A recent column in the New York Times by Timothy Egan exposes the depth of assumptions held by many in our community about Amazon, growth, and housing. The exposure isn’t so much in the content of Egan’s column but it’s form, a kind of wistful obituary for a city that, according to Eagan, was once a leisurely and simple town. That’s gone, sucked away by Amazon, the online giant that has been growing in leaps and bounds, creating lots of jobs here and around the world meeting demand for services and products. Amazon has also drawn blame for everything from wiping out books and bookstores to, well, sucking the soul out of Seattle. Eagan’s column has so many tacit assumptions that if you don’t share most of them, the column feels more like a sad diary entry rather than something that should take up real estate on the pages of the New York Times.

What comes with the title of being the fastest growing big city in the country, with having the nation’s hottest real estate market, is that the city no longer works for some people. For many others, the pace of change, not to mention the traffic, has been disorienting. The character of Seattle, a rain-loving communal shrug, has changed. Now we’re a city on amphetamines.

Sad! Eagan is disoriented, stuck in traffic, and the once plaid ridden and lazy city is now full of amped up kids bouncing around in fancy cars. Eagan sounds very much like local curmudgeon Joel Connelly or Danny Westneat, essentially lice action and column writing versions of Mr. Wilson from the Dennis the Menace cartoons.

But median home prices have doubled in five years, to $700,000. This is not a good thing in a place where teachers and cops used to be able to afford a house with a water view.

Dammit! My kids teacher now has a view of a brick wall. That’s just terrible.

As a Seattle native, I miss the old city, the lack of pretense, and dinner parties that didn’t turn into discussions of real estate porn. But I’m happy that wages have risen faster here than anywhere else in the country. I like the fresh energy. To the next Amazon lottery winner I would say, enjoy the boom — but be careful what you wish for.

I just wonder where these parties are and what “real estate porn” might be. Is there a centerfold in the local Apartment Guide I don’t know about?

I was up in Everett for a meeting a couple weeks ago and I made a point to spend the whole day there. Two things came to mind. First, the town reminded me of the song Brandy by Looking Glass. Second, Everett seemed like the room mate asleep in front of the television, with a trucker hat over his face and a PBR on the coffee table while Seattle is like the room mate with a $1000 Italian suit who is having a “crisis” because he can’t find the keys to his Mercedes.

I get it.

But do we really want to be like Everett. It is a fine town and I liked my visit a lot. However, Seattle is never going to be like Everett again. We are becoming a big, global city with lots of innovation driving jobs, diversity, and much wider and cosmopolitain world view. These are not things to be trying to stop. Sure, it can be scary, but change always is. An article in Slate magazine about technology quoted author Douglas Adams on change:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I think guys like Eagan and Connelly and Westneat and everyone else need to just soak that in for a minute. They’ve become the creaky old guy on the porch in a rocking chair complaining about “those damn kids!” Yes, change can be very difficult and it can create real pain for real people. But the best thing we can do about it is not talk about the good old days, but prepare for the good new days ahead by allowing the market to produce lots more housing and lower the barriers to entering the prosperity and boom we have going. That’s the answer. Feel sad about the loss of the past, sure. But let’s not let being sad get in the way of making progress.

Too often the tone about Amazon is all about how they are hurting people. They aren’t. People are getting hurt because of nostalgia and envy, not greed and wealth. The sooner we stop fretting about Amazon and making way for the world that wants to live here, the sooner we can overcome housing scarcity the does make it expensive.