, mountains, etc. I loved living there the second year I was there.

I find the Bay Area is so inundated with tech it's almost impossible to encounter #1 or #2...almost anyone you meet socially if you live in SF will work for tech in some way or another which was not guaranteed at all in Seattle (also true of Oakland but not quite the same). People are friendlier in the Bay but that's got no bearing on you actually being friends with them.

So the solution to #2 is to be "one of the good ones"? To not talk about important facets of yourself to avoid offending petty people? Fuck that.

You're missing the point.

The answer to number 2 is to be more than your job. To leave work /at work/.

I'm "more than my work". But that doesn't mean my work isn't a major part of me.

Your bathroom habits are a major part of you too, but that doesn't mean you bring them up in normal polite conversation. People aren't interested in hearing about your work (especially if it's in tech and they are not) just like they aren't interested in many details of your life which are very important to you. Your goal in social interaction should be to find common ground, not force people to want to talk about what you want to talk about.

>countless new techbros with no respect for Seattle culture who spend 11hrs/day at work and don't have time to develop a personality romping around town give it a real bad reputation.

I think you do a great job summarizing the hypocrisy of the left on this issue. According to the left, if a person is financially disadvantaged, they deserve sympathy and support. However if a person is socially disadvantaged[0], they not only deserve it, but also should be shamed for taking up space that more interesting people could be occupying.

[0] I don't believe for a second that there are many people working 11 hours a day. The people you describe are simply more introverted/shy people who work in tech, and you're looking for some explanation that makes their social situation their own fault.

>I don't believe for a second that there are many people working 11 hours a day.

Clearly haven't been following much of the news on Amazon as a workplace recently then.

11 hours a day is totally believable.

So apparently having a life outside of work is now a left-wing political issue? All the conservatives I know and spend time with have hobbies too.

What does socially disadvantaged even mean? Autism spectrum disorder? Having nothing interesting to say? Having no interests or ability to socially interact?

And obviously I'm not referring to shy introverts when I describe these people as "techbros" "romping around town".

And it's Amazon. 11 hours is an underestimate.

What I find hilarious is that the most hostile people weren't even born in Seattle. John Criscitello has no right to speak on behalf of native Seattleites.

He only speaks for himself - but a lot of us happen to agree with him.

"But you have no right to complain about this gentrification when you are operating newly built apartment complexes, charging a premium to tech workers. And then go on to say you have Amazon prime. Screw you, Owen."

Are you saying that it's the people that are opening the apartment complexes that are complaining? Cause otherwise I'd imagine the average resident of the neighborhood isn't running apartment complexes.

Interesting - I moved from VA (Originally from PA) to Seattle a bit over 3 years ago, and my experience has been pretty different. However, I work downtown and live on Shoreline, which is quite different from Bellevue.

I've found Seattle quite friendly to newcomers (Some friends visited and it took 3 days before some stranger didn't cover their drinks when out for dinner), and open and welcoming to me on multiple levels (as a tech person, as a board and RPG gamer, and as a geek in general, not to mention as someone far more socially liberal than Virginia was kind to).

That said, I've learned there are a ton of neighborhoods here, each with their own flavor and style, and I've only "known" a few of them. Woodinville is not Freemont is not Bothell is not Bellevue.

Fremont is not Bothowoodinredmokirkllevue. But it is basically the same as Ballard.

My experience has been eerily similar. Moved to Ballard from South Philly at the beginning of the summer, working in Bellevue.

People are so openly hostile I kinda stopped trying to talk to anyone. The "Die techie scum" graffiti all over doesn't really help either.

Seattle itself seems pretty nice. Its a shame this forced isolation is just going to lead to even bigger division.

Maybe we should hang out?

I love Seattle, but the people spewing hate against techies gets me down, hard. I haven't really run into hostility outside of the anonymous ranting on reddit and the rude graffiti, etc.

Ha, small world. It's strange, because I don't even look like a typical "techbro" as people have been describing in this thread. Work/life balance is incredibly important to me. I have a large beard, my long hair is in a bun, I have tattoos on my arms. I moved to Fremont because the one friend I had here lived there.

Shoot me a private message, lets grab a bite or beer sometime.

FUCK OWEN

I can't speak to every demographic, but I've lived and worked on the Eastside as a software dev for 15 some years now, and I've never had that reaction from anyone. Far from it, probably a third or better of the households I go to church with, or who my kids go to school with, have at least one engineer in the household, sometimes more.

That said, Woodinville and Bellevue are not Capitol Hill, which has a very different vibe. I'm as uncomfortable in that neighborhood as they would be in mine, I expect.

An interesting take on how someone really feels about programmers.

http://www.movin925.com/2015/08/10/second-date-update-podcas...

That was definitely interesting to listen to. Recommend it to others reading this thread. I have personally never met anyone being that passionately dismissive of people working at technology companies. Absurd.

> A bunch of people immediately ask if I work for Amazon with a hint of disdain after I state my occupation. So it hasn't felt super welcoming so far.

I moved to San Francisco ten years ago with $700 in my pocket, to stay with a relative, who kicked me out pretty soon because, well, having an adult man stay in your guest room when you are accustomed to pre-teen daughters, even if you really direct your misplaced desire for a son at your broke ass nephew, is hard.

I lived for years under the poverty line and basically today, when I meet someone in person, this is exactly my experience.

First, some advice I have a hard time taking: Don't let it get to you.

Second, get involved with your community. When you detect this disdain, tell people (and mean it, and research why you should), that you are concerned about what is happening to the community and that you are rightfully afraid of the things that you admire in the community being driven out.

Find ways to help.

I'm sorry, software is not eating the world, Marc Andreesen's brain is eating his soul, there can be utility and benefit to what we do, but working folks who use their hands and muscles and mouths for a living in ways we likely can't imagine are rightly upset about being pushed out.

I fucking promise you do not want to be in a city or neighborhood ruled by tech folks. People who moved to SF in the past few years are already facing their rents doubling.

You want to know what it's like to live on a third of the salary you make? Start paying exorbitant rent. [I can hear you saying that you already are, wait until it doubles. My rent is currently 5x the inflated mortgage of the house I grew up in.]

Who the fuck is Owen?

> You want to know what it's like to live on a third of the salary you make?

I've lived paying 70-80% of my income to rent. That was unpleasant and not sustainable. My conclusion was this: own a house that you can afford.

I moved here a year ago and have found it to be extremely welcoming. But I'm in science, not tech qua tech. I have made most of my new friends through outdoors, particularly whitewater kayaking. The whitewater community here is vibrant and much preferable to other whitewater hotspots because there are few lifestyle/dudebro boaters and lots of people have interesting jobs or other hobbies and are smart and conversant. I'm also married which is better--I definitely wouldn't want to date here, although there seem to be a lot of girls in science and the outdoors.

I will have to say, though, that as much as I love it here, I definitely don't see it as a particularly soulful city. But I'm from the Ozarks, which while not really diverse still has a lot of music and art. Especially the music: People literally sit on their porches playing music, and you can come up and join them, chat them up, whatever. The boundary between music producer and consumer in the Ozarks/South is a wide spectrum with most people somewhere on it, instead of it being a hard line with most squarely on the consumer side (as in Seattle, supposedly a musical place).

But there are still fun, artsy and 'gritty' events in Seattle. The Fremont Soltice festival/ naked bike ride was super fun to ride in. The Deadbaby Downhill in Georgetown was crazy. But no one will mistake it for New Orleans...

I don't think it's far to compare any city to New Orleans. I think everyone from the South is a little bit jealous of the culture of New Orleans. It's just a amazing place.

"Oh, we'll use the products you develop, just don't develop them in our backyard!"

The same has been happening with NIMBY's in the bay area for years.

I silently follow a private facebook group for a bay-area city (which you need prove you're a resident of to get access) and it's an echo chamber of xenophobia, anti-tech bias, and misguided hate.

Ah, I didn't know this was a thing. I'll tell people I work at Peets from now on. I don't really care if those damn starbucks lovers hate me. They can eat it!

Hopefully they appreciate the irony of using a Facebook group to complain about the influence of... companies like Facebook

I totally agree, people are generally cold and non-friendly here.

This has started happening in Austin. Many of my friends still live there and are constantly posting on social media about how people need to stop moving to Austin. These comments are especially made towards those from California.

It's funny to see the no California stickers and sentiments plastered in Seattle and Portland.

It's funny and also strange in that the people with such attitudes are the same kinds of people who used to post other no [immigrant group] but people don't get as outraged, somehow this sentiment is deserved. Like me, most people think it's funny.

Yet, this is just the same phobia and fear of newcomers -new comers who are going to ruin the neighborhood, but instead of driving the prices down causing wealth flight they drive housing upwards.

>John Criscitello placed posters in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood proclaiming “Welcome! Rich Kids,” and “Wish you weren’t here.”

Its hard not to feel angry at people like this. "Rich Kids" really? These "Kids" spent years developing their engineering skills to get to the point where they are now. Are engineers paid a lot? Of course. But we're certainly not in the same category as those who inherit wealth. Most engineers that I know come from incredibly humble backgrounds.

These signs piss me off every time I see them. Always make me think "Oh, I know, it's so horrible that we're helping to bring fresh life into your local economy, with new amenities and attractions". Sure, high paying tech jobs certainly contribute to housing crunches, but they also help solve them by making high-density buildings with affordable housing in them possible. The street goes both ways.

So I've lived in Seattle my whole life. In the last 5 years the locally operated grocery store near my house was torn down and replaced with a Whole Foods while my favorite movie theater (the only theater I've ever known to provide a sound-proofed room for small children) has become a 21+ reserve-your-seats $80 movie night ordeal. I don't really have a problem with new people moving in and some of my best friends work at Amazon, but you can't really classify all these "new amenities and attractions" as a positive, most of them are just overpriced crap targeted to a demographic I don't belong to. It's not like Seattle was bereft of services and entertainment before you showed up.

Hi, I work in tech.

Whole Foods is shit - it's literally just a CostCo with fancier packaging that charges more - and that movie theater sounds like pretentious pap. This all sounds like overpriced crap even though I'm the target demographic.

Are you sure there's a magical market force whereby tech workers volunteer to be surrounded by overpriced crap?

It's also ridiculous that these same people benefit greatly from a growing economy that's directly influenced by (and these days also partially propped up by) the boom in tech while deriding it like it's some kind of negative force. It sounds to me a lot more like envy than any nostalgia for artistry and run-down neighborhoods, as they claim.

This article is about Seattle trying to slow the rising number of families being gentrified out of their homes and long standing communities. The nostalgia of not taking your kids out of their current school? The nostalgia of not having a new crazy commute? There is real pain happening to real people.

Who is getting this great benefit that is so ridiculous?

Money isn't everything to a lot of people. On top of that, how much do they benefit if they end up chased out of their neighborhood?

This guy is a terrible hypocrite; he creates art bemoaning new people in his neighborhood, while being a recent transplant from New York himself. He's cashing in on the worst kind of 'us vs them' mentality.

Some people make excuses that he's only rallying against the stereotypical brogrammer, but I don't think that's true. He's really against anyone being in his neighborhood he didn't personally approve of. He's the same as the neighborhood watch keeping the 'undesirables' out of the cul-de-sac.

I think "terrible hypocrite" is a major overstatement. The guy is a gay artist who moved to an area built and populated largely by the gay and creative community, only to find it in the process of being colonized by moneyed interests and neighborhood tourists. He identified with the original neighborhood profile strongly and strongly rejects the new one, as I do — though unlike me, he's making his distaste known. I for one salute him, and I love his posters. And by the way, he's not getting rich off selling a couple handmade prints he makes in his own shop.

Just because he's gay doesn't excuse his behavior. Just change the labels on your post and many would be horrified.

That's really, really not what I said.

It's not, and you're completely right and I agree with you, but the schtick of ignoring all context that doesn't help out privileged folks is alive and well and highly encouraged on HN. Please try to keep up.

That seems both unfair and uncharitable.

I'll agree that that's certainly uncharitable; I could have phrased it better but I don't regret that I didn't. I don't think the tech community, or the people who would attempt to elide the vast power differential between it and the people they displace, deserves charity.

If the marginalized had other tools to fight for themselves, I might very well agree with you that it's unfair. As-is, I'm pretty okay with the notion that the rules of the road change when you have all of the money and all of the power and saying not-nice things about you because you are economically destroying them is simply one's tragic burden to bear.

I understand the political argument, but it doesn't help your cause when you prosecute it on HN in way that addresses others disrespectfully. Unfortunately you do that often, and as you know it breaks the rules here.

The HN guidelines don't have an exemption for being right. On the contrary, it's when you're right and the other person is wrong that they apply most.

The "original neighborhood profile" wasn't gay creatives. That didn't happen until the 70s/80s. It was blue collar mechanics and auto-shop workers before then.

Oh yes definitely. I don't mean a bunch of gay artists came and built it in the 30's or postwar period. But the reinvention of the place, in the 70s and 80s as you say, was what helped make it distinct culturally. That's now coming to an end and a new era is starting - but lots of people would rather it didn't, myself included. Not much we can do though.

I'm thinking those blue collar folks didn't want it to change either, but it did.

The only thing constant is change.

Only my subculture has value and deserves to be preserved.

You mean a place once known as "Catholic Hill" was built and populated by gays and the creative community? Or do you mean that the current moment in time, which through the ongoing process of migration, renovation and economic activity just happens to have a particular demographic that this guy found appealing.

For every buyer, there is a seller and if he doesn't want the neighborhood to change, he should be speaking with the sellers rather than the buyers.

Quintessential hipster bullshit. His community doesn't have any special rights to dictate the culture of the region and if he doesn't like the newcomers he can leave. It's also absurd to presume that just because someone has a high paying job they cannot qualify as a legitimate part of the community. Your petty and insular mindset is gross.

We might have to fuck off because the rent is too high, but it doesn't mean we have to do it quietly. The people coming in should know how much they are resented by the people they are displacing.

The mechanics terraformed capitol hill, the current community colonized it, and now the next wave is buying it.

No one here is dictating culture - they are asserting their preference to a community that was built over decades over another that is superseding it, and which they find distasteful.

Absolutely! It's disgusting how those people are flooding our neighborhoods and changing our culture. Donald Trump 2016!

II reject the idea that you can judge someone as a cultural reject based on the salary they take home.

Us too. We also reject the wealth-forward culture helping itself to the neighborhood, not necessarily the people who take part in it. But very often we find the representatives of that culture to be intolerable as well. Ye shall know them by their fruits, and so forth.

Guy from Tulalip tribe on line 2. He sounds miffed.

> And by the way, he's not getting rich off selling a couple handmade prints he makes in his own shop.

If he was, would that make him "one of them"? Making good money suddenly bars you from being a valued member of the community?

> only to find it in the process of being colonized by moneyed interests and neighborhood tourists

Can you explain what you mean by this?

Not sure why the downvotes - you're being articulate about your position, and folks are allowed to prefer what came before to what is coming... I get the sense that folks are threatened by the labels Criscitello throws around because they resemble them and are challenging his right to them in reaction. Thanks for providing cultural context to the anti-tech backlash in Cap Hill.

What he's expressing is the worst kind of conservatism. Ask any African-American family that dared to move into a white neighborhood in the 1960s.

No, it's not OK "when we do it."

And the worst part is that Capitol Hill is one of the most open-minded and welcoming neighborhoods in Seattle.

MM and in the old days it would have been "No Irish No Dogs No ..."

Agreed. For more info, looks at the video here: http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/08/26/22761976/at...

an engineer confronts him in a Q&A session about his bias towards engineers. John just blows up. He accuses techies of being quiet &boring, while at the same time accusing them of being the people who are bashing trans people. He's very inconsistent and is just good at being loud.

Oh, and he's also a transplant from NYC, so if we're supposed to buy into his transplant-hate, we should hate him too.

In my high school they didn't know the word "techie" so they had a different word for kids they considered quite and boring. Ironically it was the same word they used to describe people like John.

As a trans techie (and a lesbian at that), I already can't stand John.

This guy is nuts. Tech is the single most friendly industry for trans people; there's a reason why working in tech is a transfeminine stereotype.

this is the same guy that did the 'bellevue wives matter' huh? I didn't realize he was a recent transplant.

I love going dancing in Capitol Hill (Swing, Salsa, Ballroom) but I don't find the neighborhood as welcoming and I was told it would be. University District seems like the place to go if you're young.

Turn the tables with the old guard being straight white guy blue collar workers, and the newcomers as gay artists, how do John's rants sound now? To me, sounds pretty much like the old white bigot bitching about how much better it was before "those people" moved in. Just as cranky, just as bigoted, just as cringe-worthy when a gay "artist" says it.

Ya, some of us even grew up poor! I know I don't speak for all engineers (and we still could do better about this) but when I was in high school the easiest route to money for college was STEM scholarships and gov't funding for STEM degrees. That's what got me a CS degree.

But we're certainly not in the same category as those who inherit wealth.

Ahhh... it's the old, I'm not rich! The rich are people that make more than me!

By that definition, almost nobody is rich.

That's not the argument being made.

Sounds like it to me. What difference does it make if you inherit your money or earn your money. Either way you're "rich".

I can't imagine you're this obtuse for real but I'll bite.

Pretty sure the backlash is against the "kids" part of rich kids - as the phrase "rich kids" insinuates second-gen wealth, a mass of money without having the responsibility or maturity to have earned it.

Very different story than for many of us self-made engineers, coming from the lower end of the economic bracket and taking advantage of scholarships and financial aid to get the skills that have now landed us well-paying jobs as adults, which we've worked 8-12-hour days to earn and keep.

We may be "rich" but we're not spoiled "rich kids", that make more sense?

What makes you say that "rich kids" implies second-generation wealth? Everyone I know who uses it in a pejorative sense is pretty clearly referring to how most of the people in question are still being carded at bars. A 23-year-old making $120K is on the lower end of upper-class and can safely be assured of moving upward barring very unusual circumstances. And if you work in startup-ish/leading-edge tech, I'll lay even-odds on "spoiled" fitting. (Where do you think all the Mom-replacement startups, the feed-me-and-do-my-laundry startups, come from?) I am profoundly fortunate in my choice of career and the benefits I've realized from it--and I don't apologize for it, but I at least try to keep perspective on my extreme good fortune. There but for the grace of God, so on and so forth.

The backlash is not against "kids", but unreasonable defensiveness about the word "rich," because "oh, I'm not rich, I'm just getting by even though I have a stupid-good 401k and benefits and make enough money to never look at a bank statement." When you have to own up to just not really working all that hard and just not really having a struggle in your life that you didn't create, lots of people feel real bad. (And the ones that are hurting people with real problems should feel bad. "But economics" does not clean one's hands of one's contributions to even faceless evil.)

Fair enough, "rich kids" can also mean fresh-out-of-mom-and-dads' with too much money and not enough impulse control.

I guess the reason I assume the backlash is against 'kids' and not 'rich' is, to use my own anecdote, most everyone I know in this industry who might be incorrectly classified as "rich kids" came from much humbler circumstance, and they also try to keep perspective on their extreme good fortune as you do.

Perhaps it's the circles we run in, but most of the people I know personally who would be caught in the crossfire of "rich kids" are aware and grateful daily of their massive advantage because of the stark contrast to their childhood economic experience - and it makes them work twice as hard to make sure they maintain it, as well as pay greater attention to those evils.

I feel like the truer crime called out by "rich kids" is reveling in privilege, oblivious at its cost to others - that total lack of societal awareness I tend to associate with children, which I guess is why 'kids' seemed more backlash appropriate.

I think you and I are probably pretty much on the same page! I dig how you put it in your last paragraph, but I tend to see that as more immaturity than the actual state of being a child. And many (I'd say "most" but it could just be that the many are loud) of the folks I deal with on a daily basis are deeply socially and societally immature; my hunch is much more that that's an artifact of being so insulated than anything. I do tend to work with leading-edge, startup-bait technologies and for the organizations that use them, which may further color my perspective.

I don't think the tech industry or the people of it want to coexist with other people, and I very strongly feel like the mean streak of turbocapitalist libertarianism shooting through tech encourages a culture of not feeling a need to coexist.

And now I'm bummed again. Grumble.

At the same time, they're people that are coming in and pushing people who have lived there out, simply because they have more money. That would piss most people off.

I hear and empathize with this complaint, and I think it's a real problem. But what about the people on the other side of the fence? You work in software, some company pays you a lot to move out here, and you're in a position to choose where you want to live. Should you really not live in a particular area because it makes you part of a bigger problem?

Well you are new, so you should be required to take your substantial income and use it to get a place an hour from work so you can bus everyday.

That's totally the way the world works right?

At the same time, why are you more deserving of living there than them?

There are good arguments to be made against gentrification, and there are good arguments to be made that people don't deserve to have special privileges just because they got here first. It makes me sad that a lot of the public debate in places like Seattle comes down to "fuck you, go home."

Its really understandable why that would piss them off and I sympathize. At the same time, it seems like the only solutions are for me to quit my job and "fuck off", or to live in the suburbs and suck up a > 1 hr commute. People deserve to live a good life and improve their station, and that includes techies who are well off, in addition to the poor and middle class.

Unfortunately, it currently seems like the techies improving their station is coming at the expense of the poor and middle class who were there.

Did he do this one[1] as well? They're getting more and more aggressive lately. (Also I can't help but notice the irony that it was made in Microsoft Word.)

It says "New to the city? Work in tech? You're a plague and locals FUCKING HATE YOU. LEAVE."

[1] http://i.imgur.com/pIkA91B.jpg

No, that's just someone printing stuff up and taping it to poles. John does big one-off hand-painted things.

Our problem on Capitol Hill is people coming from the rich suburbs to trash our neighborhood, yell "fag" at the locals, fail to tip, and then Uber out, never to be seen again until next Friday. The poster doesn't say "get out of here, self-made engineers!"

That and the construction of cheaply made housing that rents for well above what the neighborhood has ever paid. It's the same story in many other places, of course.

I think John's a treasure, and I love his posters. They express very succinctly what many of us here feel - though there are less every year of course. Not much we can do about it, but a parting "fuck you" seems pretty appropriate to me.

I love John's work:

http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2014/11/the-woo-girl/

This is kind of childish, but still made me laugh: https://instagram.com/p/1OKvvFwzOi/?taken-by=aaronbrethorst

The "LEGENDARY" dick is still unsurpassed, though.

Oh yeah. Forgot about that one.

NSFW, assuming your workplace is opposed to drawings of male genitalia: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/04/10/legenda...

I wish I was a rich kid.

I only got to go to college on a scholarship, and I spent the first five years of my career making under $50k.

I'm disappointed that some people think working in tech means that you're made of money.

> I spent the first five years of my career making under $50k.

Many people spend their entire lives making less than $50k. Try and have a little bit of empathy.

My mom was a school teacher, and I think she approached $50k maybe her last one or two years before retirement.

I'm not saying that the assumption that all tech workers are rich is correct, but you might want to rethinking how much money $50k after 5 years really is.

Public school teachers don't seem terribly underpaid to me. In Seattle the 2015 starting salary is $44,372[1], which is about $60k when adjusted for a 12 month calendar. That's a solid middle class job that favorably compares with other similar career options. There is another 30% in benefits/hidden comp (health care and pension) on top of that[2]. And there is significant upside for ambitious teachers who want to focus on increasing their earnings.

[1] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/pay-varie...

[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702036875045766553...

Jesus! The first five years of your career making under $50K? Poor baby!

You may not have inherited great wealth directly, but it's a fair guess that you "inherited" some or all of the following:

* Parents who pushed you to focus on your schoolwork.

* Parents who owned a computer, or bought a computer specifically for their kids' education.

* Parents who lived in a house with consistent water, electricity and internet service.

* Parents who made sure you got glasses if you needed them, so you could see the board in class.

* Parents who understood the importance of a college education, and who helped you apply to colleges (real colleges, not for-profit scam schools), took you on college visits, filled out financial aid paperwork, contributed to your tuition.

* A relatively high IQ and/or an analytic mindset.

I'm sure you've worked hard, but don't discount the advantages you were born with, and don't fall victim to the Just World Fallacy. This planet is full of people who worked twice as hard as you and got nowhere.

Sure, ascribe everything to luck, and then so what? Where does that leave us? With less of an appetite for technology and progress? With more of a use for people who have no salable skills and hungry mouths and envy for the good life? Or does it just leave us with a bunch of people who contribute nothing more to society than constantly exclaiming that things aren't fair? We know they aren't fair. They've never been fair, they'll probably never be fair. Spinning tires over that basic fact of our universe is so pointless I'm almost offended people waste so many bits about it.

> Where does that leave us?

With a sense of compassion and a diminished sense of smug self-satisfaction, I might hope.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Those folks are straight out of an old (early) USSR caricature on how Lenin shared a watermelon with a passing peasant - took his watermelon, dropped it on the ground, picked up half of it and walked away.

Spent a decade educating yourself and endless nights practicing your craft? Its all "privillege" and "luck", now give me some of that money.

> ascribe everything to luck,

Did you misread when the person said specifically "I'm sure you've worked hard"?

Person is probably not saying "hey nothing you did was on you" but is more likely wanting to say "hey consider the greater context of your existence".

Where does that leave us? With humility hopefully. You don't deserve any credit for being born with a high IQ, aptitude for acquiring sellable skills, and into a life station where any of that mattered. You work hard, sure, but so does the farmer in Bangladesh. The only difference between him and you is the cosmic lottery. So get off your high horse about "contributing to society." All you should feel is grateful that $Diety gave you the gift of being able to do that.

  bool is_other_person_is_humble()
  {
    return do_they_make_less_money_than_me();
  }

Until I met my wife, I hadn't realized exactly the fortune I had with my family. My parents were teachers and really understood the value of education. We came from a modest background, but it was stable and they did push me to focus on school. I went to a really good school (yay need based financial aid), have a great job that pays me well.

On the other hand, we have my wife. She is smarter than me, but went 7 different schools as her family moved from place to place before she finally dropped out, worked retail as she essentially raised one of her sisters as she scraped by. In a more stable environment, she'd have almost certainly ended up in law or business school.

She now really tries to provide some sort of stability, and encourage focusing on schoolwork with her nieces and nephews, who are in danger of repeating the history of poverty.

Seeing that makes me realize how very lucky I was to be born into the family I was, and everything I took for granted really isn't just what "normal" is.

I worked my ass off to get here. Plenty of my peers with the same advantages didn't work hard, and aren't here.

Sure. People who are born into the middle class are certainly better off than people born into poverty. That still doesn't make them rich kids. Three of your factors are true for virtually everyone in America. One is pure luck unrelated from wealth. And the other two are just good parenting.

Tech is a very middle class profession. Much more middle class than most high paying professions like Medicine, Law, Executives, Consultants, Banking, etc.

And most people who would call someone a rich kid were born just as middle class (or even better).

Did any of us choose our parents? Parents are the purest luck anyone has.

He's not targeting engineers. He's targeting yuppies, fraternity punks, late-night bar hoppers, Yelp-adoring foodies, crowds of drunk people in baseball caps with money to burn standing in line for hipster restaurants and nightclubs, shouting and pissing in the streets at 2am. That's the crowd that invades your city like a plague when it becomes a trendy destination.

> yuppies

What makes you think that yuppies and engineers are disjoint sets?

I have lived in Seattle since 2009, first working at Microsoft and now working remotely for a Bay Area company. For people who aren't familiar with the Seattle area, it is cleaved into 2 parts:

1) The city of Seattle or the "west side". This area is increasingly dominated by Amazon, local startups and engineering offices for Bay Area companies like Facebook and Google.

2) The cities to the east of Lake Washington (Redmond, Bellevue, Kirkland) or the "east side". This is the domain of Microsoft, Expedia, Concur and a smaller set of startups.

Most of the intense change has occurred in Seattle and specifically in the South Lake Union area where Amazon is located. Yes, there has been change and growth elsewhere, but nothing that I would consider alarming.

I'm personally optimistic that Seattle will find a balance between growth and continuing to have an enviable culture and cost of living.

I think Capitol Hill is the most glaring change to me in the past 5 years. One of the neatest and most unique neighborhoods in the city, in a way iconic to how Seattle was seen is now filled with brand new condos and multi-use buildings. For god sakes there have been gay-hate crimes on Broadway.

Yes, tons of new development has happened in SLU, but that area wasn't much of an established neighborhood to live in before, so it doesn't bother me as much.

Seattle is quickly losing any remaining "grit" and that as someone who has always called it home that is seriously depressing. I'm in the Central District which to some degree feels more like a Capitol Hill (except with black people!) but I imagine it is only a matter of time before the condos invade here as well.

I still have yet to have anyone explain to my why "grit" is a desirable trait in a neighborhood. I can understand wanting diversity, unique cultures, but that absolutely does not conflict with a general quality of life increase.

I think it's less 'grit', and more getting annoyed that absolutely EVERYTHING is brand new. I like new stuff, but places in Seattle have signs like 'Est. 2010', and that makes them 'old', which would be absurd anywhere on the east coast or in the midwest.

I live next to Cal Anderson, fwiw.

You can think of "grit" as meaning mixed wealth. It's desirable because people are more likely to use their wealth pro-socially, rather than buy a new BMW every other year, if they don't live in an enclave isolated from the economic struggles of the rest of society.

Grit is something I used to like about Seattle. This was a city of lumberjacks and fishermen and dock workers.

It seems to me that the fact that Capitol Hill was the unique, Bohemian, and affordable neighborhood that it was in your memories was just an accident of the 20th century. It's: * Right next to downtown * Has great views and * Has very easy access to a major road, I-5.

Why on earth wouldn't having credentials like that make it prime property, even if a certain retailer didn't exist?

But from 1950 - 1990, nobody wanted to live in a city, they wanted to drive in from their suburbs. So cities became refuges for the interesting and weird, while the rest of America had their half-acre.

That trend is reverting now, and the real value of property in major cities is being reevaluated, and at something closer to what it probably should be.

Also, I really liked this Wonkblog[1], not just for highlighting the differences in densities in world urban areas, but also because he talks about the mentality of "Well, I've moved here now, but the development can stop now!"

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/th...

> * Right next to downtown * Has great views and * Has very easy access to a major road, I-5.

> Why on earth wouldn't having credentials like that make it prime property, even if a certain retailer didn't exist?

Crappy transit (49 is your only bus route for many parts of the hill and is slow and only runs on Broadyway; 10/11/43 serve very specific areas); I wouldn't call the I-5 access great (the intersection at Denny is frequently really slow and backed up because people run lights and block the intersection).

Bus routes can be fixed, that's a months-years problem. I'm sure the city will adjust at some point, probably before 2018, to give Capitol Hill really amazing service.

I was exaggerating a bit... but the highway basically runs right beside the length of the neighborhood. It's pretty convenient to get on, even if Denny is totally packed.

Can I post this comment to Facebook without retribution?

Go ahead

I don't actually disagree that it is a wonder Capitol Hill was unchanged for so long, but that doesn't mean we can't bemoan the fact that that era has largely ended.

I know that in general this is a trite topic and your quote about "no more development" is a valid one, but so is the opposite.

There's another funny quote, apparently from Yogi Berra, which is roughly: "Oh that restaurant, nobody goes there anymore, it is too crowded." And I think that kind of touches on the same thing.

Some people picked Seattle / Capitol Hill for the characteristics it had (apart from proximity to downtown), and it is only natural for us to bemoan that it isn't that anymore. Maybe that is just a fundamental truth, that with growth you will lose some "flavor", but perhaps it is also worth trying to see if city planning can help a city grow so that it doesn't.

That's the point. Of course things change, but maybe appropriate planning and policies can make it so that we don't lose what was so great about these neighborhoods in the first place.

For those unfamiliar with Seattle, SLU is adjacent to Capitol Hill. So, some Amazon employees inevitably live in Cap Hill, which is for some reason a desirable place to live (lots of night life activities, crappy transit options).

Cap Hill used to be a gay / artist / low income district of Seattle but is increasingly wealthy tech workers. I don't see this as a bad thing but obviously some people do.

Cap Hill used to be a gay / artist / low income district of Seattle but is increasingly wealthy tech workers. I don't see this as a bad thing but obviously some people do.

I think this comparison misses the point. The think the main complain with the change is just that, change. Capitol Hill used to feel much more eclectic and diverse. Today, personally, I don't feel that sentiment.

FWIW, I've lived in the neighborhood for ~7 years.

I'll echo this, and I've lived in the neighborhood for 23 days shy of 10 years.

While the changes to Capitol Hill alarm me as well (having lived there for 25 years), there have always been gay hate crimes on Capitol Hill.

Good description but I would categorize it as "Seattle" vs "East Side", when people say "West Side" I tend to think of West Seattle down through Burien.

It's worth pointing out that Google has offices in both Seattle and Kirkland - and I believe that the Kirkland office is larger, and is coming to be as important to Kirkland as Amazon is to Seattle (obviously Kirkland is much smaller than Seattle).

East side also has a big Google presence in Kirkland. The Google office in Fremont is small in comparison.

There are also north (Bothell-Everett) and south (Renton-Tacoma) sides to consider, which are also changing rapidly. Everytime I go back (I grew up there), I'm shocked by some change. The Amazon one was huge (hey, Apple is at South Lake also now!).

The alarming concern is that by creating 70k new jobs in the South Lake Union, that's roughly 70k units of housing near SLU that are going to primarily higher earning white tech workers. This is raising rent in all of the central city (including many historically considered neighborhoods of color) and pushing lower-earners further and further away from their jobs, their churches, and their communities. Yes, eventually the latter two will move with them, but to separate these communities is painful and their labor is still needed in the inner city.

Any time I see a line about a city "keeping its soul" or a company "coming for its soul", I have a reasonable expectation that "soul" is going to be defined myopically. The recent past will be regarded as perfection, not to be tampered with.

Sadly, this article continues that pattern. The past is privileged and the future is to dance only to its tune. No wonder people are upset that things are changing - privilege is being challenged.

But I have so many great memories of the past! I literally don't have any great memories of the future.

Another born-and-raised Seattleite here. Grew up there, went to UW, etc.

Seattle lost its "soul" a long time ago. For me, Almost Live! going off the air was really the bookmark that Seattle was quickly becoming a homogenized west-coast city (no different really than SF or Portland).

I don't really think Amazon is worth singling out, either. Amazon doesn't help, but Microsoft's a monolith that's been around for quite some time. They used to (and still do) pull a shitload of the UW CSE graduating class straight into MSFT, and nobody wants to live in Redmond or Bellevue until you're starting to think about a family, a house, etc. It also goes totally unmentioned here, but biotech was/is huge in SLU.

My point being, money's been flooded into Seattle for quite some time now. If they wanted to keep Seattle "Seattle", i.e. different from the other west-coast cities, the time to plan that out was 15 years ago.

I also think it's hilarious to hear people bemoan the death of the hill, and even more hilarious to see signs like "rich kids leave" and shit like that. I bet they weren't around a decade ago when the gay community used to say the exact same thing to hipsters that were flooding into the hill (myself included), even down to the insinuation that all hipsters were rich kids. Hilarious to see history repeat itself.

Yep. Born and lived there all through the 80s and 90s before moving to the Bay Area. I still read the Seattle Times online, and the gripes about Californians coming in and ruining the place in the past few years are hilarious; it's been the same story for decades. Blame someone else. Boeing engineers. Microsofties. Whatever, it's always somebody else.

Thanks for mentioning Almost Live. Every few years I search for DVDs, search torrents, etc. Truly one of the saddest days in Seattle when it went off the air.

I've only lived in Seattle for about 6 years, but have seen / felt a rise in rents over that time. When we moved here, lots of rentals were offering one or two months free rent as a move in special. Now, not so much.

Because he was sick of friends moving away, a friend of mine made his rookie run for the city council this past year. He didn't survive the primary, but he had some good ideas about housing that have in part been taken up by other candidates going forward.

The first was a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy, which would give developers building incentives, such as allowing additional height, in exchange for a fixed percentage of units being affordable. Affordability here was defined in terms of HUD's guidelines for percentage of income spent on housing (in this case assuming someone earning Seattle's decidedly not-livable minimum wage).

Some form of that first idea seems to have survived my friend's candidacy to live on in other proposals / candidate platforms. Another that I thought was clever, but hasn't seen much uptake, tried addressing the problem from the demand side. Here the idea is that Seattle would run its own voucher program to subsidize rents for low-income people. This one was a little more ambitious and would require new revenues, but is a nice alternative to supply side options.

And of course a purely supply side solution doesn't entirely solve the problem. New units tend to command higher rents in general. Also, a glut of condos might not reduce prices so much as encourage speculation from non-resident owners. Certainly more units need to built, but new construction doesn't entirely solve affordability in the near term.

This is a severely under-appreciated point about housing costs. I live in a college town and rents have been climbing to the degree where the ratio of income to housing expenses is the highest in the nation, leaving New York and San Francisco in the dust.

Every once in a while there will be more proposals to build condos over existing houses or apartments. We've been here before: housing stock is considerably increased while rents around town are given an implicit "go" to be raised across the board. If you're a financially struggling student at an Ivy League school you're not just gonna up and leave cause your rent went up another $100-$200. You're just gonna take out more debt. It doesn't help that aside from campus housing there are like 3 landlords in the whole city

Building housing in a bull market is almost always the right choice, but let's not pretend rents are going to magically fall. Or stop rising. Housing is one of the most elastic goods one can find. Everyone has to sleep somewhere.

>I live in a college town

Boulder? Because if so, PLEASE vote down the land use issues on the ballot.

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/10/they-are-coming-for-o...

Ithaca, where we don't have the luxury of flatness so everything's hemmed in by the lake and the hills, like a reverse geography San Francisco

You can build on hills. I've lived on a hill.

Minor point, but I think you mean inelastic goods.

The only solution I can see to solve my rent problem is to move to a very low-demand market. Looking into hunkering down in a cabin in Alaksa for a while because rents in the Boston area are just dumb for a recent grad.

> Building housing in a bull market is almost always the right choice, but let's not pretend rents are going to magically fall. Or stop rising. Housing is one of the most elastic goods one can find. Everyone has to sleep somewhere.

It doesn't matter if it's inelastic if demand can meet supply. The econ 101 example is diamonds (expensive but useless) vs. water (dirt cheap but necessary): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value

If the theory's not enough for you, I don't have it on hand but there's empirical research that shows this relationship holds for housing like it does for any other good.

> Here the idea is that Seattle would run its own voucher program to subsidize rents for low-income people.

The problem with subsidy programs like that is that the rents then simply go up by the amount of the subsidy.

You're right that subsidy tends to increase prices, but the rate by which that happens isn't fixed the way you describe. Vouchers result in an average increase in buying power. Over the whole population of renters (those eligible and those ineligible), this would be a marginal increase. And yes, it's likely rents would achieve a new equilibrium consistent with that aggregate increase in buying power.

But, on the other hand, the voucher programs would increase the buying power of the absolute neediest people at a greater marginal rate than for the population as a whole. The end result is that poor people's ability to participate in the housing market still improves, in that their ability to meet rent becomes more commensurate with people more affluent than them.

The solution is increasing the supply (which is how you actually drive down prices).

The fact there are height limits in the first place are part of the problem. Height limits should be removed, and height minimums should be put in place.

SF is giving pathetic 2 floor height limit increases in exchange for a larger amount of BMR units when new development should be multifamily only development with a minimum of 10 floors.

I agree the height restrictions should be more generous, but we shouldn't go to the other extreme. A minimum isn't necessary: property developers will build as much as they think will turn any profit whatsoever. You don't need to force them to try to make money -- just get out of there way!

There's also a downside to minimums: 10-story buildings aren't very cheap to build (unlike 5-story buildings), causing problems if you want new housing stock to target the poor and working class. This makes it challenging to build on the urban fringe where 3-story buildings should be replacing single family homes. 10-story buildings have no business out there, unless maybe you're building next to a transit hub.

You can try to define the "core" part of the city that needs 10-story buildings, but this is more micromanaging than you need to be, and the law will need to keep up with a changing urban landscape. As we've seen in SF and many other US cities, that's a tall order.

I moved to Seattle in 1980 and fell in love with the city and it's unique culture. Seattle has grown up for sure but in my view the growth has been handled overall pretty well and we have kept a lot of the coolest part of the culture here(music, beer, coffee, movies check out the SFF, outdoor festivals every weekend during the summer, great outdoors, the sea and mountains and so on). I have been tempted many times by offers from the Bay area and the valley but I still love this place and just can't bring myself to leave, although my second love is SF :) In a lot of ways I see Seattle and San Fran as sister cities.

Then what would Portland be?

The middle child.

I've lived in Seattle since the late 80s when I got the hell out of Olympia WA where I grew up. I remember when it was nearly impossible to find a decent tech job in the city, and you had to cross a bridge to Bellevue or Redmond, which is non-optimal for so many reasons. I for one am happy as hell that tech is booming here. If you are thinking of coming here, do it, lots of us are welcoming to transplanted tech nerds.

The west coast has a liberal population less receptive to change than Bush/Cheney era Republicans. SF has a lot of misguided anger towards tech workers.

The gender imbalance is a bummer got almost everyone

State has zero funding for the mentally ill, so they all congregate in the downtown, many around the largest tourist trap here, the Pike Place Market.

There are Maseratis driving by parks full of tents here.

I recently moved to the eastside and haven't been experiencing much disdain for being a tech worker. Most of my spare time is spent heading into the cascades to hike the amazing trails, though.

The eastside is less obsessed with preserving an image of itself as a "gritty" place. Parts of the eastside (I'm looking at you, downtown Bellevue) are sort of obsessed with the opposite — shows of ostentatious wealth.

The Cascades have a lot of great hiking and are reason enough to live on the eastside :). If you don't already, get an "America the Beautiful" pass (http://www.nps.gov/findapark/passes.htm) which will get you into National Forest areas as well as National Parks (Rainier, Olympic National Park). And of course the state Discover pass gets you into a few areas (Tiger Mountain is not super wild, but very close).

Also if you have a 4th grader don't forget about https://www.everykidinapark.gov/

My take on the East Side (coming from a Seattle POV) is the perception is that it's full of well off NIMBYs who work for Microsoft and that the area never had any culture to lose. Amazon's move into the city has changed things that were there for decades. I'm new to Seattle though so technically part of the "problem".

Seattle is a godless soulless husk of what it once was, attitudes that spawn things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_the_Bastards_Out didn't win out. Try living in Utah for a while (as a real or pretend Mormon of course) if you want to see what real culture and community tastes like even in 2015.

I work in Seattle but I'll never live in the city proper. The rest of King County, excepting the south side, is at least a decent and modestly priced ($900/month single bed apartment) place to live even if it has no soul. Unfortunately it won't last, Bellevue is in the same place Seattle was not too long ago.

(This is more hyperbolic than it probably needs to be.)

While growing up in the Seattle area in the 70's & 80's, I always thought Seattle was the coolest city in the world. It's still fun for me to visit and I do miss the trees, lakes, and Mt. Rainier, but to me it has completely lost its charm. All that was once cool and unique has been monetized and whitewashed.

Whitewashed? I think this is the most diverse Seattle has ever been. Just a smudge above Portland.

I think darmok is using whitewashed to mean "sanitized" or "cleaned up" not "has a greater percentage of white people".

Like when congressional testimony whitewashes a friendly fire incident, it generally means that they are covering it up or making it look better.

Oh I agree. I was in Seattle in 2005. My girlfriend was here in the 80s to 90s.

Out of curiosity, where have you lived after you left Seattle, and how did you like those places? I've been to a few places and liked Seattle a lot :)

My earlier comment is definitely clouded by nostalgia :-) I loved the Seattle of the past, but the Seattle of today to me seems more about horrible traffic, ridiculous home prices, and omnipresent materialism.

But that's a perspective based on my unrealistic expectation of the past. Seattle truly is a beautiful city and people who see it for the first time will probably fall in love with it. So I'm glad you liked Seattle!

People in Seattle very friendly. They are unhappy about rising rents. There is an eerie consensus that Amazon is to blame, but I haven't heard negative remarks or attitudes towards individuals, just towards Amazon the company and the tech boom in general.

I'm really impressed by the city government. Seattle is much more pro growth than San Francisco. There's much more construction. Like SF, people also blame construction for rising prices, but it's pretty normal for people to reverse causality (developers build because of expectations about demand, demand doesn't happen because developers build. But like most professions, if you aren't a property developer, it may not be obvious).

I don't think it's that simple, especially when talking about things like "luxury" development that changes the city's housing standard.

Imagine you're the loan officer in a bank. A developer comes in and says "I need a loan to build a luxury building. There's no projected demand, but that doesnt matter, becuase luxury buildings /cause/ demand for luxury units".

Seriously, would you loan him the money?

When you view it from the perspective of a property developer or bank, it's pretty clear that projected demand is the /cause/ of building construction and not the other way around.

Amazon moving downtown will create a lot more demand for higher end units. And that demand is the reason higher end units are being constructed. Amazon's plans for their downtown campus (it's huge - all the way over to Denny) /caused/ many residential developers to buy and develop lots downtown.

Think about those 45 minute waits to get on I5 right now. Imagine what it will be like with thousands more Amazon employees in line. All those people waiting in line will be thinking "I need to move downtown, this commute is crazy". That mental image is projected demand. If you picture that, you too will want to build apartments downtown.

It's fascinating and sad to read these articles, about some cities struggling with the effects of tech wealth while other cities would see it as an almost unqualified boon.

We constantly hear about a desperate shortage of software engineers from tech companies, as well as talk of "six figure" salaries. But the median price for housing in SF is well over a million now, and if you're hoping to have kids and raise a family, trying to buy a SFH or 3br apartment, even in the remaining unfashionable and mildly blighted areas south of 280 (not really unsafe, but a bit depressing in spots, lots of dumping, garbage, paved over front yards with abandoned cars), even that you'll be lucky to get in for much less thank 900k unless the house needs a lot of work or is very small with no expansion possibilities. A shortage of young people who are willing to work for salaries too low to put down real roots is not a shortage of workers, it's a wage vs cost of living problem.

SF needs to build (certainly the bay area needs to build), but I don't see construction in the bay area as more than part of the solution. We will eventually have to accept that it isn't desirable or possible to cram all the programmers into a 7x7 grid and a narrow corridor down the peninsula.

Truth is, there are a lot of interesting old cities in the US that are pretty much neglected.

I thought Patti Smyth said it best:

"The Godmother of Punk recalled coming to New York in 1967 when she was broke and the city was "'down and out,' and you could get a cheap apartment and 'build a whole community of transvestites or artists or writers.'" But today, she says, "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. But there are other cities. Detroit. Poughkeepsie. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: Find a new city."

I don't think that it's realistic to expect a coordinated effort from the tech "industry", which doesn't really speak with one voice or have one opinion. Market forces may eventually create the change we'd like to see, but for now, the tech industry really has obtained a subsidy in the form of control over the immigration system that prevents these market forces from working as they should. The first step is to stop taking claims of a worker shortage seriously, and don't give tech companies a crutch that allows them to avoid making the adjustments that will help everyone in the long run (in other words, don't allow tech companies to control visas that force workers to work in San Francisco or the valley, make sure all members of the workforce are free to chose their job, field, educational and career path, and where they live, in response to market signals).

Just to be clear, as I have in the past, I feel positively about general immigration, I believe that immigrants must be free to choose their own path in live, including what they study, where they live, who they will work for.

housing in SF is well over a million now, and if you're hoping to have kids and raise a family

Why isn't a nice condo in Mountain View for $700K good enough? 1,300 sq.ft is plenty of space to live. For instance http://www.mlslistings.com/property/ml81517677/1945-mount-ve...

Because you can get a 1300 sq foot condo for 70k (or less!) in most of the country. If you aren't among the elite of financial means (we're talking 1% wealth) SF is a losing proposition.

Whoa wait. The top 1% makes >$400K/yr. You're saying you can't afford a $700K condo on a $150K+/yr programmer salary?

How comes it's always the "other guy" that's the problem?

Because you can get a nice house with almost 2000 sq. ft. in Texas for under $300k [0]. We're not talking about somewhere out in the country or in some distant exurb, either: I'm talking about housing prices I just looked up in a nice neighborhood within the City of Dallas. It's a safe neighborhood with good schools (speaking from personal experience: I grew up in that exact neighborhood).

Also, I currently rent a 1500 sq. ft. townhouse in Dallas for $1220/month. There's no way I'd be able to get anything nearly that nice in the Bay Area.

[0] http://www.dallasrealestate-homes.com/Dallas%20Subdivisions/...

Fellow Dallas resident as well. Everyone here in Uptown keeps complaining about rent increasing but these HN threads help me realize how good we have it. The job market is extremely hot as well.

Actually, I live in Far North Dallas. Rents in Uptown are too rich for my blood.

I get all the benefits of living in a suburb (low rent and lots of space), but I can still walk to Addison Circle when I want to go out and have fun. It's the best of both worlds to me.

It's best to go by sales price rather than asking price, since very low pricing to start bidding wars is a common real estate strategy in the bay area.

I went to zillow and looked up actual sales prices for condos/townhouses in mountain view for the last six months, with more than 1,250 square feet of living space.

From my search of actual sales prices rather than listing prices, the cost of a 1,250+ sq ft condo in Mountain View ranges from $910,000 to $1.08 million.

Pretty much nothing in Mountain View goes for "asking price". I strongly bet that place will go for near $1M. The Zestimate (http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1945-Mount-Vernon-Ct-APT-1...) is $800k, and zillow estimates for that area are notoriously low.

Plus a $500 monthly HOA fee...

I haven't lived in the US for almost five years now but if I did come back I'd pick a second-tier city. There's enough remote work now that you can pick any city you want in a US timezone and still make a decent living. I don't see why everyone feels obliged to squeeze into one of three or four insanely overpriced coastal cities in 2015.

For a while, Seattle has been a second tier tech city. Some of us wish it would stay that way (affordable). While rents are on the rise, it's still a far cry from being as ridiculously expensive as SF.

It's hard to believe this given the current state of the tech industry, but until fairly recently, San Francisco was a second tier city.

What I mean by this is that San Francisco wasn't the "alpha" city for any particular career path. If you wanted to pursue law, finance, publishing, entertainment, and so forth, the alpha cities were New York, Los Angeles, and maybe Chicago. Even tech was mainly a south bay thing, and it was smaller.

That's not to say you couldn't pursue a fine career in these fields SF, and SF probably was one of the better 2nd tier cities from a career perspective (the only other one I can think of is Boston, similar in that it has top tier universities that do bring top academics to town), but it wasn't until tech hit that SF became a place you would live for your career, even though otherwise you didn't like it here.

This has changed things a lot. People have always come to SF looking for something new, but in the past, really as recently as maybe the late 90s (just before the first dot com boom), people really only came to SF because they wished to some extent to live in SF. I also think this may be what is behind many of the recent "10 things I hate about SF" posts, often comparing it unfavorably to New York or other "alpha-career" cities. In the past, whoever wrote these would simply be living in New York or another alpha city.

It has been a very deep cultural change for SF to suddenly find itself an "alpha" city for careers in a a substantial segment of the economy - in other words, people who moved to SF specifically for career advancement, but would otherwise prefer to be living somewhere else.

I lived in SF for most of the years between 1992 and 2010, so I saw that a lot of that change first hand. When I first moved there it was a funky, artsy town with a lot of interesting people doing creative things. I was there earlier this year and it now feels like a yuppie playground.

I don't see this trend reversing any time soon though so instead of lamenting this change I'll just live somewhere else if I decide to live in the States again.

One of the sad things here is that tech was one of those interesting, creative things people in SF were doing. It fit right in with the funky, artsy town you're describing. Ironically, tech was actually one of the early casualties of the tech boom. It's still out there, though, here and there.

Have you written any blog posts/comments about your remote working situation and what led up to it? I'd be interested in hearing your perspective as I've recently faced a lot of difficulty getting companies to even reply to my applications. I'm curious if there's any tips or advice you have. I really, really do not want to move back to SF to get a good job.

I think it's like a normal job search really. Be persistent, network, build up your portfolio, and don't be too picky about the gigs you take in the beginning. It took me a few years to get going but now I have more incoming work than I can handle.

Thanks for the response!

hey HN, I'm a happy software writer in Seattle, am happy to get coffee or exchange emails about Seattle culture from my perspective. I love meeting other programmers and talking about our field (or other stuff too. :3 ). Email & twitter in profile!

I lived in First Hill / Downtown from 2001 until 2011, and from the perspective of an engineer who is into outdoor sports, I can't think of a better place to have lived. I averaged 3 nights a week of skiing at the pass after work during the winters, and 2-3 nights a week of climbing at various locations (Index, 32, 38, Gold Bar) in the summer. There are also dozens of equally accessible mountain biking locations, sailing, fly fishing, hiking, etc. Sure there are more tech bros and self important hipster douches now, but it's still an awesome place to live. (I moved out to the mountains and live in a remote town of about 200 people in North Central WA now.)

>> John Criscitello placed posters in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood proclaiming “Welcome! Rich Kids,” and “Wish you weren’t here.”

Don't hate them, cash in on them. Start a high-end or artistically product and sell to the 'rich kids'.

Exactly as Banksy has done in London

The true soul of Seattle is complaining about the new people moving here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79SF7UoO1pI&feature=youtu.be

Yay, yet another city trying out the horribly naive and misguided "Below Market Rate" housing model that only serves to distort the local housing economy further.

I had a front row seat to experience the process because someone I date got into a BMR house about 1.5 years ago.

For those that don't know, BMR housing programs usually work like this:

- In order to build a new building, the builder must agree to allocate X% of the units in a building to be below market rate. In SF, I think it's currently 15% of units, or 20% equivalent of a building in another project that is located within 1 mile of the original project (I might be off a bit here or the requirements might have changed, but that's the gist of it)

- To qualify to be able to buy one of these units, someone needs to be an SF resident and make between 70% and 110% of the median income, with most units limited at 90% of the median income.

- The price of the unit is tied to the median income in the city forever (i.e. you can't sell at a "profit" like with regular housing). The only way you make money is if the city experiences real income growth above and below the median income (remember: median income, not mean income)

- From what I saw, units are ~ 1/3 of their fair market value. The unit my partner got into was a 1061 square foot, 2 bedroom, 2 full bath in a Hayes Valley luxury condo. The price was about $330k with a $60k down payment.

- There is a down payment assistance program and special lenders approved. This means it's possible to come to the table with like $10k, since the assistance program covers the other $50k. This down payment can be paid any time during the length of the mortgage including at the end of the 30 years. The mortgage is a safe fixed rate loan.

- Getting into a unit involves going through a class, filling out some forms, getting an approved lender and then applying to available units you qualify for. This puts you in a lottery to be selected. From the lotteries I saw, few enough people either know about the program or qualify that you probably have a 1/10 chance of getting into a unit. If you apply to 10 buildings, over 1-2 years, you're almost certain to get in. Once you're selected, your application goes through additional scrutiny to check if you qualify. If you do, you close on the home.

- Overall, on the unit my partner got she's paying about $2100 for a super nice two bedroom that would probably rent for $5000-5500.

- You can't sell the house except through the BMR program at a price relative to the median income when you decide to sell. There are two formula for calculating the price, you choose whichever is higher. You cannot leave the home to anyone in your will unless they also qualify through the BMR program (you don't really ever own the home except legally because of all the restrictions).

- Although you can't sell the home at a real profit in the future, the discrepancy between the current rent and the mortgage is essentially "profit" earned today. The $3000 saved per month every month (or whatever amount the person would be paying otherwise to stay in a market with great economic opportunities) is essentially profit earned off the housing now instead of from a future sale of an asset. This applies to rent control as well. Having rent control from 15 years ago and 1x the median income means you're probably doing as well economically as an engineer paying market rate today and earning 2x the median income (or something like that. I haven't done the exact calculation. It's even more if you have rent control on a multi-room unit and charge market rate like most people I know with rent control)

My biggest beef with this program is that it creates an asymptotic condition (hard limit on who qualifies based on specific percentages of median income). In economic systems, asymptotic conditions basically always great pathologies and boundaries that people try to game.

One of the biggest pathologies I see has to do with how much of the market is still excluded from affordable housing. In SF, I've read that it's estimated that you need to earn about 4x the median to be able to afford a home. The reality is that it's worse than that because homes are now being sold in all cash deals above asking before homes even hit the market officially (i.e. put in MLS).

This means that basically everyone between 90/110% of the median income and 400+% of the median income are excluded from the market for no reason whatsoever. The better non-asymptotic way to create affordable housing that is accessible to all is to change how much assistance based on a calculation that compares your current income (or better, your income in SF over the past three years averaged to make it harder to game) relative to the current median income.

The other issue I have with programs like this (and rent control) is that it conveniently satisfies the housing needs for a large percentage of voters without actually addressing the underlying problem of supply. By definition, 50% of voters are below the median income and 50% are above it. There will be roughly some bell curve like distribution around this central value and I would imagine that skewness trends towards the lower bounds, meaning that a huge chunk of voters are satisfied and no longer care or participate in solving the real problem, which is supply.

Taking rent control as the example, the 172,000 rent controlled units probably impacts 3/8s of San Francisco voters. These people vote in their short term economic interest which is protecting rent control and tenants rights and lets them be an ostriches about long-term economic interests, which is affordable housing availability as their housing needs change. That rent control studio that worked with you when you were 25? What happens when your partner moves in when you're 30? How about when you and your partner get married and decide you want a kid? By the time you need to go back to the market to find appropriate housing, there is a massive stepwise jump between the $ per person on your old rent control and the current rent control rates. The only thing that solves this problem is a moving supply and demand curve. Since demand is only going up in the area, only rising supply will actually solve the problem.

Rent control also creates another perverse asymptotic condition which is that effectively becomes a mutex on housing units preventing development and increasing supply, especially when a tenant is a member of a protected class. By the time that member of the protected class moves on or passes away, it's likely that another tenant will be protected in any building with enough units, meaning that building will likely always have a mutex on it.

Anyways, back to BMR since this isn't about rent control. It's a bad program based on no understanding of economics that doesn't really solve the underlying problem (supply) and the good intentions don't magically make it a good idea. The only good thing about Ed Lee's proposal is that it paves the way for taller units. That proposal wouldn't be half bad if it weren't for the asymptotic condition of a specific % of median income and financial assistance relative to your income.

It's a huge game of economic whack-a-mole, where "solving" problems here just causes them to pop up in another place. It is very, very difficult to work around the basic laws of supply and demand, and arbitrarily picking winners and losers is hardly a fair way of allocating anything.

Nice to see a comment from someone who's seen it up close.

The sad part is that I clicked the link to the Seattle proposal and they are repeating the same mistakes as San Francisco.

The real solution, as you point out, is fixing the supply. The reason the rent is too damn high is that the market has insufficient supply. You can encourage buildings with more store frontage near the market level(s) and more housing above by offering economic incentives (possibly with conditions like rent control) until you reach a more desired outcome.

PS: While you're doing this please also include civic funding mandates. More transit, parking areas (maybe free parking transit PnRs at the edge?, better designed surface and skybridge interlinks. Parks (public and private, maybe roof top?) as well.

Parking? Why? Remove it all, put more buildings. Cities don't need parking. You could easily remove all parking in SF. Between cycling, public transport and Uber, all your within SF transportation needs are met. For those times when you need a car to get out of town, the problem would quickly be solved by the half a dozen startups that will crop up to solve the problem of having access to a car when you need it (Doesn't Avis already have a way to have a rental car delivered to you when you need it?)

Once the no-parking model has been established in SF, other cities will have a model to copy and the startups that solved the problem can expand to those new markets.

On demand transportation companies are already starting to challenge the economics of car ownership for many people. It's only a matter of time until they challenge the economics of car ownership for just about everyone.

I'm a software engineer with a great job in midwest but I have never been happy here and have been contemplating about just packing my stuff and moving to Seattle for the past 3 years. I don't have any job leads but I have enough in savings to get a place for 6 months. Does anyone think it's sane to just move without job offers?

Probably so, if you've got good technical skills. At the very least, you ought to be able to land a couple of contracting gigs to tide you over until you find the right long-term position. There's a lot more demand here in the Puget Sound area for good technical skills than there is supply, so unless you're just not a very good developer, you ought to be able to find something reasonable.

A week of rejected job applications has me wondering if I'm not a good developer at all...

Don't worry too much about that. Apply for a ton of jobs, for weeks, if not months. Assume that for 80% of them, your resume will get tossed immediately, for no good reason whatsoever. Not your fault. Similarly, for reasons beyond your control, you'll probably fail half of the phone screens, and when you actually get called in, you won't get past 90% of the interviews. Don't worry about it: that's just how it goes. Those numbers will vary substantially with the market, your experience, your innate horsepower, and your asking salary, but the fact is, although there are a lot of developers out there, and employers are careful who they hire, there are also a lot of job openings. Play the numbers game: my rule of thumb is to apply for 100 jobs to get one that you want.

Spend a month learning to interview with a book like Cracking the Code, and yeah, you'll get a great job.

You might move a bit farther out of town to extend your savings. Plus if you're outdoorsy or would like to be, being 20 miles closer to the Cascades makes getting out midweek feasible and beating the crowds on the weekends.

The outdoors is exactly why I want to get out to Pacific Northwest. I always find myself chasing nature here. Thank you for a great tip!

I live in Redmond, and "the outdoors" is literally a block down the street, starting at the local trail. Take the dog on a run two miles down that trail, and we're in a wooded park with trails. Two more miles and we're in the Redmond Watershed park with I-don't-know-how-many miles of wooded trails. And that's "outdoors lite". A 30 minute drive gives me a choice three mountains with (if I had to guess) at least 100 miles of trails, some of which you probably won't see another person. I once did a 24 mile run on Cougar Mountain, and never hit the same trail twice (though I did pretty much exhaust the trail system after 24 miles).

Drive a little more, an you get skiing, snowshoeing, forest roads galore for your dual sport motorcycle. Hell, go dog sledding if that floats your boat, I've seen 'em out there.

If you have 6 months saved up, you should have no problem finding a job. Yeah, you'll get rejected at a lot of jobs not because you suck but because tech hiring sux balls. But I'd bet you'll find something. If you get out here, hit me up if you like; email in profile.

Yep. Plenty of jobs here, and affording a place to live is only a problem if you're not a software engineer.

I'd actually suggest interviewing first and getting flown out. I'd suspect you can swing a job within 3 weeks.

I don't know if I ever really saw Seattle's 'soul' when I lived there for 3 years. Granted, I lived in the North part. I saw a lot of white and asian people (mainly dudes) looking at their feet or looking at their phones. Seattle is one of the most difficult places to strike up a conversation with strangers or get people to actually want to hang out (worse if they are locals).

South Seattle, on the other hand, truly has 'soul'. Rainier Beach at one point was the most diverse zip code in the entire USA. You got to a coffee shop there and you'll see groups of east africans, latinos, all mixes of asian, white, african american, you name it. It's got gritty parts, nicer parts, and all sorts of interesting restaurants and grocery stores. The Amazon people don't tend to live or congregate down there as much.

As far as cap hill, fremont, wallingford, u-dist, you can keep it. A bunch of bland ass wealthy white/asian dudes looking at the ground.

I moved to SF and lived there for a couple years. The gentrification and rent is bad but the diversity and mix of people across most of the neighborhoods still beats north seattle hands down. It was a way more eclectic interesting experience than anything my Seattle time could offer.

The Asians must be very happy they've made it and can no longer be considered diverse. Have you tried getting dim sum with them? You get to eat every part of the chicken.

I find it interesting how you care about a person's race so much.

Here is an idea for the FTC: break Amazon into 3 companies: cloud infrastructure, online merchant, and logistics company.

Seattle is not for young people. The dude pool is 2:1 in a market where beer is regularly 6.50 a pint.

Marrying young and endless dinner parties where first-time homeowners proudly declare "granite countertops!" like checking that box on a list of materials is some major achievement. A bit painful.

But there's a dirty, edgy, interesting indoor culture there caused by the shitty weather. It sprouts up around everything from sex to music to art on occasion. Go find it.

> "granite countertops!"

Funnily enough, most of the time it's not made of granite at all.

Is that the only option available for married life? Surely it's possible to marry someone who is interesting and continue doing interesting things after you're married?

> everything from sex to music to art on occasion.

Most of us don't see any reason to continue doing interesting things beyond making ourselves look appealing during courtship.

Really?

In the 2010 census, the female population of Seattle was right at 50%.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53/5363000.html

The 2010 census is fairly useless for Seattle at this point. Almost 100,000 people have moved here since then (16%)

2015 estimate: 662,400

2010 estimate: 608,658

Assuming every one of those 53,742 people was male, the ratio would go from 50% female to 45.9% female.

It if I can't blame my dating troubles on demographics I might have to consider that I am less desirable a mate than I like to imagine.

Try breaking that down by age and marital status. See for instance: http://jonathansoma.com/singles/#1/3/2/0

It certainly isn't 2:1 - that was hyperbole - but it's bad. And it doesn't actually take a large absolute difference to produce huge changes in behavior. A standard economic model of this fact is explained nicely here: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/02/rev... In the efficient market limit, an arbitrarily small perturbation in the effective gender ratio produces arbitrarily large changes in outcomes.

IDK, looking at that singles page, it looks bad in all major cities.

Wrong on all counts

Am I correct in inferring from your second sentence that by "young people", you mean "single, straight men"?

“You know, there’s still some people out there that say "What does being PC really mean?” Well, I’ll tell you what it means. It means you love nothin’ more than beer, workin’ out, and that feelin’ you get when you rhetorically defend a marginalized community from systems of oppression."

The people who (allegedly) don't perceive Seattle's shitty attitude are almost guaranteed to already be card-carrying turboleftist hipsters + standard uniform, pretty much every single time.

edit: OK, sometimes they're attractive college-aged women. Because progressives have such deep respect for their cultural contributions and intuition, I'm sure.

I have a question for all you unrepentant capitalists out there -- why is it that massive concentrations of wealth pretty consistently tend to lead to a decrease in the overall quality of life?

Because if the boosters of capitalism are to be believed, the path to making society better on balance is to enable people to accumulate unlimited amounts of personal wealth and then sort of let that wealth diffuse through the people around them.

This isn't actually happening in places where wealth from the tech industry is concentrated. The rising tide is mostly just sinking everybody, and obliterating everything that isn't explicitly about making money in its path.

So what gives? How can you argue anybody is better off for all this?

Every one of your paragraphs contains a strawman.

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