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.
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
