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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

Old Seattle was an interesting place, but also a much rougher place. The SLU was mostly warehouses, junkies and prostitutes. South Seattle was the real hood, not the semi-tamed version it is now. Wallingford was a hippy commune where someone might walk into your house and take a nap.

Blaming Amazon is a total cop out. The death of "cool Seattle" started before Amazon was even a thought in Bezo's head.

It's also funny that many of the people complaining about this issue were first wave gentrifiers pushing out people before them in an effort to get to the hot neighborhoods. It's frustrating how many Seattleites refuse to admit their own hand in this process. Never mind the fact that your Ad Agency's contract with Amazon allowed you to buy that house.

Anyways, everyone in the region knows the "new Seattle" is Tacoma. So if you really want that "dive bar but might get stabbed" vibe you can move there?

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> It's also funny that many of the people complaining about this issue were first wave gentrifiers pushing out people before them in an effort to get to the hot neighborhoods. It's frustrating how many Seattleites refuse to admit their own hand in this process.

This, right here, is what drives me the most nuts about all of the complaining. Of the handful of native-born Seattleites I know (yes, yes, anecdotes don't make data, I get it), they're split about half and half between "meh, who gives a rat's butt" and "holy shit my family is rich for the next nine generations because my parents got divorced in the mid-90s and both of them bought a house in [Ballard | LQA | Capitol Hill | Magnolia] and they've said that's my inheritance."

There's a poster on reddit who typifies this to a T. He regularly whines and moans about the construction, traffic, noise, and people around his place on Capitol Hill. The thing is, in his rants, he gripes about how things were so much different when he moved here 20ish years ago. He refuses to see that HE was also a "dirty gentrifier" considering people didn't move to the Hill in 1997 who weren't looking for that hippy cool vibe and bar doors you could get all kinds of exotic diseases by simply walking past.

Cities change. They always change. Sometimes they change in ways a particular person likes; sometimes they don't. But this whole business of "good Seattle" is just crap.

> everyone in the region knows the "new Seattle" is Tacoma

I've been to Tacoma several times. They can keep it.

> There's a poster on reddit who typifies this to a T.

The Seattle subreddits (both of them, because drama) are particularly toxic as far as city forums go. Not exactly sure why, but there seem to be a lot of people who have nothing better to do than post angry rants all day. I had to unsubscribe.

Perhaps because it's not acceptable to be toxic in person?

Acting like that in person yields a much higher chance of getting punched in the face than acting like that on the internet. :)

I get the stereotype, but disagree. An awful lot of people are toxic IRL, that’s been the case for forever and nobody bats an eye. “old people rants”, “neighborhood gossip”, “backroom talk”, you call it what you want.

It’s mostly accepted. Growing up we learn to ignore it, avoid these people, or enjoy getting caught up in sterile discussions.

Most city subreddits seem to be for the most part. I think people rant there instead of their street corners.

I theorize that city subreddits are always terrible because in these we talk about issues due to our proximity to them rather than our expertise in them. Everyone in the /r/flying subreddit is interested enough in airplanes to read about them independently and then have intelligent discussions about them. That's not the case if a single-engine plane crashes in your city and we talk about it in the city subreddit.

You should see the Vancouver, BC subreddit.

The culture there nurtures a nasty, cynical, mean-spiritedness into otherwise lovely people. What is the reason for it? No idea, but I know it's true because I grew up there and it took me forty years to (mostly) purge myself of that impulse. If I had to guess the reason, I think it is looks like a Venn diagram of small-minded, provincial people who harbor a deep, unfocused rage vs. people who use Reddit and similar message boards.

Every local newspaper comments thread is basically like this. It's 4chan for old people.

Cities change. They always change. Sometimes they change in ways a particular person likes; sometimes they don't. But this whole business of "good Seattle" is just crap.

Maybe if you are talking about which vibe is your favorite. But cities can definitely go the wrong direction on quality of life, with increased pollution, decreased walkability/bikeability, safety, access to nature, and so on. And that might be objectively bad/good.

> Cities change.

Sometimes I think people on the west coast seem to think of a city as a place that's supposed to stay the same forever ("forever" being defined as starting at about 1960).

The lower east side was a German neighborhood, then a Jewish, Italian and Ukrainian. Dutch before that, of course. Then the Italians moved to Little Italy. It mostly became a Hispanic neighborhood. The Ukrainians mostly moved away and the Jews mostly moved away. The north of the neighborhood sort of became Japanese and Chinatown sort of started encroaching on the south and Little Italy slowly declined. Artists and then eventually giant condos started moving in. As you walk around you can still see marks left behind by the groups that departed many decades ago. For example, a few buildings still have prominent German inscriptions on the front, from Little Germany's high point in the 1880s – the Germans were gone by around 1900. You have no doubt whatsoever that your turn there is temporary. A city is a place of constant change. You are every bit a part of that constant change. But the city will slowly move on without you.

Don't expect anything to last longer than 10 years.

> Sometimes I think people on the west coast seem to think of a city as a place that's supposed to stay the same forever ("forever" being defined as starting at about 1960).

In my experience this isn't a west coast thing - it's just the cities here are "newer" (compared to the east coast) so haven't quite graduated to the density and usage characteristics that modern large metropolises have.

I find that what you're describing is the standard Boomer longing for the "good old days" applied to the cities they probably showed up in during their 20s. Or how they pictured them anyhow.

Usually they're the worst NIMBYs.

I'm always amazed when I'm remembered how extremely young is US. The little city where I was born is almost 3000 years old. Reading that for some people forever starts not even 50 years ago is quite weird.

Absolutely!! I’m originally from the UK so, living in the Bay, I joke that I used to go to pubs that are older than this entire town.

It’s a joke, but it’s also true: my high street had two pubs that had been around from the 1700s, a tourist information center that’s from the 1500s, and - in the middle of the shopping center - a ruined chapel from the 1130s.

That some places here are all excited about being founded in the 1850s took some adjusting to when I first moved. For me that was the age of my friends small houses...

As the saying goes, Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.

"We've restored this building to how it looked... Fifty years ago! No, surely no. No one was alive then":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OV2PbKpsMRk

To be fair to us - if you’re traveling 100 miles it’s rarely as easy as it is in the US.

In the US that’s likely “sit on this one highway for about 90 minutes”. In the UK you’d have to have do a ton of road changes and work around or through several major towns and cites.

It’s just lots more dense. So it’s less that it’s a “long way” - it’s more a pain in the ass to drive 100 miles most of the time.

"London has a lot of history -- a little TOO MUCH history." --my aunt, a flight attendant

It happens everywhere. I live in "ye olde Europe" and people in my neighborhood are still upset that a bunch of new buildings are destroying the feel of an area from "only" the 40's.

This is probably true of everyone as they age, but the demographic bubble of the baby boom gives them unusual political power to fight change. If the population were growing more the young would just outvote them. Our political system is just older than it has ever been.

>Sometimes I think people on the west coast seem to think of a city as a place that's supposed to stay the same forever ("forever" being defined as starting at about 1960).

No, forever is defined as "the day after _I_ moved in"

And this is perfectly rational! People move to a neighborhood because they like that neighborhood. This is almost tautological. Of course they don’t want it to change!

But that’s why we have to be very clear about rejecting the complaints this mood inspires. I don’t want to tell people they’re wrong to have these feelings. They are perfectly valid and normal feelings. But those feelings don’t outweigh the benefits of allowing the functional and unavoidable change that happens in neighborhoods over time.

And when you really start to dig deep into the types of things people want to do to stop this change, you end up with well-meaning, but ultimately counterproductive interventions. And that’s the nice way to say it; much of what incumbents want to do to prevent the free flow of people into and out of neighborhoods is positively dystopian.

I am sure there are reasonable things we can do to help more people afford and benefit from booming cities like Seattle, New York, and San Francisco. (For starters, we can build more housing!) But the language of gentrification is such that one new luxury tower in a sea of affordable housing is now opposed in cities like Cleveland and St. Louis on the grounds that it will change its immediate neighborhood.

That sort of stuff isn’t just nonsense; it’s harmful nonsense.

> rejecting the complaints this mood inspires

It turns out that it's really hard to be against communities democratically controlling their own destinies and not look like a monster. Local governments and the policies they make to preserve their built environments are about as pure and non-corrupt as democracy gets.

Does any place in America have high-density market-rate construction because the community genuinely supports it? Far as I can tell, it's only possible to have a city in America when the government is sufficiently corrupt / community is sufficiently disempowered that developers can cram it through.

I'm grateful for these places. I'm happy to live in one. But you have to recognize that cities in America are only possible to the extent that America is corporatist and undemocratic. Any strengthening of our communities, our democracy, or local government has always and will always reinforce the overwhelming majority support for sprawl and "fuck you, I got mine."

Yes, you’re right, it’s pretty difficult to develop a politics around this subject that isn’t awash in contradictions. But that’s because if you really drive down into what it is that people want, you’ll find that they want the impossible. They want to live in a quiet low-density neighborhood directly adjacent to a big, interesting, dynamic metropolis that never encroaches on their space. It’s not clear how an entire population who says they want that could ever actually get that.

I know what I sound like when I get deep enough into a rant about the way in which Americans fetishize local control. But I still think that what I am proposing would generate the best outcomes for the most number of people.

Isn’t that the whole idea of “the community”? Acting in the narrow self-interest of incumbents and not caring about outcomes for the population in general is exactly what we fetishize when we fetishize community activism and local control.

Sure. And I guess what I'm trying to say, in short, is that the wishes of incumbents can be both understandable, but best ignored. If that sounds like a contradiction, it's probably because it is. I think it's really hard to develop a coherent set of politics on this topic.

There is a difference. In the old days for boomers and ww2 generation, you had constant growth and improving conditions.

Now, you have displacement, but few people feel prosperous. You also have old signals of nice neighborhoods disappear as people don’t marry, push back having babies, and utilize daycare. There is zero new construction, zero, that is with reach of a median income family. The old ethnic neighborhood where you knew your neighbor is dead. But we have that image burned into our consciousness.

I definitely agree as I feel the same personally. However, I've heard about different kind of displacement from my grandparents, such as disappearing farms and forests. Of course, it's not viewed as negative as there was always room for more people.

>Cities change.

Living in a growing city is much better than living in a dying city. Ask Detroit or the hundreds of them in middle America. They'd swap in a hot minute.

Where do you think gentrifiers come from? The smart kids from the Rust Belt, the ones who got out. We are swapping.

If they're arriving in a city that's already unbearably expensive, and it up doing normal life things (coupling, planning for kids), they might end up leaving back to either that Rust Belt city, that might have a 'revitalized' downtown (microbrewery, craft coffee shop, pricey ice cream place) or two one of the burgeoning smaller cities that has better amenities than the Rust Belt one (Portland, Austin).

Then there are forgotten cities, that have good employment and affordable housing, but aren't as sexy such as Minneapolis, Raleigh-Durham, maybe even Chicago.

I'm currently in LA and the exodus is real. It sucks for people that grew up here since the wages aren't great in most jobs, housing is out of reach, and they want to be around their family.

Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?

Seattle has been dying before, particularly when it was more dependent on Boeing who would go bust every 10 or so years. Seattle will probably die and be reborn again.

There are people in Detroit mourning gentrification too

> Cities change. They always change. Sometimes they change in ways a particular person likes; sometimes they don't. But this whole business of "good Seattle" is just crap.

I echo this sentiment here in Boise, Idaho, and we seem to be in the middle of this change. Companies all over being recruited into the Treasure Valley, and the cities here are dealing with these growing pains of being an attractive place to live that has jobs and low unemployment.

Some of the "locals", however, seem to think we can have economic prosperity and growth without the negative externalities that sometimes accompany it. I think the "locals" would be happier in small towns a few hours outside of Boise, where they're not really changing (although brain drain is a bit of an issue in rural America).

This is happening in popular coastal cities all over the US. I live in the city that I grew up in, but most people I run into moved here. I'm on a Slack group where people, many of which have been here < 5 years, were complaining about the traffic and wanting the 'old' version of the city. Every person wants to be the last person to move to a nice city.

Thing is, I remember the 'old' version of the city. Almost zero tech jobs. One of the current most popular places for hanging out, restaurants and bars was a place you never went after dark (or much in the day time). Infrastructure was much worse (one of the more popular places to live now had a sulfur problem with the water so it smelled and tasted horribly). I understand the frustration with growth, but I like the new version city much better than old, and hope it continues.

  Almost zero tech jobs.

Boeing and GTE Mobilenet seem like obvious examples.

This is exactly the case. If anything different, I'd argue that many looking for "cool Seattle" are really lamenting "little Seattle".

I moved here in 99, part of an influx at Microsoft. I interviewed there on a Friday, stayed the weekend to get familiar with the area, and flew out on Sunday. As we are leaving, my wife and I sat at the airport gate wondering why we would ever want to sell our full two-story, 2800-sq-ft brick Tudor in our hip east coast neighborhood to pay $300 more per month for an 1100-sq-ft 2br apartment in Seattle. Three other couples within listening distance were doing the exact same thing, with a few of the ladies in tears. Everyone was struggling with the same thing -- a job offer in hand (I got mine same day), but how can we ever afford to live there?

We decided to come to Seattle. We bought a house in the confluence of Wallingford, GreenLake, and the U-District. On a bus, it was 15-20 minutes downtown -- and that includes stopping in Fremont and getting stuck at the bridge every day. The south side was much more sketchy (our impression) and we didn't really know anyone who recommended that side of town.

Nowadays, the commute is much longer and the houses around us are all much nicer. Few can afford to move, so everyone is remodeling their existing house.

This notion of "old Seattle" being wiped out has been happening for a long time, and it didn't start with Amazon -- they're just the latest flavor to blame.

> So if you really want that "dive bar but might get stabbed" vibe you can move there?

As somebody who's lived there my whole life, :(

I know we were just ranked the most violent city in Washington (or something) but tbh it's never _felt_ that way.

How's Hilltop? I remember it being pretty dicey when I was young.

Much better than it was. They had some big gang busts around 2009 if I remember correctly. No huge shootouts since '89 ;)

It's a joke :) Tacoma is a pretty awesome place and I love it. Yeah it's violent but in general it's not too bad, just certain places (Hilltop) can get really bad. Compared to Seattle it's crime is much higher; the stats don't lie. But much of that is concentrated in specific parts.

To put in perspective Ferndale, MI, an affordable but awesome neighborhood of Detroit, is about 4x safer. 800 to 200 violent crime per 100k per year

Stop fronting. Ferndale is north of 8 mile.

Ferndale is an inner ring suburb not a neighborhood

Pretty sure that honor goes to Wenatchee. Heck, people forget the huge slide Spokane has taken since its heyday.

People on the west side forget about the east side in general lol.

Because it’s not. Comparatively within Washington, sure...but nowhere near Oakland, South Chicago, Baltimore, Compton. I grew up in Stockton CA and while I live in Seattle now, Tacoma still feels like a pretty nice blue collar town to me.

What about Renton?

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