A Visit to the Grungy City

Vancouver BC is an authentically grungy city. It looks the way a city is supposed to look and feel.

Seattle, on the other hand, ceased being a grungy city sometime in the late-90’s, after Mayors Rice and Schell, and their cohorts on the City Council, succeeded in shoveling public money to developers. Add the tech stock boom, easy credit, and sky-rocketing housing prices, and we got a city that has swept all its poor people right out of the city limits. And that was the plan, as Mayor Schell would have told you back then. Poor people don’t belong in our city, so they were forced to leave.

Which explains the city’s attitude today, with Mayor Nickels endorsing sweeps of homeless encampments and his refusal to deal with the Nickelsville tent city. No wonder he didn’t make it through the primary.

Unfortunately, when the poor left Seattle, most of Seattle’s character left with them.

Vancouver has several neighborhoods that have cleaned out the drug dealers and prostitutes, but have nevertheless maintained their unique, hole-in-the-wall stores, cheap ethnic restaurants, tiny artsy boutiques with handmade clothing, and a proliferation of affordable family housing. Of course, politicians and big businessmen in Vancouver would like their city to look like Seattle, but the majority of Vancouverites are pushing back and trying to hold on to what makes Vancouver so great.

Not so, in Seattle. Even the Fremont neighborhood has been sanitized and turned into an outdoor shopping mall. It’s a sad day when Vancouver can boast more vegetarian restaurants per square mile than Seattle has in its entire city limits.

It all boils down to two things: first, the price of rent. In Seattle, local coffee shops, used bookstores, and even the little storefront martial arts studios have all closed down because they can’t make the rent. (I feel compelled to point out that Vancouver has a Starbucks on almost every corner, just like we have here, but Vancouver still has great, small coffee shops, too. Seattle has maybe three or four left in the whole city.)

The second problem is attitude. Everyone in America wants to get rich right now, and that’s reflected not only in our borrowing and spending habits (we want to live like the rich but don’t really have the means for it), but also in our inability to use patience and hard work to achieve a vision of something unique.

For example, in Vancouver, a young clothing designer might decide to open her own storefront in a tiny neighborhood shop with cheap rent and make clothing that students can afford to buy. She would find it important and empowering to see lots of hip, young people wearing her clothes, and be happy to build business that way. But in Seattle, that same designer would choose instead to make a few items, place them in an expensive consignment shop, and price them well out of the reach of almost everyone but the wealthy. Then she’d try to build her “brand” through an idiotic Internet campaign, and try to get on a reality TV show for fashion designers, eventually learning how to fit in with the fashion industry’s standards. This is a route that ensures sterility, stifles creativity, isolates artists from the people who’d appreciate their work the most (most of whom are not rich), and in the process destroys a city’s cultural life and its streetscapes.

Maybe the economic downturn, which is based on unsustainable rents and housing prices, will change all that. Americans are already voting on the quality of merchandise in chain stores by becoming more choosy. We are literally waking up, smelling the coffee, and deciding that Starbucks isn’t any better than the stuff we make at home.

Maybe most American artists and entrepreneurs will give up on their “get rich quick” fantasies and search instead for fulfillment in their work. Falling rents just might make it possible for them to realize this new dream.

I hope so, for Seattle’s sake.