You didn’t think you’d be reading about Star Wars here did you? Well, here’s my Star Wars post. Why Star Wars? Well, George Lucas, the creator of the epic series of films, did an interview with Charlie Rose at the end of last year talking about his feelings about saying goodbye to Star Wars (he sold the Star Wars series to Disney for billions of dollars). I found his comments about creativity and imagination very resonant with what’s going on in the ongoing discussion of housing and development in Seattle. What Lucas says about the film industry could easily be said about decision makers who finance and regulate housing. What matters to banks and investors is getting a return on investment and planners and regulators want one-size-fits-all code. If you don’t like what’s getting built in Seattle, don’t blame developers but the need for investors to avoid financial risk and the Seattle City Council to avoid political risk.

At 35:30 in the interview, Lucas says that after Star Wars became a blockbuster, two things got abused. First, Lucas points out that the industry obsessed over the technology in Star Wars, forgetting that the whole idea of film is telling a good story.

Everyone went out and made space ship movies and they were horrible and they all lost tons of money . . . There’s more to it than that. You can’t just go out and do spaceships . . . You’re telling a story using tools, you’re not using tools to tell a story.

The analog in development are the planners who fasten on a particular approach to townhouses, for example, requiring a certain number of windows on each side of the home and setting that requirement with a formula. Same thing with parking requirements, set backs from the street, and things like requiring front and back yards. All those things might have worked well once, but just mandating them everywhere all the time doesn’t mean that buildings will tell a good story. Not all films should be space ship movies and not every building should be a bread loaf with setbacks.

The other aspect of the housing discussion that I personally find more frustrating than any other is the perception that the building industry is awash in money. Yes, lots of money is being invested in new construction to meet housing demand, but builders and developers are more like the directors in the film world than the fanciful Rich Uncle Pennybags featured in myths about development. Investors expect a return from building, and if rents aren’t high enough to support land acquisition, construction, and operation they’ll take their money somewhere else.

The other thing that got abused, naturally in a capitalist society especially an American point of view which is, the studios and everything said, “Wow! We can make a lot of money. This is a license to kill.” And they did it. And of course the only way you can really do that is not take chances. Only do something that is proven. You gotta remember Star Wars came from nowhere . . . There was nothing like it. Now, if you do anything that isn’t a sequel or not a TV series or doesn’t look like one they won’t do it . . . that’s the downside of Star Wars. And it really shows an enormous lack of imagination and fear of creativity on the part of an industry.

And when it comes to the regulators, they are truly the ones lacking imagination. The proposed scheme in the Grand Bargain is as formulaic as it gets, with zero room or any imagination or creativity only ‘performance’ and the generation of set, round numbers of units on an annual basis with no measures for whether those units are having a beneficial impact on the wider housing market.

If we want creative design and policy solutions it isn’t going to happen with imposing formulas and design review. But that’s what characterizes the City’s approach to the construction of needed housing. Councilmember Sawant’s proposal to use the City’s debt capacity to build housing on City owned land has gone nowhere; it doesn’t fit the City’s template. It’s just too hard for City staff to figure out so instead of moving forward with that idea, it sits on a shelf. Let’s make space ship movies!

Part of the reason I have long been an advocate of getting rid of zoning all together is that when a formula is created so is certainty, and certainty tends to foster repetition, and, in the end, laziness. If you want to know why people are annoyed by new development of housing and the growth that is happening in Seattle it is less from the discomfort created by change and more by the absolutely unimaginative approach we’ve taken to change. Rather than welcome new ideas and collaboration, the City has chosen to impose fees on change (Wow! We can make a lot of money!) rather than encouraging it. Im pretty sure that if the City made Star Wars the Wookie would be wearing pants and the Millennium Falcon would have been half the size and had a parking lot.*

*The truth is the executives really wanted Chewbacca to wear pants, something Lucas fought against. The story is little known, but an important one in explaining how something so much a part of the fabric of American culture almost got ruined by regulators. From a post at blastr:

One of the initial problems Fox had with Star Wars was the depiction of Chewbacca. Despite the fact that the character was covered in fur, studio executives were concerned that the bandolier he wore around his chest highlighted his lack of clothing, which could have alarmed the censors and potentially harmed the film’s distribution.

Mark Hamill, the actor who portrayed Luke Skywalker, recalled to Space.com:

“I remember the memos from 20th Century Fox, ‘Can you put a pair of lederhosen on the Wookie [sic]?’ All they could think of was, ‘This character has no pants on!’ This went back and forth. They did sketches of him in culottes and baggy shorts.”