Shocking presidential primary vote and Seattle Mayor's controversial comprehensive plan

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice. I'm David Hyde here as always with Erica C Barnett of Publicola. Erica, are you in Seattle right now? I'm actually, I'm not. I'm at an undisclosed location on the East Coast at the moment.

[00:00:25] Wow. Is Dick Cheney there? It just you. I haven't looked around this. This place is pretty big so it could be. It's possible. Yeah, check the basement. Sandeep Kaushik of, I keep saying Kaushik and company, but it's what's the name of your firm? Soundview strategies.

[00:00:40] Soundview strategies. Yeah. Someone actually texted me and asked me if I left sound view after the interview. Yeah, so let's, that's funny. Sorry, I didn't realize that. I'm glad we've clarified that that's not it. Today, two of the

[00:00:53] hottest topics happening in the city of Seattle and you're going to hear Erica and Sandeep break them down. The first is we just had a presidential primary. It seems kind of boring in the sense that we knew going in who the likely nominees

[00:01:06] were going to be, and that's what ended up happening. Trump and Biden. But Ben Enderstone did an interesting breakdown which Danny Westneet highlighted in the Seattle Times talking about the most Republican neighborhoods in Seattle shifting a little bit from what we've seen previously.

[00:01:23] Sandeep, let's start with you this time. What did you see in Ben Enderstone's maps? Yeah, what Ben's pointing out is that typically the most Republican area of Seattle is kind of where you'd expected Broadmoor, right? This gated community very wealthy.

[00:01:37] There's a high percentage of Republican-leaning voters and that was sort of the traditional mix, right? Republicans were sort of the sort of business corporate elite and, you know, that was the expectation. But now the most Republican district in the city is in a very poor community

[00:01:55] in the Chinatown ID, the CID district. And I think Ben's pointing to something that's true, that this is indicative of really significant tectonic shifts in the demographic allegiances to each of the two parties and particularly educational attainment levels, right? With non-college versus college degree holders.

[00:02:19] Democrats now are increasingly educated elites and more working class or non-college educated voters are moving to the Republican Party, including non-white, non-college voters, right? And so we're seeing that in the CID. But there's also all across Southeast Seattle, there was more pro-Trump

[00:02:40] and pro-Republican turnout in communities of color. I thought one of the funniest lines he said about Democrats, we have become the party of Wallingford. It's a kind of a funny line. It's the term we had from 10 years ago.

[00:02:53] I think I brought it up in the podcast before where we've always called it the fleece belt and it's sort of Wallingford, Fremont, you know, Finney Ridge, Ballard, Greenwood. And it was sort of like arc shorthand for these sort of like 40 something educated, bougie, home-owning progressive owners, right?

[00:03:09] The fleece belt. And yeah, that is a Democratic Party now. So, yeah, Erica, only 2% of Wallingford's total primary votes were going to Trump compared to 32% in the Chinatown International District. One thing I found a little frustrating about the narrative here

[00:03:23] is that it didn't kind of go a little deeper into, you know, and I realized like you can't pull people instantaneously after an election. But, you know, that it didn't go deeper into why people are voting

[00:03:35] the way they are. And I think that you might see some very different answers when you're talking about Rainer Beach, for example, just to pull out a Southeast Seattle neighborhood versus the Chinatown ID. One thing that Danny Westneet doesn't mention in his column,

[00:03:49] but you know, the demographics exist is the fact that Chinatown is a very old area. I mean, the people, the demographics of the people living there are much, much older than the rest of the city. The average or the median age is 52 according to the census,

[00:04:02] as opposed to somewhere in the 30s for, you know, the low to mid 30s for the rest of the city. So I think the age of the people that live in Chinatown ID matters. You know, we're not talking about the exact same demographics

[00:04:15] across the entirety of, you know, every single area that went more for Trump. So I'm really curious to see and this isn't the fault of, you know, looking at the data. It's just the polling doesn't exist. But I'm really curious to see why people were going for,

[00:04:29] you know, a more Republican vote and a more Trumpy vote in those areas. Because I suspect once you break it down, it's different from Southeast Seattle to the CID. Yeah. And Anderson, though, does say like this is compared to four years ago.

[00:04:41] So yes, it's like this precinct in the international district, basically around the wajamaya that he's looking at. But there is a trend here. And what he's really getting at is this trend reflects a national trend where Democrats or Republicans are looking at that.

[00:04:57] If Republicans can start getting 25 percent of the African American vote. I mean, it's real trouble for the Democratic Party, not in Washington state, obviously, but it's trouble nationally. I mean, it is a huge problem for the Democratic Party nationally. But the other thing we haven't talked about

[00:05:12] about the primary results is the uncommitted vote, right? On the Democratic side, I think all the to the extent there was any drama at all. It was about how many voters on the Democratic side was essentially make a protest vote by not voting for Biden

[00:05:25] and voting for uncommitted, the stranger and some large labor unions and progressive groups that are unhappy about the way the administration has been handling the war in Gaza, you know, or pushing for voters to vote uncommitted to send a signal to Biden. We're under 10 percent overall

[00:05:44] in terms of uncommitted votes statewide. So that's not nothing. It's something, right? I mean, I think there is a segment of the Democratic Party base of what I would call kind of the TikTok left, younger people and more left voters who are registering some displeasure.

[00:06:04] You know, how many of those people will actually then not vote for Biden in a general election? I think that's hopefully I'm hoping that's a very small number. But it's but you know, it's not consequential that it's 10 percent. But it's also not huge, right?

[00:06:17] I mean, it's kind of a math result, like sort of a middling result for the for the folks that were trying to send a message. I don't think they send some kind of resounding, threatening message to Biden.

[00:06:29] But at the same time, I do think we have to work. If you're my age, I worry that a lot of these people that are voting uncommitted never live through the sort of searing experience of the 2000 election, right?

[00:06:43] Where the left the hard way learned a very painful lesson about sort of third party votes and sort of saying that Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same. And that Nader vote in 2000, that through the victory in that election to George W. Bush was very, very searing

[00:06:59] for that generation of the left. But I think a lot of folks are, you know, that's more than 20 years ago now. And a lot of people didn't live through that. And I'm wondering if we're going to have to learn that lesson the hard way again.

[00:07:09] I hope not because the consequences are kind of dire if Trump gets elected. Yeah, I mean, I am not your age, Sunday by any means. Let's just make that clear. But I remember I was working at an alt weekly in Austin, the Austin Chronicle at the time.

[00:07:28] And I mean, like we almost had people quitting because we endorsed Nader like two weeks before the election. And either the editor or the publisher got, you know, was just furious freaked out and we ended up reversing our endorsement and endorsing Gore and like the next week.

[00:07:45] I mean, so it's your fault. It's your fault. I mean, you know, and I lived in I lived in Austin like this, you know, liberal city kind of similar to Seattle. And, you know, I mean, this is where I'll lose some of my more left wing fans.

[00:07:59] But, you know, I am a Democrat and I am not a fan of Biden in general voted for him reluctantly held my nose, etc. etc. Don't like a lot of his politics, particularly on abortion rights. But, you know, we can't take this as a frivolity.

[00:08:14] We can't act as if this isn't like an existential election. And I don't think you have to have been here during the 2000 election. I think just being here, you know, being here on the planet from 2016 to 2020 and, you know,

[00:08:29] seeing everything that's happened since should be enough to realize that. And so I'm, you know, I am with you, Sandy, but I really hope that, you know, having sent the message on a very important and powerful issue to a lot of voters,

[00:08:41] people will sort of do what, you know, a lot of voters did in the previous elections and vote for Biden because the alternative is just, you know, I mean, the rights that people will lose are just unimaginable and unfathomable.

[00:08:55] And so I'm not terribly worried about these primary results, but I do hope that people will, you know, sort of understand when we have two alternatives that not voting is a vote. One thing we should note here is that for to actually accrue delegates

[00:09:10] to the Democratic National Convention, you have to cross a 15 percent threshold, right? And as we said, we're right now, the uncommitted vote statewide is below 10 percent. But it is a portion that I understand it by congressional district. So the seventh congressional district, which is Seattle, right,

[00:09:26] Permila-Giapal's district, it's not clear to me that uncommitted won't clear that 15 percent mark. There they're still below 15 percent King County wide. But I think it's something like 12 or 13 percent right now. But I think they'll probably cross that 15 percent threshold

[00:09:40] and at least, you know, symbolically will get a portion some delegates right for the convention. So that's, you know, that's something on their part. And again, if it's sort of sending a message within the Democratic Party that we want the Biden administration

[00:09:55] to take a sort of tougher line to Israel on their war, that's one thing. But it's kind of hard to put that genocide Joe sort of rhetoric back into the bottle. So we'll see how much and in an election that could be super close,

[00:10:08] it's all going to be on the margins. But who's going to vote for Trump over Biden on that issue when push comes to show? I mean, you bring up 2020. It could happen, but it doesn't seem super likely to me. Plus uncommitted delegates. They vote third party.

[00:10:22] The problem is they vote third. They vote for Jill Stein or they vote for Kennedy or they vote for Cornell West. Right. I mean, that's what happened in 2000. Right. It wasn't that they were voting for Bush, but that they were voting for Nader.

[00:10:34] Jill Stein got votes also in 2016. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too much. But in our delegates, we had tons of delegates who put masking tape over their mouths and refused to vote for Hillary, I think, in the first ballot.

[00:10:50] Yeah. I mean, look, you know, five hundred and thirty seven votes or whatever it was in Florida that threw the election to George W. Bush, right? And in 2000. And by the way, in any election, in any election, you could make the same argument.

[00:11:04] Also, it's nothing new to American politics to have an interest group say if you don't vote with us on this, you cannot have our votes. Look at Cuba in Florida. They're allowed to do whatever they want. I'm just saying I'm just saying they're they're playing with fire.

[00:11:20] And if they throw the election to Trump, you know, and again, it's not going to happen in Washington State. We know Washington State is going to go blue, but states like Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Georgia and Nevada like, like,

[00:11:32] yeah, Michigan in particular, where, you know, they've that throws the election to Trump. There's, you know, the consequences could be dire. So all right. Well, let's leave the presidential primary there for a minute and get on

[00:11:44] to the meat of the show this week, which is the comprehensive plan. Bruce Harrell releasing the latest on that. Erica with there's a lot of details in this plan, obviously, but but set the stage for us. What is the comprehensive plan kind of all about?

[00:12:01] And perhaps just a hint of the highlights here. I will point out before we get into it that we saw dramatically different interpretations from, say, publicola to the Seattle Times in terms of what Harrell is actually proposing. Seattle Times being a lot more positive.

[00:12:18] To step back, the comprehensive plan is a document that the city has to update every 10 years and the city is doing so this year. They're about a year behind schedule right now, almost. And it's kind of unclear why it took so long, but the city released

[00:12:34] its comprehensive plan update last week. The ComPlan is basically a document that determines how the city will grow in terms of population density, you know, where housing will go, what will be done with industrial areas and lots of other stuff.

[00:12:48] But the thing that's grabbing headlines in places like Publicola and the Urbanist in the Seattle Times is what does this plan say about how many people were expecting to move here and how much housing we're going to provide for them?

[00:13:01] And as you said, you know, the Seattle Times interpretation was that it provides new density in every area of the city. And, you know, essentially suggesting that this is almost an urbanist plan where we're going to allow more housing, more neighbors,

[00:13:16] more renters in lots of different parts of the city. My own interpretation and the interpretation of a couple of other writers for Publicola as well as the Urbanist, another publication is that it really misses the mark in terms of providing enough housing

[00:13:31] for people who are going to be moving here over the next 20 years. It's a 20 year plan and we're anticipating, you know, at least 200,000 more people and the plan provides about 100,000 housing units, which is, you know, it's nowhere near enough.

[00:13:48] And it also continues what was known as the Urban Village Strategy of the 1990s, although it's been rebranded now as the Urban Center Strategy, I guess, because that's what they're now called. But urban villages are basically areas along busy arterials

[00:14:04] where there's, you know, lots of cars and traffic and transit where renters are supposed to be concentrated in large crowded apartment buildings. And it doubles down on that strategy. And I, you know, I think there are lots of reasons not to concentrate

[00:14:18] renters into tiny little areas of the city. But we can talk more about that. But those are those are sort of the elements that are causing controversy. Yeah, one thing I would just add on top of that is that, you know, there has there is a mandate, right?

[00:14:31] There was a state law passed that mandates now that even within single family zones, which, you know, traditionally in Seattle have been a kind of political third rail and sort of sacrosanct, right? Because single family homeowners have been deeply, deeply resistant

[00:14:47] to the idea of adding, you know, infill or density into those areas, right? Which is why we ended up with this sort of urban village, urban center strategy or whatever you want to call it in the first place.

[00:14:57] So it's worth noting that there was a state law that now mandates that you have to allow four plexes or six plexes in some areas, you know, across the city. And this comprehensive plan proposal from the mayor's office,

[00:15:13] you know, does incorporate that, but probably in as sort of minimal a way as possible. And I'm kind of curious, Erica, what your take on that piece of it was. Yeah, well, it's it's it's funny. I mean, we actually talked to the sponsor of that bill, House Bill 1110,

[00:15:30] Rep Jessica Bateman from Olympia, and she said that she was tremendously disappointed in the way that the city had done the absolute bare minimum and possibly not even that to accommodate four units per lot and then six units if two of the units are affordable.

[00:15:44] If you look at the designs that they have showed that would be realistic, you know, just kind of the land use strategy to have four units. It is for separate units. So we're looking at probably townhouses. I don't there's no realistic strategy to actually allow anything

[00:16:00] like what we would consider a four plex or a six plex. It is individual units separated in space, you know, like the kind of tall townhouses that we used to build a lot of and that were pretty widely reviled about 10, 15 years ago. And they're going to be tiny.

[00:16:18] One of the things that is, you know, that Representative Bateman said was most disappointing is that this is not family sized housing. We're talking about if it's six units, they have to be a maximum of 750 square feet. If it's four, it's a maximum of 1125 square feet.

[00:16:33] So we're talking maybe two bedrooms, definitely not three. And then, you know, small one bedroom units. So the reality is, I mean, it's very likely that nothing's going to get built under this thing if it's adopted.

[00:16:45] And if developments do get built, they're not going to be for families. It's going to be a strategy to essentially continue to push people out of Seattle, you know, as soon as they start having kids, which is part of the problem that that we've seen for decades.

[00:16:59] I mean, people can't afford to live in Seattle. They moved to the suburbs. They moved to Kent. They moved to Brenton. I mean, they just they get out of the city. And that's that's not a recipe for a thriving city.

[00:17:09] You can't have, you know, a successful city without kids. But that's what this sets up Seattle, you know, to continue to be a city with fewer and fewer kids and fewer and fewer families. And even with the limitations, Erica, that you're you're explicating here,

[00:17:23] there's just a chunk of parts of the city that they're exempting even from that, right? Because they're saying because of the threat of quote unquote displacement. Yeah. That there's they can exempt up to 25 percent under the bill.

[00:17:36] And they they're doing 15 percent, you know, and those are in areas that have a high risk of displacement. That is a strategy that has been debated a lot. I think that, you know, of all the things the mayor's office has done with this

[00:17:49] plan, that is, you know, the most modest element of adopting an anti-urbanist strategy because they could have done 25 percent of the whole city. You know, I'm kind of clinging to scraps here because, you know, it's just

[00:18:02] it's like it's I mean, it's not it's not a plan for a city. It's a plan. It's it's the urban village strategy, you know, and and it's they're sort of I think the Seattle Times may have been a bit taken in by the fact

[00:18:14] that there are now these like these things called neighborhood nodes, which are 24 places across the city where there's going to be a little bit more development, three to six story buildings will be allowed. I mean, they're in places that are already sort of near density, near major

[00:18:30] transit stops, but there's 24 of them. And then, you know, and they're very, very small. There were originally, I think, 36 in the most recent sort of draft version of the plan. And they eliminated 12 of them. And the ones that were eliminated are in places you might expect like,

[00:18:48] you know, Laurelhurst, like Seward Park, like Alki, I mean, very wealthy neighborhoods that tend to object the most to having new people allowed to to live in them. The Seattle Times made a lot of that. And I think that there's just so much less there than it appears

[00:19:04] because they're it's 800 feet in every direction from a major transit stop. That's not very far. All right, let's pause for a minute. We're just going to hear an excerpt from the recent city council meeting where the Herald administration's plan was being rolled out.

[00:19:21] Since our comp plan was adopted in 2015, we have added 70,000 homes meeting our current 20 year growth target in just eight years. This statistic also illustrates that growth targets are not the same thing as zoning capacity. Even today, with this rapid expansion of expansion of housing in Seattle

[00:19:45] in recent years, our current zones capacity for new housing stands at 165,000 units. This does not include our current proposed plan and the additional capacity that will be added with it. So when we talk about the draft plan accommodating 100,000 new units,

[00:20:04] this is our baseline projection for what will get built. But it is by no means the limit on what can be built given our zones capacity. As there's been a lot of confusion around this point, it seemed worth emphasizing.

[00:20:20] Big picture here, they're saying 100,000 new homes over the next 20 years. But the Seattle Times story is saying that the Herald administration is emphasizing that that's a minimum, that the potential is for more than that. Fewer than the projected need of 112,000 set by King County.

[00:20:38] So why are those numbers so bad? I think most people feel the status quo when it comes to housing and housing costs in Seattle is not good, right? And not acceptable that we need to do better. We need to try to try to make housing more affordable, right?

[00:20:55] Because we have been on this trajectory over the last decade. Plus as Seattle has grown rapidly of ever increasing housing costs, big rises in rent costs. And so, you know, we seem to be on a trajectory where

[00:21:11] and this was a reaction on much of the kind of online left when the mayor's sort of plan came out that the attack, you know, or the complaint about it. I saw on Twitter a lot was that we're doomed now to becoming San Francisco, right?

[00:21:25] A city of extraordinarily high housing costs where, you know, that's basically the middle is hollowed out in the city of the extremely wealthy and the very poor, right? And my reaction to that was we should dream to be San Francisco, right? If you look up the density numbers,

[00:21:42] San Francisco has a density of more than 18,000 people per square mile. Seattle's density is down around 8000 people per square mile. So we're San Francisco has already more than twice as dense as we are. And what that says to me is we have an enormous capacity still

[00:22:01] to kind of grow and become more dense and add more housing. And I think the urbanists are right. That is the pathway to, you know, trying to kind of put a cap on this sort of massive run up in housing costs

[00:22:15] that's been profoundly affecting Seattle and quality of life here. And obviously this plan, I do think there are some incremental things that they're doing and they're adding a little note of density up at 130th around the new transit station up there. And, you know, as Erica mentioned,

[00:22:32] there are some changes they're making here and there to add some housing. But it doesn't seem commensurate with the scale of the problem we're facing when it comes to housing affordability. Well, in that 100,000 number, you know, I want to point out,

[00:22:46] I mean, it is it is a little bit less than King County projects that we will need, which is 112,000 over that same period. But that assumption, the assumption that that's based on is that we will continue to be as we are now a city

[00:23:01] where it is very hard to have a family and the median household size assumed there is 1.85. So you're not even talking about a couple, much less a couple with kids. And look, like I am a you know, I'm at a decadent urban night. I don't have kids.

[00:23:14] I'm not married, you know, so you would think I would be all over this. But the thing is, I mean, if you are just going to continue to plan for failure, which is where we are already at

[00:23:23] because housing prices are way too high in the city of Seattle, then you're you're saying, you know, we are going to continue to be at least as unaffordable as we have been and actually a little more unaffordable because we're not even going to meet that incredibly minimal goal

[00:23:37] of 112,000 new units. And we already have a housing shortage right now. I want to compliment your publicola headline. I don't know if this was this Ron Davis's headline or your headline. Harold throws in Talon housing with a 20 year plan to increase housing prices and worsen homelessness.

[00:23:56] That was that was Ron's headline, former city council candidate Ron Davis now now in publicola. OK, well, let's get to the politics of this so I can at least understand a little bit about the politics here.

[00:24:09] So I moved here what 2004 when NIMB is a sort of rain supreme. I think it was 2015 when CR Douglas pronounced NIMB is a dead and now it's 2024, it's almost 10 years later on the on the herald side of this. Why not go for something more ambitious?

[00:24:29] Why go for a plan that a lot of experts are saying is going to lead to higher housing prices and worse and homelessness? Just so deep. This is kind of your side. What is going on with with your side when it comes to this stuff?

[00:24:41] Why aren't they embracing? Also, by the way, I just like to point out the politics of this aren't easily sort of left right. You guys are both urbanists, but you know, so is Kemper Freeman or or so are big developers. So it seems like business.

[00:24:55] I completely disagree about Freeman, but sure. That's fine. But I'm saying business interests as well as the new urbanists left are all on one side of this. So what's left on the other side? Why do you have so many people feeling so so not ambitious?

[00:25:10] I guess. And then my other question is, how is the council actually going to react to this? Are they likely to embrace Harold's plan or or might they be more ambitious? Yeah, I think you're right, David, to put your finger on the fact

[00:25:21] that this doesn't neatly map onto a left right axis. I actually think it's much, much more an old Seattle versus new Seattle axis like old Seattle, the Seattle of 20 plus years ago when you and I moved here or Erica, when all of us moved here really was,

[00:25:38] you know, this kind of pleasantly provincial city that had this sort of small town feel. We've talked about the famous or infamous phrase from then council member Judy Necastro, where she sort of described Seattle as Mayberry with high rises, right?

[00:25:52] That was the sort of vibe of Seattle back then. It was Skip Berger, the Seattle Weekly editor wrote a column called Mossback that sort of celebrated the fact that Seattle was this sort of backwater and didn't want to be anything else.

[00:26:07] And that's the politics that says we don't want big change in growth and density. And we hate the idea when people say Seattle is a world class city. That's not the Seattle we grew up in and we want to maintain, right?

[00:26:20] And I think those are the people they tend to be older, sometimes quite far on the left like the old left in Seattle is lesser Seattle, right? That was the movement in the 80s and 90s, right?

[00:26:33] That was a movement of the left to kind of limit growth in Seattle. And that's sort of the opposition to this new Seattle is a much more urbanist sort of growth, you know, embraces growth and density and leans in on all that stuff, right?

[00:26:49] And that's the that's the political battle that we've been having. I do think urbanism is an enormous rising force in the city. And the the rate of political change and support for things like density has been astonishingly rapid.

[00:27:06] And I'm not sure that the political class on my side has caught up with that. And I do think that's sort of what undergirds this proposal. I mean, to answer the same question, I don't necessarily think it's old Seattle versus new Seattle. Old Seattle is from the 90s.

[00:27:21] And that is quite a long time ago. A lot of those people are no longer with us, to be honest. Like I think that the the debate now and especially on the city council, which to answer your question, David, I don't think they're going to do anything.

[00:27:32] I think they're going to adopt everything the mayor, you know, proposes basically as written, at least for, you know, its first year or so while they're kind of getting getting their feet wet. I mean, they're still having meetings about what the departments do.

[00:27:44] So I don't think they're going to be real aggressive on this. Nor do I think they they would be. I mean, all of the council members that, you know, that ran and particularly like Marissa Rivera, who's in northeast Seattle,

[00:27:56] which has a lot of the wealthy single family neighborhoods of the city in it said, you know, that we should we don't need more density. And, you know, and we can we can afford to have maybe a little bit of gentle

[00:28:07] density, but only if it sort of looks like what's already there and it blends in, you know, and these are these are people that are not old Seattle people. You know, they're people that are in their in their forties and fifties.

[00:28:18] It's an ongoing debate that really breaks down to money who has money and who doesn't. I think that our city council is currently made up of folks who perhaps don't remember what it was like to rent. It's people, it's people with a lot of money

[00:28:33] and nothing wrong with having money. I'm not saying that city council members, but but I but I don't think that they relate to the folks who are coming here and her like, you know, what the hell? Like, you know, rent is, you know, this three bedroom

[00:28:47] apartment is thirty six hundred dollars a month. I can't afford to live here with my kids. I don't think that that has been their struggle for a very long time. And, you know, to the extent that people's lived experience affects how they govern.

[00:28:58] I think that is a real issue. I just don't think it's a class battle, right? I mean, I think a lot of the people sort of who are your most ardent urbanists tend to be like people, you know, Ron Davis is a tech

[00:29:11] bro who made a shitload of money. Like, you know, Ron Davis is not scrambling down in the street like begging for scraps, right? Like whereas I think a lot of the anti, you know, the NIMBY types are sort of cash poor house rich people, right?

[00:29:26] Like older Seattle of that, like truer 20 years ago. Boeing bungalows, right? Right. But you're talking about people. It's not as true but but but NIMBY is certainly did not to the C.R. Douglas thinks NIMBY is certainly did not die in 2015.

[00:29:42] In fact, when we were going through the Hala process, right, the housing affordability and livability agenda under former mayor Ed Murray, right, which was a push to create a quote unquote grand bargain where we would up zone allow for greater heights in

[00:29:59] certain areas and more housing in exchange for giving developers greater heights in exchange for them setting aside a certain amount of that housing for below market rate affordable housing or paying into a fund for it, right? During that whole Hala debate, right?

[00:30:14] When the Hala committee initially kind of gingerly suggested we should look at single family zoning. That blew up into a enormous backlash in the Seattle Times and elsewhere. And I remember talking to some people that worked at KOW

[00:30:29] David a little bit on the older side telling me this was outrageous that we would go after their little, you know, I've got my little house and Ballard or wherever and now you guys are going to blow all that up and drive me out of the

[00:30:42] community and I'm going to fight this blah, blah, blah, blah. So I thought there was an enormous back then it was still a third rail, right? Like and it wasn't just Ed Murray. It was Michael Bryant, right?

[00:30:54] They all went running for the hills as soon as that backlash blew up and backed away from any talk of it. Now, that's sort of we're getting past that, right? Yeah, I mean, it's not that. I mean, I guess what I guess six years ago. Yeah. Right.

[00:31:08] But I guess the thing that I want to really emphasize is that it's not like we just have to sort of, you know, wait for these these views to die out because it's old Seattle. I mean, you're talking about people who bought their houses in the 60s.

[00:31:19] I'm talking about people who are, you know, who moved here five years ago and adopted the same attitudes. And I think that is who is in charge now. And I think that's really important to look at as we're, you know, electing people, you know, maybe

[00:31:31] people get elected on issues like they want more police or, you know, they want to do one approach to homelessness. But their attitude toward density and toward, you know, where we're going to allow fundamentally apartments to be

[00:31:45] really is the thing that's going to shape the city on a much longer term basis than, you know, then how we deal with the current fentanyl crisis or any of the, you know, important issues that, you know, are hopefully a little more

[00:31:56] transitory homelessness is not going to be resolved if we keep saying that people can't live anywhere. So not old versus new, but certainly renters versus homeowners is a part of the dynamic here in terms of the last election, maybe. And in terms of what we're seeing here, right?

[00:32:11] We're sort of an agreement about that. Yes. Yeah. If you did a poll of the city, what I'm wondering is would most people in this city be leaning more urbanist than this recent election result showed, you know, that if that if this council were to

[00:32:28] actually like look at what voters want, wouldn't they want more affordability and a little bit more density than we're about to get? Much more so. Yeah. And then there's we actually have polling data that demonstrates this very, very, very clearly that I know

[00:32:42] Erica, the chamber does every six months. The Chamber of Commerce does a poll, the index and they and I know Erica is not like some of the results that they don't like questions. Safety. Yeah. But they have consistently over the last few years asked

[00:32:57] a question about growth and density, right? Ask questions about gross and density. And what you have seen is are people willing to accept more density in their neighborhoods? That number went from being underwater to a few years ago, three, four years ago to being a kind of 50-50

[00:33:13] thing. And in the most recent versions of the poll, it is now two to one in favor of more density. That is a massive, incredibly rapid, you know, shift in attitudes towards a kind of urbanist, you know, ad density perspective, right?

[00:33:30] It's it's it's and I Erica is absolutely right. It's enormously consequential, right? I these questions about they do have a tremendous impact on what city is what Seattle is going to be like and look like in the not too distant future.

[00:33:46] So those attitudes are when I look at that polling, I'm like, holy shit, like the public is not quite in the space where our political leadership is. And there are interesting questions done, pack about why that is. Yeah. Well, I think city council campaigns are,

[00:34:03] you know, traditionally can like sort of skewed toward trying to get the homeowner class to turn out and vote and vote for people. And, you know, and there has not been, I mean, despite the fact that the city is is a majority

[00:34:17] renter, there has not been a real effort beyond sort of the Shama sawan, you know, maybe Tammy Morellis to sort of capture that portion of the city. I mean, I was going to say the left, but not even the left of the city.

[00:34:31] And I think it's because, you know, as we've talked about on this podcast before, people during elections tend to gravitate towards whatever the the sort of issue du jour is. And I don't mean to minimize homelessness. It's the main thing I cover.

[00:34:43] But, you know, you sort of run fearmongering ads about homelessness and crime and people respond to those one way or another. That becomes the issue. But again, like in the background, there's this issue of what are we going to look like in 10, 20, 50 years

[00:34:58] that is something that the city council actually makes decisions about as opposed to, like, let's say police hiring where the city council has very, very little power, particularly to reverse national trends. And and we just don't we don't because it's not

[00:35:11] the issue right now that we're talking about. We're not talking about it. And so I continue to find that very frustrating. But but it's also like, I mean, I think that, you know, that this should be more of an election issue because it actually would.

[00:35:24] I mean, as you said, Sandy, like people have really changed their attitudes on this and I think you could swing a lot of voters on this issue. But it just hasn't really been a major campaign issue for a while.

[00:35:35] Well, it's because I think that the people that have been running in recent elections and recent election cycles in Seattle under the urbanist banner, right? The people that are most ardently and explicitly pro-density, you know, I don't think they have lost, right? They've lost direction.

[00:35:51] But I don't think they lost because of their positions on urbanism. I think you and I agree on that, right? I think they lost because of their positions on things like, you know, defunding the police and at you know, abolitionist principles.

[00:36:03] My whole point is like political consultants get everybody like all worked up about issues. But it's not just about political. That's where I'm disagreeing. You're saying it's just some kind of fear of a long-range political thing. I'm saying this last election it was. I was giving one example.

[00:36:17] That the urbanists in some sense have been too freaking intersectional for their own good, right? Where they suddenly adopt a whole bunch of other political baggage of kind of, you know, left optimism. People are allowed to have opinions on more of the white things, Sonny.

[00:36:34] They're allowed to have opinions but they're not popular or successful ones electorally and they keep losing these races because they've lashed themselves to a mass. It might be that they actually believe things. We talked about this, we talked about, we have to know that.

[00:36:48] I know that hard to understand. We talked about this during the election, right? Ron Davis and you mentioned Marissa Rivera who won her election, right? And Ron was running against her on this urbanist banner and you know what happened? Ron came out saying we shouldn't ever,

[00:37:00] you know, prosecute drug dealers for any crimes, right? That was a, I mean, that was a really disingenuous attack. I think in one of the more disingenuous attacks by the opposition. Oh please. It was an idiotic thing for him to do. Not to relitigate the last election,

[00:37:16] if I can speak for a second. I think that your insistence that people only have one issue and that they should lash themselves to the right position, the winning position in your view on issues is a little, I mean, that is profoundly cynical.

[00:37:32] I think people who run for office, sometimes actually run because they wanna make a difference in the world not just because they're craving political climbers. And you know, if you ask somebody who runs for office what they believe on an issue,

[00:37:47] you might not always agree with the result even if you agreed with them on an urbanist issue. And I just, I don't think we should act like up shocked and appalled and angry that perhaps people who are urbanists also don't believe in massively funding the police state

[00:38:02] or in sweeping people from encampments and things like that. These positions, I mean, are in many ways quite compatible. And I can tell you that because I don't think we should massively expand the police state. And I am a zealot about Erdemism.

[00:38:17] I don't think we should be sweeping homeless encampments. So I think they are compatible positions and not just something that people adopted because they were dumb. There's also a question of what's gonna get news coverage and I can tell you somebody who in the past

[00:38:32] has had to pitch stories. Like comprehensive planning isn't one that editors are as excited about as a debate over whether or not Eric is an anarchist in her views. I have a hard time. And I would also say, but the progressive left,

[00:38:51] it sounds to me like the argument here is that, yeah, people can have their opinions. They don't have to be sort of craven but you also have to, people have to decide what their priorities are insofar as there is any kind of organized progressive left in Seattle.

[00:39:06] And these are, these are these are people and saying, well, yeah, but how do you feel about defund the police? Yes or no. And I can, I'm not, I'm not saying maybe you have asked that exact question. I don't know, but I know it definitely gets asked

[00:39:19] and like what are candidates supposed to say when that's the only thing the media care about? Like it's, yeah. I don't think it's the only thing the media cares about, but it's not the only thing, but it is true that anarchism is a sexy topic

[00:39:32] for people in Seattle. Like let's face it. And we've had, you know, what amounts to a kind of debate about anarchism over the last four years in some ways. And anarchist politics are not that popular. You know, when you put it as,

[00:39:45] do we want to massively expand the carceral state? I think most people in Seattle would agree with you, but did Ron Davis misstep on this question about drug dealers or whatever? I mean, politically he clearly probably did. And isn't it true that the press have left?

[00:40:02] I just fucking hate gotcha politics so much. And I hate like the easy, you know, one liner for Sundeep's, you know, flyers that he sends out. I mean, it just, you know, and not just Sundeep, but the political class.

[00:40:14] I don't know, I don't know, you might, you might, but the political, I don't tend to cover it because I think it's frivolous. The progressive left doesn't hate it and they want to do gotcha politics all the time. And Ron wanted to do it all the time

[00:40:25] by claiming that like Maritza was somehow a Trump supporter. So there's gotcha politics on both sides. Let's face it. Well, I think that's bullshit. To claim about Maritza Rivera. She's obviously a Democrat. Come on. So this is the question.

[00:40:37] I mean, it's like going to a protest march about X issue and there's a million people protesting about a million different things. That's just kind of how the left is. So it would be nice or whatever, you know, if you were giving the progressive left advice

[00:40:52] on Deep, if it were one thing, you'd say it has to decide what its priorities are. But that's just kind of unrealistic. It's not how things really work and like why are you even saying it in some ways? It's like, you know,

[00:41:01] you're going to have a whole range of issues and that's just how it's going to be. So I think there is a space in Seattle for the emergence of an organized urbanist movement or effort or organization. I'm not exactly sure what shape it should take.

[00:41:23] That is more politically astute and pragmatic. And let me give you an example. Like we were talking about the sort of debate about Hala a few minutes ago. During that process, a table came together that was called, I think it's called Seattle for Everyone.

[00:41:38] And it was a table that brought together sort of the progressive left and organizations on the progressive left along with developers and folks from the business community to push forward the density, the Hala agenda, right? It was a very effective sort of coalition

[00:41:54] that formed and organized and agitated and activated and I don't see that happening right now around urbanism because many of its most ardent proponents sort of don't wanna forge those kind of alliances. And so I do think there's a vacuum there. And I'll just close with, you know,

[00:42:12] I did the consulted on the race for Alex Hudson, right? Who ran in the third district and is a very ardent urbanist and somebody is a friend and I love Alex dearly. And after that election and who lost to Joy Hollingsworth, right?

[00:42:28] Who took a more moderate position on some of that stuff. After the election, I got an email from a very ardent Seattle nice listener who said to me like, you know, I love Alex Hudson and her urbanism, but I voted for Joy because I couldn't get past

[00:42:45] Alex's position on public safety opposing the drug law. And I wish there were urbanist candidates that were also aligned with me on, yeah. My point being, I think there is a space, a vacuum that is going unfulfilled that could move urbanism forward

[00:43:02] and where a lot of progressive voters in Seattle are, but that the left is missing. That may be so. I mean, the coalition you're talking about was a business led coalition for HALA and it did have a lot of progressive groups as part of it.

[00:43:15] But I think that what you're missing, Sandeep, is that for a lot of people, you know, the issue of urbanism which is fundamentally about housing is inextricable from the issue of homelessness and homelessness is inextricable from issues like, should we arrest everybody doing drugs on the street,

[00:43:32] you know, who are using drugs in public because they only exist in public. And so if you're talking about all these issues and saying well, we should have urbanists who are still in favor of sweeping encampments and arresting people for using drugs

[00:43:47] and saying that people can only have three overdoses before we force them into treatment or jail, which are all policies that the city, you know, is currently has or is in the process of adopting. I think that you're gonna find a problem

[00:44:00] because these are all related issues for a lot of people and including for myself, like I just can't see, I can't see urbanism without seeing housing and I can't see housing without seeing affordability and that leads to all these other issues. Yeah, I think you're too intersectional

[00:44:16] on some of this shit too. I don't think it's, I mean, I think it's not even intersectional, it's a straight line. I think it's a straight line between those issues. Yeah, I think you're mashing up stuff that doesn't necessarily need to be lashed together

[00:44:29] in ways that has been in recent election cycles anyway, harmful to the cause of urbanism. I'm just explaining to you why people think that way and why I personally think that way. I think that you can't just solve one of these issues without addressing the others.

[00:44:44] I would actually add to it though, if there was a more strategic left that focused on urbanism and higher taxes for corporations, I think it would be pretty successful and that is not the government we have right now. No, we have a government that's saying

[00:44:56] no new taxes effectively. Yeah, yeah. All right, read our lips. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nights. I'm David Hyde, she's Erica Barnett, he's Sandeep Koushik, our editor is Quinn Waller and thank you everybody so much for listening.