Comcast may be trying to kill the fiber project, or they may have some other reason for opposing McGinn.
I don't feel much genuine "fear," just annoyance that I have to deal with it whenever I go downtown. If I had any business interests downtown I'd be hopping mad.
Sure, there are a handful of homeless people and people waiting for buses, but there's nothing too scary.
This said, Seattle's downtown does have a rather dead nightlife; you have to go to other neighborhoods for that, and it is something that Seattle should work on.
Can you suggest anything which there is a reasonable basis to believe is more significant than the fiber project in Comcast's analysis of the political landscape in Seattle relate to their interests, or is this just pure distraction?
No. I don't live in Seattle, and don't have a dog in the fight. Just pointing out that a lot of people -- "corporate persons" and otherwise -- are dissatisfied with McGinn's performance as mayor.
Oh that is right, they are not persons since they cannot be jailed or hold a position that a real human would.
Maybe if the real persons behind the corporations would lobby with their identity rather than through a lawyer protected corporate shield I would believe they have the interests of the population they are lobbying against. But they don't. So their opinions and lobbyist dollars only look like means to obtain more profits from the corporate structure they are invested in.
Constituents are living batteries for these 'corporate persons' and the political process is just a way to enact corporate will as regulatory code or law, yielding profits from the living wallets under the politicians control.
(http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021614421_downtowncr...)
I completely agree that SPD is petrified. I've live/worked in downtown Seattle for a while - and while I think some of the 'scaryness' is overblown, it's hard not to see a change in the trend over the past few years.
SPD has an incredibly strong union, which is where the real problem lies IMHO. A bad cop almost literally has to murder somebody before they can fire him. DOJ took note of the resulting abuses, but of course they aren't interested in going toe-to-toe with the union, and neither is the mayor.
It's a complex problem but it stems from a fairly ordinary failure of leadership, and that particular buck stops in the mayor's office.
And Westlake is looking a lot more like Portland every year (as far as homeless youth go).
How many of those homeless people are on the streets because they lost their factory jobs and the bank kicked them out of their McMansion? I am guessing very few.
The recession didn't make these people heroin addicts or mentally ill. The homeless people that make people concerned about walking around downtown Seattle during the evening aren't the "couchsurfing until I can find a new job" kind of homeless people.
Pointing at the state of healthcare, mental or otherwise, hits the nail on the head. That is a problem larger than Seattle though.
Downtown Seattle can be a bit rough. I wouldn't lay it squarely at the feet of the mayor though - a lot of it traces back to city planning gone disastrously wrong.
Just a few off the top of my head:
- the southern end of downtown is strictly commercial. Little to no mixed zoning here, meaning that as soon as 5pm rolls by the entire area is a ghost town. If you're there past 6-7pm you will see that the homeless and addicts move in to fill the void. There is no residential or leisure traffic to balance this out. This is US-style single-purpose urban zoning run amok. Vast portions of the urban core is entirely idle after work hours.
- downtown Seattle isn't a cultural or entertainment core, unlike the downtowns of most cities. The actual food scene, nightlife scene, music scene, etc, are in surrounding neighborhoods like Capitol Hill, Ballard, Fremont, etc. This contributes to low foot traffic after work hours, which contributes to higher crime and simultaneously a magnified perception of danger.
- poor urban planning decisions meant an explosion in large-scale development without sufficient requirement for retail frontage. Lots of buildings that take up the entire block with little to no ground-floor retail, making it a pedestrian dead zone and contributing to the feeling of walking down a shady alley no matter where you are. See: much of Belltown, where the declared intent was to produce a walkable neighborhood full of restaurants and nightlife - except few residential buildings wanted to play host to them. This has resulted in little pockets of activity with vast stretches of nothingness in between them.
I work in downtown Seattle and my work takes me a-walking across huge portions of it, and my bus stop is right by 3rd and Pike. I've certainly never felt unsafe, and only occasionally have I been accosted by the homeless (or possibly crackheads) looking for money. There are some problem spots, but nothing terribly aggressive, certainly not by standards I've come to expect from my time in other major cities.
It's much, MUCH better than what I saw/experienced while living in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco or Kansas City. Seattle may have some issues with theft, but violent crime isn't out of control. Play around with this [1] Wikipedia lin or this [2] comparison tool:
Seattle is 30th in total violent crime amongst cities with a population above 250,000. Not great, but not bad. For Murder Seattle is 67 out of 75. That's, comparatively, very good.
As for your specific points, I agree with them without regarding them as contributing as much negative impact as you state. You make it sound like Seattle is some pedestrian ghost town where you're taking your life into your own hands by taking a wrong turn. Like any city, some neighborhoods are better than others for leisure activities, and there are some worth avoiding into the night. But it's no worse than most other cities, and often considerably better.
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[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_r...
[2]http://www.areaconnect.com/crime/compare.htm?c1=Seattle&s1=W...
I've seen a lot worse than what happens in downtown Seattle, and yeah, SF has it a lot worse. A lot worse.
I also have an intense dislike for the urban one-upsmanship that seems uniquely American in my experience. As if having seen/lived through worse crime is a badge of honor, and that people living/working in elevated crime areas (just less elevated than some other places) should just suck it up. SF is the absolute worst in this regard (far worse than Seattle), where any criticism about the state of poverty and crime in the city elicits a "hurrr go back to the midwest then hurrrr".
A spade is a spade, even if there are bigger spades out there. The fact that Seattle's urban planning cockups are less severe than San Francisco's should come only as a very mild, very cold comfort.
Part of Seattle's problem - one that I touched on but didn't expand on earlier - is that it feels less safe than it actually is. When it comes to quality of life though, perception of safety is equally important as actual safety. The vast stretches of nothingness at night presents a huge perception problem that I don't think can be conquered by simply telling people "yeah, that nearly empty street with no businesses and a lot aggressive panhandlers making catcalls at you isn't so bad, statistically your odds are good!".
Seattle isn't that dangerous of a city - I made that clear earlier. The downtown is mildly sketchy, the homelessness problem is acute but not as bad as some other places, but the complete void that fills downtown after work is a huge problem that prevents any major progress on this front.
By the way, Seattle is a pedestrian ghost town. Even Pioneer Square on a busy night is ghostly compared to every other urban core in North America I've ever been to. Downtown Seattle (qualified as Olive/Pine all the way down to Yesler or Jackson, and west of I-5) is completely f'ing deserted at night.
That's fair, but you're talking about normative comparisons, and I'm talking about relative ones. I think relative comparisons are more useful in a country that, all things considered, has pretty safe cities. I don't mean to dismiss all of Seattle's problems, but it helps give perspective.
> Part of Seattle's problem - one that I touched on but didn't expand on earlier - is that it feels less safe than it actually is.
That's fair.
> Seattle is a pedestrian ghost town.
No, it's not. Downtown is, yes, but Seattle as a whole has many options for a pedestrian's nightlife. Capitol Hill is one of them, and it's an easy walk from downtown even.
I think that goes back to my last point. I just don't perceive the negatives of Seattle's "urban planning cockups" in nearly as dramatic of fashion.
I'm not from here, I'm not a homer. I just find much fewer problems here than I have anywhere else. I know you don't like relative comparisons, but when choosing a place to live relative comparisons are my most helpful tool.
Seattle's downtown core is horribly planned, in a pattern that is sadly typical of American urban cores post white-flight. Its urban planning awfulness is hardly unique to itself, and like every other city that employed the disastrously myopic single-use zoning strategy, it needs to change.
Or at least, not continue - but before I left Seattle I saw the exact same pattern in Belltown, South Lake Union, and Capitol Hill. The failure to learn from the failure of downtown Seattle IMO threatens to turn perfectly fine neighborhoods into empty, unfriendly, unpleasant shells. Every point I mentioned - large full-block developments, insufficient requirements for retail frontage, and little planning around pedestrian dead zones - is demonstrated in new developments stretching out of downtown.
Note that I am not anti-gentrification or anti-development. I support building upwards and increased density. I support urban renewal. But the developmental policy and requirements that have been the city's norm for decades supports buildings that serve to enlarge the "dead zone". The city - and its voter base - has evidently not learned its lesson, or hasn't ever been to a long-term successful urban neighborhood. Now is not the time to compare yourself to crime hotspots like SF and Detroit and feel good about yourself. There is a problem, and it needs fixing, even if it isn't the same scale of a problem like San Francisco's gigantic urban fuckup.
Ultimately, I just don't see nearly the extent of "urban fuckup" as you do even in normative terms, which is perhaps why the voters you admonish haven't responded as you think they should. I won't forget your comments though, and perhaps a in a year's time I'll be singing a different tune.