When I first met with Mike O’Brien and his lead staff person on land use, Esther Handy, she told me, “I’m here to look out for the little guy when the market can’t.” I think Councilmember O’Brien and Handy are sincere in their desire to accomplish advances toward the goals of social equity and justice. We probably disagree on the paths on how to make things better for poor people, but that’s not unusual among intelligent and dedicated people.

But I truly hope that Councilmember O’Brien will take a close look with fairness at two critical decisions coming before him and the Council on housing and land use. The first is how the Council responds to small-lot proposals offered by the Department of Planning and Development (DPD). The second is proposals that impact microhousing, also submitted by DPD. In both cases people who are current residents, mostly residents of single family houses, are demanding actions from Council that will make it more difficult to build housing for new people moving to our region.

There is a very important article authored by John McNellis called Tyrannies in America published in a Bay Area real estate blog called The Registry. McNellis calls out the connection between the recent Supreme Court decision in the McCutcheon case allowing unlimited political money in campaigns and the movement of angry neighbors who fight growth and new housing. McNellis rightly points out that opponents of change represent a tiny minority–probably less that 1 percent–of the city’s people. They also know nothing about about the economics of development. McNellis says the angry neighbors are the Koch Brothers of land use, spending lots of resources to influence the lives of other people by distorting the democratic system.

How can less than a tenth of one per cent of a town’s population wield so much power? Easy. One need only combine the majority’s apathy, the opponents’ zealotry and the city officials’ fear of losing their jobs with two facts, the first curious, the second mercantile.

The curious fact is this:  every neighbor who has ever spoken at a public hearing anywhere in America is convinced that he knows not only as much but more about development than the project’s design professionals. Just as half the fans at a game are certain their coach is a dope and that they should be calling the plays, even someone dropping by city hall to pay a parking ticket knows more than the dim-witted developer. Not to mention the city’s under-appreciated planning staff.  Would such a neighbor speak with the same authoritative hubris about a city’s financial investments or its aging infrastructure or even its trash service? No. Curiously, only sports and real estate require no training to become expert commentators.

And these angry neighbors concerned about their views and parking and the “winter light” are given the same weight in decisions about the future of the city as hundreds of thousands of new people who will need housing in the years ahead. Does that make sense? Is that fair? Is that just?

And the mercantile point?

If a self-appointed expert brays and no one listens, is he still as obnoxious? This philosophical question brings us to our obvious mercantile point: newspapers exist to make money. The headline, “Project Clears Next Hurdle” will have a reader flipping open the recycling bin. But “Embattled Developer Faces Rabid Opposition” gets readers to the ads on page 42.

If a paper were to report that a project’s only opponents were the village idlers who, for want of a more productive hobby, oppose every single project brought forth in a city, the paper would not only lose money, but the poor city officials might feel so emboldened as to approve projects in a timely manner.

Money being money, this is never the case. Rather than ignore the loudly ignorant, the newspapers accord them—at a minimum—equal status with that of the experts. Thus, in the article reporting a hearing, a parent’s instinctual fear of traffic will neatly offset a highly-researched traffic study.

Very true. And what happens when the village idlers are wealthy enough to maintain a law suit all the way to Federal Court against a house that is already built. The law suit filed against the “alley skyscraper” in Green Lake was pursued even though the house was done, permitted for occupancy, and sold. That takes time and money. Even people accused of a crime in Seattle usually can’t maintain that kind of fight.

And as McNellis points out, local politicians take note sometimes not just to keep their jobs, but to score political points. Take State Representative Gerry Pollett for example, who has been grandstanding his way through the small-lot issue since earlier this session. This is a great issue for Pollett who calls his neighbors houses monstrosities, but when he actually looked at the houses in question on a tour, he admitted that it looked “fine.” But Pollett scores points and maybe even campaign contributions when he bashes his neighbors houses and the builders and workers who build them.

All this points to the simple fact that we are a growing city and it simply isn’t fair to plan around people who are more worried about what they see out their kitchen window than the needs of a growing city. Councilmember O’Brien believes in fairness and opportunity. A great place to show how that works is to dial down the voices of the minority and dial up consideration for the people who are on their way here and have dreams and hopes for a future in our city. The fair thing to do is make room in our city for new people who want to join in our prosperity.