Beautifully put.

For once I generally agree with Chuck, but with two observations:

“There has been no structural transformation that's dislocated the past from the present.” I disagree. Past structural transformations of the city have dislocated the saw mills and railroad tracks from the waterfront (the original skid road), the University of Washington from University St., and residential neighborhoods from almost every part of what we now consider downtown. And hell… look what happened to Denny Hill… talk about dislocating the past from the present.

The other point is his invocation of Eliot. “What will you answer? We all dwell together to make money from each other? or This is a community?” It falsely implies that those choices are mutually exclusive and that you must choose one or the other when the answer could reasonably be “We all dwell together to make money as a community.”

Carmel, CA was a city built on beautiful weather.

Dayton would be a great arts incubator for all the butthurt folks who can't live on Capitol Hill on part-time barista pay. Seattle was a virtual ghost town after Boeing lost the SST (Concorde-ish) project in the early 1970s. Abandoned houses everywhere.

I think it's a false dichotomy - the issue is that you don't want a monoculture - you want a diverse economy. I've watched a great many one-mill southern towns - small by comparison - suffer this fate. What makes Amazon such a problem is the boom|bust bang-bang control that results from having a monoculture.

I remember what happened to this town when the federal government killed the SST development contract at the same time Boeing was already laying off workers who were hired to finish development of the 747. The economy has certainly diversified since then, but now we face the Soweto-ization of Seattle. Service workers will bus in because they can no longer afford to live and work in the same city.

It seemed like for a brief moment in the 90's and naughts we had a fairly diverse and interesting city. Now we're losing it to brogrammers and hipsters with more cash than common sense. Surely there's a better middle ground than what we have now?

I agree that living in a dying town is awful. I lI lived in Scranton PA from 2013-14, and as a city it has little to offer. But surely there is a middle ground. I agree with @6. This is where government is supposed to balance capitalism, not sleep with it.

Seattle is by no means a monoculture.

And if you want more economic diversity, go hire Ms. Sawant to organize a new industry.

I agree with AFinch (5). The author is conflating "companies" with "economy". Without a doubt, the health of a city rests on the health of its economy, but one or two or even ten large and booming corporations does not necessarily constitute a healthy economy. The argument that Seattle needs Amazon (to live) or else it would be like Dayton (killed, dead) employs the same logic that large companies regularly use to extort cities for tax breaks, union busting legislation and lax regulations. I am ambivalent about Amazon, but articles like this are pointless at best and harmful at worst as they reaffirm an uncritical outlook on the economy and the role or large companies in it.

Since the average Amacon employee only lasts two years, what are they going to do when they quit? Leave Seattle? Find another job here? Start a business here?

Yeah well if this is the only truth, it's pretty sad and sorry isn't it? You either get to live in a place like Detroit or Dayton or you get to live in a place like New York City (or Seattle or San Francisco) and both options, they way they currently exist SUCK. I lived in Brooklyn from 1998 to 2002 and in Seattle (Capitol Hill) from 2002 to 2007 and they were both places, in those times, where there was enough economic diversity for them to be fun, interesting, enjoyable cities. Seattle was more affordable than NYC, even then, but now they are basically the same in that no one who isn't wealthy enough can enjoy them (whether that means earning $80K or $120K or $500K). And what it's doing is making other places, that used to be totally affordable and enjoyable (like, say, Portland, OR or Austin, TX or Chapel Hill, NC, or Athens, GA or Nashville, TN are now becoming more and more like SF, Seattle, NYC, etc. Where are those of us who don't make $50K a year supposed to live AND be able to enjoy thriving art/music and food/night life/entertainment options supposed to live?

Ugh I hate that I can't edit my comment. Last line should read Where are those of us who don't make $50K a year supposed to live AND be able to enjoy thriving art/music and food/night life/entertainment options.

While Amazon is growing rapidly, it's not the largest employer in King County or even Seattle proper. Seattle's not a one-industry town like so many rust-belty cities.

The US Postal Service going out of business would have nearly the same impact, job-wise.

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/03/america_…

@13, I suspect that Amazon pays much better than USPS, so the economic impact would be more severe.

I've never lived anywhere that didn't experience growth and change in a manner that made the people who were there earlier say; " what has happened to my city, town, place etc. It's just not the same anymore, I wish it were the same way it was when I first came here"
The place we live in today will not be the same place tomorrow. Places change and grow. Managing that growth is the challenge. The lack of affordable housing and public transportation are problems that we CAN and must address within the context of a growing and changing city.

The "market" may fuel growth, but it will not effectively address the issues of housing and transportation. That is something that we have to force our elected leaders to do. they won't act unless we push them.

Dayton's urban population surged in the 60s. There were race riots in the late 1960s. In 1976, Dayton school busing began. Crime soared and racial tension took over. The middle class (mostly white) fled, and declining schools further declined. According to 1990 Census, Dayton was one of the nation's most segregated cities.

In 2011, almost 90 percent of the city’s homicide victims were black. Nearly twice the national average. At the same time the city’s homicide numbers are remaining stable, the percent of homicide victims who are black increased dramatically from 65 percent in 2003 to 86 percent in 2013.

The public schools were regarded as the worst in Ohio. They remain some of the shittiest in the state. http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news…

Dayton wasn't a one-company town (NCR). As late as 1990, five General Motors plants employed more than 20,000 people. Both GM and Delphi Automotive were crippled by low productivity of UAW plants relative to Japanese and Korean makers.

With the exception of one mayor (Michael Turner (R) in the 90s') - Dayton has a been completely dominated by Democratic politicians for 45 years.

Dayton is also the same ol' same ol' story of Baltimore, Detroit, Camden and St Louis: Coercive wage hunting, sprawling local government, crappy public schools, racial identity politics...

Keep that in mind when you mindlessly vote for Sawant, demand 40% increases in minimum wages; encourage ordinances, city depts. and regulation to govern every facet of Seattle life; lower academic and behavioral standards of schools and put-up with racists interrupting public events to shout-down those that don't hold the most extreme views.

Charles, how fast before Seattle become "Seatroit" ?

Yeah Seattle definitely wasn't on the map before Amazon came around because what's a Boeing who is a Microsoft what are Starbucks

This article is so fucking stupid it hurts.

Gaaah! TS Eliot?!

He did nail Evangelical conservatives, however:

"They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be."

This editorial is a lazy oversimplification. You failed to mention that Talton admitted the real issue is Seattle's weak handling of growth by our fake liberal political leadership. Is growing affluence good? Yes, So is responsible planning and not letting Big Money run over our quality of life as they bend our city to their will.

Better cities than ours take hard stands on effectively managing growth, actually collecting impact fees and sometimes even making the Amazons pay for infrastructure improvements. If Seattle has design standards they are laughably low. The ugly, earth tone early 90s California vibe architecture that still consumes every new Belltown and many Cap Hill developments would never fly in equally centralized NYC or SF real estate. Seattle's political brass has no spine but hey, Rainbow crosswalks!

@10 asks an extremely interesting question-- given that most Amazon employees (the high tech ones, anyway) last less than 2 years at Amazon, what will they all do when they leave, and how will that affect Seattle?

I agree that we shouldn't have a "monoculture" single-company or single-industry town. But we shouldn't achieve that value by limiting the growth of a single company or industry, we should use the growth of the industry or company to encourage other business types to move into the city. We can do that by providing great transportation options and strong walkable neighborhoods. We saw that with the Weyerhaeuser re-location; with the Expedia re-location [though the area is on the low side of both metrics]; and on the other coast, Marriot will be moving it's HQ away from the suburbs to a walkable location.

As always, land use and transportation is key to a healthy city. Encourage efficient land use policies by supporting urbanist politicians!

Because, as we all know, companies are the basis of society--always have been, always will be. It never was otherwise and cannot be otherwise. So, bow to fate, you rabble move out to the distant environs, and accept the corporate "major league city" as The Only Way It Can Be.

What Mr. Mudede counsels is resignation to a lie; what needs to and *must* happen, is to organize, resist, and end a society based on "the market." 'The market' is code for the rule of individuals motivated wholly by greed and the power to trample. I say, that's a better road than resignation; ask Kshama Sawant and a growing list of others who realize this. Then act.

"Why did Dayton, Ohio go into decline?"

Oh that's easy. Dayton is about 43% black and 51% white, whereas Seattle, in contrast, is less than 8% black and almost 70% white.

There is an inherent danger in becoming a one-horse town. Amazon's continued success (or continued residency in Seattle in the age of global technology) is not guaranteed by God Almighty. Back in the early 1950s, you can be sure that nobody could have foreseen the rapid and steep decline of the then insanely successful US auto companies, a decline that turned a once vibrant, thriving American city into the walking dead. Without actively promoting a more diverse economy and by allowing itself to become dependent on one mega company (beyond even the dependence it once had on Boeing), Seattle is setting itself up to become a Detroit. Just hope that you can cash out your real estate before that happens. Nothing lasts forever, Dude. Not even Amazon.

The Tragedy of Seattle is that in the 1980s and 1990s the city was a bastion of creativity and artistic innovation. This attracted the creative genius that was creating the computer tech World. The original techie geeks were hippies. Steve Jobs even admitted to having done his share of LSD. Google's original motto was "Don't be evil". They were inventors and thought outside the box (pardon the cliché). This brilliance and progressive thought made Seattle a bustling town that supported the Arts and brought prosperity to folks who would be hungry in other cities.

However, the next generation of techies are people whose parents sent them to the best schools to learn the trade. They have no interest in the progressive culture as their only motive is to make money. Lots of money. Add to that you get the imports with H1B visas lowering the incomes of everyone else and causing long time employees of places like Amazon to be edged out. (I have no problem with immigration but H1B employees should have been paid the standard rates, not less because to them these wages are a lot.)

Amazon once had all of its management employees work in the warehouses during Christmas time. This would give managers a sense of solidarity with their staff that was unheard of anywhere else. It is now too big for its britches and has forgotten its roots in a garage. The same can be said for many other tech firms (even if they shut down the week of Burning Man like Adobe did).

The outcome is, we have a crowded city full of unimaginative people who are forcing the innovators out. The people who made Seattle such a beautiful place to live are being forced out. Buildings that are 100 years old are being destroyed by money grubbing developers who have no sense of History. The creativity that marked Seattle is moving away to more affordable places. Soon it will be a town full of unimaginative robots all sitting in cafes that look exactly the same. They be working too many hours for too little money yet they will think they are so cool for being Seattlites. However, Seattle's soul will have been lost.