Seattle's Ups and Downs

Failed to take touristy pictures and had to improvise!

 

After a while in Seattle, I haven’t quite made my mind up about the city: It certainly has its ups and downs (that is funny because there are very many hills in Seattle – our house was located on a street with warning sign for trucks: 20 percent incline. I had to take several breaks when walking home).

Seattle is an attractive city in many respects. I enjoyed the culinary diversity brought about by the long history of East Asian immigration to the West Coast. I was a month of many firsts!

I’ve had Chinese dumplings for the first time (at a tiny restaurant in the International District, where an elderly lady rolled out the dough, filled it and pinched it into dumpling form at the neighboring table). I’ve had Pho for the first time (and tried to learn the correct pronunciation from my Vietnamese roommate – he deemed me hopeless) and – probably my favorite experience – I’ve been to a Korean restaurant for the first time. The menu was in Korean, but I managed to order a soup with the help of the waiter. I was pretty surprised to end up with seven plates in front of me, filled with stuff that was all new to me: some kind of pancakes, spicy kimchi, and something that I assume were potatoes marinated in honey. In the International District, I also spent almost an hour in a supermarket, just strolling though the isles. There was frozen pizza, but next to it, there were all variations of frozen dumplings, vanilla flavoring next to Durian flavoring, as well as something called “fish cakes” (I was intrigued, but I chickened out), and 7.7 pound jars of kimchi that would unfortunately not fit into my backpack. And lots of stuff I was never able to identify.

Besides, Seattle is also a very open and progressive city with a big LGBT community. On my last day, I went swimming in Lake Washington, at a tiny beach in Denny Blaine Park – a place that the internet describes as “increasingly gay and increasingly nude”. I felt almost like at home at the West Coast of the Cossi! And the smell of weed – which was legalized in Washington in 2012 – seemed to hover over all of the city.

I also liked that Seattle is a very green city (in the original meaning of the word): I lived in walking distance to various small and large parks, and I could also walk down to Elliot Bay to look over the water, and watch the ships load and unload at the port. And in the other direction, National Parks and Forests are very close by the city, too.

Undoubtedly, Seattle has a lot to offer and it has become very popular for good reasons. The population is growing, and tech companies like Amazon, eBay, Dropbox, Facebook and so forth have moved to the city in recent years as well.

Which leads us to one of the city’s big downs: its big housing crisis. The city’s rents have increased 57 percent in the past six years – and that is not without effect. A guy I met on the bus on my very first day in Seattle told me that he could not afford his apartment anymore and would move into an RV next month. I also made my own experiences: finding a place was very challenging, and I ended up in a bed in the living room corner of a shared house with five roommates. Privacy was provided through two book shelves shielding me from the rest of the living and kitchen area, and I payed more than three times as much as for my room in Leipzig (which actually features four walls and a door).

Of course, one has to mention that the average income in Seattle is growing, too, and the minimum wage amounts to $15 an hour, which is the highest in the US (if Wikipedia does not fail me). But on my first day in the city, just from walking out of the train station, it became painfully obvious to me that not everyone profits from the leap in the Seattle’s popularity and economy to the same extent. Homelessness is on the rise, it is commonly written about a ‘homelessness crisis’ in the city. It is not easy to find reliable numbers on homelessness, but according to an annual random one nightcount, the number of unsheltered people has increased by 19% only between 2015 and 2016. As an info screen in the Public Library told me, homelessness affects especially LGBT adolescents and people of color. African-Americans are five times more likely to become homeless, Native Americans even seven times more likely than white people. It seems off that a city as flourishing as Seattle cannot provide more help to the homeless than designing benches impossible to sleep on. (I am being a bit unfair, actually the city has workedon ways to fight homelessness and spent a lot on the issue – it just hasn’t been very effective yet.)

I had a conversation with a man in his late twenties who told me he was unable to work without his diabetes medication, so he could not start a physically demanding job he was offered, because despite his health insurance, he could not afford the portion of the medication’s price he had to finance himself – a cycle that seems so unnecessary.

I had another encounter with a man on the bus, who told us with tears in his eyes to be grateful for the roof over our heads. He also lived in the shelter - despite having a job.

Many of the people on the streets obviously are in desperate need for mental and/or physical health care.

I think most of the reasons people become homeless are not very different from the rest of the US: ridiculous medical costs, unexpected lay-offs, mental illnesses – and a lack of safety nets in all of these situations. But Seattle has one of the highest absolute numbers of homeless in the US – only “topped” by New York City and Los Angeles, (according to this page,) although the city’s population is much smaller. I guess it comes down to the lack of affordable housing and the increasing rents again.

The Economist ranked Seattle the 3rd most liberal big city inthe US in 2014. What does that even mean, you ask? I have no idea, but I hope that the city will soon be able to live up to this reputation and provide people with roofs over their heads.