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Is Bellevue a New Brooklyn?

Posted by: meganrs
Thanks to: Megan Ritchie Saffitz
17 December 2006 - 5:00am

Bellevue, Seattle's largest neighboring city, grapples with Robert Lang's categorization of it as a "boomburb" -- having nearly as many foreign born citizens (32%) as New York's Brooklyn neighborhood (38%).

"[Robert Lang] says he doesn't mean Bellevue feels urban like Brooklyn. It surely doesn't -- downtown feels more like a giant mall than ever, now that it has four of them. Three are insufferably titled 'The Bellevue Collection.' Only Bellevue would 'collect' malls.

Lang says he means that Bellevue is a 'cosmoburb' -- a place tagged as a white suburb that is no longer either white or suburban. Bellevue now is less white than Seattle and has nearly as high a share of foreign-born residents (32 percent) as Brooklyn (38 percent).

Yet people can't bring themselves to call it a real city."

Full Story: Is Bellevue a New Brooklyn?
Source: The Seattle Times, December 14, 2006
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