I like the trend in Seattle personally. We are in a major building boom right now and if everything was entirely new construction it would be jarring in the future. The facadism in SLU particularly prevents the entire neighborhood from being cooike cutter glass boxes and gives some visual variety that maintains the (idealized) historical style of the city.

Go look at Bellevue and Redmond, the cities were obviously built in a series of booms that had very little variety. It's all very stale and boring.