Belltown is not "Downtown"

First, let's take a look at this picture. Some day, developers will paint their condos and apartments a different color, but for now, everything is what we might call Belltown Beige. Won't happen this year, and probably not this decade.

But one thing we can be sure of: Belltown is not downtown, no matter what the Pee Eye says. A rookie named Lynsie Burton last week regurgitated a Seattle Police incident report on a shooting at 2nd and Pike, a report that referred to the intersection as "Belltown." (The headline, no longer online, was, "Man injured in Belltown after shots fired from car sunroof"). But the address was, in fact, Second and Pike, as "downtown" as you can imagine. After I complained (and even misspelled her name on Facebook), she corrected her post, explaining she had simply copied the police report. (Ahem, that doesn't really excuse an error like this.)

So I wrote to the Seattle Police Department, and heard back from Sgt. Sean Whitcomb,

Thank you for your email. We try to be very sensitive to the neighborhoods where crime occurs. Speaking for Public Affairs, when we do a post for our SPD Blotter, we make every effort to localize crime news by accurately depicting the neighborhood where it took place.

Whitcomb corrected the original report and said he'd share my concerns with the rest of the SPD Public Affairs staff.

Too late! A paper called the Sky Valley Chronicle, based in Monroe, referred to the original SPF post and called the shooting "Like the Wild West in Seattle's Belltown area."

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd suggest that SPD was trying to sweep crime (and crime stats) out of downtown and into surrounding neighborhoods. Belltown, after all, is Seattle's most densely populated residential neighborhood, though we've got enough troubles of our own with the bars, clubs, and drunk frat boys.

Despite all the new construction, and literally thousands of new residential units, there's still such strong demand that new apartments command rents that would have seemed astronomical only three or four years ago.

The photo above was taken from the 8th floor of a new building called Art House , where one-bedroom units go for over $2,300, two bedrooms $3,300 and up. And if that doesn't put a lump in your throat, consider the surcharges: a $45 per person application fee, a non-refundable $250 "administration fee," a pet deposit of at least $250, not to mention $35 "pet rent" (per pet per month), $45 to $100 for storage, $175 for a compact parking spot ($200 for a "regular," $225, God forbid, if you need a second space), plus you pay your own utilities, plus a requirement to maintain a $100,000 renters insurance policy.

Who can afford this, you ask? Well, all those new hires at Amazon, for starters. G-gulp.