Equinox Studios owner Sam Farrazaino, who says the blocks have given his neighborhood the feel of a “war zone,” has installed a number of the blocks around land he owns in Georgetown, although he says he used his “eco blocks” to “define parking” for his business, painted them to make them more attractive, and did not put them in the public right-of-way. “It’s a complicated… debate,” said Farrazaino, who described a rat infestation on a lot surrounded with RVs that made the ground look like “a moving carpet.” On the other hand, he said, “We keep pushing people around and saying we solved the problem, but the end result of the people with the power and land being able to push out that people that don’t have power and don’t have land is terrible.”‘
I couldn’t have scripted a better comment.
He’s exactly right: the ownership and control of land is what has created this problem and addressing that is the best, if not only, way out of it. My empathy for land owners/home owners who feel compelled to defend their wealth by knuckling those without land is pretty low. If they took a look at the city’s rental property database and realized how many homes in their neighborhood were rentals — maybe they own one themselves — and the corrosive impact that has on the city, they might see things differently. But I expect we’d hear “well, that’s just one house…what harm can it do?”
Last I looked, fully 20% of the homes in Seattle were rentals, off inventory, unavailable to be owned by people who live and work here, some owned by out-of-state investors, large and small. How do you think some of these globetrotting influencers underwrite their glamorous lives? Whatever happened to working for a living, for being able to live and invest in your community?
So what is to be done?
get rid of the state’s “Uniformity clause” that prevents taxing land as productive asset
institute a land tax/ground rent that discourages low-value uses of land (parking lots, brownfields, strip malls along busy arterials)
get rid of obsolete parking minimums and height restrictions on new developments, with a ground rent that will drive more dense land use
The results of dense land use can be see in most major cities of the Northeast and Midwestern US, London, Rome, and other EU cities (from personal experience), as well as in the suburbs of Paris and other metropolises. They are known as “housing projects”, which uniformly turn into concrete jungles and end up being demolished after decades of rot that come from concentrating human nature in small spaces. Only Asia, and specifically places like Singapore seem to have solved the problem of housing millions of people in small areas (again from personal experience), and their answer of strict police control, harsh penalties for crime (death penalty for drugs or guns), and zero tolerance (expulsion from housing) for negative social behavior (graffiti, litter, etc.) that we would think of as simply rude. In the Western world, where such controls would be anathema, dense urban housing means concentrating and hiding the very small percentage of substance abuse addicts, the mentally ill, and the criminals who prey on all of the above with low income and middle class folks who want to live and work in cities. People with any financial means get out of there as soon as they can afford to, steadily raising the percentage of bad actors. Still looking for a place where that has worked out.
I think the missing middle — the 4-6 story buildings in many cities like Paris, Vienna, etc — are not “housing projects” as we see them in the USA. Those prefabricated slums, in the USA and various social housing projects in the UK, were doomed from the start. Walled off from the cities or undeserved by transportation and other services, they could only fail. There are better, more thoughtful choices to be made.