By Josh Feit
Seattle’s pro-housing activists used to rightly call out the hypocrisy of “In This House” Wallingford liberals whose exclusionary zoning politics seemed too ideologically close for comfort with Donald Trump’s Build the Wall politics.
This was circa 2017, when local progressives were pointing to Seattle’s history of housing-covenant racism as a way to expose the ugliness of Seattle’s single-family zoning paradigm.
Still campaigning for universal housing access (sigh), local YIMBYs now have the receipts on the philosophical similarity between Trumpism and Seattle’s angry zoning rules, which make it impossible to build apartments in most neighborhoods. May I point you to page 511 of Project 2025 which says the future Trump “Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.” There you have it, Alki, Magnolia, Queen Anne, Laurelhurst, and Seward Park: Seattle is a Trumpist safe space. (The housing section of Project 2025 was written by Ben Carson, Trump’s former Department of Housing and Urban Development director.)
As Erica and I have documented here, here, here, and here, the Harrell administration had to be dragged kicking and screaming to minimally comply with new state zoning requirements, proposed by State Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), that allow more housing in traditional single-family zones. While the Harrell administration’s new 10-year Comprehensive Plan proposal makes a nod to the state mandate for fourplexes—it includes new density bonuses for stacked flats, including larger, family-size units, and no longer completely exempts 15 percent of the city from the new mandates—the mayor’s governing conceit remains bullish on the same old failed 1994 model of “neighborhood planning” that sequesters density onto busy arterial roads.
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Sadly, cordoning off density not only artificially inflates housing prices by putting a cap on development, but it undermines effective transit and saddles lower-income people with the environmental and safety hazards of car-choked streets. In Seattle, it also segregates low-income kids from the best schools and makes it impossible to run out and buy a frozen pizza or laundry detergent after 10:00 pm.
A closer look at Project 2025’s reasoning for opposing more flexible housing rules tracks to Seattle homeowners’ own familiar arguments against adding density. You just have to translate the national context to the local context to hear the “neighborhood character,” local-control pathology in Trump’s go-to document.
Again, quoting Project 2025: “American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations.” Sub in “individual neighborhoods” for “localities” and city government for “the federal government,” and I could be quoting any anti-renter homeowner testifying at city hall or writing on the butcher paper at an Office of Planning and Community Development outreach meeting.
Project 2025 goes on to mirror Seattle’s “lefty” housing opponents, with another classic reactionary canard: That the real answer to the housing crisis is preserving existing houses.
“Along the same lines,” the document continues, “Congress can propose tax credits for the renovation or repair of housing stock in rural areas so that more Americans are able to access the American Dream of homeownership.” Not only does that Project 2025 logic echo the Seattle NIMBY argument that there’s no need for new housing, but it’s hard to miss the similarities between Trump’s idealization of “rural areas” and Seattle’s preservationist mentality, which says we don’t need more development in our neighborhoods, we simply need to make do with what we’ve got. Of course, what Seattle NIMBYs are trying to preserve is a idealized mid-20th-century version of the city that excludes renters, low-income people, and new buildings that don’t conform to the current “neighborhood character.”
While blue cities like Chicago and Denver have announced they will not cooperate with the Trump administration’s nativist agenda, Seattle’s leaders have remained largely mum on MAGA’s looming assault. In the immediate wake of Trump’s 2016 win, then-mayor Ed Murray announced that Seattle “would not be bullied by this administration into abandoning our core values” and went on to sue the Trump administration in defense of sanctuary cities. Fast forward: Current Seattle Mayor Harrell is taking the olive branch approach, saying, “I’m not going to D.C. with my fist balled. That’s just not how I lead. I look for opportunities … no matter who’s in the White House.”
Given Harrell’s grumpy response to a state mandate to allow more density in single family zones, the opportunity to partner with the Trump administration on the NIMBY aspirations spelled out in Project 2025 should be popular in Seattle.
Josh@PubliCola.com
You must be paid by greedy developers that want to tear all the homes down, bild monstruosities, make lot of money for themselves and then overcharge for rent.
False equivalency and case in point.
Trump’s agenda calls for up to 60% tariffs on imports from China and 25% from Mexico. Here is the context: the PNW just lost its only glass recycling plant, which is in Seattle. The closure resulted in the loss of 250 union jobs, with pensions and other benefits. The plant closed, because the company and their union filed a complaint with the feds concerning China and Mexico (and Chile) dumping manufactured glass wine bottles in the US, using their own government subsidies to undercut domestic manufacturing. Biden’s ITC ruled against the company and forced the closure.
A ruling in favor would have saved 250 jobs, preserved municipal recycling of glass across the PNW, including Seattle, and allowed the company to continue to invest in cleaner operations per their lease with King County. Most of the region’s glass will head to the landfill.
Question for Josh: would a favorable ruling, which would have added a tariff and import tax to imported glass bottles just be shilling and equivalent to supporting the Trump agenda?
Why doesn’t sharing a house seem to come up for affordable housing? Or pairing up on an apartment? There seems to be a lot of rigidity around one’s right to have one’s own space. There’d be fewer lonely people if they shared space. And I completely agree that walking up and down three stories does not work well for many people. I am sad for the poor materials and design replacing older stock.
It does seem like having a roommate is much less common than it used to be.
What makes you think people don’t have roommates anymore? Is there any data or is it something you just “feel” is true?
Seattle is only nice because of the single family neighborhoods. If you haven’t noticed, all the high density areas of Seattle have terrible architecture and are generally awful places to visit.
You have beaten this horse to death with your tres bourgie private school liberal arts college degree.
Give it a rest.
In This Seattle House, We Believe:
Black Lives Matter
Love Is Love
Housing Is a Human Right*
etc. etc.
(small print at bottom)
* But You Can Have My Single-Family Zoning When You Pry It From My Cold, Dead Fingers.
The Mayors proposed comp plan allows for 300,000 new housing units in Seattle. It’s better than some preachy sign, but it’s not going to finance or build the housing we need.
Good piece.
Baby Boomers are dropping like flies, and this will only accelerate as time passes. At least some, if not most, of their properties will go on the market. No generation since theirs has had as many large families as their parents did, so there should be plenty of availability. Except perhaps that the incoming techies are buying it all up, or maybe what some think is beautiful and well-built and therefore worthy of preservation, is not to their tastes.
Whatever, there IS plenty of housing, and instead of demonizing homeowners who have worked and saved to own their homes in distinctive neighborhoods, how about turning that attention to those whose tastes run to the new cookie cutter crap built garbage that is overtaking what was once a most liveable city.
The people who live in SF neighborhoods and want to preserve them may not all be racist exclusionists; they may be just like the people that want them gone, or at least want their neighborhood as it currently stands gone.
The people already here don’t owe newcomers anything more than courtesy and civility. They don’t owe newcomers the freedom to destroy their neighborhoods.
Finally, as occasionally noted, what’s being built is neither affordable nor appropriate for the people who most need housing. Seniors aren’t likely in favor of stomping up and down 3 flimsy flights of stairs multiple times a day, and parents with young children may find that model, which along with the tiny square footage dwellings being built, are not suitable for young families.
And neither of those groups are likely to want to be car free and spend half a day getting to and from a park or beach or other recreational opportunity.
So, a generation is dying off and leaving it’s properties to the market, what’s being built is not suitable for many who need housing, and homeowners who have worked long and hard for their choice of SF homes don’t owe anyone the fruits of their labor. All these racist, bigoted canards don’t describe them; they are tropes meant to shame Innocents so developers can profit.
No thanks
Those big houses will end up as rentals, like the one derelict buildings near Roosevelt high school back in the day. The heirs will pocket the rent on the beach in Bali or some speculative conglomerate will buy them up as they come available.
Have you ever heard of an elevator? It’s a neat technology, I’d check it out.
Well, I’ll at least agree with “what’s being built is not suitable for many who need housing”
And don’t expect the urbanists to care about that. The only problem they have with what’s being built is there are “too many regulations.”
The Election offered 2 candidates
A rapist and a war criminal? Add Woman’s and men’s lives and rights matter to your sign
700,000 young Russian men slaughtered in Ukraine and 60 to 70,000 non Jewish residents brazenly butchered in the Middle East predominantly from American armaments.
Not a stretch at all. The (almost entirely) homeowners who wrote Wallingford’s Neighborhood Plan for example decided that what was best for the neighborhood and community was “for the poors to live near pollution” in nearly so many words:
Most of Wallingford is comprised of architecturally attractive single-family homes, which are experiencing escalating sales prices (and property taxes) due to the increasing desirability of Wallingford as a place to live.
Some community members recommended zoning changes to accommodate a greater variety of housing types in the community, and to support home ownership at lower levels of income.
[but instead]
New multi-family units along Aurora, and the housing stock along I-5 and near the Fremont industrial areas were cited as areas where students, new families, and others could find affordable housing.
This truly applies.
“Mr. Madison, what you have just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it.”
Keep it inside the lanes please Josh. To say that Seattle’s “angry” zoning rules make it ” “impossible” to build in “most” of Seattle’s neighborhoods is just flat out fake news. With the (ongoing, to be sure) implementation of HB1110 it is feasible to build 4 and 6 unit buildings in ALL of Seattle’s neighborhoods. While one may be annoyed by Harrell’s “grumpy” response to the bill, nevertheless it is going forward. We should be focused more on where we are NOW than where we WERE.
A bit of a stretch.