Things have definitely gotten bad (I visit downtown every weekend and live in Ballard), but the same thing has happened in other cities as well for similar reasons. So on the one hand, people saying “it’s nothing” are wrong, but people say “Seattle is dead” are also incorrect. These problems can be solved, well, managed, with a bit of a swing to the right (from the far left, which is happening now).

I remember Seattle from the late 70s (as a preschooler), the 80s, and the 90s. I even worked at 3rd and Pine McDonald’s in 1994, and it was pretty bad back then, except the retail and office crowd kept things from getting bad until about 7PM each night (I often closed). The new thing now is (a) laws not enforced at all and (b) downtown was completely drained of office workers. Both of those can be fixed.