This afternoon I attended a celebration of the life of Jim Potter. Lots of the development community showed up, and there were beautiful statements about his impact on people’s lives. Jim’s life was about family. And I suppose that his ability to master the world of development the way did is related to his confidence that he could always count on coming home to a deep and abiding love from and with his wife and children. But he was also a man who epitomized Epictetus‘ advice that “for every challenge, remember the resources you have within you to cope with it.” He was strong, and his strength led to confidence, and I think he was a risk taker because he knew, because of the love of his family and his certainty in himself, he’d win in the end. The crowd of people who were at his celebration is testament to that; Jim leaves a progeny of highly motivated people determined to make a difference in the world.

What stands in the way of that legacy is the profound mistrust that we have for each other in Seattle, a mistrust that leads to rules and regulations intended to stop bad things rather than encouraging good things. Zoning is a concept that was born of a well intentioned effort to protect people from bad things. The Euclid decision enshrined the idea that the state’s police power was needed to prevent the mixing up different uses, especially industrial uses, from harming people.

The constantly increasing density of our urban populations, the multiplying forms of industry, and the growing complexity of our civilization make it necessary for the State, either directly or through some public agency by its sanction, to limit individual activities to a greater extent than formerly. With the growth and development of the State, the police power necessarily develops, within reasonable bounds, to meet the changing conditions.

The world in 1926 was one in which factories belching smoke and sulphur were built right next to cramped tenements of the workers in those factories. While such conditions certainly still exist in some form or another, they aren’t the norm. Instead what pushing apart uses–living, working, playing–has lead to is a situation in which we favor long commutes, driving from place to place, and spending our limited resources on trying to get from where we live to where we play to where we eat to where we work. This has been disastrous to our environment, creating pollution of our air and our water. It also distends our transportation resources, disaggregating demand instead of putting people and places closer together.

I’ve heard two things in the past week: “don’t say zoning is bad”, and “I’m not sure I can build housing in Seattle anymore.” These are two troubling comments. The first is worry about letting go of something we know because to let go of the idea of zoning would lead to a Houstonian chaos with drive through liquor stores and endless one-story sprawl. The second comment shows a profound sense of doubt about the ability of the biggest most progressive city in the region to welcome growth. One is a clinging to a bad we know instead of inventing something better, and the second is the exhaustion with playing cat and mouse with regulators killing good things while on the hunt for bad things. Both show the cracks in our basic trust of each other.

Zoning, the limiting of use and where that use happens, has distorted our economy and our lifestyles, encouraging an obsession with rules to limit people from doing things that might harm other people. It’s best summed up by a professor of mine who said, after a bunch of kids tore up a local golf course hot rodding on it with their cars, “it isn’t amazing that it happened, but that it doesn’t happen more often.” That is, when we think about violations of norms, it’s usually when they are so exceptional that they fall out of the norm. But why would we regulate our world based on such outliers? Why would we find the worst offenses, the ugliest buildings, the most unsafe forms and typologies of housing, and regulate as if everyone intended to build to that standard?

Building new things people need and want, including housing, is a risky business. The essence of investment and entrepreneurism is taking risks, and taking risks requires not avarice, but trusting other people. Jim Potter trusted other people to do the right thing, and that’s what made him able to take the risks he took in his business life. Someone pointed out that when Jim went to a restaurant, he’d hand the menu to the wait person and say, “you decide.” Can we, in Seattle, do the same thing with land use? Can we get beyond zoning and rules set to stop bad actors and put ourselves in the hands of each other and say, “you decide.” The future of our city, our region, and our state depends on it.