Another born-and-raised Seattleite here. Grew up there, went to UW, etc.<p>Seattle lost its &quot;soul&quot; a long time ago. For me, Almost Live! going off the air was really the bookmark that Seattle was quickly becoming a homogenized west-coast city (no different really than SF or Portland).<p>I don&#x27;t really think Amazon is worth singling out, either. Amazon doesn&#x27;t help, but Microsoft&#x27;s a monolith that&#x27;s been around for quite some time. They used to (and still do) pull a shitload of the UW CSE graduating class straight into MSFT, and nobody wants to live in Redmond or Bellevue until you&#x27;re starting to think about a family, a house, etc. It also goes totally unmentioned here, but biotech was&#x2F;is huge in SLU.<p>My point being, money&#x27;s been flooded into Seattle for quite some time now. If they wanted to keep Seattle &quot;Seattle&quot;, i.e. different from the other west-coast cities, the time to plan that out was 15 years ago.<p>I also think it&#x27;s hilarious to hear people bemoan the death of the hill, and even more hilarious to see signs like &quot;rich kids leave&quot; and shit like that. I bet they weren&#x27;t around a decade ago when the gay community used to say the exact same thing to hipsters that were flooding into the hill (myself included), even down to the insinuation that all hipsters were rich kids. Hilarious to see history repeat itself.