Well, here we are. This is the 666th post on the Smart Growth Seattle website. Maybe this is the end. We’ll see what happens next. Over the course of the last four years we’ve been joined by a variety of contributors and covered a range of topics and issues. I wish I could look back at all these posts and say they had made a big difference. I can’t. But that is the nature of both promoting change for a better future and protecting what is valuable about our past. My experience with the smoking ban is a lesson I try to keep in mind. There wasn’t one thing that made the difference in moving our state and city toward a wide and comprehensive limit on smoking. But there were moments to remember.

One of those moments came after we passed the smoking ban and I got a call from a major contractor working on big high rise projects downtown.

“Can we ban smoking on our work sites with this new law?” the voice asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Just do it.”

“That’s all I needed to know,” the voice said. “Thank you.”

And just like that, smoking was banned at numerous worksites. I’d guess that there isn’t a major worksite that allows smoking.

The truth is the law had nothing to do with that specific issue. The employer, in this case, didn’t need the law. They could have banned smoking because they wanted to. All I did was give them permission. The nervous and worried people at the Department of Health at the state level had given them a long bureaucratic answer. Maybe. Maybe not. Blah. Blah. Blah.

“Just do it!”

I was just in Louisiana on a brief trip and we managed to fit in a boat trip out to the bayous and swamps outside New Orleans. The tour guide boated us all over and alligators would come up to the boat and he, and anyone else who wanted, could take a stick with a hot dog and feed the alligators.

“The big ones are awfully shy,” the tour guide told us. “They didn’t get that big by taking lots of risks.”

So it is with people and bureaucracies. The alligator repeated himself a lot, and he said more than once when talking about the alligators, “That’s two hundred million years of evolution right there!”

There are two things about evolution that are important. One is that it tends to favor stability. Stay out of trouble, avoid conflict and you’ll live to be a big and old gator in the swamp. The second, is that change is inevitable, and when the environment changes the organisms that can adapt to change end up passing on their genes into the future.

What’s true of the swamp is true of social change. Yes, if we go with the flow on housing issues and just accept bad policy like Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) some of us might be ok and get fatter, longer, and older. But, if we hang on, we might just find that things will change. And if we’re patient, people will come around.

When was the last time you heard someone complain about cigarette smoke in a bar in Seattle? When was the last time you heard someone complain about a no smoking policy in an apartment building? In a rental property? In a rental car?

So here’s to the next 666 blog posts. Maybe I won’t have to write that many more before we get where we need to be.

Alligators. The Omen. Cigarette smoke. Bad housing policies. I hope I didn’t give you nightmares.