How Amazon Swallowed Seattle

from Gawker:


How Amazon Swallowed Seattle

CML
Filed to: AMAZON 8/18/15 11:50am


Seattle is dead and Amazon killed it.

The recent news around Amazon has focused on the company as a workplace. Much of it has been unflattering, all of it is accurate. But a more comprehensive indictment of Amazon would also describe its effect on the rest of Seattle, which used to be a great place to live. In recent years, it has become consumed by Amazon.

I was born here, in 1988. My city was a gentle, easygoing place, a salad of cultural influences: citizens of the outdoors, of grunge and high art, with a dash of software among its bluebloods. Here I reveled in mild weather and glorious views; here I played in the best high-school orchestra in the nation (at a public school), and surrounded myself with brilliant people who understood me and made me better.

Nowhere else was life so good.

.....(snip).....

Seattle has always been prosperous. Now, it is expensive. The center of the blight is South Lake Union, for decades a low-rent neighborhood of warehouses and newspapers. Nearly three years ago, Amazon bought 11 buildings in the area, from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, for $1.16 billion; its objective is to build a “campus” in the image of Google’s, in Mountain View.

Efforts to this end have not been unsuccessful. South Lake Union used to be a dump. Now, as in Brooklyn (as in San Francisco, as in Portland, as in Austin), cubical buildings and yuppie boutiques have emerged from the carcass of industry. South Lake Union is no longer a neighborhood; it is a boomtown, in all the worst senses. Not since 1897 has such a gold rush so remade the Seattle waterfront. SLU’s gender ratios, makeshift culture, and inflated prices recall the Klondike. A cruel irony of tech is that it should free work from geographical constraints; “you can work anywhere,” goes the bromide. If only. In real life, wealth concentrates in faceless hubs more than ever before.

.....(snip).....

Things have gotten to the point that one good friend talks seriously of moving to Portland. A year ago, he spoke often of Seattle’s greatness, and spoke of Portland with our customary derision. Now he, too, laments Seattle’s death: “It was too nice here,” he said. “It couldn’t last.” Another friend left Seattle because it was “too competitive.” We had no rejoinder, and back he went to his hick town on the Columbia River. Yet another friend briefly entertained a whim to return to Las Vegas. Until recently, such a caprice was unthinkable. Even software engineers relocate, due mainly to discontentment with their jobs. Their final destination is often San Francisco, as if Seattle wasn’t yet bad enough. .................(more)

http://gawker.com/how-amazon-swallowed-seattle-1724795265