Why are some Seattle pedestrians so reckless in crosswalks?

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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Pedestrians in a Seattle crosswalk (via Seattle.gov)

Recently, I saved two people in Seattle from death or serious injury. The more interesting issue to me is why I had to.

Returning home on a Saturday afternoon after refereeing youth soccer, I was cutting through downtown Seattle. Driving north in Belltown in the right lane on Western Avenue, I stopped behind a small truck that itself had stopped at what I call a conditional stop sign, which requires a halt only if pedestrians are waiting to cross. I could see a 30-something couple stepping off the east curb into the marked crosswalk and, eyes forward, striding briskly across the street.

But in my driver-side rear-view mirror I saw a vehicle racing up from behind me in the lane to my left, not slowing down at all. I immediately grasped that car wasn’t going to stop in time, if at all. The couple crossing the street had disappeared in front of the truck in front of me, meaning they would emerge in the left lane just in time to get hit and killed or at the least badly hurt.

So I did the only thing I could. I leaned on my horn and held it. Although I was a car back, the long, loud obnoxious blast had the desired effect. The startled couple paused. The offending car whizzed past us all on the left, running the soft stop but hitting no one. I single-handedly freed up two gurneys in the emergency room at Harborview Medical Center.

But the incident got me to thinking about other near-misses I’ve seen involving vehicles and pedestrians trying to get across streets. By personal observation, of all the places I’ve lived or worked before becoming New To Seattle–and that’s a bunch–Seattle takes the cake when it comes to persons crossing streets on foot with so little seeming regard for their personal safety. I’m thinking that some of this apparently blithe attitude has political roots. Continue reading →

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In Seattle, liberal politics, marijuana and the cops

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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Having gone through my first major election cycle since becoming New To Seattle, I can tell you I live in one politically liberal town. Obama-Biden beat Romney-Ryan by better than a 2-to-1 margin (I’m using stats for all of King County, where Seattle is located), far greater than the statewide 56-42 split. Maria Cantwell, the incumbent Democratic U.S. senator, carried the Seattle area by nearly three-to-one. Local voters approved adult recreational marijuana use and same-sex marriage by roughly 2-to-1 margins that swamped the considerable opposition in other parts of the state.

But then there is the Seattle Police Department, which long has had a somewhat different sense of things. Famous for hitting and ticketing jaywalkers, the force is under a federal order to clean up its act. In its latest escapade, the department was just sued after a jailhouse microphone captured a white cop saying he would “make stuff up” to keep in the slammer two wrongly arrested black robbery suspects who also said cops hit them. The SPD says officers did nothing wrong.

But maybe the cops are finally reading the election results. In the aftermath of the marijuana vote, the department’s official blog site, SPD Blotter, posted an article about how to handle weed in Seattle in light of I-502, as the ballot measure is known. The post’s somewhat whimsical title: “Mariwhatnow? A Guide to Legal Marijuana Use in Seattle.”  Continue reading →

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Big Seattle charity makes another iffy financial efficiency claim

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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At United Way of King County, it’s still too good to be true.

“More than 98 cents of every donated dollar goes to meet community needs,” the largest unit of the nation’s largest charity by contributions declares on its Web site. Also up there:  a link to its freshly posted financial statement for the fiscal year ended June 30.

Well, not by my reckoning, which works out to 91%. Nor by the reckoning of the parent United Way organization, which also figures about 91%. Nor even, amazingly, by UWKC’s own, brand new financial statement. It includes a convoluted schedule unapproved by its auditors that in effect calculated the charitable commitment at 97.9%–less than 98%, not more.

You have to understand this is not so much about numbers as it is about P.R. One way competing charities battle for your hard-earned dollars is by depicting themselves as more financially efficient–more money going to the mission, less to fundraising and certain overhead–than the next guy. There are standard metrics for these calculations.

Some dubious charities I have written about before or after becoming New To Seattle use highly questionable accounting ploys to hide financial efficiencies as low as 0.4%–yes, only 40 cents of every $100 going to the cause. I hasten to add that UWKC to my knowledge is not a dubious charity. But as I explained earlier this year,  it uses its own, ah, unique formula to burnish its presentation that, sadly, borrows a tactic from some of its more unworthy rivals. I will say that UWKC does state its methodology in full–if you are able to slog through to page 23 of the 28-page financial statement, and then understand what you’re reading.

I’ll save you the trouble. Continue reading →

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Crista Ministries reduces an efficiency claim–a little

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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Did you know? Things can change quickly on the Internet.

Three days ago, I posted an article here questioning the new financial statements of Seattle-area Crista Ministries. Among other things, I examined the way its World Concern unit accepted millions of deworming pills easily purchased for 2 cents and said they each were worth $1.30–a 6,400% exaggeration by my reckoning. The effect was to make Crista look more financially efficient than it really was.

I linked to a World Concern Web page on the Crista site making a grand claim about its financial efficiency. Thanks to a screenshot I made to preserve the evidence, here is the relevant part of that page:

By my figuring, the true charitable commitment ratio–the amount of total expenditures in direct furtherance of the stated mission–really was a lot less, somewhere between 83% and 89%.

This morning, I dropped by the site again. Lo and behold, the 94% efficiency claim had disappeared, and a lower one put in its place! The language quoted above was gone, replaced by the following (courtesy of another evidence-preserving screenshot):

Now, I’m not sure I agree with that carefully qualified efficiency number, since it apparently still uses the $1.30 valuation for 2-cent pills. But it’s lower than a flat 94%, and therefore closer to my New To Seattle notion of reality.

Now you know.

Follow William P. Barrett’s work on Twitter by clicking here.

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Seattle-area Crista Ministries now gilds gifts by only 6,400%

Posted on by July 5, 2014
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I didn’t know all that much about Crista Ministries, except that the the religious organization, based on the leafy grounds of a former TB sanatorium just north of Seattle in Shoreline, operated schools, senior citizen housing and radio stations, while selling a lot of advertising. But Crista also touted a foreign aid program called World Concern so big that the amount of donated goods it received and then distributed were sufficient to put Crista on past Forbes lists of the country’s largest charities. All that donated swag also made the charity look more financially efficient, about which a boastful claim was made on its Web site [and removed after this post went up].

But here’s what I know now. Crista’s numbers listing a large amount of donated goods were essentially bogus, or at least not grounded in reality. And they’re still essentially bogus, or at least not grounded in reality. And that claim of extraordinarily efficiency? Not really.

Let me explain. Continue reading →

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Yellow Cab at Seattle-Tacoma Airport: What 10% discount?

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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(courtesy Puget Sound Dispatch)

Maybe it’s just an extraordinarily well-kept secret in Seattle. Members of AAA–you know, the American Automobile Association–are generally entitled to a 10% discount off the meter for rides with Yellow Cab of Seattle. But some taxi drivers claim the discount doesn’t exist and won’t honor it.

How do I know? I just encountered the brick wall yet again. Continue reading →

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Charity pleading for money in Seattle spent 0% on its mission

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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See update at end of post

Given all the questionable charities that have cold-called me since I became New To Seattle, it was bound to happen. Official records say that the organization Vietnam Veterans of Washington State spent absolutely nothing raised toward its stated charitable mission of, well, helping Vietnam veterans of Washington State.

You can see the evidence for yourself right here on the official Website of the Washington State Secretary of State’s Office in Olympia. For the fiscal year ended December 31, 2010, the charity, which lists an address in suburban Auburn, raised $40,957 and spent not even one dime on program services, as charitable efforts are called. Looking at the charity’s tax return for that year, it appears that $33,361–82% of the money raised–went to an outside paid fundraiser. The rest, I guess, stayed in a bank account somewhere. Continue reading →

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Seattle media go nuts over prediction of minimal rain

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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Last night, I watched the 10 p.m. news on KONG-TV, the sharing sister station of the more established KING-TV (King Kong, get it?). The lead story (produced by KING-TV) was upcoming rain in Seattle. Not a big storm or a lot of rain: a quarter-inch or less. No prediction of damaging lightning or high winds. And not even right away, but maybe a day or two off.

This is what passes hereabouts for big news. When it comes to unremarkable weather events, Seattle might be the most schizophrenic city in the country. This is certainly so of the many places I lived before becoming New To Seattle last year.

Weather that would be a yawn in other places–a light sprinkle, thunder–gets massive attention in Seattle. During the summer The Seattle Times actually devoted the top half of one front page to a giant photo of lightning above West Seattle. That was accompanied by a story that described no impact or damage, except, in my view, to the psyche of residents. Continue reading →

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Dubious charity soliciting in Seattle gets a break in Olympia

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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The other night I got a telephone call from a pleasant fellow who said he was raising money for something called the Washington American Veterans Service Foundation. Washington AmVets for short, he said. The caller was a little light on specifics about the good works that would be done with contributions. But he was still hopeful I would commit to a specific sum so he could mail me a pledge card to return with my check. I politely declined.

Those of you who visit this space know that pitches like this are grist for my New To Seattle mill. I immediately went to the charities section of the Washington Secretary of State’s office website in Olympia, the state capital. The closest match I could get was something named AmVets Service Foundation–Department of Washington.  I am assuming this is on whose behalf I was called. To my astonishment, the entry said that its charitable commitment–the percentage of total expenses spent in furtherance of program services–was 100%. To underscore the importance of the calculation, the figure was in boldface.

As ordinarily understood, program services do not include fundraising costs and certain overhead. So if program services was 100%, then why was I getting a call from a fundraiser–presumably paid–who wanted to send me fundraising mail, requiring expensive printing and postage?

To me, the answer is that someone in Olympia was sent a bowl of mush, doesn’t know how to read or can’t work a calculator. I took a look at Washington AmVets’ filed-under-penalty-of-perjury tax return sent to the Internal Revenue Service–which you can’t get on the Olympia website but which can be downloaded elsewhere. I’d say the charitable commitment ratio was more like 22%. The Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance, a major charity watchdog, thinks anything under 65% is unacceptable.

As I read the return, Washington AmVets spent about $3.35 in fundraising costs for every $1 spent on charity. Continue reading →

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Departing Seattle Weekly owners were good copy

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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It’s been easy of late to beat up on Village Voice Media, publisher of Seattle Weekly, New York’s Village Voice, Phoenix New Times and 10 other big free alternative weeklies. Caught in the epic meltdown of print advertising and with no subscription revenue, many of the papers, after rounds of layoffs, are editorial shells or worse of what they once were. (Since becoming New To Seattle last year, I have yet to hear anyone talk about a Seattle Weekly story, whereas its direct competitor, The Stranger, this year won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing by Eli Sanders.)

VVM’s lucrative Backpage.com website has drawn criticism and lawsuits for sex-oriented ads described as conduits for child prostitution. Washington State passed a law, clearly aimed at Backpage.com, requiring age verification in sex ads, but VVM, which denies adding to the problem, got a federal judge to block it on free-speech grounds.

Now, in what is being called damage control, VVM is selling the weeklies to a new Denver-based company, Voice Media Group, owned by certain executives of VVM. Backpage.com, its hefty cash flow and its legal battles will stay at VVM, which is owned by Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey. They are the Phoenix-based Mutt and Jeff duo who over the past four decades amassed a mini-journalism empire as much through financial maneuvering as journalistic enterprise.

Larkin, who ran the business side, and Lacey, who oversaw editorial, are both in their mid-60s. After storied careers, it looks like they are retiring from journalism for good. Now, you’ll find a big split of opinion on them among journalists; in a commentary posted this morning on the online Seattle news site Crosscut, Seattle Weekly co-founder David Brewster called Larkin and Lacey “swashbuckling renegades,” which sounds about right. But I, for one, will miss them. In their day their papers produced good copy–and they themselves were good copy. Continue reading →

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The usual suspects of Seattle (plus others)

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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I was out of town when this was published last week, so I’m a little late. The new annual edition of the Forbes 400 came out. Four of the top 20 spots on the celebrated list of the Richest Americans are now held by people from the Seattle area. That’s more than any other metro region, even New York and San Francisco/Silicon Valley.

Bruce Nordstrom (via University of Washington)

Eight individuals from Seattle and western Washington grace the Rich List, up one from last year. The newcomer, who is hardly New To Seattle: Bruce A. Nordstrom, the 78-year-old former boss of publicly traded but family-controlled Nordstrom.

Forbes put him at No. 360, pegging his net worth at $1.2 billion. I believe this is the first time a Nordstrom ever has made the Forbes list, which has been published since 1982.

Bruce, whose grandfather founded what at first was a single shoe store in 1901, ran the resulting department store chain for years, retiring as chairman in 2006 (Son Blake is in charge now). I hope your retirement is this good. Nordstrom shares have gone up 600% in four years. This is especially nice given that the company’s proxy statement says Bruce now has a claim to 27,694,012 shares and the share price at this writing is $56.05. That math works out to $1.55 billion. But part of this stash belongs to other Nordstrom relatives, while a whopping $54 million of shares are listed as collateral for an undisclosed loan, debt that reduces overall net worth. It can be rough up there in the 1%.

Actually, there might be another billionaire in the Seattle area–Bruce younger sister, Anne Gittinger. The Nordstrom proxy credits her officially with 15,470,812 shares–worth a cool $867 million. But also in the proxy is mention of an additional 5,501,520 shares in a trust controlled by Brother Bruce in which she is “the beneficiary”–not one of many beneficiaries but the only one. Do that math, and it’s another $308 million. So her total is $1.175 billion, which is higher than the lowest 13 people on the Forbes list and pretty close to a statistical tie with Bruce.

Maybe next year. Continue reading →

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Chief Seattle statue’s 100th birthday recalls city’s grabby origins

Posted on by September 9, 2023
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Chief Seattle statue (via Wikipedia)

It’s easy to miss even if you drive right by. I’m referring to the statue of Chief Seattle with his raised outstretched hand installed under a clump of trees along Denny Way on the northern downtown edge of the city named for him.

The monument by local sculptor James Wehn will have its 100th birthday on November 13. That’s also the 161st anniversary of the big day in 1851 when a group of gringos from Illinois (including the Dennys for whom Denny Way is named) showed up on Alki Point jutting out into Puget Sound and started the process of clearing out all the native Americans. In Seattle November 13 is now called Founders Day, ignoring the presence since time immemorial of the original locals. Continue reading →

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Seattle floating homes and the U.S. Supreme Court

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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Floating homes along Lake Union in Seattle (via Wikipedia)

On the legendary first Monday in October, the U.S. Supreme Court in the Other Washington will hear arguments in a Florida case with important implications for inhabitants of the most famous residences in Seattle.

The floating homes along Lake Union.

The Supremes will decide the appeal of Fane Lozman. He’s a Florida man who lost his own floating home after the City of Riviera Beach invoked federal maritime law to seize his bobbing castle for allegedly unpaid dockage fees, tow it off, sell it to itself at auction, and sink it. Lozman contends the action was retaliation for his opposition to a local real estate project. The case will be heard on October 1, the first day of the court’s new term.

As someone New To Seattle, I am interested in the local impact.

Seattle undoubtedly has the entire country’s best-known set of floating homes. Thank the fact that one was the residence of the Tom Hanks character in the wildly popular 1993 romantic comedy movie, “Sleepless in Seattle.” Collectively, floating homes in Seattle, which can be quite expensive, are tourist attractions in themselves, as I can attest from watching visitors madly taking pictures from Lake Union tour boats of young children playfully paddling in their “yards.” Floating homes are defining elements of Seattle, like the Space Needle and a lot of rain.

And as it turns out, the Seattle Floating Homes Association–yes, there is such an organization–filed a 45-page friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court case supporting Lozman, the houseboat owner. The brief, also submitted on behalf of a California owners group, hasn’t gotten any coverage in Seattle that I can find. But it makes for interesting reading. Continue reading →

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Seattle’s .01 inch of rain gets national media attention

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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The .01 inch of rain that fell at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is getting ridiculous national media attention. Sure, it broke a 48-day no-rain streak, second longest ever here. But now is usually what passes for the semi-dry season, anyway. It’s not like there was flooding or loss of life. There was so little rain–a single rain drop is a lot thicker than .01 of an inch–that many streets around town weren’t even completely coated.

Still, I got calls from family members on the East Coast who said they heard about the rain on New York radio. A trip around the Internet showed stories about Seattle’s .01 inch of rain on the Web sites of such outlets as The Washington Post, Fox News, the Miami Herald, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. A Google search of everything put up on the Web in the last 24 hours with the words “Seattle” and “rain” produced 32,200 hits.

At least this time, notably missing–to me, New To Seattle, anyway–was the kind of snark the national media displayed when a six-inch snow storm shut down Seattle for three days in January.  “Snow wimps,” declared a typical headline in the Los Angeles Times.

Instead, the various media sites are now playing this latest weather event–if it even could be called that–as sort of a man-bites-dog story. But when you think about it, this is really a dog-bites-man story. Light rain in Seattle is a story?

On a slow news day, I guess anything can get coverage.

Follow William P. Barrett’s work on Twitter by clicking here

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Does a 1941 description of Seattle still ring true?

Posted on by May 30, 2015
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“Nothing can ever take away from Seattle the dramatic splendor of its natural setting, and it is perhaps the challenge of this setting which makes one wish for Seattle a destiny somehow comparable in greatness to the landscape in which it lies.”

This stinging passage comes from the chapter on Seattle in Farthest Reach: Washington and Oregon. That’s the travel narrative-cum-social-critique by Nancy Wilson Ross published way back in 1941. Ross was a Washington State native and novelist better known for her later books on Eastern religions. She died in 1986 at age 84.

Ross portrayed the Seattle of 1941 as a social-climbing, overreaching town full of provincial phonies with unsophisticated tastes and unjustified prides, a city notable mainly because of beautiful surroundings. The fact that Farthest Reach was issued by the fancy New York publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, insuring a national audience, likely inflamed the wounds.

For me, New To Seattle, the question is how much of Ross’s pointed 17-page description of Seattle rings true today, more than seven decades later. I’d say some, but hardly all. Continue reading →

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Orange flags and bad drivers in Seattle

Posted on by August 5, 2014
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Orange pedestrian flags at a Seattle crosswalk

You see them at various places all over Seattle. Buckets strapped to the side of a pole at a street corner. In the buckets are a bunch of bright-orange flags, often homemade. Someone who wants to cross the street can take a flag, carry it across the street and deposit it in a bucket affixed to the other side of the street. The idea is that passing motorists will see the flag–if not the pedestrian–and stop.

They’re known as pedestrian flags, or pedestrian crossing flags, or simply pedflags. The surprisingly self-help system is not unique to Seattle. Its suburb of Kirkland apparently was the first U.S. city to roll out pedflags in 1995. They have been used in parts of a few other American jurisdictions, including Salt Lake City, Park Ridge, Ill., Dane County, Wis., Aiea, Hawaii, and Berkeley, Calif.

I can’t find any studies concluding they are effective. Nor can the City of Seattle, which, while encouraging the citizen efforts I see now, abandoned an official pilot program started in 2008 due to inconsistent results and–this is a quote–“frequent theft of the flags.”

But I’d say Seattle pedestrians can use all the help they can get. That’s because Allstate Insurance today released its annual ranking of the largest U.S. cities when it comes to driving ability. And Seattle again fell deeper into the bottom quarter. Continue reading →

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Proof of ‘Seattle Freeze’ is found in all the dogs

Posted on by June 3, 2015
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Labrador retriever (via Wikipedia)

Click!

The light bulb popped on over my head a few days ago after, in the space of five minutes, I saw four different people each walking two or more dogs on the streets near my Seattle home. Four solitary humans with nine or ten lively pets. For me,  it’s the link that helps explain the phenomenon known as the Seattle Freeze.

The Seattle Freeze is something that people have been talking about for a long time. There’s a reference of sorts to it in Farthest Reach, Nancy Wilson Ross’s 1941 social commentary travel book about the Pacific Northwest. The concept has its own Wikipedia entry as well as 53,400 hits on Google, a spot in the Urban Dictionary and lengthy online threads. It’s the belief that newcomers find it hard to make friends with earlier Seattleities who prefer to hang out with existing acquaintances. The condition been blamed on everything from a supposedly very reserved Nordic culture (although descendants of folks from Scandinavia account for less than 6% of the population) to the many days of drab, no-sun weather, which supposedly dulls the personality.

There are those who deny the very existence of the Seattle Freeze. In my experience, very few of the deniers are, like me, New To Seattle. I certainly think the Seattle Freeze is alive and well. But it’s my most recent encounter with dogs and their owners that is giving me some fresh insights.

As I see it now, the Seattle Freeze is simply a fear of humans being rejected by other humans. Ergo all the dogs, who provide their owners with unconditional love and, thus, no chance of rejection. Continue reading →

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New-arena debate in Seattle involves city’s self-image

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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Unless you live in or around Seattle, you probably haven’t heard much about this. The city is debating a proposal to build a $500 million indoor arena adjacent to downtown with the goal of luring back an NBA franchise. The team would replace the Seattle SuperSonics but take that name. That’s the team Starbucks owner Howard Schultz sold in 2006 to Oklahoma interests who, contradicting their stated intentions, soon but not all that surprisingly moved the franchise to Oklahoma City and renamed it the Thunder.

On the surface, the arena debate in Seattle centers largely on money. Chris Hansen, a Seattle native said to have made a fortune in hedge funds, would provide $300 million if local governments will issue $200 million in bonds and grant some tax breaks. Some residents are understandably leery. One reason is Seattle’s sad propensity for remaining on the financial hook after building sports venues that either quickly become outdated, like Key Arena, or have structural problems, like the falling roof of the old Kingdome, which later was torn down. There are also concerns about how the new arena, which would be located just south of baseball’s Safeco Field and football/soccer’s CenturyLink Field, would affect traffic around the nearby Port of Seattle.

But to me, the difference of opinion has at least as much to do with Seattle’s continuing split personality. Do residents want a big-time city, or not? Continue reading →

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Latest novel about Seattle lampoons city’s persona

Posted on by May 30, 2015
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I just finished reading the newly published Where’d You Go, Bernadette. It’s at least the fifth novel to appear this year set in Seattle. (The others are the racy Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy by E.L. James and the historically evocative Truth Like The Sun by Jim Lynch.)

Bernadette is written by Maria Semple. Like me, she is a transplant from the Los Angeles area, but a few years before I became New To Seattle. Her website makes a point of saying, “Maria loves living in Seattle–thank you for asking.”

You might not think that from her book.

The cleverly written and structured contemporary novel about a dysfunctional family living on Queen Anne Hill, a politically correct neighborhood, is a massive send-up of Seattle and especially its politically correct population. Semple spares few targets as she uses the words, thoughts or actions of various characters to score points. Continue reading →

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Eschewing A/C, hot Seattle residents head for their basements

Posted on by July 6, 2014
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Screen shot today at 6:15 p.m. PT

Thirty-two years ago, when I became New To Houston, one of my new neighbors described the weather thusly: “Son, we have three seasons in Houston. Summer, followed by July, followed by August.”

During the seven years I lived there, this proved to be quite true.

Last summer, when I became New To Seattle, one of my latest set of new neighbors offered me this advice. “There will be some hot days here,” I was told. “Just stay in the basement.”

Okay, so that isn’t something memorable like “Remember the Alamo!”  But today is the second straight day of 90-degree-plus weather in Seattle, the hottest string in several years. I’ve been staying in the basement, and it’s just fine. The coolness of the earth around the house keeps the lower floor about 12 degrees cooler than the main ground story.

I haven’t lived in a home without some kind of A/C in close to five decades. But in Seattle, I am hardly alone, and this says a lot about the nature of the city. Continue reading →

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