Going To Work And Building Trust

This is the third post in a series about how I ended up working on the housing issue. It is more reflective and qualitative than quantitative. I’ve over the years about the many mistakes being made in housing policy along with ideas on how to make better policy. This series is a look back at my experience and how we got where we are today. It ends with some ideas about how to change how we think about housing

After almost a decade of debate on how to accommodate future growth, Seattle was still grappling with the issue by the end of 1998. During this time, I spent countless hours in meetings with fellow neighbors discussing the city’s growth, where it should occur, and how to make it meaningful and legible for future generations. While I had previously volunteered for these discussions, in 1999 I was now hired as one of six Neighborhood Development Managers tasked with implementing neighborhood plans, with the potential to either become part of the solution or part of the problem.

Expectations were high in the 37 neighborhood planning areas in Seattle when I began. Each neighborhood plan was rife with hundreds of recommendations big and small ranging from crosswalks and street lighting to new libraries and bridges. What had been warfare between opponents of planning and the City imposing the planning regime had stopped, replaced with diligent participation. The planning process may not have been the most inclusive or diverse process, certainly not by today’s standards, but it drew in anyone who wanted to participate, even erstwhile critics and skeptics. Throughout, however, there was an abiding sense of concern: “Would the City really follow through implementing plans.”

There are two examples of building trust that are important to understanding where the City and the neighborhoods found some trust with each other in two very different neighborhoods. The Admiral neighborhood in West Seattle had been a hot bed of opposition to the planning process, concerned that the idyllic and almost suburban mostly single-family neighborhood would be plowed down by Soviet style concrete apartment buildings. West Seattle, separated by the rest of Seattle by the Duwamish River had even talked secession. Parking was a worry, and as growth was programmed for the business district, the neighborhood demanded parking as part of implementation.

You can read more about the Admiral garage here.

In South Park, a poor, working-class neighborhood on the same river to the south, also felt cut off physically but also demographically from the rest of the city. The aging South Park draw bridge was on the verge of failing, and the replacement proposed was a fixed span bridge that would have allowed navigation of the river but would have landed right in the middle of businesses fragile and fledgling business district. The neighborhood had changed over the years, going from a largely Italian farming community to a single-family community surrounded by industrialization and inhabited by Latino immigrants. The neighborhood wanted a new draw bridge that would preserve the business district, a draw bridge just like the three other draw bridges across waterways in more affluent neighborhoods.

You can read a longer treatment of the South Park story here.

In the case of Admiral, we proposed issuing a bond to create an additional underground in a new development that was being proposed on a surface parking lot that had previously offered almost free parking for people shopping at local merchants. Businesses would effectively tax themselves over the life of the bond to contribute to debt service. In South Park, no matter how many proposals were offered, and no matter how many times, the experts insisted a draw bridge was too expensive or infeasible, we kept the option on the table. In Admiral, the City Council eventually killed the collaboratively funded parking garage, but the developer added it anyway. In South Park, eventually, more than a decade later, federal funding was found, and because there was a plan with a draw bridge, it was completed.

What does this have to do with housing? In both cases, in failure and success, what kept people who otherwise might have been fighting with each other, the City, or both, found common cause in a plan that had measurable goals. My role at the City was not to say “No,” but to manage expectations, do the things we could get done, but keep dreams alive as well. Rather than drive ideological feuds, the City played facilitator, generating trust so that even when a neighborhood lost, it at least felt as though all if its members had come together and could fight another day. I’ll get to today’s housing discussion later, but the housing discussion we’re having now isn’t really about housing, it’s about a battle someone has to win and someone has to lose.