Someone just slipped this art over the transom–AND I LOVE IT!–but I am increasingly paranoid that we’re close to losing first-mover status on the gondola project I pitched you back in April. I thought at first this must have come from your shop, but as I have heard abso-fricking-lutely nothing on that end, I don’t know. With you tight-lipped bastards, you never can tell. Moving a lot of comparative percentages of Kindles lately? Ha ha! I kid.
Thing is, it didn’t come via the secret network of underground pneumatic tubes linking Seattle’s elite power centers. By the way, have you been getting Ballmer’s Sonics jersey orders, too? They look sharp. I put myself down for a few, just gotta remember to send an intern down to Nordy’s to pick ’em up.
Obviously we do rely on the OTT (over-the-transom) network when the tubes are down, but mine are working fine. I just sent Blethen that box of Cubans for going ahead with the anti-stadium editorials. (YOU’VE GOT STONES, BLETHEN!)
Two problems! Speaking of Blethen, this is in the Times today, buried in that story about tunnel work cutting into waterfront business. Yeah, I know, boo-fucking-hoo! You lobbied your asses off for the single most expensive option there was and now you’re shocked to find there’s no money for mitigation? This goddamn unfair world!
Wait, it’s not that story, it’s the seawall replacement story: “Ambitious preliminary plans for the park include a gondola climbing from the waterfront up to First Avenue at Union Street”! Jesus Christ, Jeff! I read that and my heart sank to damn near Facebook’s stock price!
God love those loons at City Hall, but if the city tries to build a gondola it will take 35 years and the final design will look something like this. You know it’s true, Jeff! Stop laughing! It’s true!
Plus, update from Luntz on messaging, turns out “gondolas” won’t fly. Everyone thinks you’re digging a canal down Denny filled with caterwauling Italians poling kayaks! I was just in Switzerland, Jeff, taking in the glorious Alpine view of my bank account, and I heard them calling gondolas “cablebahns.” This is very good, I think, but we’ve still got to be careful about sounding too…you know. My god, the trouble I got for writing in Obergruppenführer on the org chart!
AMAZONBAHN! See, the rhyme takes the scary out of the German. You put the happy smile beneath it, it’s all doppelbock and pretzels. I hope to god you’re pressing ahead on your end. I’m running through a lot of expensive Scotch naming things. We both know crosstown congestion isn’t going to fix itself. I lose about three interns a week on Denny, Jeff. They simply never come back. It’s Day One, Jeff. Day Two, let’s string some cable.
Imagine all the transit, moving people around (Image: Seattle Subway)
Saturday afternoon I sat Seattle Subway‘s Ben Schiendelman down at the Hopvine and asked just what the heck was going on.
Schiendelman is an interesting character: a software engineer and transit enthusiast (he’s one of the gang at Seattle Transit Blog) who’s evolved into a transit advocate, willing to plunge into the messy and often-arcane realm of political action to get things done.
That impulse, simply to speed things along, is largely what the new non-profit Seattle Subway (over 1,600 fans on Facebook) is about, the catchy, “envisionary” full-system graphic aside. (Ballard! West Seattle! It’s like someone’s planning to reattach Seattle’s arms.) Underground, aboveground, they don’t really care, so long as the net result is speed.
Sound Transit already has big plans for light rail in the region, it’s just that because it is a regional entity, it often has to move at a slower pace, as intransigent anti-transit forces are won over and voters in less-wealthy areas agree to allocate the revenue to pay for infrastructure. As a compromise Sound Transit has been breaking out its big transit projects into “phases,” all of which require ballots marked “Yes.”
Seattle Subway wants to leverage Seattle’s bias to vote pro-anything-transit, even a Monorail. In fact, that failed Monorail project has given them an idea. I’ll let The Stranger‘s Dominic Holden summarize:
Here’s how it would work: Seattle voters would take advantage of the City Transportation Authority, created by the state legislature in 2002, which was intended to fund the monorail. That authority still allows voters to establish a motor vehicle excise tax of up to 2.5 percent for “a transportation system that utilizes train cars running on a guideway.” An initial vote as soon as this November or next year could pay for relatively inexpensive analysis and design work for the first line—probably to Ballard and West Seattle.
As Schiendelman is careful to emphasize, the idea is not to compete with Sound Transit, but to help turn a tortoise into a hare. If you map out all that Sound Transit means to accomplish, at its current rate of returning to voters for piecemeal approval, it might take a century. With Seattle giving a push, Schiendelman asks, could we bring that down to 30 years?
For a start, if the City Transportation Authority can front-load the money for studies and planning Sound Transit still needs to do, progress there could be made in 2013, instead of 2016. Slice three years off here and there, it starts to add up. So Seattle Subway’s first goal is to figure out if they can, using the CTA, get on the 2013 August primary ballot with a proposal to raise planning moneys for Sound Transit.
If you are a transit wonk, this all makes perfect sense. But if you’re looking at paying the motor vehicle excise tax, you might need a little more reason to take transit on your shoulders. As it happens, by coincidence, Amazon wants to build a very good reason to invest heavily in Seattle transit right now. Let’s take a look at Amazon’s timeline: Back in February, it was still a rumor that the internet retailer was interested in buying twelve acres of land, near Whole Foods on Denny, for a corporate headquarters.
(Image: Amazon's Design Review proposal)
At this precise moment, land purchased, they are seeking to fast-track permitting for Rufus 2.0, a new campus of three towers, adding up to three million square feet of office space. For New York-style contrast, that’s a little more than the amount of floorspace in the 102-story Empire State Building (2.7 million sq. ft.) and, for ironic contrast, about the same size of an old Chrysler plant. Each of Amazon’s towers would be up to 40 stories tall, with a “series of 5-6 story structures at their base.” They would like to get the Master Use Permit squared away by December 20, 2012, thanks.
“The company reported recently that it ended 2011 with 56,200 employees, a 67% increase from the prior year,” noted the Wall Street Journal recently, but that was soon out of date. Geekwire provides the new total: 65,000. Amazon won’t tell you how many of those employees work in Seattle, but however you slice it, you can’t get that many more people on Denny. Let me quote The SunBreak (full disclosure: me) on this:
Again, there is no solution envisioned, even as South Lake Union bulks up with Amazon, PATH, and Gates Foundation employees. We are simply supposed to accept as the natural way of things that public transit means taking 45 minutes to travel what could take seven minutes. Maybe it’s time to elect an engineer of some kind to the City Council?
(Sidebar to City Council: You know what makes a great public benefit package? GONDOLAS!)
The first point is, this is the kind of private development that our transit infrastructure needs to be able to keep up with, and I think you would be hard-pressed to make the case that, currently, we are managing that. The second point, is that it’s not a one-off that Schiendelman is a software engineer, and also interested in improving transit. Amazon, iconically, and in general, high tech, are reshaping Seattle’s self-image as a sleepy little burg on the Sound, a place to get away from it all. Seattle’s central core is becoming as dense as Manhattan, argues Schiendelman, if it isn’t already.
Amazon is putting down roots, and so are its employees. People who are used to optimizing systems for gains of split seconds are not going to be happy with transit that fails, each and every day, due to demand and lack of priority. (As Metro discovered when OneBusAway got flaky.) An engineer thinks that kind of thing is crazy. If it has taken Seattle a long time to realize that fast, reliable transit needs to be a priority, Seattle Subway is here to tell you that waiting even longer to implement would be crazier still.
At 9:22 a.m. Friday morning, on the 300 block of Terry Avenue North, armed robbers entered a restaurant–police aren’t specifying which, but since the block includes the Brave Horse Tavern, Cuoco, and Portage Bay Cafe, the odds are good that Tom Douglas took a loss.
A robbery in itself–even an armed robbery–isn’t big news in a big city, or even Seattle, but it is a little incongruous to imagine the thousands of Amazonians streaming thither and yon while (as I hear it) robbers were pointing guns at threatening restaurant employees while they tied them up.
The initial, terse police report gives merely the time of the incident (9:22 a.m.), the time of the report (10:37 a.m.), a summary (ROBBERY-BUSINESS-BODYFORCE) and the kind of business (RESTAURANT).
As you can see from Spotcrime.com’s map, South Lake Union isn’t exactly crime-free, but the bulk of the incidents are car prowls, with a few assaults thrown in. Robbery of a business during daylight hours requires a different kind of criminal than an opportunist or hooligan.
For all that, the crime seems to have gone uncovered by local media, even though the Seattle Times is just blocks away. I have a call in to the Seattle Police Department to see if there’s an update, or more details they can divulge.
UPDATE: SPD PIO Mark Jamieson says the incident has not yet been assigned to robbery detectives, but will be soon, and that a public (redacted) version of the report will be available online in a few days. (The usual promise is three business days to get reports up.)
UPDATE UPDATE: Here is the redacted narrative from the police report–I’ve tried to fill in aliases for the blanked out names to keep it readable. I had initially heard the robbers were armed, but the statement indicates they relied on bodily force, so the post has been updated to reflect that:
PER VICTIM [A], HE WAS IN HIS OFFICE GETTING THE DAILY RESTAURANT CASH READY FOR THE DAY. THE LISTED SUSPECTS ENTERED THE OFFICE, SUSP. #1 STATED [HE HAD A] C.O.D. DELIVERY. SUSP. #2 WAS CARRYING TWO CARDBOARD BOXES. WHEN THEY WERE BOTH IN THE OFFICE SUSP. #2 THREW THE BOXES AT VICTIM .
BOTH THE SUSPECTS THEN GRABBED VICTIM [A] AND FORCED HIM DOWN TO THE FLOOR, THE SUSPECTS USED A ZIP TIE TO TIE WRISTS BEHIND HIS BACK. SUSP. #1 THEN ASKED FOR THE COMBINATION TO THE SAFE. [A] WAS AFRAID THAT HE WOULD BE INJURED SO HE GAVE THE COMBINATION. SUSP. # 2 STAYED ON BACK TO KEEP HIM ON THE FLOOR. AT ABOUT THIS TIME VICTIM [B], WALKED INTO THE OFFICE AND SAW [VICTIM A] BEING HELD DOWN ON THE FLOOR. SUSP. #1 STATED “WALK AWAY”.
SUSP. #1 THEN GRABBED VICTIM [B] BY THE BACK OF THE HAIR AND PUT HER FACE DOWN ON THE FLOOR AND USED A ZIP TIE TO TIE HER WRISTS ABOVE HER HEAD. SUSP. #1 THEN GOT THE COMBINATION FROM [A] AND OPENED THE SAFE. HE TOOK APPROX. $5,000.0 AND SEVERAL BUSINESS CHECKS FROM THE SAFE. SUSPECT #1 THEN ASKED [A] WHERE THE REST OF THE MONEY WAS AND [A] TOLD HIM THAT THERE WERE SEVERAL BAGS ON THE DESK. SUSPECT #1 GRABBED ALL OF THE BAGS WHICH CONTAINED APPROX $1,000.00 IN CASH. SUSP. #1 THEN STATED ” WE ARE GOING TO LEAVE NOW, IF YOU MOVE IN FIVE MINUTES WE ARE GOING TO KNOW AND WE’RE GOING TO HURT YOU.”
BOTH VICTIMS STATED THAT THEY WERE NOT INJURED DURING THIS INCIDENT. THERE WERE SEVERAL OTHER EMPLOYEES IN OTHER PARTS OF THE RESTAURANT. NONE WERE IN A POSITION TO WITNESS THIS INCIDENT.
R/O BAGGED THE ONE REMAINING CARDBOARD BOX AND THE TWO ZIP TIES AND LOGGED INTO SPD EVIDENCE TO BE CHECKED FOR FINGERPRINTS. THERE IS POSSIBLE VIDEO EVIDENCE BUT WAS NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.
Picture of GMD Mueller gondola lift in Gstaad, Switzerland, built in 1984 (Photo: Wikipedia/Acather96)
Dear Mr. Bezos,
You seem like a fairly thick-skinned gentleman, so no doubt you will keep smiling through the “Behind the Amazon.com smile” series from the Seattle Times. But Mr. Bezos–Jeff, may I?–consider your PR team. They are sensitive people. Haul one in and examine him or her for signs of stress this week, and I am sure you will see they are looking a little ragged. Sort of like a warehouse worker. Ha! No, I kid. We have fun.
Help us to help you help them, Jeff. The Times makes a big deal of your alleged anti-philanthropy stance. Philanthropy, schmilanthropy. You know what philanthropy is? Let me speak frankly: Getting something done because the other assholes aren’t doing it. You think Andrew Carnegie meant to build homeless shelters? No, he was investing in technology. It happened to be information technology shaped like a building, but there it is.
Let’s talk gondolas, Jeff. Cable-fucking-driven gondolas. You know why? Because the other assholes aren’t doing it. There you are in your new South Lake Union digs, central to everything, all wired up, and every day your employees are sardined into the #8 bus, which during commute times is traveling at less than walking speed. You can’t buy a condo in SLU anymore, so the best they can do for proximity is Belltown, Queen Anne, or Capitol Hill.
I don’t need to tell the man who runs Amazon about logistics. This situation isn’t going to improve on its own. Plus, you’re expanding from SLU to your new Denny parcel. More stress on that godawful Denny, and there’s no conventional solution. More buses would just stack up in traffic, and the city will never find the cojones to allocate a bus-only rush-hour lane.
I’m not an engineer, Jeff. But I think I share your interest in disruptive technology. And when it comes to the constraints, or guiding forces, of this particular situation, I am betting that you, like me, will come to the conclusion that the solution here is gondolas. Ask the Gondola Project. They’ll tell you. Cable-propelled aerial transit. It’s like a super-low-orbit space elevator, without the space and orbit. But the elevator part, that’s right on–an elevator that moves transversely. Lateral thinking, Jeff.
Now I admit, just as the Seattle Transit Blog says, “most people find the idea of urban aerial trams and gondolas far fetched.” That’s why this is a letter to Jeff Bezos, Jeff. Far-fetched is up your alley. Take this gondola-ball and run with it, and all your philanthropy problems will melt away, while you stay right on brand: Amazon is the company that is futurewise. It’s not like no one else does private transit: Boeing has for years, Microsoft’s Connector keeps expanding, even the Hutch and Children’s run their own fleet.
But fleets of what, Jeff? Buses. You will have gondolas. Which is going to end up on the evening news around the world? Buses or a new gondola system? I think you know that answer to that. Fucking gondolas will, Jeff. People will line up for that.
You don’t have to be out there alone on this. I know you could, you don’t give a shit. But run it past Paul Allen at your next billionaires’ brunch. Paul gets transit. Better, he gets that the rest of us get transit much more quickly if he visits City Hall to tell them, Guess what, I’m putting my own goddamn train down Westlake, bitches.
Talk out the financing. Great thing about gondolas, they’re not as expensive as other transit options. They’re the door-desk of transit, Jeff.
Philanthropy is just a way to do something transformative politely, Jeff. “Watch as I philanthropize,” you say, and then everyone claps. What do you care? You got the shit done that needed to be done. Step into a gondola, whisk yourself away. “I’m riding on a Be-zos line,” you can hum, to Berlin. (You like Berlin, I feel it.) The SLU station can be called The Amazone. “Ama” for heart, Jeff. You feel like making history again?
UPDATE: A reader reminds me of this much more serious and less profanity-laden post about the prospect of South Lake Union-spanning gondolas, by Matt Roewe on CityTank. Good news, Jeff! Roewe estimates the cost for the project could be just $75 million.
Is spring in the residential real estate air? (Photo: MvB)
It may be hard to believe, but overall, the nation’s real estate market has been slowly on the mend for some time. As Redfin points out in their milestone bottom-calling post:
A year ago we said sales would be up in 2011, and despite the unfair comparison of a 2011 with no tax credits to a 2010 that had the homebuyer tax credit in effect for half the year, 2011 did indeed see about 2% more sales than 2010 in the markets we serve across the country.
In Seattle, realtors are perking up, trading stories of that now-mythical experience, multiple offers above listing. For Seattle, Zillow lists 7,300 homes “recently sold” versus some 3,200 for sale. That’s not to say it hasn’t been a cold winter for home-sellers–all three Case-Schiller price tiers fell in December, points out Seattle Bubble–but a stagnant inventory was helping to push prices down. More recent numbers suggest a “surprise sales spike.”
Redfin currently counts some 530 foreclosed properties in the Seattle area (280 in Seattle proper) that are for sale, but that number is likely to increase in 2012. An AP story on the national foreclosure picture says that a recent $25-billion mortgage settlement is likely to turn the foreclosure faucet on wider:
At the end of January, there were 645,000 bank-owned homes in the U.S. that had yet to be sold, representing a 17-month supply at the current sales pace, Blomquist said. In addition, another 710,000 homes were in some stage of the foreclosure process. Other estimates put the number of homeowners who are either behind on their mortgage payments or in foreclosure at the end of last year more than 6 million.
Redfin’s (and Seattle Bubble’s) Tim Ellis argues that the stream of foreclosures will act to keep real estate prices from rising for the foreseeable future, but that (barring major external shocks) Seattle’s real estate market won’t continue to lose significant value.
Commercial real estate in Seattle is another thing entirely. If there were a heat index, you’d see warm waves spreading out from Amazon’s South Lake Union headquarters. TechFlash reports that their proposed designs for a 3-million-square-foot expansion in Seattle’s Denny Triangle call for towers up to 37 stories tall. Developer Martin Selig now plans, says the Seattle Times, a 4-story office building by the Sculpture Park. Previously it was to have been an apartment building, but Eric Pryne writes that Selig is concerned about overbuilding: “[m]ore than 6,000 apartments are under construction in King and Snohomish counties, with thousands more planned.”
Not enough people are signing up and sticking with Amazon Prime, Bloombergian sources whisper, perhaps less than half of current analyst estimates of 10 million.
At $79 per year, joining Amazon Prime used to mean free two-day shipping, as a reward to the Amazonian power shoppers out there. It was pure, distilled Amazon thinking, creating feedback to drive the so-called 80/20 rule. Amazon would put its 20 percent on Prime steroids–they didn’t even have to know who those people were, because the Prime incentive would let their customers self-select.
But Amazon Prime has since become a sort of grab-bag, indicating a loss of focus in favor of a shotgun approach to generating sign-ups: How about “Unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows”? What would you say to: “A Kindle book to borrow for free each month”?
Geekwire points out that Amazon has been doubling down on Prime: “A 30-day Amazon Prime trial is included with the company’s Kindle Fire tablet, and Amazon is counting in part on subscription revenue to make up for the low $199 price of the device.” Shares fell on the news, which, unusually for Amazon, was about actual numbers. Previously, mentions the Seattle Times, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Thomas Szkutak had offered this conference-call guidance: “[E]arly stats that we’re seeing we like a lot.”
A Google Maps view of the parcel in question
But Bloomberg also reports on Amazon’s “private” negotiations with Clise Properties, Inc., who have been trying to sell a 12-acre, triangular parcel of land (near Whole Foods) on Denny Way since 2007. Amazon has almost tripled in staff size since 2008, and they are hungry for more office space. (I’ve always assumed that, for the purposes of irony, Amazon would take over the old Seattle Times offices as well.)
This also is pure Amazon, which throughout its history has been second-guessed by a string of analysts, while the Bezos-led company has steadily forged its way toward greater growth. It’s fine, as a shareholder or prospective shareholder, to look askance at Amazon’s squishy guidance, but it’s worth noting that Amazon is, in fact, Amazon. It’s not that they don’t make mistakes, but they continually course-correct in favor of company growth, while refusing to apologize if that eats into short-term earnings reports. It is a story as old as Amazon itself, along with people buying on the dips.
The initial, terse police report gives merely the time of the incident (9:22 a.m.), the time of the report (10:37 a.m.), a summary (ROBBERY-BUSINESS-BODYFORCE) and the kind of business (RESTAURANT).
