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Feb 27, 2015 8:00 AM
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
All contents © Index Newspapers LLC
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Comments
signed,
straight white male seattle resident of 7.5 years, "cap hill" resident of 3.5 years.
They choose Capitol Hill because it is the most convenient to their jobs. How hard is this to understand? The majority of the new high-paying jobs are in downtown and SLU. Capitol Hill is directly adjacent to both - you can walk to work.
"4.5 years" sounds like the same grasping at straws as when kids argue over shit like, "You're 8 and a half years old?? Well, I'm 8 and THREE QUARTERS! HA!!"
(not going to say how love I've been here because who gives a fuck? it's not a dick measuring contest. the city belongs to all of us.)
For the record, the newcomers do not often patronize any relevant or worthwhile businesses on the hill, just the chain stores and idiot bars and whatever Dave Meinert tells them is cool. They'd rather Pony was a Dave and Buster's, I guarantee you.
And yes if you're not queer or a weirdo or have a general respect for the character of a neighborhood, you should stay away, If you moved here yesterday you should take note of a neighborhood's vibe and do "as the Romans do." Everyone is just burning Rome to the ground and building a plastic replica of what they just left behind on top of it.
I'll take that one as being addressed to me, since I'm a straight white guy who works in tech. Here's your answer, dude: I moved here because my friends lived here. And I think that remains as good a reason for someone to move here today as it was for me in 2003.
I mean, you almost had it figured out when you were like, "Who moves anywhere to be near a Panera bread?" -- Exactly. Just take the thought experiment one step further and you'll realize that your new neighbors might actually have legit reasons for wanting to join the neighborhood.
None of which is to say that I welcome the people who come here just to get unpleasantly shit-housed on weekends and occasionally spread hate. I'm not happy about my jacked-up rents, either, but I don't think it's my place to decide who is and isn't cool enough to be my neighbor.
That being said his art is cool.
Some of us are genuinely interested in getting involved with our neighborhood, but could be thrown off or hesitant when neighbors are blatantly unwelcoming.
It's quite entertaining to be compared to a zebra in a land of forest animals even though Seattle is a motherfucking metro area with people from all around the WORLD. But it's also pretty cool natives and adoptees care so much that newcomers are 'invading', since this denotes a strong sense of pride and ownership of the neighborhood. That's awesome. I'd like to feel that same pride for my new neighborhood one day. Soon.
Huh? Are you confusing the Central District with Capitol Hill?
Everyone has simple-minded sound bytes like "Rent Control", and cartoonish villians like "rich white people" and "tech workers". When City Government floats solutions like creating "workforce housing" to augment Yesler Terrace, so I would really like to know - what can be done?
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/how-c…
" Over the past few years, however, opposition to new construction on Capitol Hill has subsided. The Press Apartments didn't devastate the Pike-Pine corridor, as some predicted. Instead, that sliver of Capitol Hill is thriving. And this fall, the mayor submitted legislation that could boost Broadway's building heights, and the neighborhood Stewardship Council recently passed on a chance to appeal the proposal.
Capitol Hill has learned that the benefits of density outweigh the annoyances, and the neighborhood has gotten smart about demanding smart density--including more interesting buildings, like the Braeburn--instead of blocking it. If only other urban nodes--like Northgate or West Seattle--would follow suit."
Blaming Tech workers, most of whom are young and vote for taxes/buses/education, just causes they have the money doesn't help the situation.
Tech workers are getting priced out of houses by rich foreigners. Artists and the gay community are getting priced out of Capitol Hill by Tech Workers. People of colour are getting priced out of CD/South Seattle by Artists and the gay community...And each group blames the group a head of it, when we're all getting screwed by the real lack of regulation and income inequality (our regressive tax system) and the real 1% keeps getting more and more...
So we can either keep having a class warfare between the classes, or we can get our act together and make things better.
Why isn't the Stranger pushing for housing regulation? Both the Mayor and CM Sawant have plans, why aren' these being covered more?
Seattle is facing economic apartheid.
Tech workers where one of the biggest supporters of gay marriage. The Tech community and the artist community of seattle have a long history together (Hugo House was founded by the first Technical Writer at Microsoft).
We should have an income tax in Washington. But it's not the new Tech workers who time after time have voted against it (or voted against turning South Lake Union into a park, or voted against taking 1 billion of fed money to fund a subway).
We should have rent regulation in WA (or at least Seattle). But once again it's not the new Tech Workers who voted for the politicians that put our current system in place.
And it's not the Tech workers committing violent hate crimes up on the hill.
Rents where great in 2008, but the economy was shit and a lot of people where leaving Seattle. It doesn't mean that 2008 Seattle was a fair place. But we could work together to make 2015 a fair place...Or we can just keep blaming each other while the developers/CEO's get richer.
It's not gradual—it's on EVERY corner. Boom! Boom! Boom! Like Dresden, Germany—A BOMBING! Boom! Boom! Boom! Cranes! Cranes! Cranes! There are so many buildings that are still empty.
This is all part of the city's plan to keep Capitol Hill a viable, enjoyable neighborhood as the population of the entire city continues to rise. The simple reality is we need a huge number of new residences, and locating them in a neighborhood with easy access to downtown and South Lake Union makes irrefutable sense.
This can't NOT change the demographic of a neighborhood.
Like any living entity, a city and its neighborhoods will grow and change; otherwise, they will die. Capitol Hill's identity continues to change -- it was not the city's first gay neighborhood -- and we should manage that growth in a way which provides the most benefit to us citizens.
These people aren't leaving any sort of footprint in the neighborhood. They're never actually the person on the street.
Oh, please. I recently moved from a hundred-plus year-old brick apartment house to a new building. In both cases, I see my neighbors out on the street, in the stores, at the bars and restaurants. And I've never owned a car, because I like living in a walkable, vibrant neighborhood.
Snap! What a great takedown of the "we don't want those people in our neighborhood" attitude which belongs in the most gated community of NIMBY-land. Such an attitude is nothing more than the rant of a suburbanite who wanted to be the last person ever to move out there, and now won't stop complaining that other people keep doing exactly what he did.
We all live here because we all want to live here. If we don't get along well enough to all live together here, then we have no "community" to disrupt.
But thank you for your insight. I wish you all the best creating your community. Unfortunately for me, and many of my friends it is already too late. I don't know where we will end up, but it will be somewhere I can work with my hands and pay my rent with solid 40-50 hour work week.
I like this guys work. But who the fuck does he think gentrified NY/Williamsburg? He did. And people just like him.
So he fled NY to then help gentrify Seattle.
Making your art about how other new comers are gentrifiers - when you've only lived in a community 4 years - is the definition of a clueless douche bag.
Conventional newbie BS. he's been here four and a half years and he's complaining about people moving into Seattle. what a dick.
I vote for gentrification as a structural phenomena, and forego personalizing it - however easy (and fun!) it is to hate on privileged tech bros and 'Bellevue bitches'
(What you say may be true, Sean, but someone has to point out the infantilism.)
Fuck off to New York you unoriginal hipster prick, and take your unwarranted self importance with you.
EDGY!!!!
This person is the cause of the thing he is opposed to.
The problem of how to keep neighborhoods both cool and affordable is by definition unsolvable, because everybody is cool now, so in a period of explosive growth the demand for cool neighborhoods is essentially infinite, and thus the prices will rise astronomically. No one anywhere in the world has solved this problem. No one ever will.
The reason city neighborhoods like Capitol Hill were ever cool in the first place was because they were abandoned by white flight. You could get a groovy old apartment for peanuts -- why, even unemployable heroin addicts could afford one (Cap Hill used to be overflowing with them). That's not true anymore, because now EVERYBODY wants to live in a hip urban village. It's the suburbs, many of them, that are being abandoned to the poor and the immigrant. That's where this guy ought to go, except that Auburn wouldn't have him).
This twat has a lot of nerve talking about suburbs he's never even been to. Soulless? You don't know what soul is, brah. He also doesn't know anything about LA, where crappy art like his inane pasteups wouldn't get him interviewed in a Taco Bell restroom, let alone a leading hipster newspaper.