It's hard to imagine great wealth. But Seattle's 'Wealth Walk' makes you feel it 3%
By Scott Greenstone0%
5/25/2026, 1:04:31 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 8 faulty reasoning types, including Anchoring Bias, Indoctrination, and Optimism Bias, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 6% saturation with 67 hits. Analysis detected 240 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,126 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 13.3% and a BS Rank of 3% (16,466 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 97.90% of the article peer group.
To start "The Wealth Walk," an interactive theater performance and history tour, I met creator Ryan Guzzo Purcell in Mount Baker Park, by the tennis courts full of pickleball players, in Seattle.
Purcell began by handing me a dollar bill.
"You can put that in your pocket," he said.
"And now we're gonna shift from the real world to the imaginary world.
I invite you to take a single step forward."
Purcell got the idea for "The Wealth Walk" — which debuted last year but returned this month and plays through June 7 — during the pandemic, scrolling through viral videos that tried to illustrate massive wealth with metaphors.
For instance: If a grain of rice represented $100,000, how many would Jeff Bezos have?
(Fifty-eight pounds of rice, it turns out.)
"It's very hard to hold onto that level of abstraction because you stop thinking about what the actual wealth looks like and can buy," Purcell told me.
His walking tour aims to give participants a visceral experience, showing them contrasting wealth disparities in their own city — their own neighborhoods.
Teaching walkers how these disparities came to be, Purcell hopes they don't just see the wealth gap, but feel it with every step.
At the tour's beginning, Purcell led me up a quiet, almost hidden leafy path, into the upper-crust of the Mount Baker neighborhood.
The only sounds were birds and landscapers, and the views weren't blocked by power lines.
English brick and Tudor-style homes were shaded by exotic cedars.
In order to not just see wealth but feel it, Purcell said to imagine we were making $1 million with every step.
"Take a moment and think about what a million dollars might mean to you.
How would you spend your first million dollars if a million dollars fell into your life just like that?"
Purcell said.
"When you've spent that first million, I invite you to take one more step, and imagine that it happened again."
Two more steps and we've made enough to join the mythic 1%.
We stroll by the palatial Phiscator Estate, a colonial-style two-story with Corinthian columns, lush lawns, and make enough money to buy it, then buy it 10 times, according to Zillow.
Why we can't imagine big numbers
Danielle Isbell, a Seattle resident and social impact consultant who's been on the walk and brought her coworkers along for a redux, said she started struggling to picture the money the more steps she took.
"I do think it helped, but I also think it reinforced for me that there's just something, at least in this human brain that I have, that will like never really fully be able to conceptualize it," Isbell said.
Why?
"Because it's beyond human experience," said Nora Newcombe, a Temple University researcher of spatial cognition.
She said an American might have a reference point for $1 million — that could equal a nice home.
Or an average home in Seattle.
"Out beyond, you know, your average home or a little above average home, they have very few markers," Newcombe said.
"They've never shopped for a private jet."
To try and get wealth walkers there, Purcell said to repeat the mantra, "I own that."
The Prius.
The GMC Denali pickup.
The landscaping companies whose logos are emblazoned on doors of Toyota trucks.
"For the rest of this walk, anything you see, you're earning enough money that you could own it," Purcell said.
But not long after, we descended down stairs into Rainier Valley.
It's different.
Fewer sidewalks.
Power lines here criss-cross the sky.
Homeless folks in the park by the public housing ask us what we're doing.
"It's a thing called 'The Wealth Walk,'" Purcell said, waving.
Does 'The Wealth Walk' work?
The point is not a poverty tour of Rainier Valley — we also visit snug P-Patches, and Purcell sprinkles in Indigenous and immigrant history.
He takes us by the very first house a Black family moved into here, in defiance of racial covenants.
He shows us Franklin High School, where he attended growing up in nearby Beacon Hill.
The seeds of "The Wealth Walk" were sewn in Purcell's teenage mind here, as he looked out the windows during class.
Out the north windows of his 11th grade pre-calculus class, he saw the Mount Baker Boulevard greenway snaking up to the hill.
Out the south windows during history class, he saw a denser, concrete neighborhood with more commercial and abandoned buildings.
Purcell walked through the policy choices that made these two neighborhoods what they are, from segregation to redlining to who owns what.
Before he launched his first performances last year, he went along the route dropping notes off at each house he passed, explaining what "The Wealth Walk" is, inviting people to attend, and giving them his email if they wanted to ask questions.
The walk has evoked some strong responses from residents of both Rainier Valley and Mount Baker neighborhoods, Purcell told me.
"Everything from like, 'Oh, this is that wealth walk I've heard about.
It's so great,'" Purcell said, "to like, 'Why are you making people hate people who live in this neighborhood?'
And I say, you know, 'That's not at all my project.
I love this neighborhood.'"
He was married in the Mount Baker Community Club, he mentioned as we walked by it.
Purcell doesn't want you to shake your fist up at luxe Mount Baker either.
As big as the disparity is between these two neighborhoods, they're actually far closer to each other than they are to neighborhoods of the super-wealthy — like the ones we could glimpse across Lake Washington, where Bill Gates lives.
After walking a mile, we are billionaires, but we're nowhere near Gates and his neighbors.
To become richer than Elon Musk, richest man in the world, by my count we'd need to walk clear across the lake, over the mountains, past Montana's border.
At the end, Purcell reminds me about that dollar he gave me.
He tells me to keep it.
"A dollar is no longer a useful unit of measurement when we think about the super wealthy," Purcell said.
"But every dollar has the same amount of power as every other dollar, and what we choose to do with that money shapes our neighborhoods, shapes our cities, shapes our world."
"The Wealth Walk" is an invitation to "imagine the unimaginable," Purcell said.
I still can't, in my brain.
The history part of the walk is vivid, while all the numbers blend together.
But now, when I think back to the walk, I feel a twinge in the soles of my feet — and I think some part of me understands.
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