
How Big Tech Swallowed Seattle - uptown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-30/how-big-tech-swallowed-seattle
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peatmoss
I know people like to hate on Amazon for the gentrification of Seattle, but as
someone who has studied and worked in urban planning, I absolutely believe
Amazon did the right thing by betting on an urban campus in the heart of
Seattle. They could have built another suburban Microsoft or something like
the monstrosity that Apple is doing, but Amazon didn’t.

I’d like to say that this comment is totally unbiased, but it’s not. I
recently started at Amazon (I speak for myself / opinions are solely mine),
and I’d be lying if I said that the urban campus that I can walk to wasn’t
absolutely part of my calculus. I could not imagine commuting to Redmond for
Microsoft, or Kirkland for Google.

I moved to Seattle a decade ago and biked through SLU on the way to my
internship at the Seattle Department of Transportation downtown while in my
masters program. I am still amazed by the changes in SLU. I absolutely feel
the disparity and displacement, but I cannot blame Amazon or Vulcan. The
reality is that Seattle has simply not permitted, incentivized, and built
enough residential and public transit capacity to accommodate the growth that
was forecasted to be huge. Affordability has suffered.

And that is a matter of political will. People like to blame planners, but the
planners saw most of this coming. Change is hard, and Seattle has done pretty
well in spite of everything. We’re not the Bay Area, and we can be proud of
that.

