I don't understand what makes anyone look at the current big tech company towns and think "yeah I want that to happen to my city too"
No kidding. You want a giant, soulless corporation to swoop in, swell the city core with a disproportionately white and extremely wealthy group of people, and effectively destroy any semblance of unique lifestyles or cultures that once existed there?
Trust me on this, what Amazon has done to Seattle has been disastrous to just about every cool thing in the city. South Lake Union has turned into a gigantic, sterile, corporate hellscape bereft of any life after about 6PM. The only people benefiting from this are people who already own homes - people who are typically old, white, and wealthy. It is destroying the demographic diversity of our city.
The modern architecture drains any sense of style and culture out of the area, drives long-time mom and pop businesses like family restaurants and quirky boutique shops out of the area, and effectively makes it completely uninhabitable for people not working at Amazon.
Well as long as it has a view of Historic Kenny's House, I'm down.
:lol
It's shocking how accurate that season has been, and how true it rings in Seattle today.
Well Seattle had Microsoft for ages. Technically Redmond, I know. Baltimore has nothing. Let Baltimore get some shine, man lol.
Redmond was once far removed from Seattle's local housing economy. The geography of the region separats the Eastside (Remond/Kirkland/Bellevue - the former tech core) from Seattle city proper. It remained affordable for most people until Amazon really started exploding in size.
I'm a Seattle native and the only people I know that complain are people who moved to Seattle around 2007 / 2008. My friends and I who grew up in the area are glad to see Seattle going from a sleepy town feel to a world class city.
I have been here since the early 00's (born in Redmond, spent some of my childhood in Alaska, and then moved back) and what has happened to the city is, frankly, a disaster.
A sleepy town full of quirky people and neat stuff has been completely sterilized by Amazon's stratospheric rise to power.
It's incredibly sad to witness. Most people who work for me commute from Tacoma or Everett - brutal either way. Most people who work in the city make less than those who work for me. I can't even afford to live in the city proper, and I'm in management.
I'm willing to bet a lot of people are secretly okay with that happening.
I'm sure they are! They're exactly the kind of people who are compounding the problem because of their relentless NIMBYism... Old, wealthy (usually home or land owning) white folk who are extremely happy to have an almost exclusively white, wealthy group of young working professionals come in and sweep out all of the riffraff, and balloon their housing values to mind boggling sums.
It's sickening.