Ohh-hh, Ohh-hh, Who Are the People In Your Neighborhood?
When Amazon.com announced Amazon Fresh last week, it piqued some bloggers' curiosity, but we didn't spend much time thinking about it. Grocery delivery? Interesting, but we weren't going to dive in.
Then this weekend we read about the "thug"-infested Safeway -- in Rainier Beach! Crap, we thought to ourselves. That's our Safeway, literally just a few blocks from our house. Apparently we're risking random parking lot beatdowns every time we visit.
(It's not the closest grocery to us. That'd be the unappealingly named Saar's Market. Either the name scares away thugs, or that old trick of playing classical music to drive away the young'uns really works.)
Maybe we should rethink that grocery delivery thing, we thought. The article is inspiring other people in the neighborhood to drive to the suburbs for groceries. That article was really just a final straw for JvA of Mid Beacon Hill blog -- she's got a list of other incidents in that Safeway parking lot and nearby that certainly gives us pause.
Add on recent incidents like the firebombed video store, a fatal stabbing that ended in a fatal shooting, sexual assault at Rainier Beach High School ... and, well, we get nervous.
That said, we moved to the Rainier Valley in part because of the cultural diversity, which seems to be a phrase inextricably linked with high crime rates. Back when we first mentioned that we moved to Rainier Beach, reader sophie said she heard that "there are more languages spoken within 98118 than any other zip code in the country." We're not sure if that's true, but when we walk around the neighborhood we see lots of people from lots of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and we think that's cool.
Of course, we also moved to Rainier Beach because we could afford to rent a pretty awesome house. It could be argued that fretting about the multicultural neighborhood (and losing electronic equipment to burglars jonesing for drug money) is the price we pay for joining an early wave of gentrification.
Regardless, we didn't move to Rainier Beach hoping we could isolate ourselves from anything scary. Our neighbors shop at Safeway. We're not planning to stop (though we also get organic produce delivered, and sometimes shop at PCC, Greenfresh Market, or the downtown Whole Foods). That Safeway itself is in the middle of a remodel, so we figure they're not going anywhere soon -- though some people commenting on the PI's article worry that it might.
We'll just be sure to keep our eyes open when we go grocery shopping, because lord knows we don't want to drive to the suburbs (yes, yes, Greenfresh is in Renton -- but we work in Renton, so it's not a special trip). We'll let Amazon bring us our blueberries before we drive to Bellevue for 'em.
