Pullout Jan 28, 2015 at 4:00 am

All I Can Say Is: I'm Sorry?

Spokane is here.

Comments

1
I hate that kind of nativist crap. Insofar as the concerns about the future have some legitimacy, they're the fault of long term residents--who've tolerated NIMBY BS that's long restricted housing supply.
2
My family has been around king county for generations, and you'll never have to apologize to me. The steady stream of transplants from in from Spokane to Shanghai make the culture diverse and rich. The vast majority of my friends were not born here.
4
I welcome new people to Seattle. It's new people that regularly pull it out of the provincialism it tends to mire itself in.

The only newcomers I don't like are the people who buy up condos and leave them empty, or only visit them for a few weeks a year. Those people are obviously rich bores who are not being taxed enough, and we could be filling those spaces with more productive and interesting people.
5
"Here, the city feels soaked in nostalgia for how charming it used to be and angst over its future, where everyone will be too rich and all your favorite bars will be replaced with condos."

I appreciate your honesty, but this sentence has been thought, if not written, by every budding journalist in every up-and-coming city in America for the past four decades. Welcome!
6
Heidi, Seattle has always been as you describe. I was born in Seattle, and there was antipathy toward newcomers when I was in junior high school. This idea that Seattle is some kind of Nirvana/Brigadoon/whatever seems to have been the result of Seattle spiking Money Magazine's Best Place to Live spreadsheet in 1976. Seattle is an unremarkable city in a remarkable location. And Seattle has always wanted to be San Francisco. No mere mortal can afford to live there, either.
7
Spokanites always get a free pass. Seattle is the town everyone moves to when they grow up enough to get the hell out of Spokane.
8
Cool! Glad you're here. As a Seattle native I can say that, if anything, E WA folks have kind of an ultra-Washingtonian mystique to us Greenlanders. Like you're all butch and could probably ride a horse.
Plus Spokaners (ites?) have contributed a ton to Seattle culture over the years. All the cool punx houses when I was young were full of Spokane kids.
9
Welcome to Seattle. Anybody giving Spokannibals the stinkeye can fuck off. Nobody really cares, but a lot of people like to pretend that being not-from-here is a problem. It's an act. Fuck 'em.
10
Preach it, yo.
11
@7:

Or pretty much any other smaller town in Washington & Idaho for that matter.

I do think psychologically there's a big difference between young people from the outlands moving to nearest "big city", because that's what you do when you're young, ambitious and have a deep, abiding desire to get away from whatever hell-hole of a small(ish) town you grew up in. It happens everywhere, and those people deserve a break, and shouldn't necessarily be lumped in with the advancing hordes lured here from far-and-wide simply for a six-figure starting salary and free bagels and Mountain Dew or whatever.

Not that you can really blame them for doing that, but I seriously doubt most of them ever spent their last couple of years of high school thinking to themselves, "I can't wait to get out of this dump and move to Seattle!", because they would presumably be willing to move to ANY city that offered them what used to be considered the equivalent of a senior manager's salary for an entry-level position writing code-script 60 hours a week.
12
In my experience there isn't really a negative opinion or antagonism to people who move to Seattle, especially when they move from the outlands. Seattle is a great city and that's what young people do. So many people that live here are transplants that to hate non-locals would leave just about anyone friendless.

However, I do think there is hostility to those who move here and price-out the locals. Pretty much everyone I know hates techies because they are a large part of why Seattle has changed so much. They move into the condos that have replaced our favorite bars, art spaces and affordable apartments. Meanwhile, they tip horribly.

Wanna be a cool transplant? Tip well, live in the most economically ethical way possible (No new condos!) and support more longstanding businesses rather than the newer, flashier yuppy shops and restaurants that spring up. Luckily, many of these places are still around and nobody who cares is currently wanting of more locally-ethical options for most of their needs.
13
I'm hostile to people who drive SUVs in the city even though EVERY.BLOODY.INCH of Seattle is paved (YO, peeps, you're not in the Adirondacks!); people who replace the perfectly good tires of their trucks with hugemongos that should only be used on monster truck rally tracks - to compensate for being short dick men; people who can't figure out the concepts of the four-way-stop intersection and the apostrophe. Curiously, the same people tend to commit all these crimes against humanity (and roads, and breathable air, and a Puget Sound w/o toxic algae blooms, and shellfish fisheries, and babies' lungs, and global warming, and and and - I could go on all day here).

If you're not one of these people, welcome to the the burgh. I wish you speedy success in growing ze webs betwixt your toes.
14
Heidi, you forgot to mention how you secretly think the name Sidney Brownstone is totally fake.
Will that by in next week's paper?
15
Any and all Red State escapees are welcome - unconditionally.
16
Left Seattle for SF years ago - and man, for all the complaints about the hostility of locals here, Seattle is _so_ much friendlier to newbies than the Bay Area. SF natives are snobby and hostile as fuck to anyone they don't deem sufficiently "local", and regard one's years of residency in the city as the deciding point to win an argument over literally anything at all.
17
You could always move to Yakima.
18
I moved to Seattle from Wenatchee and never experienced this. Seattle welcomed me with open arms, while simultaneously holding a coffee for me and herself in either hand. Sometimes, I think people get so caught up in their own view, that it becomes all they could see.
19
Just don't start telling us we have shitty cake.
20
You can make it up to me by going back where you come from. Everything that makes Seattle wonderful is going to be less wonderful because of the population increase. When you visit places like San Fran or NYC...they are dirty and gross and overpopulated. That is our future here in Seattle. I guess my only option is to invade Portland which is what Seattle used to be. Sorry Portland. I guess its a trickle down affect.
21
L_Sid, now that was funny!
22
We wouldn't have this problem of so many newcomers if the educational system here better prepared native Seattleites for all these new tech jobs.

Or, if native Seattleites (of which I was once) weren't such precious snowflakes that they intentionally took low paying jobs that allow them to do their "art." For whatever that's worth.

Instead, Amazon, Microsoft, et al, have to import workers. Think on that.
23
Wow, Seattle attracts people from elsewhere in Wash that want to live in a big city! 'Magine that!

I think this ruinous trend started when my great aunt packed up her Conestoga wagon and moved up from Olympia. I'm pretty sure she managed to shrug off the disdainful stares of the Boyd's-sipping lumberjacks and lutefisk-munching seadogs who were already convinced that the town was going to hell when that Boeing guy's airplane factory started pushing up rents.
24
I would like to register
25
Heidi - you missed the mark on just WHO is moving here. Seattle is being over-run by know-it-all 30 y/os. Just look inside the window of a fancy restaurant sometime.

They are of the generation of "Everone Wins a Trophy". Try offering the slightest constructive feedback and they freak. I had a co-worker ask our boss if she could re-write her job performance over the weekend. Attitude, privilege with a lack of perspective on out of control tuition, outrageous rents, working three jobs of the recession generation.

Try being a little bit humble before all the Seniors, middle class and youth LEAVE Seattle.

Please wait...

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