All you really need to read is the author info…or just do a quick Ctrl-F for “radical”…
I read that as “Christopher Kirk wants to go back to the 1970s and to that end has served on public historic preservation and design review boards which are a big reason why nothing ever changes.”
And I am not the only one to see that…Given the tone of that opening, I am sure you will be shocked to learn that Christopher Kirk is a 73-year-old white guy.
Horseshit like “a convenient but inflammatory and erroneous way to justify a radical, top-down, across-the-board redefinition of our residential land-use patterns” or “a radical, ill-conceived, statewide rezoning which will have unpredictable effects on the character of your neighborhood” could come out out of the press office of Rafael Edward Cruz (R Self-interest).
The fastest and most efficient way to develop housing is to build large, multifamily projects, and studies repeatedly show that Seattle’s multifamily zones have enough capacity to meet projected needs. These zones are on major transit lines and close to shopping and work areas. Multifamily housing can either be apartments or condominiums, so a variety of economic levels and ownership options can coexist. Seattle’s carefully developed urban-villages plan is based on this concept.
So why isn’t it being built? We know from the Times’ own coverage that construction lags demand. Maybe the “carefully developed urban-villages plan” is terrible?
More, denser housing won’t necessarily mean more affordable housing. Many large cities are denser than Seattle, yet their housing costs are often much higher. Also, even massive housing construction will not fix problems related to inadequate mental-health care, drug addiction or people choosing to live outside normal society.
He’s right on this but not for the reasons he would want to be: there is no affordable housing without affordable land. A quick perusal of rents in Paris — 6 times as dense as Seattle — doesn’t reveal rents that are 6x as high as Seattle. And yes, more valuable locations have higher rents, just as rents in Spokane and Sultan are less than Seattle. Location has value. And land is finite, unlike demand for land as population grows, which is why housing costs rise. The price to acquire land rises with population, as David Ricardo explained 200 years ago, and rents rise to meet rising wages, as Henry George explained in the late 1800s. And the casual hand-off of blame to the victims of mental health and opioids, rather than the society that creates those issues, tracks perfectly.
They completely change the nature of neighborhoods while creating housing that doesn’t work well for families with children, or most older people, and they are not particularly affordable.
This thinly-veiled “do you want those people as your neighbors?” passage is a key part of the argument: We asked for workers; we got people instead says it all. Seattlites want to be served but don’t want to see the servants. “Neighborhood character” is often used to make people think about the people they might have to see, who might listen to music they don’t like or cook food they don’t enjoy.
Further, massive, one-size-fits-all rezoning is unprecedented and a terrible shift in public policy.
This is actually beautiful in its self-delusion. What the ^%&^% does he think single family homes are but “one size fits all” zoning? What he objects to is expanding the club and this has one of my key takeaways from my time in Seattle…that clubs — swimming pools, tennis clubs, etc — are as strong here as they are anywhere. We have public pools, more than in Atlanta, but we have more private pools — “swim clubs” — as well.
Redlining and discriminatory covenants affected many single-family neighborhoods in the past, but that does not mean single-family neighborhoods are inherently discriminatory today. Neighborhoods were discriminatory because of shameful, racist, private business practices related to sales, covenants and mortgages, not because of zoning laws. To address past inequities, it makes sense to develop proactive programs to help disadvantaged groups make up for past discrimination and have more housing options, including ownership, rather than eliminating the entire category of single-family housing for everyone.
The Seattle Process, on display…create a program with consultations and committees and whatever dilatory processes are needed to ensure nothing ever happens.
Single-family housing is more expensive because it has more open space and vegetation, more living space, more peace and quiet, and more stable populations of long-term neighbors who know each other — all reasons why people pay more to live in single-family neighborhoods.
A bit of a tautology here…let’s be clear, that single family homes are essentially houses surrounded by private parks, versus more dense housing that allows more public parks and that denser housing can take many forms, including apartment buildings, duplexes, row houses, etc. Yes, land is expensive, due to scarcity, and whatever houses the most people per square foot is best. Unless people like the author want to assign a maximum population for Seattle — cap it at 500,000, say — and let the bidding commence for the 85 square miles of land therein.
In the last 10 years, much of commercial Seattle has been bulldozed and redeveloped, and/or allowed to lapse into disrepair, chaos and crime.
Oh, good, more oooga booga nonsense. He claims to know a lot of about Seattle but is he aware that a 1.3 acre parcel of land sits idle downtown, right across from City Hall, and that land has been a hole in the ground since 2005? There are many under-used or disused parcels around Seattle but to have the old SPD HQ building demo’d in 2005 and still sitting idle should be an embarrassment to everyone who works in City Hall from the mayor to the city council. Not that Mayor Teargas was capable of embarrassment and the council seem little better.
Only Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods have remained healthy and maintained their unique character. Polls show that most people prefer to live in single-family homes, so if these neighborhoods disappear it seems likely that people will start moving to the suburbs as they did in the 1960s.
Scary nonsense like this, with vague threats about neighborhood character (people who don’t look like me and won’t cut their grass like I want it cut), is just part of the plan to keep Seattle a collection of car-dependent suburbs rather than a city with all kinds of serendipitous connections and experiences. Every week I see lists of “10 things to do in Seattle this weekend” and I wonder “why just 10?” and at the same time I wonder why I have to plan? Why can’t I just go out and find things that are happening? One reason is I live in a car-dependent suburb out in D5. I can get to other places by bus/rail but mostly downtown…not across down. Seattle has not yet recreated the Interurban railway and streetcar lines it was bequeathed and decided to destroy in favor of cars.
If you do not support a radical, ill-conceived, statewide rezoning which will have unpredictable effects on the character of your neighborhood and the value of your home, please ask your state lawmakers to vote against House Bill 1782 and Senate Bill 5670, and follow up with your city council.
But on the other hand, if you want to tell aging cretins like the author that they are past their sell-by date, ask your state lawmakers to make Seattle and Washington for everyone.