I was glad to be part of a sweeping story about growth and its opponents in the Seattle Weekly which has been on news stands since last Tuesday. The author gets the narrative right, one that I’ve been explaining to people who ask, “how did we get all this opposition to growth?” The truth is that opponents of growth used to be effectively managed into understanding that growth has benefits and, with help from the City, neighborhoods can get those benefits. But today, we live in a world where the City is a helpless bystander when it isn’t making things worse with regulation that overreaches and simply makes housing harder to build and more expensive. Did the election change anything? Almost. Unfortunately it looks like growth opponent Lisa Herbold is on track to get elected to the District 1 position in West Seattle. Here’s a passage in the Weekly story that sums up the views of the people who support Herbold:

This is worth underscoring: When Bradburd and Fox look at a developer, they don’t see someone working to get the most use out of a property in a way that benefits everyone. Instead they see the One Percent squeezing the most profit out of the land in a way that is primarily self-serving. It’s a continuation, they say, of the deregulation and privatization that largely defined the Reagan era. This is part of why the debate over growth is so polarized: For Bradburd, Fox, and many others, the current wave of development in Seattle is part of a decades-long and international trend that amounts to an economic cleansing of poor people.

The good news is that Rob Johnson has been elected in District 4, covering most of northeast Seattle. I believe he takes a more positive view of what builders and developers do. The story is worth a read. The election may not be over since Herbold leads by only 27 votes which means a recount is almost certain. Either way, we’ll see how things settle and keep making the effort to talk about the issues and change the narrative: more housing choice and opportunity is what will make economic diversity possible in a growing City like Seattle.