Charles, you should consider interviewing a commercial real estate broker. That might prove more useful for evaluating tower construction in Seattle than reading relatively obscure economic theory.

You likely wouldn't hear a references to Keynes, but no doubt you'd find a way to reference him in your subsequent Slog post.

Seattle's bubble has burst, most of new office buildings are empty. Amazon, Google and Facebook have abandoned large portions of their campuses, and this I saw, first hand, today, on the street skipping through and throughout the city. Last time the bubble burst this is the exact kind of thing folk where saying. Real estate folk will keep things inflated with more and more hot air until they just can't anymore and then everyone will nod to the obvious. Yeah retraction! Prices drop, artists and weirdos might return.

I'll just quietly murmur that there really hasn't been any sort of reduction in applications for electrical service. It's truly nuts.

These are the musings of a middle aged man. I am well into my 40s and have similar reflections. The nature of cities is to change and reinvent themselves, and the nature of the aging is to comment about bygone eras. My 15 year old son, he don’t care.

@1: "Charles, you should consider interviewing a commercial real estate broker."

Now that you mention it, he did recently try using sources who had actual knowledge of the economic situation he described:

"What should Washington state do under these circumstances? There really are only three options, according to the sober experts I have spoken with. (They can't come out of the dark because they do not want to lose favor with Boeing.)"

It didn't end well.

"I'm an aerospace consultant. I've worked with the csuite of many aerospace companies, including Boeing. This is the most poorly researched article I've seen in a while."

(https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2021/02/26/55487672/boeing-should-sell-its-renton-and-everett-plants-to-the-commercial-aircraft-corporation-of-china/comments/13)

"Its key logic is that capitalism is not about the production and distribution of things people actually need, but rather the production of luxuries."

Nope, capitalism produces things people are willing to pay for, or at least the things people think other people will pay for. Go to your local dollar store, you will find lots and lots of things that are definitely not luxuries that were produced by capitalism. What capitalism doesn't produce are things that aren't profitable, like free education and low income housing. That's why we have governments, some of whom are less than perfect in providing these.

It's honestly all either hotels, apartments, or office space for a number of companies such as Uber, Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Zillow, Oracle, Facebook, etc. Nothing mystical or philosophically complex about these types of buildings going up in the most moved-to city in the country.

Cure the economy magically, with herbs! Please call Dr. Charles Mudede @the stranger!

This was all zoned by us back around 2004, at the time we decided to upgrade transit, actually.

By the way, we're putting a 16 story office building on top of the U Dist light rail station, surrounded by 24-40 story building blocks.

The house Charles lives in was once Native land and he should be ashamed of the land 100 year old house it stands on... seriously people. Buildings are not bad, well some of them are ugly as sin but so is your mother and that hideous 80s modern house you live in. But fuck everyone for hating on redeveloping 100 year old earthquake deathtrap properties you want tax dollars to save because some band played there or some coffee was really fucking good. Not all change is bad Charles.

Does anyone still give a shit as to when the next big earthquake is coming?

@13: Nope. Harassing the first female BIPOC SPD Chief out of office took priority in our Council's chambers. (Last I checked, they hadn't a plan to keep all of our bridges standing, either.)

This article reads like a bad term paper that references the titles of a bunch of books the author hasn't read, then quotes several more the author hasn't understood.

One relevant tidbit from Veblen is the concept of luxury beliefs. E.g. one can derive high status from completely asinine and illogical opinions because this signals the 'fitness' to survive the ill-effects of their implementation.

Congrats on owning a house and the gig you're signalling loud and clear that you can't get fired from. Very elite my friend.

That was 5 minutes I'll never get back. Muede has a rather wacked view of how housing and real estate markets work. He also has a very conservative sense of nostalgia. And since he is a 'SOCIALIST!!!' his nostalgia can't be conservative... no, those things that attack his nostalgia must be 'CAPITALIST!!!'. Muede is becoming an old man with an old man's gripes.

Every 30 years a city must reinvent itself from the ground up. The old must make way for the new. Because a city is not an organic thing... it's simply a collection of people. And as the people change, so does the city.