Seattle Times: New Money

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Monday, November 5, 2000, 8:00 a.m. Pacific

New money: How prosperity is changing life here

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The prosperity of the past decade is unprecedented in local history.

The Puget Sound area always has been a place built on economic booms -- of Alaska gold, of timber, of airplanes. Now the region is living the high life because of high tech.

Economists say these good times have lasted longer and reached deeper than any previous boom.

In several stories over the next several weeks, the Times will look at how prosperity -- its promises and its paradoxes -- has touched lives and communities around Puget Sound.

We'll provide a statistical look at who has benefited from tremendous economic growth and who has been left behind.

And we'll explore how prosperity has altered the social landscape -- how new wealth has changed how we live and who we think we are, our expectations and our values.

The economy -- particularly the high-tech engine that has created so much new wealth -- appears to finally be slowing.

Still, prosperity has left its mark on Puget Sound in ways we will feel for years to come.

University Village Shopping Center, once anchored by Ernst Hardware and Lamonts, now features the designer glitz of Restoration Hardware and Anthropologie. Both sides of the lake are filled with new monuments to our affluence: two professional-sports stadiums, a rock 'n' roll museum, a symphony hall, grand libraries, lakefront mansions.

The social changes are also hard to ignore.

In a region that once prided itself on being solidly middle-class -- and where even the CEO of the region's largest insurance company drove a Chrysler station wagon with 200,000 miles on it -- we now talk incessantly about money. Who's got it? How'd they get it? Do they deserve it?

Boeing engineers once embodied the face of middle-class Seattle. Now a new class of local high-tech millionaires is at the forefront of what is being called history's first "mass upper class.''

Most of us haven't become rich, of course.

Those who have worry about how they're perceived. Some of the rest, now matter how they're doing, are filled with envious twinges about whether they missed out. And many worry that they'll never be able to buy a house in Puget Sound's stratospheric real-estate market.

No single story -- no single set of economic figures -- neatly sums up these past few years.

The very rich not only have gotten richer, but on the strength of stock options, vastly richer than most of us. But household income has risen significantly nearly across the board, in part because so many new jobs have been created.

At the same time, two paychecks have become a necessity for many families because of soaring costs. And wages for nearly half the work force have actually lost purchasing power.

Over the next few weeks, we'll peer into the lives of the newly rich and janitors, talk with philanthropists and Boeing workers and look at how new money is changing everything from girls' sports to the tropical fish tank business.

Among the upcoming stories:

When it comes to extravagance, we may not be Miami or Beverly Hills. But the region's well-to-do have been on quite a buying spree. There's a waiting list to buy Steinway pianos -- the Rolls-Royces of concert pianos -- and they're winding up in some unusual places.

For years, Boeing has produced two things: airplanes and Seattle's middle class. Two generations of the Finlay family have toiled there, with vastly different expectations about what it means to be middle class in this era of big paychecks and inflated dreams.

In one Eastside neighborhood, many newcomers announce their arrival by tearing down the home they just bought. Gentrification is moving from the inner city to upper middle-class suburbia, setting off a new kind of culture clash.

Used-car salesman Raul Gamino, who came here from Mexico, has prospered from the trickle down of Eastside wealth. His customers are immigrants -- legal and illegal -- who fill the demand for construction and restaurant workers. He used to sell them $300 junkers; some now buy $12,000 used SUVs.

"Venture philanthropy'' -- charitable giving that sometimes comes with an attitude and an agenda -- is on the rise, helping to remake public schools around here.


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