Jet City Journal

Fixing Aurora Avenue North

Thunderbird Motel, originally uploaded by Kevin Pedraja.

If you live within a quarter mile of Aurora Avenue North, you're probably familiar with the problems highlighted in a recent Seattle Times story.

"About 20 motels operate now from North 40th to North 145th, the Seattle city limits, and peeling facades, burned-out neon signs and buckled asphalt lots hint to conditions inside."

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"The density of cheap digs has fueled Aurora's reputation as a magnet for drugs and prostitution. An average room goes for $50 a night."

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"'Crime on Aurora has been a deeply ingrained problem that's lasted for decades," said Seattle police Capt. Mike Washburn, commander of the North Precinct. "Aurora is a state highway, it's easy to get in and out of ... and the motels are certainly a piece of this.'"

While the article points out that many of the hotels on Aurora are well-managed and not contributing to the area's crime problem, there are clearly some landlords who permit illegal activities to take place on their premises.

I'm probably not alone in wishing that the motels would just go away. But advocates for low-income and homeless families insist that the motels are a necessary evil, as they provide much-needed housing for the city's less fortunate. That's a fair point, but many of the motels charge outrageous sums for rooms that are, in a word, horrible. Even worse, the city, state and Federal government are actually paying for this squalor through various housing assistance programs. Put another way, you and I are keeping slum lords in business through our tax dollars.

So, here is a modest proposal to address the problems of Aurora Avenue. The city and state should start a program to acquire the offending motels through eminent domain, refurbish them, manage them and rent them out to low-income residents at reasonable rates.  Couple that with the establishment of a Seattle Police storefront station on Aurora somewhere between 85th and 120th streets and the initiation of regular foot patrols. Clean, well-managed motels and a stepped up police presence would do much to eliminate the underlying problems that have made Aurora Avenue a boulevard of broken dreams.

As long as Aurora Avenue continues to be a haven for petty crime, drugs and prostitution, there is no hope that it can rise above its current seedy circumstances. Respectable businesses won't want any part of a neighborhood where potential customers fear to walk.

Gaming the Seattle DPD permitting process for fun and profit

I live in a North Seattle neighborhood of modest houses built mostly in the early to late 1940s, generally single-story brick ramblers along with a few slightly larger houses of 1960s or 70s vintage.  Back in January, I noticed some renovations being done an unassuming little house around the corner from mine on North 90th street. The house, which had a detached garage with a mother-in-law unit over it, appeared to be getting a much-needed makeover. 

The original 1911 North 90th Street (or according to Trulio.com, 1917 North 90th St.). Clearly this is a single property. (Photo snatched from Google Maps.  Sorry.)

A few weeks later, construction crews started taking the garage apart. Or so I thought. Within weeks, the garage became a full-fledged and very tall modern home that towered over the surrounding houses. Not only was this new house out of scale and out of character with the rest of the neighborhood, no public notice of land use action had ever been posted signaling that the lot would be subdivided. I decided to try and find out how this could happen.

Simple thought for the day

The economy, she is crappy.

It's a matter of professional pride

Glenn Greenwald now admits that he was wrong about Sarah Palin.  She is not, as he first thought, devilishly smart and prepared to take on the media.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Vis:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Now I'm a professional PR person and I've media-trained more than a few people during my career. Some of them were absolutely horrible speakers to begin with. But after a few hours or, at worst, days of work, it was almost always possible to make them sound credible, even if they were talking about topics that were not their primary area of expertise. Seeing Palin flail in these interviews, unable to answer even the most obvious and likely questions, leads me to conclude that either she has the worst media trainers EVAR or (and I think this is more likely) she is a complete and total moron.  There is simply NO WAY she wasn't given better talking points for the foreign policy experience question.  None.  Or, for that matter, the question about the financial crisis and John McCain's record of reform from the previous interview with Couric. After all of the time and effort invested in making Palin sound like something else, in the end her true self shines through: and that is an unserious and shallow person.

GM continues to be lame.

Production photos of the Chevy Volt are out. And it's boring.  I don't know why I'm surprised.

I was actually considering a Volt based on the concept. It would have been the first American car I'd purchased in more than 20 years.  Not any more.  Regardless of what's under the hood, this is a clear illustration of why GM is dying.  Boring, boring, boring, lowest common denominator styling.  When will GM learn that people actually care about form as well as function?

iPhone 2.02 software breaks application updates

After installing the 2.02 update on my first-gen iPhone, I can no longer install new versions of apps without first deleting the prior version.  Aside from being incredibly annoying, this is a serious problem for apps that use and save data, because removing an app from the iPhone also deletes all of its related data. 

I'm not the only person experiencing this problem.

9/16 Update: After installing iPhone 2.1 and doing a complete restore, wiping all my apps and then reinstalling all of them again, I now seem to be able to install updates again.  Hallelujah.

Apple's continued incompetence

Apparently, bricking my phone for a full day this month wasn't enough for Apple.  Today, my iPhone decided that it wouldn't recognize headphones any longer and would only play music out of the built-in speakers.  After trying everything I could think of, the only option left- short of a visit to the Apple Store - was to restore the software.  Unfortunately, once the restore was completed I was greeted with the dreaded  "Could not complete iTunes request" error message.  More than two full weeks after the launch of the iPhone 3G, Apple still hasn't fixed its iPhone activation server problems. Apple may want to consider themselve a consumer company, but until they can deliver basic functionality to their customers without endless hassles, they're just another consumer unfriendly tech company.  Citing unexpected demand as an excuse for poor performance just doesn't cut it anymore.  Can you say "not ready for prime time?" 

Let the bad PR begin

That old expression "nothing succeeds like success" is a load of crap.  Apple created a feeding frenzy for its new iPhone 3G and for its iPhone 2.0 software for existing 2.5G iPhones. Success, right?  Problem is, they can't handle the traffic to upgrade and activate all those phones and now a lot of very unhappy people are sitting around with very expensive, very stylish paperweights.  I'm one of them. 

So this raises an interesting question: is this just a one-time blip or a sign that Apple has a lot of work to do before it can become a truly consumer-focused company?

P.S. My AppleTV is bricked, too.  Nice going, Steve.

Update: So where I was getting the ubiquitous and really helpful (unknown error -9838), now I'm getting (unknown error -4).  Progress?  Who the hell knows. 

Facebook uses its power for good ... or evil?

So, I just got a Facebook message from a friend who will be visiting Seattle with his daughter later this summer.  He asked for recommendations on what to do.  I made a few and then suggested he check out The Stranger for additional ideas, typing out the Web address.  As if by magic, an ad for The Stranger appeared within my message.  I didn't ask for it and had no way to delete it.  I'm not too bummed because in this case it was totally relevant.  But still. That's weird.  And kinda creepy...

Seattle: Big ugly houses bad; Big ugly condos good

Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes in a car with me driving around Seattle knows that one of my favorite (and annoyingly frequent) rants is about the city's desire for greater density and the resulting plague of craptastic four-up, fake craftsman condos that are popping up everywhere.  Apparently, however, while it's OK to put multiple cookie cutter condos where one house had previously stood, it's not OK to build a ridiculously over-sized house on the same lot.