Bill Withers came to mind this morning as I considered how some neighborhood groups use and abuse data generated by planning agencies to implement the Growth Management Act. Here’s Mr. Withers on being used and used again:

But it doesn’t feel so good getting used when you’re on the other end of neighborhood groups that say “we’ve got plenty of buildable land, we don’t need upzones” or when they say “we’ve blown through all of our growth targets, we need a moratorium on growth!”

The truth is that the data produced to plan for growth doesn’t support either of those statements. And the purpose of GMA data isn’t to support schemes to close of the issuance of building permits but instead to actually plan for where growth will go and how it can be welcomed sustainably.

What about the first claim, “we have enough zoning.” Here’s what I wrote in a post at the Sightline Institute’ blog a few years back:

Numbers . . .  are extrapolated from a subset of King County’s UGA numbers, called the Sea-Shore Subarea. This is problematic because the Sea-Shore Subarea includes two cities other than Seattle, Lake Forest Park and Shoreline, and an unincorporated area, North Highline. The Movement’s analysis of the Buildable Lands Report doesn’t make any effort to disaggregate the Seattle data from these other areas that have, in some cases, radically different land use patterns and policies. They use the terms Seattle and Seashore interchangeably.

The numbers the neighborhood groups pick in this case are distorted because they include lots of other data. Essentially their sample is contaminated and is of almost no value to support the claim they’re making. But even if we took them at their word we know that the neighborhoods oppose projects even when there is available zoning capacity. I pointed to one project that was perfectly within the zoning capacity but was killed by neighborhood opposition.

When can you move in? You can’t, because the project isn’t going forward. Neighboring single-family residents were outraged that the developers would be removing trees from the site. They rallied around the trees, organized themselves, and eventually the developer backed out. The owner of the property wound up selling the building and property to a private school. The neighborhood won and the region lost, even though the developer would have been removing fewer trees than they legally could.

The point is that no matter what the advocates of a moratorium say they’re trying to do, they’re objective is to slow or stop the development of new housing in their own neighborhoods, even if the comprehensive plan would encourage growth in their zone. Just take a look at what’s going on with the LR3 zone.

And what about the idea that we’ve “blown through” our growth targets. Here’s what a the Puget Sound Regional Council says about the purpose of Growth Targets:

The Washington State Growth Management Act (GMA) requires comprehensive, long-range population and employment planning for cities and counties. Growth targets are used to help inform this work. Growth targets — based on the state’s official growth projections — state the MINIMUM NUMBER of residents or jobs that a jurisdiction must accommodate and will strive to absorb by some future year.

Growth targets are aspirational, but must be rooted in objec- tive analysis. While they are goals for the future, targets also serve as key benchmarks against which progress can be measured, are an impetus for countywide collaboration regarding future growth, and serve as a guide for local comprehensive plans and their implementing development regulations (emphasis is mine).

Growth targets are like those mileposts you see on the side of the trail that tell you how far you’ve come; the targets never were intended to function as indicators of “runaway growth.” On the contrary, passing the growth target for jobs and housing is an occasion for celebration. But what does Jon Fox et al say about job growth, a prime indicator of our city’s economic health?

Whether they can’t afford Seattle — and many lower-wage retail and service workers now cannot — or simply prefer less-crowded suburbs, more downtown workers are putting up with longer and more hellish commutes. And adding more high-rent apartments and office space appears to be failing at reversing this trend.

There is a far better and obvious solution: Locate more of those jobs out there in the burbs and closer to where these thousands now live (emphasis mine).

It looks like the NIMBYs and their allies (organizing a big push for the upcoming neighborhood summit) have used and abused the numbers to the point that, as Mr. Withers pointed out, they are just about used up.