
I took my Volkswagen in to the shop to have the clutch checked.
If you don't know what a clutch is and you don't know how to drive a manual transmission, then you might be younger than my car.
There once was a repair shop in my neighborhood within walking distance. "Service stations," as they used to be called, were places where you could buy gas and a can of motor oil. There was always a mechanic around who could throw your vehicle up on the lift in the service bay, check the fluids, fix a flat tire, change a fan belt and generally keep things in tune. The service station that was in my neighborhood still sells gas. It's self-serve only, of course. Where the lift bays were there is now a "convenience store." It sells basic foodstuffs, wine, beer, cigarettes and vaping devices, all at higher than normal prices. It also sells lottery tickets.
There are a lot of convenience stores around, but few service stations.
On the way to drop off my car, I drove past my neighborhood bank. The building was empty. It's been closed for about a year and there's a large "For Lease" sign hanging in the front door. Several national and regional banks have closed nearby branches. The commercial spaces remain vacant. Nothing moved in to fill the void. I think that the bank CEOs want to eliminate their 'brick and mortar' storefronts (and their employees) by encouraging customers to bank electronically using their smart phones. I refuse. I don't refuse because I do not understand how digital banking works. I refuse because I do understand how digital banking works.
The car shop where I dropped off my Volkswagen is one of a shrinking number of family owned businesses in this part of town. The windows are barred. The owner has mounted video surveillance cameras at the corners. A sign in the parking lot cautions customers to lock their doors and to leave nothing valuable in the passenger compartment. In the greenbelt around the periphery of the repair shop there are discarded brown paper bags with empty bottles, shards of aluminum foil (probably used to heat up methamphetamine or fentanyl) lots of plastic bags, and sundry garbage. Across the street, near the bus stop, a grocery cart lies tipped over on its side.
I talked to the repair shop owner for a few minutes. I talk to everyone. I think people should talk to people, whether you know them or not. The repair shop owner told me about his burgle bars and the cameras.
"They don't make any difference," he told me. "People steal cars and then drive the stolen cars through the doors late at night. They come in, take what they can and run away, leaving the stolen vehicles stuck in the front door. The police come the next day. Or they don't come at all."
The repair shop owner told me that five years ago he was paying $5,000 a year for 5 million dollars in general liability insurance. His former insurance company dropped him because he had been burglarized so many times. Now, he has a new insurance company that provides the same coverage for double the price and triple the deductible. He continues to be burglarized, but he doesn't report it any more. If he does, his premiums will go even higher. Or his new insurer will drop him, too, and he will go out of business.
City officials talk about the crime rate dropping. They're lying. The crime rate has not dropped. It's only that many smaller crimes - shoplifting, vandalism, theft, retail burglary - are no longer reported to the police or to the insurance companies.
I can relate to this. Since well before Covid, I have practiced law from a home office. I carry a general liability insurance policy that covers the usual unexpected events like slips, falls, vandalism, theft and alien marauders from another solar system. I live in a relatively good neighborhood: only a few automobiles have been prowled or stolen, just a couple of houses have been burglarized and neighborhood mailboxes have been ransacked only now and then. I personally have experienced no claims... so far. This year, however, my general liability insurer also dropped me. It was not because of my own claims history, but because the insurer - Allstate - was getting out of the business of insuring any small business in the State of Washington. The risk was too high, according to Allstate. I found another insurer: But I could only purchase half the coverage for double the premium, just like the car repair shop owner experienced.
It would take a little time before the shop could check out my Volkswagen's clutch, so I decided to walk around like a landlubber Ulysses touring Northeast Seattle.
There is an upscale shopping center nearby. The shopping center includes a Tesla store, Lululemon, and other trendy fashion shops you might find in the tony commercial districts of Manhattan, San Francisco or LA. The shopping center parking lot is full of expensive cars, many of them electric. There is a multi-bay EV charging station on site. Shoppers - mostly well-groomed and fashionably dressed - go about their affairs, looking at this or that and looking for others to look back at them.
The main campus of the University of Washington is up the hill. Students - young, affluent and outwardly normal looking - patronize the many upscale stores. Their parents apparently have money. The entire shopping center is private property with private security and you don't see any homeless people.
There is a liquor store next to the QFC grocery store. You cannot even enter the liquor store without showing photographic ID. All bags have to be checked at the entrance. Rolling luggage, duffel bags and carts are absolutely prohibited. There is an armed off-duty police officer wearing body armor standing at the door. Inside, all of the bottles are under lock and key. You have to make your selection and a store clerk will then pull the bottle and put it in your check-out basket.
Homeless people live in the greenbelt surrounding the shopping center. In the neutered argot of American "progressive" politics (so called), the homeless are euphemistically described as 'campers' or 'people experiencing homelessness.' They live adjacent to the bike trail or in tents near the freeway or in "tiny homes" - Hooverville-like villages or campsites set up on church parking lots or City green spaces. Many 'campers' squat in vacant buildings where they sleep, cook food and mix injectable drugs like meth and fentanyl over open flames. Building fires are not uncommon in Seattle now. Even as I type this, there is a two-alarm fire on Capitol Hill where a 'vacant' building is burning. The adjacent structure has now also caught fire.
I continued my odd city odyssey. In the University District, some are passed out or sleeping on the sidewalk. Strange people barely attired in dirty, torn and misfitted clothes mumble incoherently as they meander down the sidewalks and stumble across the streets. They are on drugs or they are crazy. Or both.
No, they are not university students. But they might have been when and where I went to college.
Some of these down-and-out people hold crudely lettered cardboard signs next to the freeway exits and panhandle for money. Sometimes a driver stops and gives a few bills. Usually not. It's unknown what the money is used for, but it is as likely spent on liquor or drugs as on food. BMWs, Audis, Porches and large late model SUVs drive by with their privacy glass windows rolled up. It's a tale of two non-intersecting cities.
There are a lot of taverns, coffee shops, recreational marijuana vendors, "cheap eats" restaurants, glass pipe smoking paraphernalia, and tattoo shops in the University District. And, of course, there are several convenience stores. They all sell basic foodstuffs, wine, beer, cigarettes and vaping devices, all at higher than normal prices. They also sell lottery tickets.
The main university bookstore is still open, but it's a mere shadow of what it was. Where once there were three floors of books, there is now just one. The 'fiction' section of the bookstore is spare and populated with the usual vacuous titles you can find in airport waiting lounges along with a mishmash of Trans or LGBTQ oriented novels, science fiction and romance books. The 'history' section of the bookstore is skimpy. The history book titles, such that there are, look like they were selected and approved by censors at the U.S. State Department, Homeland Security and/or the CIA.
Perhaps I am partly to blame for the sad state or our bookstores. I used to enjoy hanging out in them, drinking coffee and browsing for hours. Now, there are just a few decent bookstores left. Some of the West Coast survivors might be far away in Portland, Oregon, San Francisco or Vancouver British Columbia. Instead of visiting bookstores, I now buy books online, like everyone else. I try to avoid Amazon, however, for various reasons I will discuss another time. Instead, I began to buy books from The Book Depository located in the U.K. The Book Depository paid for the trans-oceanic shipping and there was no sales tax. Then, I learned that The Book Depository - once an independent book seller - had been acquired by Amazon.
Two years later, Amazon shut it down.
Downtown Seattle is full of tourists. Or so I hear. I don't go downtown very often any more. It has changed dramatically in the last two decades. The sidewalks downtown are like the sidewalks in the University District. Several major retailers have closed. Near the courthouse, people lie passed out on the sidewalk. The gigantic cruise ships dock and pour out their human cargo. The tourists mill about, take photographs, shop for souvenirs, eat in the chain restaurants and go back to their hotels or their Airbnbs or their cruise ships at nightfall.
Airbnbs are partly to blame for the so-called shortage of affordable housing. Housing is, indeed, unaffordable for most people, but it is not because of any "shortage." The lack of affordable housing is caused by inflation, the reduced buying power of your money, and big capital in the form of corporate investors and real estate speculators who swoop in and buy up the housing stock for cash. They then lease out the houses to middle and working class people who must rent because they cannot afford to buy anything. Or, the investors turn the housing stock into tourist abodes like Airbnb. Either way, big capital exacerbates the problem. Other big cities of the world that have similar problems know that the investors are the problem, not the solution. It's a problem that we cannot solve simply by building more cheap residences that, too, will be bought up by big capital to turn into rentals or tourist Airbnbs.
The City thinks that tourism is a clean and healthy industry. I disagree. Tourism creates, at best, low-wage service jobs. Tourism as an industry fosters crime and corruption and superficial social voyeurism. Tourism strains public infrastructure. Tourism causes native residents to avoid all the places that the hordes of tourists usually visit. Tourism creates a tinsely, movie-set kind of urban Disneyland. Some tourists are polite and gracious. Others are simply obnoxious. A few are idiots. They all leave in their wake noise, congestion, pollution, and inflation for the locals to deal with. I understand that residents of high-tourism disaster areas like Barcelona, Venice, Florence, Paris and Athens agree. There is growing sentiment world-wide to curb, if not outright ban tourism.
But, do you remember my Volkswagen? I had left it at the shop to have the clutch checked out and I had some time to spare. I returned to my pedestrian odyssey in Northeast Seattle.
I walked over to the Bartell Drugs to buy some small items. Bartell's was founded in 1890. It was a local company until its 69 stores were acquired by Rite Aid in 2020.
In 2023, Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy. It started to shutter pharmacies all over the country, including many Bartell Drugs in Washington State.
The Bartell stores that remain open look very sad. Their shelves are bare and the stores do not carry many brands. I couldn't find the razor blades I was looking for. A Bartell's store clerk told me the reason for the empty shelves was "supply chain" problems. I think that means a) they are in bankruptcy and vendors won't sell them merchandise, and b) the various trade tariffs imposed by the U.S. Government on China have made it too difficult or too expensive to obtain certain consumer goods.
I have had a similar experience looking for products online. Often, a product was "out of stock" or "back-ordered." Literally for ever!
What does this mean in a society when you cannot buy simple razor blades? Is this what if feels like in wartime when consumer goods are rationed? Is this how it felt on the other side of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War? It seems that, now, we are within the Iron Curtain and we are the ones who are experiencing rationing.
I couldn't find what I wanted at Bartell's, so I tried at the nearby QFC grocery store. QFC stands for "Quality Food Centers" and it, too, was a local company. First founded in 1963, QFC soon absorbed Thriftway and Stock Market groceries.
Grow or die is the western economic model. Big fish eat little fish. Big corporations swallow smaller corporations. Everything in the western model of hyper-capitalism tends toward monopoly. Contrary to the standard narrative, capitalists hate competition and they always try to kill it off.
QFC was itself acquired by Fred Meyer. In 1998, Fred Meyer then merged with Kroger, one of the biggest grocery store chains. Currently, Albertson's has proposed to merge with Kroger. That merger would create one of the biggest food store chains in the world.
There used to be a large Safeway grocery store nearby. It was shuttered about a year ago. Its boarded up windows grace part of the photo montage at the top of this story. The Safeway parking lot is now seasonably used as parking for University of Washington Husky football games. Where now the Safeway is will eventually rise another thicket of small apartments and condominiums. Perhaps this is why there are now so many "convenience stores" - the number of grocery stores is shrinking.
There once was an Office Depot supply outlet on the other side of the shopping center. It, too, was demolished a year or two ago. In its place, of course, are hundreds of small apartments or condominiums.
Apartment buildings are springing up everywhere like grass. There are now more newly constructed tiny apartments and condominiums around the University District than there are student dormitories on campus. A couple of years ago, the City deliberately changed the zoning laws in the U District to foster mid-rise housing construction by the private sector. Everywhere you look there are more mid-rise housing units under construction. Developers buy up small local businesses and affordable old boarding houses, tear them down, and build lots of small housing units to rent or sell. These new mid-rise apartment buildings and condominiums and multiplexes all look alike. They are all made of ticky-tacky. They add to population density and traffic congestion. They will rapidly deteriorate and become slums.
Who is supposed to live in all the instant Cracker Jack box-like apartments the developers are building everywhere? It probably doesn't matter.
I have the impression that the West is actually experiencing, not a recession, but an economic depression all across the globe. Although the massive federal works projects of the Franklin Roosevelt administration did alleviate some of the pain of the Great Depression of 1929-1939, what actually ended it was War. Today, governments everywhere are implementing both programs - massive federal works projects... and War. You have to wear blinders not to see this. Additionally, there is nothing that "creates" more jobs quickly than a lot of housing projects (except, of course, the creative destruction of War and the arms industry).
In essence, solving the "affordable housing crisis" may not be the point. The point is to prime the economic engine, to increase the flow and circulation of money and to stoke the profits of the investor class. It doesn't really matter whether anyone really needs the new tiny apartments or whether they will last very long. The economic churn is everything.
In downtown Seattle, the office space vacancy rate in 2019 was 5%. In 2024 the vacancy rate is 25%.
It could be worse, I suppose. In San Francisco, the office space vacancy rate has hit 34.5%.
In response to the "affordable housing crisis" and the glut of empty downtown office space, the Seattle City Council has voted to waive land use codes and allow office buildings to be converted into residential apartment buildings. Among the candidates for "conversion" to residential apartments is the thirty-eight story Smith Tower constructed a hundred years ago in 1914. This sounds as absurd as the script for the 1999 movie Being John Malkovich.
Nevertheless. The local growth coalition has ordained that more of the same is necessary. Because there is an "affordable housing crisis."
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Anyway. The Safeway store is no more.
I ducked into the QFC.
I found my razor blades. Well, they weren't exactly what I was looking for, but close. The razors, however, were on a shelf behind a locked door. The self-service store had been transformed into a full-service store. A clerk had to come and unlock the security grate and pull out the product for me. This is a grocery store! Many items in the store were locked up, even those that weren't terribly valuable. "It's because of all the shop-lifting and pilferage," the clerk wearily explained to me. I asked the clerk how a retail business could be run this way where a clerk had to "unlock" half the merchandise for individual customers. She simply shrugged. She didn't know any better than I did. I think she is concerned that, sooner or later, management will try to replace her with an AI robot. Then, she, too, could join the ranks of those "experiencing homelessness." Or, she might lose her home and have to rent one of the brand new teeny tiny apartments that will be erected nearby.
In Seattle, the minimum wage for "large employers" is currently $19.97/hour. That's high, relative to other cities. But the cost of living here is also extremely high. The rise in wages is always outstripped by inflation and the galloping cost of living.
Always.
No family (and possibly no single adult) can long survive in Seattle earning the minimum wage.
I continued my odd city odyssey. I left the upscale shopping center and walked north. The old Kidd Valley hamburger joint - one of Seattle's oldest - was boarded up and fenced off. I think that more small apartments or multiplexes will be built here. Eventually. Graffiti covered the walls of the old hamburger joint. It looked very sad.
Further up the street, a jeweler who had been in business for decades had closed his store forever. The jeweler told me a few months ago that he had been burglarized six or seven times in less than a year, his door smashed in by stolen cars or pickup trucks, his shop ransacked and his inventory stolen. He had installed bars, mounted surveillance cameras, put in an electric access door and acquired a large dog to guard the premises. He reported the break-ins to the police and to his insurers. It was for naught. He called it quits.
I trundled back to the repair shop. My VW was ready. The clutch was beginning to fail, but it might last a while longer. Maybe. I drove home.
I found out later that, while I was traipsing around on my odd city odyssey, someone had been shot and killed just about half a mile to the north outside the main entrance gate to Warren Magnuson Park. The shooting happened at a 7-Eleven convenience store. It sells basic foodstuffs, wine, beer, cigarettes and vaping devices, all at higher than normal prices. It also sells lottery tickets.
There are a lot of shootings these days in Seattle. Almost every weekend, we hear gunshots coming from Warren Magnuson Park after nightfall. The police don't investigate, although the Mayor has purchased a "Shot-Spotter" technology that will inform the police where the gunfire is coming from. It was a waste of money - anyone could tell them when and where the gunfire is coming from. But shootings are barely news any more. Still, the politicians insist that we have to do more to "get the guns off the streets."
But in my odd city odyssey I didn't see any guns on the street.
I saw signs of gangsterism and lawlessness on the street.
I saw economic lawlessness and profiteering.
I saw lawlessness and violence in our federal government. It (hypocritically) talks nice; but it robs, kills, lies and cheats like the criminals on the streets, just on a bigger scale.
And I saw corruption of the civic soul, the civic soul of a society that is decohering before our very eyes.
We seemed to have lost our way somewhere and we can't figure out where we are or how we got here or how to turn ourselves around.
I think the answer to the riddle must come from answering the questions in exactly that order: before we can figure out how to turn ourselves around, we have to understand where we are and how we got here. Otherwise, if we cannot figure out where we are and how we got here, we might just run around in circles like headless chickens and end up back where we started.
My odd city odyssey brought me back home. My old Volkswagen still runs okay. For now. I don't intend to leave town. Anyway, where would I go that's any better? I intend to stay here and help sort things out, if I can. But it's a far bigger undertaking than any one of us can do alone.
* * * * *
