Flywheels by Tom Alberg

Author:Tom Alberg [Alberg, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS067000, BUS071000, Business & Economics/Leadership, Business & Economics/Urban & Regional
ISBN: 9780231553186
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Part 3

8

Livable Cities

A Seattleite who had somehow fallen asleep in 2000 and awoke in January 2020 would think he had been transported to another city. Downtown, all but deserted after 5:00 p.m. in 2000, would be teeming with life. The South Lake Union area, previously pocked with vacant lots, cheap motels, and car dealerships, would now be home to Amazon and have been transformed into a metropolis of glittering skyscrapers anchored by trillion-dollar Amazon and four-story futuristic glass orbs known as Amazon Spheres. If our Seattleite awoke in the months before COVID-19 struck, he would have been amid hordes of tech-savvy newcomers busily streaming among their offices, downtown apartments, workout facilities, and restaurants. Just a few blocks away, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eradicate global poverty and disease with Microsoft-made money, has become the largest philanthropic force in the world.

Long considered a second-tier city, Seattle has clearly arrived, envied by outsiders for its dynamic, tech-driven economy, and barely bothering to hide a certain smugness at its success. In addition to its traditional technology clusters of internet, e-commerce, mobile, and enterprise software companies, Seattle has dozens of new companies built around the next generation of cutting-edge technologies. Among them, AI, cloud computing, quantum computing, and the commercial use of outer space. Biotech is booming too, with Juno Therapeutics, Sana Biotechnology, Nautilus Biotechnology, and Seattle Genetics.

Two of the three most valuable companies in the world, Amazon and Microsoft, have drawn thousands of high-skilled, well-paid workers to the region, and two of the world’s wealthiest individuals, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, live here within a mile of each other on the Lake Washington waterfront. Fifty percent of Seattle families have incomes over $121,000; 25 percent over $200,000.1

This surge in creative workers and wealth has created positive ripple effects, providing a tax base and private contributions that support the arts, medical research, social welfare, schools, a new rail rapid transit system, and a $15 minimum wage with built-in escalations. Support from the tech sector together with traditional private donors allowed the Seattle Art Museum to grow a world-class collection and create a sculpture park on the waterfront. The new wealth powered huge capital drives by the University of Washington, propelling the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering—with two new buildings and tripling its offering of undergraduate computer science majors—to become one of the highest-ranked in the nation. Soaring retail sales and property taxes increased city revenues from $3.85 billion in 2010 to $5.9 billion in 2019.2

But our recently awakened Seattleite would also see thousands of homeless people, many of them living in parks or tents pitched alongside sidewalks and highways. He would sit in our traffic-congested roadways that frustrate our well-to-do and ill-serve our less affluent. He might assume that a city of highly educated, well-paid tech workers would have world-class public schools, but he would be shocked to learn that the academic disparities between middle-income white children and low-income students of color that tarred us two decades ago have only worsened.

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