One year ago today, Publicola published a blog post called Seattle City Council Common Denominator: Smothering Innovation,  that I suspect made a few people, especially now former Councilmember Sally Clark, very mad. I was encouraged to submit a post to a website about the process of writing. Their request for posts was titled, “The Call to Create.” This is what I came up with. They didn’t publish it. And a year after I wrote the post, I figured I’d share that writing about writing here. 

I have never called myself a writer. Somehow that term doesn’t seem applicable to me. But I do write, and it is the pixelated word that got me where I am today, working to change the narrative in Seattle about how we grow sustainably. As a blogger, I spoke up about things in a way that many people hadn’t before. I was pro-development and pro-developer at a time when developers are perceived as bad people. I see developers as the people that take the risks to build our city’s future. My own creative process, if it can be called that, is about change.

The phrase in the request for submissions, “call to create” is loaded with assumptions. Is there a complimentary phrase: the call to destroy? Does either call exist? The presumption is that there is a caller and a called. Creation also presupposes destruction. Do we really want endless creation? Doesn’t that, as Eddie Izzard points out, just mean we will need a bigger garage to store everything that we create?

I would call this dialectic between creation and destruction change. This is why I write what I write. Often what I see in public policy is an effort to stop change, to make the current situation the permanent. But the fact is that Seattle is the fastest growing city in the United States; and growth isn’t some nebulous force, it is people. Human beings are moving here, and they need places to work and live.

Our problem is very much like a family hosting Thanksgiving. We have to prepare for the guests we expect. They’ll need a table big enough, with enough chairs to sit on. Each person will need utensils and an appropriate portion of food. All this can be planned for in advance.

But when it comes to housing policy, our leaders makers are doing the equivalent of sending back the chairs; the guests are still coming, but they’ll have no place to sit. At almost every turn, the City’s leaders have been doing things to make it harder to build housing, making more rules, imposing more fees, and bargaining away additional development capacity. Why are they doing this? To make sure the people who are already here are more comfortable, to protect them from the anxiety created by change.

In my writing I have been very hard hitting, and this can make people upset. In one blog post I mocked the Council saying

If the city of Seattle regulated hot dogs one can only imagine what the advent of the corn dog would provoke at City Hall. How do we define a corn dog? Is it safe? And about that breading made of corn as opposed to a bun—what have other cities done?

In subsequent correspondence with a Councilmember, Sally Clark, she brought this up.

I look forward to hearing more, though I am very busy crushing innovation in other areas. Hot dogs and corn dogs are in the crosshairs, as you know.

Ouch. And I responded back.

The corn dog example is apropos here; it’s likely we’d end up with less units [of housing] and higher prices of something we actually want. Unlike Uber (and no criticism of them is intended) we can go into the numbers.

We hope you’ll let the innovation run free; hot dogs, corn dogs . . .

I wrote the corn dog post in about 10 minutes and hit send to an editor who worked it over a little bit, but not much. Less than two hours from the time I had my fingers on the key board the post was live and, evidently, roiling through City Hall. The idea had come to me a week or two earlier when I saw a man walking out of a Safeway in West Seattle eating a corn dog. The analogy came immediately.

I am often reminded of an interview with Jacques Derrida in which he speaks of the fear of writing.

I relate to this so much, that I have actually studied what happens when I wake up in the morning and I feel the strange anxiety he describes. What is it? Is it the fear of the “call” I should listen to; or is the “call” the urge to write something that will certainly be upsetting. I’ve come to believe that the burst of energy that comes while writing something that will have impact, and the strange twilight fear are both an indicator of a call; they go together and can’t be separated.

And that fear and anxiety prove that words matter, they are serious tools that can take things down or build things up, create and destroy. What’s happening with housing policy matters not just for the people here today, but the people who want to be here tomorrow. Will we clear space for them at the table, or will we fight change? Will we destroy some old ways of doing things and create new ones? Our decision matters, so I will keep doing what has to be done.