I'm sorry, but that architecture is horrible. Garish colors, boxy, communist.

INSTANT NEIGHBORHOOD, hopefully. It will be fascinating to see how this dovetails with the Vulcan Yesler Terrace projects. @1, perhaps, but considering the budget constraints, not bad, and housed with local biz, for the most part, instead of corporate chain stops. Besides, since when has Seattle ever been known for its architectural splendor?, other than the raves for the flash cube library/homeless day center....

It's colonialism. Hispanic colonialism of the PNW, which has been going on, very slowly, for years. What was the Hispanic population of Seattle in 1972? Had to be miniscule; today it's only about 6%.

La Raza is fulfilling it's mission as a colonialist project. That's not a value judgment, btw, that's a normative statement.

@3, UH, uh, uh,,,yeah, just like all those English, Irish, German, Canadian, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Somalia, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, etc, etc etc "colonialism" waves, I guess. Also, I'm too dumb to know what a "normative statement" is but it quacks and walks like, oh, Racism,,,

I walk through the courtyard almost every morning and evening. They did a nice job with it. El Centro is a good neighbor on North Beacon Hill.

It will be interesting to see how they persevere in the face of the ridiculous amount of development going on there. They are tearing down the old hardware store and putting in a series of seven story apartment buildings, 300 or so units altogether, with only 25 parking stalls. What could possibly go wrong? Thank God we have off-street parking at Maison Vel-DuRay.

@4

It means I'm not judging them for being colonialists when I say it's a normative statement, not a value judgement. Just calling it what it is.

I'm proud of my settler-colonialist roots. My ancestors earned this land with blood and sweat. Through war with the small numbers of indians, who were nonetheless quite brutal, let's be honest, to homesteading and working the land and building the towns and cities.

Now we have Hispanics moving in, which our elite promotes, in the name of reducing the white population -which is euphemistically called "diversity." But soft ethnic cleansing is really what it is and it's the result of policy. Some would call that a slow genocide, coupled with whites' low birthrate...

... but again, I'm not judging.

There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.

#1: It looks absolutely nothing like communist-era architecture.

#6: You have no ownership of the land. There have been Spanish and Mexican people in the American West longer than any of your ancestors have been here. Also, you didn't earn anything because accomplishments are not inheritable. I'm guessing, based on your comments, that you're probably a white trash parasite who wouldn't know a hard day's work if it bit you in the ass. The Latino immigrants, like all immigrants int his country, have a work ethic far greater than your own and bust their asses to make it here, you know, like the ancestors you claim gave you stake to this country. One day you Stormfront fucks are gonna wake up and realize that this country isn't your and never was. People like you could probably use a little ethnic cleansing.

#3: It's not a normative statement. It's a symptom of your deep paranoia and pathological xenophobia.

Oh wow, we got another Thoraboo on this thread. I wonder what happens when you take your little Volkisch LARP act over to Iceland? To Norway? Do you think your cousins would respect you?

Yeah, it looks like Stormfront is fucking leaking, allright.

#11

Sure it is. They have images of Aztec warriors on the building walls. On mayday, they have Aztec dancers and chanting and so on. They are asserting their culture and staking claims to land they had no prior connection to. Aztec's never lived here. But they sure are now, and they assert themselves, as any healthy group would- unlike Europeans.

But I do have a question: when whites become a minority, will we have a reservation like the natives? With special rights and tax breaks and so forth? What happens once the Hispanics have completed their settling of the PNW(Or maybe the Asians will beat them to it)?

Remember when people were afraid the Irish would overrun this country like cockroaches? I mean, looking at Steve Bannon's fat ass, I guess they did.

What's going to happen is that more and more people are going to assimilate to whatever the dominant culture is. Over a period of a couple generations, most likely.

#17: Ethnic and cultural groups are not engaged in biological competition, even though they may be in political and economic competition depending on context. The problem is you actually believe that cultural representations and practices are some kind of biologically imprinted trait subject to natural selection. But people are one species with genes that are 100 percent compatible. There are no inherent differences between people aside form the incredibly superficial differences in phenotype. "Miscegenation" is as normal to human beings as violence, and cross-cultural exchange and integration has been a normal aspect of human populations for thousands of years. There is no pure homogeneous culture, every one fucks each other and borrows from each other all the time. That's how civilizations evolve.

You conflate cultural aesthetics and language with some kind of deterministic force, a pseudo scientific and largely discredited assertion. You literally believe that the creative images produced by cultures is some kind of contagion that changes the "host culture." None of this rooted in science or objective facts. I know a lot of Latinos in this region, and everyone of them is as American, if not more so, than you. They watch American sports and television, they listen to American music, they eat American food, they intermarry and interact with every other ethnic group in this country, they work 9-5 jobs. There is no difference between them and anyone else born in the States, even though some of them speak Spanish and like cool Mexican things like the Day of the Dead. In your pathologically racist brain, this is unthinkable, so you just reiterate stupid stereotypes and talk about how threatening paintings of Aztecs are. And of course you're offended that they celebrate their holidays, even though you don't give a second thought to the fact that Anglo-Americans do exactly the same thing.

1) Spanish explorers from Mexico were surveying the coast of Washington in the eighteenth century, and were in fact trading with indigenous people living here. There were Mexican vaqueros ranching in the PNW in the nineteenth century. Your ancestors probably got here in the last 100 year at latest. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

2) Our country is founded on the notion of self-governance and sought out immigration from all over Europe and eventually elsewhere because immigration was seen as a source of a productive population that could colonize the vast "wilderness." This country was not ethnically defined in its foundational documents, and the US constitution has nothing to do with the self-determination of a European ethnicity. The Americans are not a racially defined people, but rather defined by citizenship. This is not the "homeland" of your people, but all people who came here.

3.This is patently false. It is well known that in most counts, whites are proportionately the biggest recipients of welfare in this county.

4. You're a fucking nutjob. Thanks for playing!

Charles, I asked the question below in the comments to your piece "Are Rich People to Blame fotFor the Fire That Killed Dozens in London Tower" http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/06/…. I am cross-posting here as well.

You claimed that the cladding used on the Grenfell Tower apartment complex in London was "what turned an ordinary fire into a towering inferno that killed 12 people." The Plaza Roberto Maestas complex you are raving about in this piece was constructed with THE EXACT SAME Reynobad aluminum cladding as Grenfell Tower.

Please explain how this material is both "the future of Seattle" and "what turned an ordinary fire into a towering inferno that killed 12 people."

I wonder if an urbanite made an expedition to a rural town, they could have a colorful encounter with a local who shows off their heavy metal music skills.