You don't have to drive 5 minutes to buy a bottle of water in Belltown. You can do that in a 5 minute walk, and there are multiple grocery stores within a 5 minute drive.
There is an IGA on 3rd below Pike. But yes Belltown has (mostly) always been a wasteland. There used to be a pretty good grocery store kitty-corner from the Cinerama.
The point is development in Belltown has been highly restricted for decades, preventing dense, multi-purpose buildings from being built in that neighborhood.
Even the newer buildings being built right on Denny and Queen Anne Ave N in Belltown are entirely the creation of zoning, as they are height capped and forced to subsidize parking (which rents for $0.XX per sqft a month) over usable space that rents for dollars a square foot. Most of the people living and working in that area are using transit, with 70% not driving: https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/docs/2014TrafficRepor...
I can walk across the street from my apartment in Bellevue and get food, furniture, and groceries but this is the exception even in Bellevue: outside of downtown areas many apartment complexes require getting in a car or bus to get anything.
Could we not fixate on the choice of example? I'm not familiar with Belltown and I don't really care, I'm much more interested in the parent's point and whether it's true.
However I think the real takeaway from the parent comment is that US cities are not designed for pedestrians[0].
[0] http://www.newurbanism.org/pedestrian.html