neighborhoods

 

Last night Jack and I saw a play called Clybourne Park at the Seattle Rep.  We were aiming for last-minute half-price tickets, but lucked out and found ourselves at pay-what-you-will night.  The play is a satire about Chicago real estate demographic changes.  The first act is set in 1959 during “white flight” and the second is set in 2009 where a white couple is moving back into the house that is central to the first act.  It was thought provoking and funny at times. 

It also was timely for us.  We’d like to build a house (“architected” like that of the couple in the play) someday in an urban part of Seattle.  In order for that to be financially possible, it will probably be in a less glossy neighborhood.  In other words, we’re exactly the kind of people who might be part of a wave of gentrification. 

The neighborhood where we live and I work is called Pioneer Square.  It used to be really seedy and now it’s got a burgeoning tech industry and it’s generally on the up and up.  I really like it, and I have this desire to get in on the ground floor before it gets too nice to be affordable. 

The point is, Jack and I don’t mind a neighborhood with tattered edges.  We haven’t had reasons to think about school systems and we rarely find ourselves in places that make us feel unsafe or uncomfortable.

But then take this past weekend.  While having lunch on Sunday in the International District with family, we learned that we were practically sitting on top of the site of the Wah Mee massacre, one of the worst killing sprees in state history, where 13 people were killed in a Chinese gambling club.  Chilling, right.  Although I wouldn’t learn it for several days, that same morning (at 2 a.m.) a 21 year-old woman was shot when someone “indiscriminately opened fire in Pioneer Square.”  If we had been awake, we would have heard the shots.

No, we don’t plan to head back to the suburbs, but this has been a lot of food for thought regarding neighborhoods.