Correction: Murray Did Not Bring ‘Developers and Housing Advocates to the Table.’
As the local press, the closest thing we have to historians of our city’s unfolding story, busily writes the obituary of Mayor Ed Murray, they are already embedding in that narrative basic falsehoods, what historian AJP Taylor in his important and controversial history of World War II, The Origins of the Second World War calls “legends,” things that people widely believe happened even though they didn’t. Today these legends would be called “fake news.” Here’s the latest from The Stranger embedded in their latest editorial that calls on the Mayor to not run for reelection because of allegations of child sexual abuse:
From taking up the cause of raising the minimum wage, to bringing developers and affordable housing advocates to the table, to your groundbreaking work on advancing LGBT equality during your tenure in the state legislature, you’ve made a positive mark on this city and this state. But your response to these allegations has eroded public trust in your leadership.
I’ve emphasized in bold italics the fake news. The Mayor, even in the most superficial sense did not bring developers and housing advocates to the table. I’d even challenge the formulation that those two categories of people, developers and housing advocates, are different. Residential housing developers, by definition, are housing advocates. They are at the permit counter all the time, trying to get permission from the City bureaucracy to do what they do best, build housing.
But more than that, the Mayor, whatever else he did do, brought people with different opinions and organizational affiliations, and professional perspectives to his Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee. There was some agreement there between those people. And later, a table was set but not for some wide swath of opposing ‘developers and housing advocates’ but for one developer, Vulcan, one non-profit housing developer, Plymouth Housing, a representative of the state’s largest non-profit housing developer advocate, the Housing Development Consortium (HDC), and the for profit attorney that represents the Washington State Housing Finance Commission. And at this small and exclusive table was born the Grand Bargain, the wide imposition of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) upon all builders of housing even while those builders and developers were NOT consulted or included.
Look at the signers of the Grand Bargain.
That’s just the facts. Not a conspiracy theory. What Taylor says of historians applies, I think, to reporters of the news:
Historians often dislike what happened or wish that it had happened differently. There is nothing they can do about it. They have to state the truth as they see it without worrying whether this shocks or confirms existing prejudices.
The Stranger is not alone in these abuses of context and fact. It’s a simple wave of the hand and a shrug I’m sure that would follow from them or others in the press when confronted with this. But one simply must consider that those words “developers” and “housing advocates” mean something. How many of each of those were brought to “the table,” what was that table (HALA?), and what was the result? Housing advocates, as I suggest, are a diverse bunch from those who build housing for a living to those that think it should be no longer be a commodity. And developers? Same thing. Developers range from small scale builders to giant companies like Holland or Touchstone. What does The Stranger mean in this formulation, “bringing developers and affordable housing advocates to the table” and calling it part of the Mayor’s “positive mark on this city and this state?”
After digging around my memory of historical theorists I remembered another great historian, E. H. Carr who’s well known for his criticism of existing historical methodology. In his What is History?, I found this in a section in the opening chapter called “The Historian and His Facts,” and I think it’s relevant to today’s reporting on what’s going on with housing:
The necessity to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts themselves, but on an a priori decision of the historian. In spite of C. P. Scott’s motto, every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello’s characters who said that a fact is like a sack – it won’t stand up till you’ve put something in it.
Let’s be sure we look carefully in the various sacks presented over the coming days, weeks, and months of this election season to be sure what they contain. In this case, the inspection would send the The Stranger back to their keyboards for a rewrite. Maybe something like, “The Mayor aspired to bring a wide array of people concerned about growth and housing to the table to achieve a lasting consensus about how to accommodate coming growth affordably in Seattle. That effort yielded benefits for some and criticism from many others. It remains to be seen whether his legacy will include this as a success in solving what some call Seattle’s housing crisis or a contributing factor to it getting worse.”
