Today Smart Growth Seattle begins a banner ad and pre-roll ad campaign to highlight what the Seattle City Council has been doing and not doing to increase the supply and choice of housing in the city. You can see the full video above, and you can sign the petition on the petition page.

Our intention with this campaign is to build support for increasing housing supply; that would mean the City Council will have to change its course away from costly regulations, rules, and fees and towards a plan to use an array of tools and policies to make it easier to build housing.

I’ve been pointing out that the elections for City Council next year will likely be a referendum on how the Council handled housing and growth in 2014. We’ve seen what they did with small-lot housing, and fortunately Councilmember O’Brien has slowed down bad legislation on microhouisng. We had to appeal Councilmember Clark’s proposal to downzone our important low-rise zones. Next up, what will the Council do with incentive zoning.

In each of these important areas of legislation, the Seattle City Council has a choice: support smart growth by allowing more housing choices as we welcome 120,000 new people in the years ahead, or make it harder to meet housing demand and drive up prices for everyone. There should be a really high threshold for passing any legislation from now on that limits housing supply, and blocking the “winter light” doesn’t meet that threshold. A lot is riding on their choices, including who remains on the Council after the 2015 elections.