Getting Richer: Is Your Neighborhood One of Seattle’s Hot Spots for Rising Wages?

Seattle Times | Gene Balk | February 15

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-neighborhoods-wage-growth-hot-spots-getting-richer/

“Stagnant wages have plagued American workers in many places — but not Seattle. As regular readers of this column are aware, we’ve experienced some of the biggest income gains among major cities in recent years. The median wage for someone who lives in Seattle and works full-time was around $61,000 in the five-year period from 2011 to 2015 — a 13 percent increase from the 2006-to-2010 period, according to census data. That is the fourth-largest growth in earnings among the 50 most populous U.S. cities.”

 

Help on the Way for Washington Students Who Lost Financial Aid for College-Level Exams

Seattle Times | Paige Cornwell | February 15

http://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/help-on-the-way-for-washington-students-who-lost-financial-aid-for-college-level-exams/

“Thousands of low-income students in Washington who lost federal financial help to take college-level exams will get assistance this spring from a new fundraising initiative. A group of Washington public agencies, businesses and education nonprofits is working to try to raise $800,000, enough to ensure that any high-school student in Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) classes can afford the end-of-course exams they must pass to earn college credit. The fees for those exams range from $53 to $116 per exam.”

 

Downtown Seattle’s “Incredible Year of Progress”

Seattle Times | Jon Talton | February 14

http://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/downtown-seattles-incredible-year-of-progress/

“The Downtown Seattle Association held its annual breakfast this morning at the Westin Seattle, releasing its State of Downtown 2017 economic report. Association CEO Jon Scholes told the 1,200 attendees, ‘It’s been an incredible year of progress and there’s more to come.’ Vishaan Chakrabarti, author of A Country of Cities and founder of the New York-based firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, was the keynote speaker.”

 

Daily Report: Why Retail’s Future Is in Seattle

New York Times | Pui-Wing Tam | February 13

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/technology/daily-report-why-retails-future-is-in-seattle.html

“How do behemoth technology companies test out new concepts? If you are Amazon, you use your hometown as a living lab…In the past few years, the giant e-commerce company has tried out numerous retail experiments in Seattle, including a drive-up grocery store, a physical bookstore and a roaming delivery truck called the Treasure Truck. Amazon’s tests have cemented Seattle’s reputation as a hub for retail innovation, which in turn has spurred the creation of jobs and demand for office space in the city.”

 

Google Quietly Donates $10M to University of Washington in Another Major Computer Science Gift

GeekWire | Taylor Soper | February 13

http://www.geekwire.com/2017/google-quietly-donates-10m-university-washington-another-major-computer-science-gift/

“We already know that Microsoft, Amazon, and Zillow made multimillion-dollar donations to help build a new University of Washington computer science and engineering building. But another tech giant has also contributed to the expansion — albeit in a quieter way. Google confirmed to GeekWire today that it is donating $10 million to the University of Washington. The gift is ‘a mix of support for research projects and research facilities,’ according to a new mention on the UW website for the second computer science building, which counts Google’s donation among the $90 million in commitments raised for the project as of this month.”