Getting Involved In City Planning

This is the second 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 finishing graduate school in California and transitioning to political work, I returned to Washington state where I had gone to undergraduate school in Tacoma. I was living in Seattle, and there were plenty of things to get involved in but I chose neighborhood planning, an outgrowth of the State’s Growth Management Act (GMA), legislation passed in the late 1980s designed to encourage density rather than sprawl. Implementing the law would require Seattle’s largest city to plan, and that meant lots of community meetings and a chance to know and be known. Neighborhood planning was my first chance to help shape how legislation would work at the community level.

Neighborhood Planning

Back in 2012, I wrote a bit of a historical analysis that was, in a way, prophetic of the Puget Sound and Seattle’s take on the GMA. I said then that there was a “an ideological realignment on growth that is painfully pulling apart an old coalition of urban planners, environmentalists, and progressives who, generally, have been in alignment on social and political issues.” What was beginning was a rift between planners who saw data that showed that it was better for the environment and economy was helped by more people living in the city rather than exurbs and neighbors who worried about damage to their property values. Neighborhood planning healed that rift by looking ahead and letting neighborhoods indulge in what they’d add to the built environment, often things like traffic circles and curb bulbs.

Light Rail

When I got involved as a volunteer in planning in the Beacon Hill and South Park neighborhoods, I thought this small, visible improvements were necessary. But along with these were bigger fish; light rail was finally happening, and it was bypassing Beacon Hill. The new regional infrastructure would pass beneath the neighborhood, but Beacon Hill would get no station because, Sound Transit said, it would have been too deep, making the Beacon Hill station the deepest in North America. But neighborhood volunteers demanded to see plans anyway, regardless of the cost. The pressure continued until a shell was proposed, then finally an actual station in the final plan.

The Seattle Process

What I learned from this experience – and the time that passed between the initial demands for a station and the completion of the station was more than a decade – was neighborhood persistence pays off, whether it is calling for good things like more transit and housing, or less, like downzones. Reflecting on the connection between housing and transportation, I wrote in 2009 that, “land use policy that creates density which in turn creates demand for transit . . . will be crucial to the success of light rail—in Seattle and elsewhere. In the 1990s, neighborhoods saw the tradeoff between the transitory discomfort of accommodating more growth and infrastructure like light rail as beneficial. It was worth the trade.

As a volunteer neighborhood planner, I felt engaged and also listened to. The Seattle process was at times Byzantine, and there were thousands of meetings. But the friction between neighbors, neighbors and the city, and between neighbors, the city, and planners, wore down the rough edges. People learned, over time, to trust one another, to disagree, and to find some common ground while finding a parking place for items considered far-fetched or infeasible. In a sense, it was a golden time when absolute ideologies weren’t at the table but rational self interest was transparent. When I went to work at the City implementing plans, I this trust was the foundation of success.