On the Google newsfeed on my phone there was a story from a website called Drivin’ & Vibin’ entitled “5 Reasons to Avoid the Pacific Northwest” https://drivinvibin.com/2022/11/29/avoid-pacific-northwest/. After first exalting its scenic vistas and whatnot for the drivin’ and vibin’ outsiders, it gets into the usual stereotypes (some more true than others) about the weather, being an expensive place to live, being overcrowded, traffic issues, people are self-righteous superstars-in-their–own-minds (well, not everyone), and there are (supposedly) 12,000 homeless people in Seattle.
You could probably find five reasons to live in the Pacific Northwest too; Seattle has a $15-an-hour minimum wage law, so that is one reason, and if you can find a working roommate, you can get by alright. But I will say this: things have changed dramatically in Seattle since I moved to this area 30 years ago. When I was stationed briefly in Fort Lewis I visited Seattle almost every Saturday (only 50 cents to take a bus back then), and it just seemed like a “cool” place to live.
It took another decade for that plan to come to fruition, and fortunately nothing had changed much in the interim. Downtown Seattle had lots of movie theaters, book shops, video, music and computer software stores. There were affordable places to live in or in the vicinity of downtown even if you were only making $5-an-hour; of course you had to make allowances for the condition of such places, but anything out of weather was better than nothing.
But things did gradually change; I’m not sure exactly when the change started, but I knew something very bad was happening when the last Tower Record store closed in 2006, along with all the other book, video and music stores, with maybe a few “mom and pop” stores left selling used product. When Fry’s Electronics “one-stop shop for electronics enthusiasts” closed shop in Renton in 2021, I knew it was all over, with Best Buy hanging on a thread even as it doesn’t stock the product you want and hangs on to the product you don’t want, as was the case the last time I went to the Tukwila store looking for a new laptop. A 2013 article in Seattle Magazine stated the obvious:
No matter what one thinks of Amazon, it has been wildly effective at wiping out the competition—thanks to its demographic reach and massive used book inventory (via legions of private sellers). With Borders having declared bankruptcy and Barnes & Noble surviving by selling practically everything but books, Amazon is poised for total market domination. And that’s not including the used books of the future, i.e., e-book downloads.
And it wasn’t just books new or used, but just about everything else that you probably wouldn’t find in a store. I mean, why bother go to a store if the likelihood was that you wouldn’t find it? Of course for those who were not used to online retailing, going to a store to get your hands on something right then and there was preferable to paying for shipping and not knowing exactly when the item would arrive, but now you don’t have any choice in the matter—either buy something online or not at all.
The closure of “art,” foreign and second-run movie theaters was also a real bummer. I mean, there was no place to go anymore. The Seattle Science Center used to host big-name traveling exhibits; not anymore. The Seattle Art Museum is kind of a joke, What was the Experience Music Project was birthed out of a love of classic rock music; now it’s called the “Museum of Pop Culture,” and if you don’t think there is anything impressive about current pop culture, then it isn’t worth the price of admission.
Anything on the pier is only for tourists, and there is not a lot worth
visiting more than once (the aquarium, the “Space” Needle); although I am a little
curious about revisiting the zoo, that’s way up there by Green Lake and my
memories of the one time I was there it wasn’t much to see, since you couldn't even spot some of the exhibits in their "realistic habitats."
The demographics of Seattle have also changed rather dramatically, especially from South Asia. The city isn't really all that "cosmopolitan" anymore, just quite a few full-of-shit people. Once you could always tell where what demographics lived by what side of the street they waited for the bus on; for buses heading north, you saw mostly white and Asian people, and buses heading south, mostly non-Asian minorities. Now, it is harder to tell about the people heading south.
The Central District used to be 80 percent black; today it is less than 15 percent and going down. This page https://www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/WA/Seattle/Central-Area-Demographics.html doesn’t even bother to do a race or ethnicity breakdown, and it is clear that this is now a predominately “white collar” neighborhood with above the median income, where most of the older homes have been condemned and demolished in favor new places for the yuppie class to live after they pushed out the original inhabitants, with the number of new (and more expensive) housing units skyrocketing in just the past decade.
Even Bellevue—where once right-wingers working in Seattle sought refuge from all those “socialists”—has boggled the mind with its changes. With the help of investment from China, downtown Bellevue looks more like a business version of the International District. Just 20 years ago, the “main street,” Bellevue Way, has grown from a suburban drive-through with the Bellevue Mall the only commercial retail business of note…
…to a gaggle of new office towers:
Of course some things stay the same, like the weather. The “endless summer” we had this year lasted from July until October 20, and “fall” lasted approximately two weeks before winter-like weather set in. Just because it snows a wee-bit doesn’t mean we’ve only just now seen a taste of winter here, because snow is actually rare in Western Washington, which is actually a reason for people to want to live here this high on the latitude scale.
What is also “rare” is mostly clear, freezing weather in the middle of November, as we have just experienced. Having grown up in Wisconsin, that is the kind of weather I wanted to escape. As for the rain, while it is just so damn “gray” around here most of the year, the reality is that as far as actual precipitation, Seattle has no more rainy days than “sunny” Miami, and 50 percent less of it.
But as mentioned, if for you are not into the club and bar scene, the changes in Seattle and the area in general are not conducive to expanding one’s horizons unless you get tired of being cooped-up and just need to get out and walk around out of sheer boredom. Myself, my time is spent doing two jobs—my “real” job to pay the bills, and doing this here, which does take up a lot of my spare time—and then find whatever time I have left to mine through all these Blu-rays and DVDs I still haven’t watched.
Would things be different if I was living in a place not the Pacific Northwest? Probably not; you just "adapt" and get by the best you can.
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