Seattle in 2018 Is Beginning to Look Like the Seattle Depicted in 2001 TV Show, Dark Angel

Dark Angel

They used to say one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. It was sort of a joke, until the June morning those terrorist bozos whaked us with an electromagnetic pulse from 80 miles up. You always hear people yapping on how it was all different before The Pulse. Land of milk and honey blah, blah, blah, blah with plenty of food and jobs and things that actually worked. I was too young to remember, so, whatever... The thing I don't get is why they call it a depression. I mean, everybody's broke... but they aren't really all that depressed. Life goes on.

In Dark Angel , which is set in the same year as Blade Runner—2019—Seattle has completely lost its middle class and is left with the super-rich, who live in condo towers, and the very poor, who, if lucky, live in slum-like apartments, and if unlucky (and most are unlucky) on the street. When the hero bikes around the city, we see, street after street, people living in vans, cars, RVs, and tents. What caused this economic catastrophe and extreme inequality? In the pilot of the series (which aired on Fox on October 3, 2000), Max Guevara (Jessica Alba)—a racially mixed "genetically enhanced" soldier who is hiding from the owners of her superpowers, the US military—provides this explanation:

But not everyone is broke in her world. The rich persist. And we know they do because the Seattle Police Department exists. A society that has nothing but broke people does not need to be policed. It can do the job itself for nothing. The ontology of law enforcement is not the control of the human passions in themselves, but the protection of property and its owners.

Seattle is also becoming like a Third World country. But to understand what this means, I have to leave the TV show for a moment and turn to a chapter in a book, Shebeen Tales: Messages from Harare, by late Zimbabwean poet Chenjerai Hove. You will recognize emerging aspects of Seattle in Hove's description of Harare in the chapter, 'First World', 'Third World' and 'Fourth World' City."

'Welcome to the city of Harare' the city fathers wrote on a large, beautiful signpost near the airport, positioned close to the independence arch carved out of some of the most expensive marble there is. The city of Harare indeed. If I were a city father, I would have written 'Welcome to the cities of Harare', for there are many cities in one, with different flavours, or personalities, if you want to put it that way. 'First World', 'Second World', 'Third World', those are the sections of this capital of nearly a million people, including the homeless who tend to settle on any open space available. They do so, creating another, maybe 'Fourth' or 'Fifth World'. But the police always get there sooner or later, with batons and handcuffs in their hands, to erase the squatter camps with the anger of fire if not bulldozers. That is probably their only way into the newspapers, the squatters whom no one claims as their relatives.... This is the 'First World' part of the city, with flashy cars, smartly dressed men and women purposefully rushing to some unknown nowhere at an incredible speed. The expensive cars, the flower-boys selling roses, the glittering shops well-fitted with neon lights to dazzle the night shopper, they are all here, then the wide streets, broad and clean, in which even a blind man could drive, for they are straight and arranged neatly in a pattern in which it is hard for anyone to get lost.

In the essay, Hove doesn't bother to describe the Second World and goes From the First World directly to the Third World, which "is not the world of business executives," but "the world of those who see life 'face to face'... Or those who came to the city 'to look for a morsel'." The homeless live in the "Fourth' or 'Fifth World.'"

In Dark Angel, Seattle's Third World condition (which is a city with all of the worlds) is a consequence of The Pulse, an electromagnetic-shock wave that fried a bunch of computers on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. This loss of information about wealth (or value) crashed the whole economy and the depression become permanent ("life goes on"). That's why people are living on the streets. But what about the real Seattle. Why are so many people living on its streets? To begin with, there was the economic crash of 2008, which resulted in the massive destruction of middle- and working-class wealth. Homes were lost, and the recovery, thanks to the GOP's resistance to forms of demand that were not privately owned, was very slow. Many never recovered from that catastrophe. And the government spent a fortune, not on saving working- and middle-class home owners, but on protecting the value of the stock markets. This is Quantitative Easing. It revived "animal spirits" (speculation more than enterprise), and property values in global cities began to rise sharply.

13D Research put it in this nutshell:



Accommodative monetary policy following the Global Financial Crisis drove an unprecedented flood of institutional and individual investor capital into real estate, with cross-border flows concentrating in cosmopolitan megacities. This has dramatically divorced megacity property-appreciation rates from economic fundamentals — primarily the spending power of residents. Moreover, it has made local housing markets far more intertwined with global economic conditions. According to the IMF, 30% of property price movements today can be attributed to global — not local — factors, up from just 10% two decades ago.

This boom for some has been a shock for most. Though official unemployment has been in decline, housing is claiming more and more of a worker's already stressed income. This stress has caused lots of snaps. There were stress tests for banks but not for people.

Though the market in some global cities is cooling, in others, it is not. One of the top cities experiencing sharp price inflation is indeed Seattle.

More words from 13D Research:



No doubt many megacity markets continue to boom around the globe. Just in the U.S., prices of houses and condos in March surged 6.5% from a year earlier according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index, including 5.8% for Boston, 13% for Seattle, 8.6% for Denver, and 3.4% in New York, despite the softening in Manhattan.

Sponsored Practice safe flu shots. ZOOM+Care makes flu shots easy and safe. Schedule ahead, skip the line—get in and out in 5 minutes.

We can expect two things to happen in the near future. One, Seattle's Third World will expand because investments do not follow the second law of thermodynamics: finance always and monstrously leaves cooling markets to hot ones. And because Seattle still has the combustion of a growing economy, money will flow into it from the colder outside. The next thing is "home prices [will go far] beyond the spending power of the local population." For Hong Kong, a person "now requires 19.4 times the average salary of a resident to buy a home, up from 4.6 times in 2002. In London, the equivalent price-to-income multiple today is at 16 times." Expect Seattle's price-to-income ratios to synchronize with these other markets. What they all have in common is a market that's not connected to their local or regional economies, but to "foreign and institutional" capital.