Great places come with a cost

I’ve been spending the last few weeks putting together a photo album for Trouble 1. Like a real hands on photo album. I started for his 30 year birthday last year and made the first two, covering his life from my growing belly until he was five. Now for his 31 it was time for album nr. 3: summer -91 - summer -93. Which means our first stay in Seattle is told in pictures and writing.

Looking at a downtown picture shot from the Space Needle deck I am struck by how sparse it is. The high rises scattered over the area. And pointing the camera to South Lake Union I am thinking, wow these pictures are historic! Seattle has grown into a dense city and some places are completely changed. And the densification just keeps on happening.

There are more construction cranes in Seattle than in any other US city. While many American cities don’t have a real downtown, Seattle has a very clear and distinct one centered around the heart of shopping Pacific Place Mall, Westlake Mall and the Nordstrom flagship store. It’s great! Especially when you are new to a city it is really helpful to have a center to navigate around.

And as if that’s not enough one more downtown is coming up. South Lake Union in my pictures from 1993 is an industrial area area with one story buildings (Umebor, think Västerslätt) where you could find most anything from shipping and boat supplies to film rolls. And boy was that a hard neighborhood to navigate! Today it is the Amazon campus with 25 000 employees, more to come and a city center growing for the daily need for all those blue badged people. Easier to navigate? Well, they say it’s hard to get in and out because it’s already congested and has made the commute even worse.

For as long as I have known Seattle it has never been an inexpensive city. The only time the home prices went down was after the 2008 crash, but Seattle was never hit in the way many other cities in the US were. In 2010 I dreamt about buying the fabulous penthouse where I was staying for the summer which was for sale at a bargain, 375 000 $. I even bought lottery tickets! No luck though unfortunately.

Today Seattle tops the nation in home price growth. The national numbers are up 5.8% for the last year, Seattle 10.8%, close to double! During my early Seattle years renters were only people who were in transition or didn’t have a reliable income. That changed when home prices became unaffordable even for people with a more stable life, and during the past four years rents have skyrocket across Seattle about 40%!

So what happens to a city which is super expensive going on even more expensive? Well, except traffic congestion it attracts a finical elite. And some Seattleites who have been there for generations have to leave.

It turns out nearly half of Seattle millennials consider moving as Seattle-area costs are soaring!

45 percent of millennials in the Puget Sound region think they will have to move somewhere cheaper to afford the life they want, even though nearly all would prefer to stay in the area. Such a loss! Such a terrible loss!

This is not a problem exclusive for Seattle. Attractive places are difficult spots for young adults to start a life, same goes for Umeå although on a different scale. The condo market was up 12% only in the last quarter here. Those cities might also be a hard place to retire or being disadvantaged in other ways.

The costs in booming Seattle are even negative for tourism. A recent J.D Power survey ranks Seattle 37th on the list of the top 50 destinations in the US! The gorgeous Emerald City! What happened? Well, tourists have pretty much the same complains as Seattleites: traffic is bad and it’s expensive. A Best Western hotel in Seattle does probably not have a higher standard than in Phoenix or somewhere else. And Air.bnb doesn’t help. People offering apartments know the market values.

Where am I going with this? Well it all started with that 1993 downtown photo I just pasted in my son’s photo album. Cities like Seattle and Umeå where building cranes move like choreographed in the sky are great cities. Developing, evolving, fun, often young. The median age in Umeå is 38 years, in Seattle 35,5 of 2015. But all that comes with a cost. If you can afford that cost it’s great. If you can’t, not so much.

Fix it! Just fix it!!

I must say I am terribly disappointed. I thought more of them. And that it just hadn’t happened yet. And I feel a bit stupid I have to say, or at least naive.

During the process of creating Väven, the new building for cultural arts which opened november 2014, there was a lot of resistance for moving the city library to the facility. 

The core of Umeå city center is extremely small.  And we are very lazy. Anything which isn’t within the square of three blocks feels remote. Like if the area around Pacific Place and Westlake Mall in Seattle was the only place to be. Anyway, at the core of these three blocks there is the Metro bus terminal, Vasaplan. A bit like the Grey Hound station in Seattle although a lot nicer. The city library was located right at Vasaplan, which of course was perfect. 10 steps and you were there. The library was also a great place to wait for your bus. The newspaper and magazine corner a warm and friendly companion while waiting.

So one of the big cons against moving the city library was that it would be too far from Vasaplan and hard to get to. Now, Väven isn’t located more than three blocks from Vasaplan, so that’s like a joke. That is, of course, if you don’t have any physical problems and are able to walk those blocks.

I used to defend the con argument with the obvious one: the City would of course see to there were buses stopping frequently at the entrances of the new city cultural center and library, anything else would be unthinkable!

Now it turns out I was wrong. The City has no intention what so ever to secure bus communications to Väven. The argument for that: Vasaplan is close enough for people to walk from. Well hello, I have news for you: not everybody can walk! There is also only one (!!!) handicap parking space located at Väven, which is a building stretching two blocks in a square.

I have periods when I can walk one block or maybe two, but I can’t do it by myself, someone needs to be with me. And there are times when I can only do a few steps, and those times are more frequent. I am physically challenged. I still have problems using the word handicapped about myself. Physically challenged. Temporarily. No, probably not.

Some people who are handicapped can still drive. And those people need a handicap space to park in. And I am sure there are more than one handicapped driving person who wants to visit Väven and the new city library.

Some people get around in a wheel chair, and most of the times they are assisted by someone. They might be able to take the bus to Vasaplan and get themselves to Väven. But as Umeå 6-7 months a year is covered in ice, slush or snow, I am sure that trip is not one they fondly go for.

I can’t take a bus, so for me the City ignorance is not a problem. I can’t drive, so that one single parking space doesn’t bother me (personally) either. I need someone who is kind enough driving me, letting me off right outside the entrance, then driving parking the car somewhere while I am sitting waiting for that someone to come back and be with me during the visit. So, I don’t fit in to any of those categories.

But I do feel deeply for everyone who is physically challenged and in pain trying to do this by themselves. It’s a most difficult, dangerous and vulnerable situation. And I can’t believe the complete ignorance and lack of empathy with the officials who are responsible for these decisions.

In fact, those decisions aren’t even legal. According to the Swedish discrimination law, the City is, already during planning, obligated to secure and provide availability for everyone. What the City of Umeå does (or more correct, doesn’t) is further more not according to the legally enforceable UN convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Which Sweden has signed and agreed on.

I feel embarrassed for myself about all the times I argued for the location of the new library at the Umeå River not being a problem. Umeå wanted to turn it’s face to the water again, like it once did, and just like Seattle is planning to as well. Of course the City of Umeå would also provide communications for all of us to be a part of this face lift!

And I feel sorry and sad for everyone who is now excluded from Väven, this amazing already award winning building, the new Umeå front porch.

But most of all I feel ashamed and mad for the City of Umeå breaking Swedish law and ignoring the UN convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability. And the only thing I can say here is: fix it! Just fix it!!

Ship ahoy!

Oh how I loved being in Seattle during the Holiday Season! Just loved it!!

The Christmas tree lighting ceremony at Westlake Mall! The lit up Downtown, crazy with Christmas shoppers! The ferries filled with dressed up people going to Christmas parties! The neighborhoods competing about the most insane over-the-top light displays! But most of all I love the Christmas Ships!

For many years I made sure getting my dosage of Seattle Holidays. I packed my bags in December with an assignment of a story for Swedish National Radio or Television as an excuse and headed over for a week-ten days in a rainy city making the lights even more vibrant in the reflecting puddles.

I shot Seattle Men’s Chorus in Beneroya Hall and the Dreamliner Virtual Rollout, I reported about the different ingredients of the American Holidays and about The Washington Software Alliance. I told the story of the Cool House, the new city public library and I interviewed the author Russel Banks on a Seattle December visit. I also spent days sitting at the Blackbird Bakery on Bainbridge Island working on the texts for my photo show Away is Home, Home is Away. A couple of times the visit was postponed to right after Christmas, making me spend New Years in the Emerald City!

The Holiday memory I treasure the most though is the year we stayed in Seattle. Cause there can’t be any better place for a Holiday experience than Portage Bay overlooking the Montlake Cut!

Our place for the year was a small house that didn’t look like much from the outside, but was such a wonderful little home for my family. It was on Boyer Avenue about five blocks from University Bridge, and Portage Bay was the best entertainment all year round. I used to have my afternoon tea lying in my cushy cream colored love seat watching whatever was going on down on the bay through my big panorama window. I never got tired of that view! All those boats in different shapes and sizes! Trouble & Trouble and I had our different Argosy cruise ships favorites. Come to think of it, Trouble 2 and I actually agreed on the same preference.

This weekend is the opening for the Christmas Ships in Seattle. And I know exactly what Portage Bay looks like this evening! A parade of lit up, dressed up, spruced up boats glittering and glimmering in the dark night! And some of them have music, choirs singing on the black water!

Trouble 2 and I could sit for hours watching the floating lights waiting for our ship. Here it comes, there it is! Let’s just sit here forever and enjoy this! Oh how I miss that! And where did that little boy go?

Actually, he and Audrey are down in my kitchen making dinner for us. He is right here. In the woods at the end of the road. The opposite to Portage bay. No water for ships to sail on. I am doing what I can to lit up the dark though. Strings of lights in my maples guarding my gate. Light curtains from the roof of my front porch. Spotlights shooting up my dad’s ash tree down in the corner and the big pine next to the field.

There is one ship though! My grandfather’s old apple tree is lit up with spotlights and along the round wooden deck underneath sits a string of lights. Another string is attached to the rope tied around the stem at the crown of the tree and anchored in the ground some feet away in the lawn. That device actually looks like a backstay and in the summer I even connect a light piece of fabric to it, which makes you think of a sail.

It’s been snowing today. In the snow there is a lit up apple tree that in wintertime looks like a space ship. No, I don’t have any waters. And there are no ships sailing here. I might be able to arrange some singing though. On my space ship in the woods at the end of the road.