Diary of Living in a Tech Town while not working in Tech
Inspired by Fran Lebowitz’s Diary of New York Apartment Hunter
When you ask what people do in Seattle the most common answer you will get is, “I work in tech.” I do not work in tech. If they work for a brand name company they might mention it or they might not depending on how important they want to feel. That’s when you hear the words, Amazon, Microsoft, or So you can imagine he surprise when people ask me what I do and I reply, “writer.” They look at me like a line of flawed code. Someone forgot to debug me out of town. Back in the 70s when Boeing left, someone put up a billboard, “Someone turn off the lights when the last person leaves Seattle.” So many people were leaving with the loss of the airplane jobs that it seemed like the Emerald City was going to do something that seemed impossible: dry up. It is rarely dry in Seattle. Now it seems the sign should read, “Tech workers only, if you do not work in tech, do not come here. We will not leave the lights on for you.”
When I speak of this phenomena I of course have to include The Greater Puget Sound region. Locals will remark that Microsoft is in Bellevue. Bellevue is a giant office park with McMansions surrounding. It is not a city. It is a city for municipal purposes only. I have long thought that in order to be a city the new municipality should be at least 25 miles from the other city, otherwise the whole area should be one city. Many suburbs around major cities were created as separate entities in order to keep out the “wrong sort of people” anyway. It’s a legacy of America’s past. How best to make sure that brown people don’t move in? Form a city and price them out or use restrictive deeds to make sure that only the right sort of people move-in. Many of those boundaries still exist.
The magic of cities, a magic that is often under appreciated by those who don’t live in a city, is diversity. Seattle can be a diverse place if you know where to look. That is why I ponder why people get confused when a non-tech person exists here. There are places all around the city of people who do not work in tech. The guy who delivered your chipotle? He doesn’t work in tech. The Uber driver who’s going to take you home from the bar tonight? Also not a tech worker. Same goes for the person at the gas station or at the trendy restaurant. The reality is that Seattle is filled with non-tech people and yet almost everyone who works in tech is surprised when they find one of us in the wild. At some point, I shouldn’t be surprised, Seattle has always been a bit of a company town. Boeing was first and later Amazon. Microsoft doesn’t count; they are in Bellevue, on the other side of Lake Washington over which we’ve had to build not one, but two floating bridges.
Seattle has certainly grown from its past as the port of call for those going to gold fields of Alaska or those who stayed after WWII to build airplanes. These days, a laptop is far more powerful than a rivet gun. Thanks to Microsoft, Amazon, T-Mobile, Zulily and many others, tech workers (with high salaries) flooded into town and rented or bought almost everything they could get their hands on. This led to finding a place to live in Seattle for nearly anyone else to be a nearly futile effort.
Looking for places to live in Seattle is an adventure. The first challenge is price. If you can’t pay thousands of dollars of upfront costs and thousands per month, you’re stuck moving farther north or farther south looking for something affordable. In my last adventure trying to find housing in Seattle, I ended up in a building in the International District. It was a notorious 1980s flophouse (I later learned) and was priced right: $1,215. However, that cheap price would come with the price of plenty of drama. However, that isn’t the only problem with housing.
The second problem is how to get there. The streets in Seattle are broken. And the one not broken street is a parking lot. Speaking of parking, that can be a problem too. Parking in downtown Seattle doesn’t exist on this plane of existence. At least not any plane of existence that I have access to.
That’s the trouble with taking an apartment, sight unseen, and signing a lease for it without ever trying to see if there’s parking. I hear the cries of “go car free!” And I agree with those calls. I’ve dreamed of the car free lifestyle. I was the boy who thought rather than learning to drive I should save up to move to New York where cars are not a thing. There’s only one problem: I had just bought a new car. I had paid taxes and tags and spent thousands. To sell the car and go car free would mean thousands out and how long would the 15–18 thousand I’d get out of the car last with surge pricing on Uber and mass transit passes. And I had also to consider my health. Could I do the walking necessary if my asthmatic lungs decide that its raining too much and they weren’t interested in breathing today. So the car was kept and my search for parking in the International district of Seattle continued apace.
The first few years weren’t so bad. I tried the garage and the surface parking lot but they were too expensive so it was on the street. That worked alright. I parked up with the nurses and doctors at the hospital on Yesler Bridge. Getting down wasn’t so bad but getting up that hill was always a challenge. It wasn’t until the last year that my car started to get vandalized. In once instance, I saw the guy carrying away my stuff including all the copies of my novel in one of my good Target bags. In another instance, they broke out every window on the block. I met a guy with a dog who said his friend tried to ward them off by filling his car with trash but they would break-in and go through that too.
Many people, my family included, decry the bane of urban crime. It is a complex issue that involves crime enforcement, massive homeless that comes from elsewhere in the United States, and desperate people who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive. All the proposed solutions are a good idea for some part of the population. Having worked with street people and lived with them, I will always split street folks into three groups: the first are those who are just down on their luck and won’t be out there long, the second are those for whom life has thrown them a sucker punch and usually have a substance abuse issue which can be fixed with the right support and housing; the third group is the hardest because for them the streets are a lifestyle from which they cannot or will not escape.
I eventually put my car in storage for the my final few months at that location. I lived the car free life of the city and only used my car when I needed to get to places not easily reached by Uber or mass transportation. The expense was out of control. This was my moment to escape Seattle entirely. The city has given me a clear message: if you aren’t making a big tech salary, don’t bother trying to find housing. I suppose that is why people move out to the suburbs and make those terrible commutes. Fortunately for me, I was location independent and I could move away but I did not option for suburban life. I decided that I was on the wrong coast entirely.
