The Insurgency in Seattle

For months now, many of us who care deeply about our city ("Civic Seattle") have been trying to put our finger on the pulse of the new administration.  And so far, we can't seem to find a heartbeat.  There may be several reasons for this but local pundit David Brewster (still an east coast transplant after 40 years) recently told that bastion of business and commerce leaders, the Downtown Rotary, what he thinks is happening...and, for the most part, I have to agree.  David and I have worked together for years and he has always tried his best to be the voice of the alternative view. Today, he is using http://www.crosscut.com/ as his mouthpiece and here is an excerpt from his current take on our fair city...alternative or not, there's a lot of truth in it.  Granted, this is local politics but Seattle is on the national scene now and we're not San Francisco 20 years ago. David is making unbiased sense...for once, at least.

"A year ago, probably many (including me) would have felt that Seattle politics was very stable. Mayor Greg Nickels had put together a traditional political coalition of developers, unions, big business interests, municipal employees, and environmentalists, leaving only neighborhood groups and deep-greens on the outs. Then suddenly, voters gave the two-term mayor a pink slip, as he finished third in the primary to two unknowns.

What happened? Nickels was an inside mayor, liked at city hall and good in deal-making but not well connected with the public. Another factor was Obama’s campaign a year before, which drew many young people into politics and trained them in the new, social-media aspects of highly targeted politics. Many flocked to the Mike McGinn campaign, and then on into his administration, which retains the feeling of a youthful crusade, cheerfully defying their unbelieving elders.

“Authenticity” is a key value for these young voters, who are deeply cynical about conventional politics and super-quick at detecting phoniness. Accordingly, Mayor Mike dresses casually, hangs out with young crowds at the Crocodile, and does seemingly outrageous things like dissing Steve Ballmer or ignoring the protocol for state-of-the city addresses. These things send powerful messages of insurgency and genuineness.

McGinn, more than most politicians around here, grasps that Seattle has changed dramatically in the last 10-15 years, becoming a McGinn kind of town. Seattle had been, during the long Cold War boom that greatly favored the region and its economy, a classic "city of the last move." People moved here in mid-career, psychologically considering Seattle a place to settle down, to join civic organizations, to get involved in local schools. They were the ones who took the legendary fork on the Oregon Trail west — the one leading to farmland, not gold fields. And they built, particularly in the 1970s and 80s, an admirably civic-minded culture, what I call Civic Seattle.

Well, Seattle is now a classic "city of the first move." As they do with New York and San Francisco and LA, restless young people move here right out of college. They want to hang out in a cool city with lots of starter jobs and other young people and nightlife. Psychologically, they are not really intending to stay so much as to get launched. Last-move cities build solid middle class neighborhoods, jobs, and institutions. First-move cities draw an irreverent, disruptive, geeky “creative class.” They are the footloose foot soldiers of an innovation economy.

And that’s produced the major fault line in our region and our politics: the tension between an Innovation Economy and a somewhat dispirited Civic Seattle. Bridging this gap is the challenge and opportunity of the day. That’s my theme in this essay.

Thanks largely to Microsoft, this region massively put its eggs in the new economy and the young workforce it requires. The transformation has been especially dramatic and swift in Seattle. Only a generation ago, we were the most middle-class large city in America. Now we are a city with a disproportionately high number of well-educated, young, detached newcomers. We are San Francisco.

Here are a few figures to demonstrate how extreme a case Seattle has become, how far the pendulum has swung.

 Our average household size is now 2.08, well below the national average of 2.61 and lower even than San Francisco’s (2.24).

 The percentage of families with kids is 19 percent, while the national average is 31and San Francisco’s is 18.

 The percentage of non-family or unmarried households is 55 percent, compared to the national average of 33 percent.

 53 percent of Seattle adults have a college degree, highest in the nation and 20 points above the national average of 33 percent.

 Lastly, 31 percent of the Seattle population has lived in the city for five years or less; only Austin, Texas has a higher number, and it’s 32 percent.

Welcome to the Next Seattle. Smart, unmoored, mobile, young, liberal in politics. (Interestingly, the demographic portrait of towns surrounding Seattle is very close to the national norms.) So, Civic Seattle, picture a speeding bicyclist passing you as you sit in your Lexus SUV at a long red light. And maybe giving you the finger.

Such rapid demographic change has finally caught up with our slow-to-change political order. Suddenly coming to power, this new elite finds the fading regime too fond of cars, too slow in addressing climate change, too cozy with established ways of doing things. As one friend in the McGinn shop enjoys telling me, I’m Microsoft. Mayor Mike’s Apple.

In short, Mayor McGinn is no fluke. And his politics,as well as McGinn himself, are likely here to stay. These politics are impatient, oppositional, anti-suburban, deep green. They have only the slightest ties to unions, to big vested interests like the University of Washington or Microsoftor city hall and its rule-bound workers. Just as previous insurgencies used the Pike Place Market and the Commons and the R.H. Thomson Expressway as wedge issues in assuming power and as organizational tools to rally the young troops, so this rising counter-elite uses the deep-bore waterfront tunnel as a big fat symbol of auto-worshipping old-think.

Our version of evolution is more like punctuated equilibrium, where we jump to a new plateau rather suddenly.

A critical question is whether the McGinn insurgency will have staying power, or whether it will provoke a return to the political consensus Seattle has enjoyed since 1970. I’m pretty fond of that old order, having chronicled it and cheered it on for decades. Develop the arts, make a major research university, build a lively downtown, create fine urban neighborhoods to hold the middle class, cherish diversity, rescue old buildings like Town Hall, and keep plugging away at reforming our schools and building transit.

It’s a good record, but viewed by this Next Seattle, it’s not good enough, not contemporary enough. Where’s the extensive rail transit? Where’s the global leadership to a post-carbon economy? Where are the switched-on schools? Where’s the living arts scene, as opposed to a museumized culture? Why, above all, such complacency?

The key issue around which this new politics turns is climate change, and what we can do about it locally and in our daily lives. To its credit, this new political order doesn't want to keep biding its time, accepting tiny gains. Consider, for instance, the longtime goal of Civic Seattle to stop sprawl and build up a high-interaction, culturally rich downtown. The record is not very good. The Downtown Seattle Association recently reported that Seattle has lost 30,000 jobs in the past decade, 21,000 of them from the core city. We are very late in building rail transit, maybe too late. Or look at this measure, the percentage of all jobs in a region more than 10 miles outside of the central business district. Of the 45 largest American cities, Seattle (56 percent outside 10 miles) comes in 10th worst. "

By David Brewster