When was downtown the fun evening getaway? I've been here 15 years, and unless you're looking for a Frat Bro party in Belltown, Fremont/Cap Hill/Ballard were always where the real social life was. They're all doing just fine now - you wouldn't know there was a pandemic on.

I’ve been visiting Seattle since a toddler living in the tri-cities circa late 1970s. It indeed was a place to be, at least for a kid then a teenager and even when living in the U district and working at crackdonalds on third and pine.

But when I tell my son Seattle center used to have arcades and a roller coaster, he doesn’t believe me. Or when I talk about sending my great aunt and uncle off back to Alaska on the ferry at the water front (the Alaska marine highway used to start at Seattle rather than Bellingham).

The two I'm thinking of are in Texas and they're doing well.

If I'm reading it right, the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density. People still think they can hack together solutions by subsidizing housing, rent control, applying grants, etc but I'm more of the mind that there's probably a max size to a city, where once you hit a threshold it either takes a nosedive into poverty or becomes so unsustainably expensive that it chases out what desirable things may have existed there in the first place.

There's no lack of denser, cheaper cities than Seattle. If there's a max soze, Seattle isn't there yet. Poor design is the likely issue, likely cars being the problem. Cars take up a huge amount of space, both for wide roads for getting places, and parking both at home, at work, and at shopping centres.

> the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density.

I don't know where you got that. Affordability downtown isn't really what is keeping people away (and it is not like rental buildings have lots of vacancies, nor are close to downtown condos, towhomes, and SFHs difficult to sell), but retail and restaurant choices have been decimated over the last decade, it isn't thriving from the point of view of someone going there to do things.

Ah, retail and restaurants are low-margin businesses, so I usually associate their decline with a rise in cost (labor + real estate). Usually restaurants don't just go away, they're replaced by fewer-in-number but more-expensive options that people don't want or can't eat at regularly. Cost also correlates with density, but I think that's more abstractly. Eg: more businesses show up, more workers are needed, more houses are needed, supply and demand flip flops as inventory in a relatively-fixed area shrinks or becomes a rental market instead of buyers market.

Retail has declined due to online commerce. Seattle ironically lost its downtown Bon Marche/Macy's to become more office space for Amazon.

The homeless factor can't be understated in Seattle, especially with all the encampments downtown. I worked at 3rd and Pine McDonalds in the mid-90s, and for as bad as it was back then, it is ten times worse today.

I was just in Seattle for the first time in about 5 years. The situation was... not good. And this from someone who has spent a lot of time in SF and always had a not totally positive take on Seattle with respect to the grunge factor compared to other PNW cities.

Compared to other PNW cities, Seattle is about average. Portland isn't much better, Vancouver is...better because it is Canada but otherwise has very similar problems. No one can decide whether the term "skid row" was coined in Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland, they all had a similar place that was muddy because logs skidding to the mills which became a home for the down trodden.

So at least as far as its peers in the PNW, Seattle isn't very much of an outlier. Well, unless we can compare to other Seattle-area cities like Bellevue, which can simply push most of the homeless problem onto Seattle.

Huh. TIL. Thanks!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_row

I imagine there are nicer areas of Seattle than Downtown just as there are nicer areas of SF than Moscone/Union Square/Market Street but ick. Not really a city person except to visit anyway but the northern West Coast (and maybe the whole West Coast) has just gotten worse if that's possible.

There are several city parks outside of downtown overrun with homeless encampments. Many roadside parking strips and interstate greenspaces too. It's widespread.

The city is trying to move people into housing but there's a lot of mental health and addiction problems that make many people resist the outreach support.

All of the west coast cities have similar problems (soaring housing costs, high growth, great tech jobs, lots of homeless people). Even when we count non-coastal cities in the west (Spokane, Reno, Sacramento, Las Vegas), it doesn't look better.

Is it due to the weather? ( you don’t freeze in winter)

Combination of weather and a political climate that makes harsh approaches to a difficult problem unpalatable. It's probably mostly not housing prices although that doesn't help.