Years ago, when I was running a City Council campaign, I arrived to the campaign headquarters to find the candidate with a draft letter to the editor. Some story in the paper was not to his liking, and he felt he needed to set the record straight. I told him that I was pleased he’d gotten his thoughts and emotions on paper. “Now,” I said, “You can crumple it up and throw it away.” After some back and forth he did. What I knew early on, almost by instinct, is the best way to keep a bad story going is to talk about it, and the worst way to get a good story is to argue with reporters. For the most part, the press really is trying to get the facts right and tell a story that is interesting to its audience. But the press, like the Mayor or City Council, is a powerful institution and can profoundly shape the public discourse on an issue. A recent story on KUOW was an example of reporting on growth that is factual, compelling, and helpful of the discourse.

I like Joshua McNichol’s story, The Man Who Steals Houses in Seattle, because it got the facts right about that challenge builders face with vacant buildings. It’s a subtle point, but one that, I think, comes through in the story: builders would rather have housing occupied than vacant. What makes this difficult is the regulatory regime at the City that drags out the permitting process and ties demolition to getting a building permit. When getting that permit is uncertain, demolition is uncertain too. Add to this the City’s unhelpful Tenant Relocation Assistance Ordinance (TRAO) which creates more hassle, paperwork, and uncertainty when notifying a tenant that their current residence is going to be demolished. The TRAO problem isn’t paying assistance to qualified tenants, it’s the chance that some hiccup in the process or an overzealous regulator will hang things up right at the time the bulldozers are ready to move.

Second, I appreciated the interesting confirmation of the beauty of market forces in the story. I’ve written about Friedrich Hayek before, and the story about Greg and his efforts to take advantage of vacant buildings for shelter is a classic example of what Hayek called “spontaneous order” and economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand;” the tendency for people to spontaneously solve problems on their own without mandates or fiats from government. Greg even talks about what he’s doing, improving properties and keeping them organized and clean, as a kind of “invisible hand.” What Greg is doing is illegal, but he’s found the animating principle behind Weld Seattle, which is taking the notion of improvisational shelter legitimate. Weld is creating a housing option for people coming out of jail, setting the up with employment, and offering building owners waiting for demolition a solution for the hazards of having a building sit empty.

Finally, the story isn’t yet another “greedy developers empty housing that could be used by the homeless” story. In contrast, the story shows the complexity of the issue, with builders and developers wanting people in their buildings, people in the community jumping in on their own to repurpose buildings, the legal complexity of both, and the potential of a solution that is both legal and beneficial. This just hasn’t been the norm in reporting of growth in Seattle. Usually, the story is confirmatory about new housing to respond to growth being “a problem” or “an impact.” It’s not, it’s a benefit. However, there will be discomfort associated with it. Empty houses sitting that way for months or even years is one of them. It’s something we can solve together if everyone just stops and thinks for a while. If it Weld had not appeared as a solution when it did, I’m almost sure we would have had some legislation proposed by Council to force builders to house people in their vacant buildings.

When we talk about “the news,” we’re really talking about narrative, a story. Today, in our region and especially in Seattle, the story that is told is about someone making lots of money at our expense; building lots of new things to create jobs and housing for people not like us and coming from far away. Our lives, the story goes, is being made worse by all this turmoil and someone else needs to pay for it and it should slow down and stop. The press reenforces this story every single day in big and small ways. True, an old lady might lose the loading zone in front of her apartment building to a bike lane, but that’s part of bigger, positive shift toward supporting people who want to stop driving. But when the Seattle Times reported that story it focused on a sad picture of the lady and how she might be killed walking to the end of the block to get picked up by her family.

It takes a lot of work to change this mindset. Yes, being a boom town comes with some inconvenience and discomfort. Telling that story in a sympathetic way requires solutions like Weld so there is a story to tell, but it also means doing what I told my candidate years ago never to do: complain when stories are bad. But we also should heap praise when the press gets it right. We’re all in this together and there is a big difference between seeing the press as an enemy and seeing them as an important part of the solution. But if they don’t hear other voices how will they know when we think they’re doing a good job or a bad job? If they were going to tell the story differently we have to criticize when they get it wrong, offer alternative and factual story lines, and then be appreciative when they tell a better story.