"Somebody Please Kill Me"

I keep my eyes peeled for stories that appear in The New York Times that easily could have originated in fringe media. I think the attraction for me is the idea that there is indeed a basic reality to the times in which we live; despite all the effort to filter it and spin it, it shines through.

Yesterday in the national edition of The Times was Emily Badger's exemplary "Happy New Year! May Your City Never Become San Francisco, New York or Seattle." In it she encapsulates the secret truth of present-age United States: our urban tech hubs -- our "good as it gets" incubators of 21st century capitalism, the zenith of current civilization -- are dystopias:

In truth, most of these cities have qualities other cities would reasonably desire. Denver has one of the country’s fastest-growing tech labor forces, with minorities and women relatively well represented in those jobs. Seattle and Portland have among the fastest all-around job growth. New York has some of the fastest-growing wages. San Francisco has unemployment well below the national average and household incomes among the highest in the country.

But San Francisco-ization and the other -izations don’t refer to the process of acquiring any of these good things. Rather, those terms capture the deepening suspicion of many communities that the costs of urban prosperity outweigh the benefits. The tech jobs and the high wages aren’t worth having if they come with worsening congestion, more crowded development or soaring housing costs.

Amazon’s search this year for a new second headquarters made this trade-off explicit for many cities. Despite the tens of thousands of new high-paying jobs in tech and construction on offer, protesters in Chicago and Pittsburgh — even some in the winning areas of New York and Washington — concluded that they didn’t want to be the next Seattle.

Numerous writers in Seattle warned that they were right to oppose that future.

Embedded in these fears is something slippery, seemingly inevitable. Once you let tech giants in the door, you have a homeless crisis. Once you allow more density, you’re surrounded by skyscrapers. Once housing costs begin to rise, the logical conclusion is San Francisco.

“Bostonians: Do you worry more about Manhattanization? Or San Francisco-ization?” Tim Logan, a Boston Globe reporter who covers development, asked on Twitter this year. To him, the cities represent different routes to the same end of creating urban playgrounds for the rich.

This is what we are left with. We have no national project other than to cater to the whims of the super-rich.

Yesterday in the morning dark on my walk downtown to work where the skyscrapers of Amazon are being built a homeless guy camped out on Broadway was freaking out, screaming "SOMEBODY PLEASE KILL ME."

From there I strolled down the hill past other small homeless encampments. On Denny, where it begins its steep drop to the viaduct over I-5, the dividing line between my neighborhood and downtown, a young homeless man, obviously mentally ill, slept on a mattress in an abandoned storefront. He's there all the time, on the mattress, wrapped in a dirty sleeping bag.

In the 1990s the Famous Pacific Dessert Company occupied that storefront. At the time it seemed shiny and new; the neighborhood seemed up and coming, what with being Ground Zero for Grunge; rents were affordable, arts abounded.

Now that storefront reeks of excrement and is littered with trash; the neighborhood is dotted with high-rise high-end apartment buildings and condos; corporate retail lines Broadway. This is what we are left with.

It's a profound failure.