“It’s not my Seattle anymore”
My wife’s dear auntie, a lifelong Seattleite, mostly
“It looks like one of those matchboxes sold already”
Woman talking to her boyfriend on the street, Fremont District, June 2022
I’ve come to realize that I have a perhaps unique perspective on my natal city. I haven’t been a full-time resident for some 35 years, but I’ve kept showing up least twice a year, for short trips and long ones. This makes me a homeboy but not quite, a tourist but not quite that either. I certainly love my beautiful hometown. The city is deeply close to me, but you might say we have an open relationship. Put another way, I agree with my wife’s aunt (I’ll count her as my aunt too, really, after all this time). It’s not my Seattle any more either. But I’m mostly OK with that.
I spent a week in Seattle this month, so to make a start on my June post I plan to present a brief photo essay on one north Seattle neighborhood where I stayed for a portion of my time there. After that I will make a couple of comments on economist Thomas Piketty’s new book Equality, a work that is well beyond my capacity to reflect upon in one post but which has already influenced my thinking about what urban prosperity might mean. Finally, lest I entirely lose the theme of crime and policing introduced in the last two posts, I want to provide a link to a Sacramento Bee piece that describes a new police strategy here in Sacramento.
Seattle and Center-Led Urban Growth
Seattle, of course, has since at least the late 1980’s been one of the obvious riser cities in the changing US and even global urban economic hierarchy. The influx of wealth, people, and highly educated talent to the city and the surrounding region has in turn manifested in major changes to the urban fabric.
These changes are in no sense neutral. There are issues of gentrification, issues of race (Seattle was notoriously redlined in the mid 20th-century with the Black population largely shut out of emerging middle-class neighborhoods north of the ship canal), issues of affordable housing, a terrible issue with homelessness, issues of public safety, and more. Bowing to this complexity, the central thing I want to comment on, or really show visually, is the physical change to the urban fabric in one neighborhood, the rate at which we are seeing densification, and what densification perhaps could and should look like.
But before turning to the photos I want to share, it seems important to say that Seattle is not a random case when it comes to urban density. My old hometown has been among the most effective and creative big US cities at welcoming new people. One might say this stems from the Cascadia region’s environmental ethos, and the recognition that we need more dense urban forms to create any hope for environmental sustainability. But, then again, there is a strong environmentalist ethos in the Bay Area as well, and Seattle’s big southern cousin has, to say it straight up, done a shit job at welcoming new residents for decades now. See this slightly old but interesting Business Journal article comparing Seattle and San Francisco. The comments of a planner who has worked in both tech hubs are particularly interesting.
There is also an unusual center-focused development pattern within the Seattle metro area. When I was a kid in the 1970s and 1980s the city was losing share of residents relative to the surrounding region, and in fact losing residents in absolute terms (a fact people forget is that Seattle proper, which boasted roughly 560,000 residents in 1960, had only about 490,000 when I entered high school in 1980). But the city has been growing steadily since somewhere in the 1980s (the immediate aftermath of the the early 2000’s “dot bomb” recession partly excepted), with the trend accelerating very rapidly since 2010. See this fascinating Seattle Times piece, which shows that the city of Seattle proper welcomed some 130,000 new people over the 2010s, for a 21 percent growth rate. The Eastside, by comparison, had an also impressive but slower 18 percent rate of growth. One might expect higher rates of population growth on the Eastside, given that the center of the region’s high tech industry still arguably sits across Lake Washington, but this has not been the case. One might also expect, in the aftermath of the pandemic, for the rate of population increase in Seattle proper to taper off. However, I am not so sure about this. We may be seeing a self-sustaining trend, and a city that may increasingly begin to look like enormously dense Vancouver to the north.
Fremont, A Photo Essay
But now to the photos. The neighborhood I want to profile is Fremont, a hillside section of town angled upward, steeply in places, from the ship canal to roughly Woodland Park Zoo. I’m choosing this neighborhood for perhaps no better reason than the fact that I’m fond of it, which in turn led me to choose to stay there for a couple of nights in an Airbnb. I found the place profoundly changed from the pretty but rundown boho-stoner district I remember from my youth. But I also found Fremont still very much recognizable, something that cannot be said of large parts of adjacent Ballard. It’s an area that, at least right now, wears its increased density well.
As you can see in the photos above, distinct traces of what the faded old Fremont used to look like still exist. Even back in the day Seattle was a LGBTQIA+ friendly city, or gay and lesbian friendly, as we might have said at the time.
In other places the formerly faded old craftsman homes dotting Fremont have been lovingly restored by people with money, or perhaps by people who have come into money through no particular merit other than hanging onto family property over a long period of time. In any case, a dreamy kind of early twentieth century single family craftsman utopia is back on the market for those who can afford to buy into the dream. I must admit to a certain amount of house lust.
Meanwhile blocky vertical townhouses, presumably the “matchboxes” to which the woman walking down the street who I quoted in at the beginning to this post was referring, are replacing parts of the old urban fabric. Some Seattleites rue this trend, but to me the matchboxes seem at minimum badly needed, and in some cases like the ones above quite attractive. They don’t give me house lust like the old craftsman homes, but seem like more than pleasant enough places to live in a great city with a buoyant economy.
I spent time in coffee shops, of course, while in Seattle. This stalwart independent, Lighthouse Coffee, is a fabulous one. I was surprised, however, to see that perhaps ninety percent of the people in the coffee shop were white, or if you insist, White. Seattle is more diverse than it used to be, but the place to look for the new diversity is not necessarily in the pretty old urban core. See my post from last month dealing with similar spatial trends here in Sacramento.
And then, in the hazy middle distance, is Ballard, with its solid blocks of five- and six- and more-story stick-build apartments and condominiums, a completely changed neighborhood. The new construction technology supporting these buildings, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, seems to be the cheapest way to build densely and at scale. Maybe these structures are inevitable, to be welcomed despite the emotionally cold and very likely short-lived urban fabric they to create. Certainly the housing crisis is everywhere real, and we need a lot more building. But I don’t know. I strongly prefer the mixed evolutionary stage visible in Fremont to what we see in Ballard.
As a final thought before moving on to a new topic, I wonder how much of the huge recent housing price increases seen in Seattle are the structural result of an increasingly asset-driven as opposed to income-driven economy, not the result of population growth per se. See this link for a fascinating podcast interview between Ezra Klein and Rana Foroohar for one place I got this idea. Or simply note that the recent period is not the only one where Seattle has grown very rapidly. Between 1940 and 1950, for instance, the city’s population grew by 37 percent, much faster than in the more recent period (although part of that related to the annexation of large portions of north Seattle). Then, between 1950 and 1960, the Seattle population grew by about 12 percent. This all took place during a time of increasing equality and expanding housing and homeownership opportunity. Urban population growth and decreasing housing opportunity, in other words, do not inevitably have to go together. Current rental and housing price run-ups are related structurally not merely to population growth and high tech jobs. Instead, they also relate fundamentally to the particular, heavily finance capital-driven regime of economic accumulation that has been in place since the 1980s.
Thomas Piketty’s Equality-A Brief Review (Part 1)
Besides traveling to Seattle, I also took a much shorter trip this month to Sacramento’s Capital Books, where I picked up a new hardback copy of economist Thomas Piketty’s book Equality. You can pick it up there too, or at your own local bookstore, or if you insist on stimulating the economy in Seattle, at Amazon. It’s an extremely thought-provoking text, produced by one of the world’s preeminent social scientists, and for the most part highly readable despite a some sentences and paragraphs only a graduate student could love. For instance, try this one on for size: “The construction of new forms of federal socialism, that is, democratic federalism driven by explicit, verifiable social objectives, is a challenge for the planet as a whole.” Maybe people smarter than me can explain that one.
Despite this stylistic critique, I found Piketty’s book to be refreshing and hopeful. One of its basic messages is that, looking across long time scales, equality is very much on the rise. There has been so much pessimism across the political spectrum in recent years, most painfully to me on the left, so it is refreshing to read sentences like this one: “Human progress exists: the movement toward equality is a battle that can be won, but it is a battle whose outcome is uncertain, a fragile social and political process that is always ongoing and in question.”
Another strength of Piketty’s book is the whole second chapter, titled “The Slow Deconcentration of Power and Property.” Using, among other data sources, detailed property and inheritance records kept by the French government since the time of the revolution, Piketty chronicles a sharp historical drop in the proportion of wealth controlled by the richest one percent of the population. Between approximately the beginning of World War One (when the top one percent in France held roughly 65 percent of national wealth) and the beginning of the 1980s (when the top one percent held about 25 percent of national wealth) the very richest clearly lost ground. According to Piketty, nearly the same trend was true throughout the Western world. Since around 1980, curiously the very time when the Seattle area began its upward rise in the economic hierarchy, the top one percent has again begun to accumulate more and more assets. So we have a distinct and problematic recent trend toward inequality, but part of the value of Piketty’s book is the way he places this in the context of a long-term movement toward equality. Of course, this movement has been the result of choices and political struggles.
So if the one percent lost very significant wealth share during the middle twentieth century, who gained in share? According to Piketty it was not the poorest 50 percent of the population, which then as now owns almost no assets. But the upper part of the formerly working class population, essentially the group from the 50th percentile to the 90th, gained tremendously, forming what Piketty calls a “patrimonial middle class.”
Family history is on my mind, since I was primarily up in Seattle to visit family, and this story tracks perfectly with my own family. The photo below is of my great aunt Mossie partying with three of her women friends (Aunt Mossie, or Arabella, is at left). Mossie’s father was a coal miner, but during the early middle part of the 20th century she rose to become a schoolteacher. Her brother, my grandfather, became a medical doctor. My other grandfather, the son of a small city factory foreman, managed to complete college while working in a tool and die shop alternate terms. He eventually became a principal at a K-9 school in the same Midwestern town where he had grown up. It’s a remarkable story of social rise that happened at a very specific time, and for a specific set of reasons both personal (my grandparents were remarkable people) but also structural. Here I will mention among other things the early advent of widespread public high school education in the US. I am reminded, reading Piketty, of the importance of my day job as a high school teacher.
I am also reminded by Piketty of the lower half of the wealth distribution across the Western democracies, people who have never had any wealth, and most especially the descendants of former enslaved persons in the US. Piketty has some interesting and specific ideas about what to do in regards to the wealth gap, to which I plan to return in a future post.
A Plan for Violence Reduction in Sacramento
To conclude this post, I want to say I was heartened to learn in the Sacramento Bee of a new plan by Sacramento’s first female police chief, Kathy Lester, to combat gun violence in the wake of the April shootings downtown. You can link to the article here. The focus of the plan will be on three small geographic areas where a highly disproportionate amount the gun violence occurs (Del Paso Heights, Oak Park, and Meadowview/Valley Hi). According to the Bee, of the 945 gun crimes reported in 2021 throughout the city, 423 were concentrated in these neighborhoods.
Though the Bee is predictably too delicate to say so, these three geographic areas are also centers for the Black community in Sacramento. Will the City’s violence reduction plan become a form of healing and investment for the Black community, or will it devolve into just one more attempt criminalize being Black in public spaces? Obviously everyone’s hope is for the former, and a central part of Lester’s plan seems to revolve around outreach through community groups.
As Daniel Kennedy’s brilliant book Don’t Shoot has shown convincingly, this kind of targeted, community-focused investment approach absolutely can work to bring down violence, as long as it is matched with appropriate enforcement and consequences for the small number of offenders perpetrating most of the violence. But the trust-building and investment that form the cornerstone of this kind of strategy cannot be a quick fix. Will Sacramento have the patience and strength to see Chief Lester’s plan bear fruit? Only time will tell.