Welcome Back, Berger

Seattle Weekly Editor-in-Chief Knute Berger white unflighted recently, moving from Kirkland back to Seattle.

But, guess what? He didn't cotton to it. Why? Because, as his Pulitzer-worthy investigation in last week's Weekly reveals, Seattle ain't what it used to be.

Among his shocking discoveries, sure to surprise Seattle Weekly readers:

"gentrification is scrambling the old neighborhoods"

"the old square-head Ballard is gone"

"U Village is now a yuppie fun zone"

"There's some new freeway running through the center of town."

Ok, we made up that last one. But this is (as they used to say in Ballard) fer sure. Knute Berger does not like what he sees in the 2005 edition of Jet City. No, he longs for the Seattle of old...

"when the economy was in the tank...our neighborhood was plunging downhill, and the city was depopulating"

and

"Lincoln, Garfield, Roosevelt, Franklin, Nathan Hale—these [high school] names told Seattleites everything they needed to know about your race, class, or ethnic background"

Finally a voice that says: Let's return Seattle to its glory days of poverty and segregation!

We are being overly harsh. Berger's main point is that because homes are so expensive middle-class families are being priced out of the market--a sentiment that we have expressed many times. Note--no links there. This is a sentiment Seattlest expresses to friends, not to the general public, because no-one sounds stupider than when they assert that things were better back in the olden days.

As our mother told us when we lamented the implosion of our beloved second childhood home, the Kingdome, "Grow up. Things change. Deal with it."