What Seattle does well: is a blank slate onto which you can start over and make something of yourself. I did not understand “the American Dream” til I moved here. The town lets one create whatever imagined reality one wants to — and then has enough economy to help make it real.

The urban core like lots of towns has its good areas and bad. The area has always had a grungy exterior – part of our charm. A lot of thats moss and mold from the water, plus we really do skimp on city services here. Be thankful the power stayed on. As for those bums, coddling bums (sorry, “homeless”) is a 100 year tradition here. No sense stopping now.

What we do well is provide a minimal base camp to go out and explore. The area does have a struggle between Los Angeles and Tokyo and Chicago for the soul of its city, right now Los Angeles (sprawl) seems to be winning. Chicago is in decline, and Tokyo always has some appeal. No matter what we keep replacing what we have with new, there are really few historical landmarks, and what few there are tend to get over valued because there are so few to begin with. Neon signs are big.

As for the lack of city parks, we’re surrounded on all sides by forests and lakes and ocean. Parks just give the bums a place to sleep anyway. We have enough of those. And I don’t know if you noticed, but its fairly hilly in the urban core, clearing off land for a park implies you spent a lot of prime real estate that could be getting put to business use. We do tend to be a lot more conservative particularly business wise than you might have expected. I think you’ll find any west coast town a weird combination of social liberal yet very tight with money / commercially conservative. And transit is in a 15 year decline — it was moved out from under City administration in 1995 and given to the County, who promptly began investing only in one-way suburban commuters, to the detriment of any plan for the downtown core. We all still feel that impact today.

Yet it is a great place to live, start a business, come up with an idea, write code, create a plan and not have people shoot it down. There’s a reason many of our local business’s went huge, like Starbucks and Microsoft (and subsequently got cited as reasons people outside the northwest hate us).. its because one can grow here, away from the cynicism and pressure of the east coast, any idea here is a good idea until proven otherwise, and then it just was an idea that didn’t sell yet. Direct confrontation is fairly discouraged, and failure is nothing to be ashamed of. So we’re an incubator community for start ups, we’re very good at that.

We are not good at consensus leadership, in fact, we tend to be anti-leader and no civic project no matter how important is one that can’t be debated for 20 years first. That ugly waterfront road is a perfect example; some want it to be torn down, some want it repaired, some want it replaced either with another elevated road or else with a tunnel. All ideas have their strong points, all have their champions. So nothing is done. Leadership in the nortwest means achieving consensus, which generally means doing nothing til its absolutely necessary.
Roads and transit in general tend to get put off til the last minute, then something slapped together. Why you need more roads? Shouldn’t you just go live closer to your job anyway? Seattle expects you to solve your own problems, the government isn’t going to solve it for you.

As for druggies downtown, I live and work downtown and I never get propositioned by anyone for anything. I think you must look like an easy target. I’m also over 40 so that isn’t the reason, I guarantee I am not big or imposing or particularly conspicuously dressed. Maybe they see me every day and know my face and leave me alone cause I live here. That might be it.

The area is skittish about outsiders ever since WTO, we kind of got our collective a** handed us by everyone from the national media to the cops to the absolutely idiotic bad planning our leaders provided, to the out of town punk protestors that showed up to break our windows and litter our streets and cause the police to go batshit insane and figure out paramilitary policing on locals for the first time. It was a lightswitch change in the relationship between police and locals — we used to trust each other quite a bit, now there is always fear. I think we got a little less trusting of outsiders and a lot less concerned what our city looks like to them after that.

I’m assuming you might disagree with the commenter below…if so, on what counts? Residents of a place often end up sliding toward one pole or the other, either lambasting their city with unwarranted vigor or naively defending it in the face of unquestionable guilt…have either of you had experiences that have pushed you one way or the other?

The article was really about first impressions. I don’t claim to have gleaned any revelatory insights from three days of walking around and riding buses. But while first impressions never tell the whole story, they don’t generally lie. A number of other sites have reposted the article, and it has been interesting to see the comments readers have left. Most seem to agree that Seattle’s urban core is not a healthy place, that reputation exceeds reality.

I’m curious, though, as to what you see as Seattle’s strengths and weaknesses? What does it do really well? What makes it special? What does it need to work on? How long have you been in Seattle? What keeps you there? At the end of the day, it’s the efforts of concerned and caring citizens that matters, not the rantings of a random blogger.

I’ve been propositioned more frequently in a two block walk through Times Square than I’ve ever been in a 20 block walk through Seattle. Perspective is where you look for it, and nobody who lives here would have been in the least surprised by your experience in Pioneer Square, since everyone here already knows what you just found out: that’s where the druggies tend to hang out, in large part due to the neighborhood’s abundance of charity missions, homeless shelters and social service agencies.

Whatever overly romanticized notions you’ve developed over the years about Seattle are just that, overly romanticized longings for a place that only existed in your imagination, and which has very little to do with real life. But complaining that the Seattle you saw didn’t match the Seattle in-your-head doesn’t make your sense of disappointment OUR problem, now does it?

And really, you’re trying to compare the attributes of a 380 year-old city with one not even half that old? Talk about apples and oranges.

We’ve got our problems here, sure, and we’re in the process of dealing with yet another growth-spurt, just like we had during the first decades of the city’s founding in the mid-1800′s, and again during the Yukon Gold Rush at the turn of the last century, or the one that accompanied the War boom of the 1940′s, or during the dotcom boom of the ’90′s, and now with the New Media boom of the early 21st Century. Seattle’s entire history has been written on an intermittent series of boom-and-bust cycles; and each time we’ve struggled with balancing the desire to maintain the character of earlier days with the need to adapt to new and changing circumstances.

The result is a public character that perhaps seems coldly accommodating to the outsider, but that’s because we have a long experience of dealing with idealistic newcomers such as yourself who eventually become disillusioned or disinterested and drift away, leaving the natives to pick up the pieces of your shattered dreams and turn them into something out of which we can actually make use. Not to worry: we’re really good at that, we’ve been doing it for a while now, which is why we’re still here.

And so what if it’s raining? That just means more deep powder in the mountains (a mere 40 minutes away) this time of year. You can choose to see the glass as half full or half empty, but either way it’s still got water in it, and we’re a people who know just what to do with water, regardless of what state-of-matter it happens to be in at the moment.