Westneat: Seattle actually is ‘CRAZYTOWN’ — and it will likely be our salvation after a tough 12 months

I also rave about bad news. However, it’s worth pointing out an underreported aspect of the Seattle pandemic – all of the people out there who ignored the negative narrative.

People like Navjit Singh.

Singh is 29 years old, and last year when faced with all the gritty PR about the city, he didn’t freak out or crouch or fled to Bellevue. Instead, one day he was driving on Capitol Hill in Seattle, right next to the ragged CHOP / CHAZ zone that upset Fox News so much when he saw a plywood-covered, graffiti-strewn little shop.

“They had given up and moved out,” says Singh of the previous tenants. “We said ‘that’s it! This is the place. ‘”

Singh is now co-founder of Spice Box, a restaurant specializing in North Indian cuisine. His father Makhan mainly cooks. They signed a lease because they were insane enough to want to open a restaurant next to old CHOP in the middle of a global pandemic.

But business is booming, says Singh. Even now, the Walgreens across the street are covered in fresh plywood to anticipate more vandalism. But Singh says Spice Box has no intention of locking or getting in.

“The pandemic, all the problems in the city, it was an opportunity for us,” he said. “People say we took the chance to open here, but it was our dream so we knew it would work 100 percent.”

We’ve probably written a hundred stories about all Seattle stores closing, and they were all true stories. What was not emphasized, however, is that new business applications have skyrocketed at the same time.

In Washington State (unfortunately there is no data by city breakdown), the US Census Bureau reports that new business startups in the first three months of 2021 rose 41 percent year over year.

Meanwhile, the Urban Institute reports that the existing small businesses in Seattle were the toughest of all major cities studied. The closure of the pandemic caused delinquencies for small businesses here that were below the national average.

The result is that “the broader doomsday predictions for neighborhoods never materialized,” Bloomberg reported to Businessweek this week. Her story shed light on a number of other new stores that opened on Capitol Hill in Seattle despite the pandemic and unrest, including restaurants, a Mexican chocolatier, and a newspaper kiosk that also sells beer.

The allegedly dying downtown Seattle is also showing unexpected signs of life. It was announced earlier that month that the semi-abandoned Macy’s building had been purchased for nearly $ 600 million (roughly three times what the previous owner had paid for it in the past decade).

News came last week that some companies, including a law firm and an asset management company, had rented a few floors in the new Rainier Square Tower downtown. This is the same building that Amazon made a symbol of its opposition to Seattle’s proposed corporate taxes a few years ago.

Amazon’s relationship with Seattle continues to evolve. But if taxes are really that outrageous, what use would it be for an asset management company of all people to sign a big lease in order to stay?

Then there was news that two life science companies were embroiled in a bidding war for an office complex and one paid more than three times the tax value for it – $ 119 million.

This all seems like a lot of action for a location circling the drain. Are these people just not seeing Fox News?

Seriously, the pandemic has tested Seattle in a myriad of ways. It has exacerbated some of our worst pre-existing conditions, and now the city has a ton of urban repairs to do.

But I can’t help but believe Seattle will be doing well. One of the less told stories of the dark plague year is that so many people here are really crazy hopeful dreamers. Enough not to join the hype. In order to tear the plywood off anyway, warnings of life support measures are doomed.

I think we’re CRAZYTOWN after all.