Redmond Mayor Marchione Shows Us What Success Would Look Like
A week ago I was able to get over to the Master Builders Association mixer in Redmond. It had been a while since I had visited the city and the lure of Jack’s Bar-B-Que and connecting with some builders added to the reasons to take the trip over the bridge. I ended up being impressed with Redmond’s Mayor, John Marchione who spoke at the event. Here’s part of what he said:
We’re always trying to work with our customers and make things work well because you know if we’re going to have housing be anymore affordable we’ve got to make things predictable so you guys can predict, so the market can predict, and so we can have that dream. So, thank you all for being part of building the plans that us cities imagine and being a part of building that dream that vision that we keep out there.
You might remember I wrote about the things keeping us stuck when it comes to housing policy and also about what things we could as a community and industry to change the way people think about housing. Today in Seattle we’re still arguing over whether supply and demand is a real thing and how much “profit” people who build housing should make. In Seattle, developers are very much see as the problem. What we need is research and communications that will shift people’s conceptual framework: when prices go up that means we need more. And well meaning left leaning people would see that blocking growth is just as bad as Donald Trump repealing DACA.
What was powerful about Marchione’s comments was they were delivered matter of factly to a crowd of housing builders. He highlighted predictability and how builders actually make the city happen. Builders aren’t just building housing, they are helping other people build their own dreams whether it is a new home, a job, or a city trying to fulfill its planning objectives.
The fact that Marchione would even show up and say these words out loud is shocking when compared to his elected counterparts in Seattle that want builders to “pay their share” and are making things more unpredictable every day with haphazard rule making, fees, and trying to tax new housing.
My dream is not so much that builders and developers be lauded as the solution to the challenges of housing policy but as part of the solution. The Seattle City Council and Mayor don’t seem to recognize the value of new housing; instead they see it as an impact, something that makes no sense considering housing is scarce in Seattle.
When I heard Marchione’s words I had to imagine how different and better things would be in our city if we had leadership that could be collaborative with us rather than ignoring the expertise builders have at best, and at worst making them out to be villains. When elected officials in Seattle sound like Marchione, I will know our housing “crisis” is over.
Photo is of what I call the Tipsy Cow Building in Downtown Redmond.
The Seattle Times Responds
I sent a critical letter on a recent op-ed in the Seattle Times challenging the use of a picture. As I say in my follow up to this response, maybe I’m paranoid. Maybe I’ve been doing this too long. But the Times’ Mark Higgins responded in a very complete manner and I followed up with him. I think we do need a full and more in depth dialogue on these topics to move things in a better direction.
Hi Roger,
Thanks for writing to us and sharing your feelings about our coverage of real estate and your concern about a recent Op-Ed. You raise some legitimate points and questions, and I appreciated your ideas and openness on future coverage.
I can only speak to your concern about how we illustrated the Op-Ed and not to your larger issue about overall newsroom coverage. I hear what you’re saying and would urge you to reach out to City Editor Matt Kreamer or Business Editor Rami Grunbaum (who edits our real estate coverage). And as you mentioned in your email, you and I did just recently work to publish an Op-Ed that you wrote. I look forward to working with you again.
You’re right, too, that it would have been ideal had we sent a photographer out to Jade O’Neil’s house. However, given our time and limited staffing, that was not possible. When situations like that occur, we look for options to illustrate our work. Ms. O’Neil sent me a photo of her and her daughter, at my request, but the image was not quite right. By way of background, so that you know we don’t take these matters lightly, before we use any staff photo we turn to our Photo Editor(s) to discuss the appropriateness of pairing an image with our opinion pieces. In this case, the Photo Editor agreed with me that, in this case, it was fine to do so.
Respectfully, I disagree with your statements regarding the use of the photo we ran with O’Neil’s Op-Ed. In the 500 or so comments on the piece, I don’t recall seeing a single honest expression of confusion as to whether the house pictured was tied to the incident Ms. O’Neil described. The cutline made that clear.
Your statement that including the photo of the new homes going up in the CD is somehow an indictment of all such housing is, well, ludicrous. As Ms. O’Neil wrote in her Op-Ed, it’s the pace of change that has so rattled Seattle residents. Just read the comment stream. As older homes are bulldozed and new, often larger homes erected, the fabric of our neighborhoods are changing and that is certainly true of the CD, where many long-time families have chosen to move farther south, as this newspaper has documented in multiple stories. As Ms. O’Neil wrote, “Today, it’s different. I’m raising my family here, but sometimes it’s hard to feel at home.”
With tens of thousands of new housing units going up, and as house builders seek new opportunities across the city, this topic of growth and change will be debated and analyzed for months if not years to come. I’m happy to work with you and your clients as we document that profound change and the issues and opportunities that accompany it.
Best,
Mark
Mark Higgins | Deputy Opinion Page Editor | THE SEATTLE T I M ES
206.464.2094 |@markhiggins | mhiggins@seattletimes.com
Hello Mark,
it’s the pace of change that has so rattled Seattle residents. Just read the comment stream. As older homes are bulldozed and new, often larger homes erected, the fabric of our neighborhoods are changing and that is certainly true of the CD, where many long-time families have chosen to move farther south, as this newspaper has documented in multiple stories.
- Gentrification and displacement — I have yet to see a sustained and peer reviewed definition of these terms, and I have yet to see a way to measure them quantitatively. It is simply irresponsible to use these terms in the discussion without first asking what they are and how to measure them. Something is going on, but what? Are these terms about the feelings about the disutility of change versus an actual consequence of policy? Is it appropriate or even ethical to create a normative standard of racial mix in a set of census tracts? What is the correct racial mix and ratio of white people to other people?
- It’s too hard to build — I am sure you believe in supply and demand. Again, I don’t want the Seattle Times to agree with our point of view, but each aspect of this issue and story would greatly benefit if you could hear from actual builders about the hassles and difficulty of getting their product to market. If we were talking about a food shortage, the front page of your paper would be frequented by stories about the many hurdles, mostly political and bureaucratic, that a slowing down the production of and thus boosting the price of food in grocery stores.
- The high costs of non-profit subsidized housing — As I pointed out, this is worthy of investigation. And as I have only partially joked with reporters, it’s an award winning story. I want to point out, that the Chair of the Mayor’s HALA Committee, Faith Pettis is an attorney that make millions of dollars from transactions related to tax credit non-profit housing, the very thing that her committee advised needed more money from our builders to sustain. That’s a big story. If Jack McCullough had been chair of that committee, you would have written about the conflict. We need to shine a light on how the non-profit industry is driving policy in a very unhelpful way. Again, that’s my opinion, but it’s worth a story or two or three.
- What are the solutions? — Obviously we all want to answer these questions. And I have appreciated the Seattle Times’ efforts over the last several years to create a dialogue on this topic. We need more. And frankly we need help. Today, the dialogue is taking place in a largely unmediated and unfacilitated political arena dominated by Kshama Sawant and her allies. People in the community concerned about this issue are being offered demagoguery and promises about lowering their rent and policies are being considered and implemented without any consideration or consultation with people who build and operate housing. We must widen the menu options for the community to consider.
(Yet Another) Letter to the Seattle Times
IPeople might say that it’s a mistake to pick a fight with the region’s daily paper, the Seattle Times. But, at this point, I don’t think the coverage of growth and development could get any worse. My hope in communicated directly and bluntly is that the Times might try reporting and writing about growth in a different way. I’ve made suggestions before. I think the people at the Times are doing what they think is best, but I think their coverage is making the conversation about how we grow more difficult and not easier.
Dear Mr. Blethen,
I am writing you to express an ongoing concern with your editorial choices about housing and growth. I’m also concerned that your staff is dismissive of legitimate criticism and overly defensive.
Last week you did a really great and important service by publishing Jade O’Neil’s first hand and emotionally devastating account of racism. I believe that her words about the event could have been a great opportunity to facilitate a dialogue about race and privilege.
I say, ‘could have’ because you chose to put a picture of a newly constructed house at the top of the article. First, this exposes the family in that home to potential derision and disapprobation. Are we to believe that this home is the one where the angry driver lives? The implication is a real one and you should have considered that before potentially exposing someone that may not have had anything to do with this incident.
More importantly, your paper has consistently demonstrated a sensationalistic approach to the housing and growth discussion. Again and again your real estate reporter, for example, writes stories about reports about increases in housing prices without explaining the basic fact that, new construction (like new clothes or a new car) is more expensive than older housing.
These stories never break down numbers based on room size and location. This matters since price is likely moving unevenly. Citing averages and putting the word “skyrocketing” in front of them do to shed light on what’s going on I the housing market. It is also a bit exploitative and unhelpful to pick tenants with problems and highlight their plight. In one notable story, the reporter cites numbers but fails to put them in context, giving a misimpression that likely proliferated throughout the discussion of housing prices.
These stories, with inflammatory headlines and photos, are confirmation that new jobs and growth are ruining the city and making life harder for poor people.
The fact that the stories don’t explicitly say those words (‘growth is ruining the city!’) doesn’t absolve you from being responsible for fanning the frustration of people who’ve made up their minds about the causes of “skyrocketing” prices: Amazon, brogrammers, and greedy developers and land lords. The stories are posted on social media with comments calling out anecdotes in them as further proof we need to clamp down on the production of new housing.
Worse, slapping a photo of a nice new house above O’Neil’s heartfelt expression stokes the issue of race then folds those flaming embers into the fire. It’s as if the implication is that the house did something wrong, and that’s exactly how many people upset about changes in the city and rising prices will feel. Had you used a picture of O’Neil in her car or something more relevant to her story, this might have inspired a different discussion. Had the headline used the word “privilege” and “public space” it could have provoked a dialogue.
These things matter. Please don’t issue the standard defense of “the stories don’t say that” or “pictures and headlines are chosen separately.” You are supposed to be professionals at the regions last daily paper. You can and must do better and recognize that content and form matter. Reporting and getting the facts correct are important, and I don’t dispute that your reporters work to do that. However, headlines and anecdotes and photos all contribute to angst about growth and stir up racial tensions rather than trying to facilitate dialogue to understand and heal them. This, inevitably, leads to bad policy.
We are happy, in fact I’m asking you, to work together on stirring up actual debate and discussion about why housing prices are what they are and how we can, as an industry, city, and government address them. Our city is at a tipping point; we either do the right thing now or watch our city enter an inflationary spiral that will make us the next San Francisco. I am not asking the Seattle Times to take our side, I’m asking for leadership of the kind that we have grown to expect in the past from journalism not just doing the equivalent of pointing at a burning building and saying, “Fire. Fire. Fire” over, and over, and over again.
Our members would be happy to talk about their work and the dramatic and onerous increase in regulation adding to costs (check out the long and growing list of costly regulations. This is news!). Talk to demographers that can explain that gentrification and displacement are very hard to define and measure. Check out the fact that Seattle’s black population in some census tracts really has dropped; but it has gone up substantially in others (I wrote a long post taking a closer look at Census numbers. It’s worth your effort to dig deeper here too). Also the numbers bear out that our city is rapidly becoming less white. Finally, your paper should take a deeper look into the exploding costs associated with subsidized, non-profit housing. Recently, two projects in Seattle built a combined total of 200 units at a cost of $92 million; almost $500,000 per unit, while in Eastern Washington 200 units of Farmworker housing was built for about $3 million. What’s going on? It’s worth investigating.
And I do appreciate the opportunity to respond to the City Council’s efforts to impose impact fees. Thank you!
I’m taking a chance that you’ll listen and respond constructively. Or perhaps, like Gene Balk, you’ll agree that it would be better to be rid of me, a phrase posted by Balk in a comment thread that sound strangely Henrician for a journalist. Instead, I hope it opens up a longer conversation.
Sincerely,
Roger
Seattle Times Wants to “Get Rid” of Critics; But We’re Not Going Anywhere!
The Seattle Times has once again demonstrated it’s breathtaking tone deafness to issues of growth in the city. Recently they published a guest editorial by Jade O’Neil who was born and raised in Seattle’s Central District. In the editorial, O’Neil describes an incident between her and a resident of the neighborhood in which the neighbor tells her, “You need to leave!” In the editorial, O’Neil ascribes this to her being black and the victim of what I would call a privilege issue: occupying public space depends on how you look, your race, and your standing in the economy. It’s a real thing. I spoke about it with Brice Maryman in the interview I did with him. But O’Neil’s heartfelt expression of her own experience gets twisted by the Seattle Times; the Times slaps a picture of a new house above O’Neil’s writing. The message is unmistakable: the source of the problem is new housing.
When I criticized this, Gene Balk the Seattle Times’ FYI Guy said, “There’s just no getting rid of you, is there?” I think that’s what he said, but I’m not sure because Balk came back and deleted the comment along with my response. Someone was fast enough to get a screen shot though.
The right thing for Balk to do would be to apologize in the thread or at least acknowledge that he crossed a line. He could have rephrased or whatever. I would have accepted that. But for a journalist or someone claiming that designation to imply that he’d like to be rid of me is truly disturbing. I wish I had a screen shot of the exchange. I don’t. But I wanted to post this here, and express my genuine concern about what O’Neil experienced on the street. I know exactly what she’s talking about, and it is true that racism is alive and well in Seattle. But it isn’t caused by housing. And I think the person who lives in that house should be outraged that their home would be used that way by the Times. I’d demand they take the picture down. The implication might be that the person who owns this home is the one who profiled O’Neil. That’s unacceptable.
And if anything happens to me, well….
Durkan, Moon: Please Focus on Real Housing Solutions!
I realized last week that both candidates for Mayor are pursuing policies that are out of the scope of the job of Mayor and distractions from the pressing needs we have for more housing and a better approach to growth. Jenny Durkan has decided to pay for two years of college for high school graduates in the city and Cary Moon is toying with a tax on “speculation” on real estate to pursue money laundering. Of the two, Durkan’s proposal is the most irresponsible and harmful while Moon’s is more of a waste of time. Taken together, they show how outliers and pandering to political factions are going to imperil any chance we have from sliding down the San Francisco death spiral.
Durkan calls her scheme for free tuition, Seattle Promise, and she will guarantee that “every Seattle kid graduating from high school will know they have a debt-free route to enter the workforce career-ready or to pursue further studies at four-year colleges and universities.” She goes on to say, that “the Seattle Promise will benefit around 700 young people a year who otherwise might not continue their education, but fully funding this effort will cost around $7 million per year”
I think this is an indicator of what must be internal data showing that Durkan is failing among the strong and very real “Stranger Voter,” a younger demographic that skewed strongly toward Bernie Sanders and is highly influenced by and influential on local weekly paper The Stranger. It might be annoying, but it’s hard to argue with the power of the Stranger Voter. Durkan has the dollars to spend on getting a good read on where those voters will go, and she doesn’t have them. She even cites Bernie Sanders in her roll out of the program. It’s hard not to see this as $7 million bribe to younger voters.
Meanwhile, Cary Moon hasn’t repudiated her support for a real estate speculator tax on people from outside the country or outside the city. After Councilmember Lisa Herbold clumsily asked King County Assessor for data on foreign buyers, she faced a burst of criticism from people concerned about the xenophobic and hypocritical proposal to tax anyone buying property from outside the country or city. In my own criticism of Herbold I did mention Moon in passing, and Tweeted to her directly to just drop the whole idea or risk embarrassing herself. She has gone silent on this issue from what I can tell.
The problem with Moon’s use of “speculation” in her campaign is obvious and is pointed out perfectly in Assessor John Wilson’s response to Herbold’s weird request for data on foreign buyers in the pursuit of taxing them. Wilson wrote,
I don’t believe this proposal addresses the problem we are collectively seeking to fix: affordable housing. The luxury home market is not driving our affordability crisis. It is simple supply and demand of housing priced for working people and seniors that is driving skyrocketing prices.
Just allow us to build more housing, please!
Add to this obvious point that nobody has shown how exactly the foreign cabal would be able to buy the requisite hundreds and hundreds (about 1400 estimated by Mike Scott) of apartment units and empty them out to have a 1 percent impact on overall prices. What’s bizarre about the conspiracy theory adhered to by Moon and her constituents is that it is about as credible as the contention that Bigfoot is wandering in volunteer park and that the Loch Ness monster got a job at Amazon and is now living in the reservoir. Total bunk.
But at least Moon’s bizarre conspiracy theory is about housing in Seattle, and the Mayor of Seattle has some responsibility for policy that has an impact on housing prices. Durkan’s proposal is pure pandering to a demographic that is highly suspicious of her and her motives using taxpayer dollars. It seems desperate and off topic, especially while tonight we’ll have hundreds of people sleeping outside and in their cars. Sure, paying everyone’s tuition is great, but is that really the responsibility of the City of Seattle? And once again, Durkan is trying to bash Trump rather than paying attention to the unraveling of our own housing market.
Sadly, I’m the only one in town that will call this out. However, this could be a defining moment for the city, and the campaign for Mayor. Durkan is walking around town with the blessing of big shot lawyers from downtown, Vulcan, and the Chamber of Commerce and handing out entitlements to get elected. That is not something that bodes well for the hardworking people with family owned business producing housing. Durkan cares more about funneling cash to constituencies that will get and keep her in office rather than engaging with the real people at the front who are trying to keep up with housing demand. The non-profit housing industrial complex supports her candidacy as well. They know who’ll take care of their interests and provide them more capital.
When it comes to Durkan, at least, “equō nē crēdite, Teucrī! Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentīs.” Consider yourselves warned.
The featured image is a drawing by Cesare Nebbia an artist of the Italian school, 1536-1614, titled, “Laocoön Hurling a Spear at the Wooden Horse. The reference is to Virgil’s Aeneid 2:40-60 when Laocoön, a priest, warns the Trojans about the gift they are about to receive from the Greeks crying out, “”Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks, even when bringing gifts.” Immediately after Laocoön says this, he throws a spear at the horse. There are groans from within from the hidden Greek soldiers. But it’s too late, and two huge snakes come out of the sea and devour Laocoön and his sons. Sad!
