Seattle Weekly Editor-in-Chief Knute Berger, in The ‘Just Right’ People (click for full article), writes on the Craftsman aesthetic and the relation of the bungalow to a true, working middle class:
Some years ago, my then-grade-school-aged daughter
was trying to figure out where our family fit in the grand scheme of
things. "Dad, are we rich?" she asked. No, I answered. "Are we poor?"
No. Her face brightened, and she said happily, "Then we’re the ‘just
right’ people!"That’s social-class theory according
to Goldilocks. In my daughter’s eyes, we had attained a kind of secure
just-rightness that offers comfort. That kind of value used to
personify Seattle, a city that prided itself as being a middle-class,
democratic, populist alternative to big Eastern metropolises or
sprawling Western ones.Rich people showed up in
Seattle pretty late. The first millionaires were made by the Alaskan
Gold Rush, which ushered in a rum, retail, and real-estate boom. Early
labor activism added resistance to the growing influence of the robber
barons, and the clash between upper and lower classes evolved a city in
which there was little economic difference between union blue-collar
workers and Boeing white collars.
leave it to a Seattle columnist to waste lots of word count blaming the president for a localized problem, via great extrapolation. did the tax code change dramatically on january 21st, 2001? nope.
i tend to cite the mentioned “bash and build” developers who have been running amok here for the better part of a century. where are the historic homes?
entire neighborhoods have been lost for public development, and the rest of the old houses are getting picked off one-by-one. a developer buys a small, old house for $400k as a tear-down so they can build 6 units on the land and sell each for $1 million.
what are the local governments doing to prevent this? little. king county is more concerned with taking away undeveloped land from property owners in the eastern half of the county, than they are in historic preservation. and the seattle city council just sees more residents as more people to charge property tax — so build density wherever possible.
plain and simple — people here, both the governing and the governed — don’t seem to be bothered with historic preservation. or historic anything, really. i’ve come to know the self-described “progressive spirit” here to mean “i refuse to learn from example.”
this makes me glad i grew up and lived most of my life on the east coast. also that i’ll be going back there before i decide to bring any children into this world; i’d rather they grow up to be “yankees” than to be “progressive.”