I’ve written before about why I have an appreciation for Edmund Burke, 18th century Anglo-Irish political thinker and philosopher. His Reflections on the Revolution in France is probably the most important contemporary criticism of the French Revolution and an articulation of the role of tradition, government, and rule of law in establishing and preserving a free society. That book was really a letter. And what follows here isn’t as august as Burke’s work of course, but it is correspondence via email. I posted something similar two years ago about the same topic: will Seattle do the right thing on permitting more innovative housing solutions. 

It was a reply to a question about Single Room Occupancy (SROs) and microhousing. In giving my thoughts to a relatively open questions — “what do you think about SROs in Seattle” — I found myself writing an essay on why our current state of affairs in Seattle is a mess. Take a read. You might feel like Lord North, another Member of Parliament and contemporary of Burke, who, when he fell asleep during a tedious speech being given by a colleague covering 500 years of history said, when hearing the speaker was only up to the 17th century, “You have woke me a century too soon!” 

Upon reflection, later, I realized I was too negative in my assessment, at least in the sense that everyone should be trying various approaches to the issue of housing. There are a lot of people trying to influence the conversation and that can be a good thing.

But as far as supply goes, zoning or more FAR isn’t the answer. As I’ve pointed out before, I was always a big proponent of upzones. In fact, I was derisively characterized as an “upzone cheerleader.”

I think zoning itself is a 20th century solution to a 19th century problem. That is, we had rendering factories and big industrial uses competing with housing for land in densely populated cities. The notion that we should separate uses and geographically phase them in and out made sense in the early 1900s.

Unfortunately, the rise of the single-family home and subsidized highway system after World War II meant that this idea became enshrined as almost a sacrament of American civil religion: a house with a yard, full of furniture, with a car parked in front. That Genie is out of the bottle and has been running free and setting policy for more than half a century.

Those of use who grew up in the last quarter of the last century learned that the norm was to transition from improvised multifamily living to mortgaged single-family living. This was what was expected and this is what the government encouraged in the tax code; buy a single-family house. As long as roads were free, that meant that the marginal disutility for the equity in a home would be commute time. People were willing to pay that opportunity cost and sit in traffic.

The typical Wallingford or Ballard resident shouting themselves horse at that meeting in Ballard is sitting on a literal gold mine and the City Council knows it, mostly unconsciously. These angry neighbors are the political base and the tax base for Counilmembers big personal political dreams.

But so are the angry mobs of socialists who, bizarrely, think that the enemy is “corporations.” The Council is beguiled and frightened of both mobs. On the one hand they know the votes north of the ship canal can make a break a political career; but in today’s world and with districts, the ideological purity of socking it to The Man is important for raising money and building momentum for higher office.

That meeting was strange. The angry mob of rich homeowners clashed with the angry socialists wanting to eat the rich.

However, neither of these angry mobs has the answer.

And neither does the City leadership.

Adjusting zoning here and there might modestly improve supply, but if it comes with higher costs, that density will just mean higher prices and rents. This is why MHA doesn’t work to solve the price problem. Every square foot given, even with the existing code, comes with costs and risks that must be rationalized by higher selling price or rent. If we add to those costs and lengthen the time to build and increase risks with onerous legislation and taxes on operating housing, we’ve weighted down whatever advantage we’ve created with additional FAR. In truth, we’ve made the problem far worse.

What we need is fairness, efficiency, and massive deregulation to allow more supply. The first issue last: it’s tough for local progressives to hear “deregulation” and not think of Ronald Reagan, Republicans, and “Voodoo Economics.” That’s just wrong. But I get it. However, it is also simply true that the gross overregulation of the housing market is constraining production of a good thing, housing, which in turn means higher prices. Local government controls the spill way of the dam; by closing and building the dam higher, the wealth of single-family homeowners — the water on the other side of the dam — just gets turned into a bigger and deeper lake.

Thimbles of subsidy taken from the trickle of supply coming out of the spill way, do nothing to ameliorate the suffering of people with less money. Neither do modest upzones.

Unless and until we can break down that dam, and let the river run free so that people down river can get access to that life giving water, things will not get better. Neither the socialist mob nor the wealthy neighbors have any interest in breaking down the dam.

Urbanist efforts to tweak the code or tree regulation or parking or whatever may yield little drops of benefit here and there, but they won’t have the affect on the larger problem that is self-imposed through our political process.

We ought to be outraged at both mobs and by their servants at City Hall, not debating over beers and coffee and lunch how to tweak the code. The Urbanist and YIMBY effort while well intended will have little impact on this mess until it accepts as intellectual bedrock no more rules to limit housing unless it is for basic health and safety, that the way to help people struggling with rent is to give them what they need most, cash, and then finally, that if we build subsidized housing, it ought to be without any barriers to entry and for people with the greatest number of challenges.

Too many of the smartest and well intended people in Seattle are wasting time chasing DADUs, upzoning single-family neighborhoods, and redistributive schemes that simply won’t happen or won’t help. We simply must focus on the facts and what is right. If what is right isn’t acceptable to City Hall and to the two mobs, we have to concentrate on winning that fight over the longer term.

So there is a way forward. But it isn’t easy. I know. I’ve been there for the better part of the decade and lost friends and funders who think there is a way to talk ourselves out of this. But if we can’t be effective and persuasive with the facts and we know the right answer, then we need to give up or we need to persist anyway and accept the consequences.

This, I’m sure, is much more than you bargained for, but all this is heavy on my mind. I hope it is somehow useful.