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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Congratulations, you've successfully de-lurked me by writing about my city. I largely agree with what you say about it, but there's some stuff I'd like to add.

  • @atelier already mentioned the "documentary" "Seattle Is Dying" from 2019 (https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw), which seems roughly accurate if you ignore the hyperbolic narration and music. What they show is real, but they draw too many breathless conclusions. It could have been a solid look at the city's problems, but instead it comes off as culture war propaganda.
  • You missed a chance to take the light rail one stop north; the next exit is on Cal Anderson Park, former home of the CHAZ/CHOP. (It's been mostly cleaned up, although it's still apparently a center for drug dealing at night.)
  • You also may have missed the bus stop on Pike (one block south of Pine) between 3rd and 4th; I'm there on a weekly basis, and I've seen two purses snatched in the last year, one of which involved several people laughing at the victim.
  • I have no idea why the city is ripping up perfectly good streets and adding traffic calming, or replacing perfectly fine crosswalks with red cement ones, while there are streets elsewhere that are almost literally composed of potholes and patches ("almost" because the sides where cars park are mostly fine). I think that the city government is divided into parts that want to make the city better, and parts that want to pursue progressive policies regardless of where they lead, and they each do what they can within their areas of authority. Seattle is libertarian in some weird ways, but I do truly love our privatized DMV replacements. They compete on customer service.
  • One trick you may not have noticed is that, while the police can't clear people off of sidewalks, maintenance can do a lot of pressure-washing, which accomplishes the same goal, as well as its ostensible purpose of reducing the formerly-pervasive smell of urine and feces. You didn't mention those, so I assume it's back to whatever passes for normal levels in the rest of the world. I'm not sure I can tell, anymore.
  • Part of the answer to why the police are doing what they do, downtown, is that we've finally gotten a fair bit of tourism back, concentrated on the market and 1st Ave, but also to a few of the high-end stores. I think the city government is trying to keep that safe. Most of the rest of the city relies on private security these days.
  • If the British-themed restaurant you went to was Kell's, I'll just say that the owner is someone who can opine on the kind of pastie that you eat and the kind of pasty that you cover up certain body parts with. ;-)
  • University Village is where University of Washington students and faculty shop. The grocery store there has one of the better wine and liquor selections (for grocery stores). But I'd disagree that it's "near the city center": maybe by some other cities' standards, but not by Seattle's. It's an entirely different neighborhood. For some reason, Seattle has lots of little urban centers that have identity, if not character, and there's not much organic foot traffic between them. To get to the U District from downtown, you'd probably have to climb a few hills, cross a canal, and cross I-5.
  • I have a friend from Atlanta who refers to a "murder Kroger" there; I've taken to calling that McDonald's the "murder McDonald's". It's probably the sketchiest corner in the city that anyone's likely to visit by accident. Tellingly, they don't let people inside the restaurant any more, and only serve takeout.

For context, when 2020 hit, the city's mayor was Jenny Durkan, who as a white lesbian former-prosecutor lacked the identity credentials to shut down the George Floyd protests. Our new mayor is Bruce Harrell, a half-black half-Japanese man, who does have those credentials. And believe it or not, the city's been getting better since then. Everything you saw was worse a year ago, and worse a year before that, etc. Downtown is positively bustling now, compared to the wasteland that it used to be, although it's nothing like what it was before 2020. The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices, a progressive black small-business-owner (pot shop) who wants more policing, probably because she doesn't like her neighborhood getting shot up.

Still, I think national businesses have correctly gotten the message that Seattle now lacks the consistent political will to create a good business environment. By which I mean, keeping the streets clean and sane, and criminalizing looting and shoplifting. It's a shame, because for quite a while the city had competent, business-friendly governance, which allowed all the "cool parts" to flourish. Perhaps chalk it up to ideologies which fail to propagate themselves.

If anyone wants to see a microcosm of what this looks like, check out this article from a neighborhood blog. Pay attention to what's said, and how they say it, and the range of views expressed in the comments. https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/12/how-joy-hollingsworth-flipped-city-council-district-3-seattles-most-progressive-district/

And yes, I regularly visit Portland, and it is worse. Although like Seattle, it is starting to recover.

The radical DSA councilwoman retired, and was replaced with the "more conservative" of the two choices

This was due to a redistricting that pretty much guaranteed she would lose, right?

I don't think so? I haven't examined the numbers, but the core of the district is the same, and the borders are more compact. I'd naively give Sawant better than average odds that she could have won again, if she'd run again. It sounded like there was a last-minute push to do something like that, but it got shut down. From the article below:

“We did it. We won fair, legal, equitable, renter-empowered, community-led Seattle City Council district map in the first-ever redistricting process,” the Redistricting Justice for Washington group said in a statement.

https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2022/11/district-3s-new-borders-set-in-seattle-redistricting-commissions-final-map/

However, maybe if you dig you could find something? Halfway down this article is a map overlaying Sawant's performance in the last primary with the district borders in this primary, and it does look like she would have lost some strong areas. (The white area in the NE is the arboretum, and no one (legally) lives there.

https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/08/mapping-the-hollingsworth-hudson-primary-victories-in-a-less-polarized-district-3/

But for context, this guy came in third in our jungle primary, and he's about the most conservative possible in the area:

https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2023/08/district-3s-surprise-third-place-finisher-endorses-hollingsworth/

I haven't really dug into the issue, but my recollection is that her recall election was close enough that any loss of supporters due to redistricting would have made reelection unlikely.

But maybe it was more than pendulum swinging back towards the center than the redistricting.

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