This article offers a deeper examination of the term groupthink and I think I see it in our local (and possibly) national discussion (never debate) about housing and homelessness.
You don’t have to read many article or tweets from the local urbanists/professional activists to see themes repeating, about new affordable construction techniques/building designs (by architects and designers) or arguments for the creation of more landlords (!) by people who either want to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) or hope to find one they can afford. But they never mention land, without which all these ideas are just that.
But the same themes also exist in the news coverage: more encampments, more RVs on the streets, more homeowners disappointed or angry about all of that, but no solutions. Just more chin stroking or what looks like mutual aid but might just be a hobby. I remember a Girl Scout troop 15 years ago putting together hygiene kits for people who were living rough on Seattle’s streets: I don’t see any adult-proposed solutions that go any further than those of a group of 10 year old girls. If you are still delivering clean socks and hygiene products to the same people in the same location over a period of years, are you trying to make things better or just make what we shouldn’t accept more comfortable?
It might seem unduly harsh to say that but this is such a longstanding problem. If this was a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake, we wouldn’t see the same people on the street 15 years after the fact. But this manmade disaster, the unwillingness to actually share the land, to put land to work through taxes and zoning, seems to be unsolvable.
Utah, not a state known for its progressive ways, decided years ago that simply renting apartments and housing people was the most cost-effective way to get people off the street and, more importantly, to give them some stability, some consistency. An apartment, some rented furniture, a place to safely store one’s few possessions, a bathroom, and some social services gets people off the street and keeps them off at a lower cost per person.
Of course, this might prove difficult in a market like Seattle where the high value of land drives up shelter costs but again, there is a solution to that: tax commercial land to fill out its highest and best use as a development and see what that does to rents. Developers need cheaper land and people, those currently housed or those who are priced out, need cheaper housing. But land is never mentioned in the myriad discussions about housing. Walk — don’t drive — through Seattle’s neighborhoods, along arterials like Lake City Way or Aurora Ave and see how many empty or underused parcels you see. Go on Google maps and see how many parking lots you see downtown — not structures but just paved lots that could be mixed-use developments, making far more for the city than the property taxes are bringing in.
Casting back to the RVs on neighborhood streets and all those parking lots, you begin to see Seattle as a city built for cars, not people. And you see Seattle itself as a collection of car-dependent suburbs, rather than a city — too much annexation and too little integration of the small cities around the old pioneer/port city.
You hear more about setting up RV parks for those who were able to get one vs any support besides sweeps for those in tents or sleeping in doorways. Years ago, there was a city-supported lot in a disused restaurant parking lot: it has since grown to become a formalized service. So we accept turning what could be remunerative land into an ersatz car camp, with services, while allowing our public spaces — sidewalks and city parks — to become tent campgrounds with no support. That land could be paying for the services people need, but we fritter that value away, like there will ever be more land. And then we wonder why this problem seems to be intractable.