Seattle in Brief

Seattle has jobs. It has always had plenty of middle class jobs: first in fishing, shipping, lumber and coal mining. Later railroad building, gold miner transportation to the Yukon, longshoremen, and shipbuilding. Then airplane building. Finally, software and software contracts. Immigrants from Europe and Asia, skilled and unskilled, flocked to Seattle, which was well-known for tolerance and coexistence. Seattle’s suburbs gave rise to Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco. And now Seattle is dominated by the King Kong of Monkey Island: Amazon. On Seattle.gov I read that one in fourteen adults between the ages of 22 and 34 was employed by Amazon in 2015. Now it’s probably even more. The many years of middle class jobs, the mild climate and the beautiful scenery have sparked two entwined trends: population growth and liberal values. Sadly, these trends are now at odds with each other. While the Seattle city council was busy forging sister city relationships and outlawing circus animals in the 1990’s, the city attracted more residents than its streets could carry. Public transit here lags 25 years behind. And housing prices, like in any boom town, have been skyrocketing. In our niece and nephew’s neighborhood, a modest hundred year old Craftsman sells for a million bucks. Flipping houses is evident: a listing sold in March for $400K, then pops back up on the market, maybe with a a new coat of paint, in July for $800K. Their neighborhood has been gentrified into the unaffordable. But one can practice mixed martial arts in the same studio as aerial yoga. Going native for the day, we bought $13 egg and bacon sandwiches and $5 coffee from a fedora-wearing barista. We passed on the ketocoffee, that’s coffee with butter and coconut oil, and the turmeric-beet latté. Since we’d seen the downtown sights on previous visits, and since traveling with motor home and housepet limits one’s urban adventures, we visited Lake Sammamish in the suburbs.