I’ve tried. I really have. But I think the Seattle Times is officially hopeless. Here’s what they said in their endorsement of Jenny Durkan last week:

On housing, both candidates should be more cautious about upzoning single-family neighborhoods. That can decrease affordability by making houses and older buildings more valuable to speculators. Housing policy should be guided by data and collaboration with residents, not special interests, backroom deals and divisive rhetoric.

Rental supply is rapidly increasing in Seattle with nearly 37,000 apartments being built now or in the pipeline. But the supply of houses to own is at risk. City plans say there is enough capacity for projected growth without rezoning.

Single-family neighborhoods are essential to Seattle’s livability and appeal as a place to start careers, companies and families.

Buying homes is hard in today’s market but remains an important path to the middle class for immigrants, millennials and others. This opportunity shouldn’t be further diminished.

First of all, and those goes to the Times and to “urbanists” who have been distracted by single-family upzones, there are not going to be any upzones to single-family zones. It’s not going to happen. Furthermore, it’s a red herring. Builders are struggling to build housing in the low-rise zones because of overreaching regulation. The so called missing middle (which I wrote about a long time ago) is already being built, but it’s slowly being stomped out by the Council.

Second, a much more rational City Council than the current one decided to eliminate most new single-family housing in single-family zones! As Mugatu would say, “I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.” It’s as if our long battle to save small-lot development and our total defeat at the hands of the Council never happened.

I’ve used the graphic above as a reminder. Our proposal was totally rational and proportional. We wanted to build small houses on small lots with set backs on the front, back, and side along with height limits. You can see that the small-lot housing we were talking about legalizing would have been smaller than what the code already allows for single-family housing. Furthermore, lots in our proposal would only be buildable if they were no smaller than the average size of all the lots on the block face. This proposal was totally and completely rejected and ended small-lot development as a source of housing supply in single-family.

Do you get it now?

And no, allowing more housing in single-family zones doesn’t make it more valuable to speculators; it makes it more valuable to the owners of existing single-family lots! 

Hello? Can you hear me?

The last two paragraphs have left many people in town slack jawed. What? With single-family housing prices reaching into the low $600,000 range in Seattle how in the hell is anyone supposed to “start a career” or find a path to homeownership. Immigrants? Huh? If anything what I just said ensures that the prices will keep climbing. We’re not building anymore but the demand isn’t going to diminish.

And as if it wasn’t obvious enough how confused and upside down the Seattle Times editorial board and their reporters are, here’s what Seattle Fair Growth, an anti-growth single-family protectionist group, said in response to the editorial:

We appreciate the above statement from the Seattle Times editorial board.