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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

The neighborhoods they built that stuff in (mostly South Lake Union and Denny Triangle) used to be so sleepy in 2010 and earlier. It was a big transformation.

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Earlier than that, they were actively dangerous. I spent a lot of my childhood in Belltown, and it was not a safe place in the late 80s and early 90s.

SLU and Denny Triangle are amazing now. Those are some of the few places with restaurants open into the evenings. Amazon, like them or not, does a great job prioritizing local businesses in the retail spaces in their buildings. They can't all survive, but they've had a good track record.

I haven't lived in Seattle since 2011. I remember Belltown having one or two blocks that felt a little spotty or like you wanted your guard up, but the rest of it was thoroughly gentrified by the time I left, and it was a common choice to live for new college grads from the suburbs arriving to work in tech. I have to assume the process has continued.

Yep, it's even fancier now. The main spot where it seems sketchy is directly across the street from the Downtown Emergency Service Center.

The area around 3rd and Blanchard is sketchy, but in the rest of Belltown the biggest hazards are incompetent Uber/lyft/doordash/etc. drivers and drunk people on lyme scooters.

Streetwise is a great documentary about the mid 80s in Seattle

https://youtu.be/Lu10UUtgxoM?is=t4Q7o4FyI6HlydhL

They were (maybe still are?) around 20% of sq feet overall and a lot of that was leases in buildings far from SLU with no obvious Amazon branding.

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