The C is for Crank

Seattle Times Overlooks a Key Factor in Ballard Rental Market—Renters

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 18:01:00 -0800

Urbanists tend to see in-city building booms as a positive thing: More supply lowers prices, and provides opportunities for people to live near their workplaces, rather than in sprawling suburbs. The Seattle Times, in contrast, looks at the apartment and condo boom in Ballard as a dark harbinger of "overbuilding"—the possibility that there may be more supply than demand, pushing prices down.

This, the Times reports, would be "a disaster ... for the landlords." A terrible outcome! In the Times's world, landlords should have total control over the market, and thus prices, and tenants should pay whatever that artificially price-inflated market supports.

Works great, right? Except for, I dunno, tenants, who make up half of Seattle's population, and would benefit from lower prices. The Times, needless to say, didn't interview a single tenant advocate (or renter) for its sky-is-falling story.

Legalizing Cheap Housing, Without Eliminating Standards

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:56:00 -0800

The C Is for Crank

Two weeks ago, Sightline director Alan Durning kicked off a blog series called "Legalizing Inexpensive Housing"; so far, his posts include an impassioned argument for rooming houses (known through the '90s as single-room occupancy housing, or SROs, and in a more recent variation as "aPODments"), and another arguing against the city's recently adopted rental-housing inspection law.

Rooming houses, with small private bedrooms and shared bathrooms, essentially disappeared from downtown Seattle in the last couple of decades, as real-estate developers came back to downtown and new zoning rules mandated things like kitchens, minimum living space, and private bathrooms.

I can go with Durning on rooming houses up to a point; although I strongly believe people should be allowed to live in small spaces without amenities that drive housing prices up, like private baths, kitchens, and parking, I also support fire codes and maximum occupancy limits, two factors Durning blames for pushing SROs out of existence.

But where I turly diverge with Durning is when he arguses against the city's rental-housing inspection law, which requires landlords to register with the city and submit to inspections by city-licensed inspectors. The aim of the law, which just passed last month, is to make sure tenants aren't living in substandard conditions, and to ensure that renters aren't discouraged from reporting problems by fear of retaliation from their landlords.

Durning raises a concern about the law: What if, by mandating inspections, the city ends up increasing the cost of housing? The problem with the analogy is that for many poor people in Seattle, Payless would be a huge step up. People are already going shoeless.

Durning believes that the more you regulate housing, the more expensive it becomes. "In fact," Durning writes, "I fear it is a move in exactly the opposite direction from where housing policy ought to be going. Where it ought to be going is toward repealing a raft of restrictions that effectively ban inexpensive housing in complete, compact communities. Repealing these rules, I believe, is the single largest sustainability opportunity that most cities have within their legal authority."

Durning uses a shoe analogy to make his point. Poor people tend to buy cheap shoes at places like Payless (guilty), whereas rich people tend to buy them at upscale places like Nordstrom. By setting mandatory housing standards, and threatening landlords with punishment (and tenants with eviction) if those standards aren't followed, Durning argues, the city is effectively forcing everybody to shop at Nordstrom.

The ultimate result, he believes, is that some poor people will buy Nordstrom shoes (expensive housing) and scrimp on other necessities (food and electricity), or buy shoes on the black market (illegal tenemants). And some will end up going shoeless (becoming homeless).

The problem with his analogy is that for many poor people in Seattle, Payless would be a huge step up. People are going shoeless, and shopping on the black market, already. The rental-housing inspection law is about basic health and safety—making sure apartments have access to water, light, air, and heat, for example. The factors Durning cites, like limits on density and minimum parking requirements, certainly do drive the price of housing up, but they aren't addressed anywhere in the rental-housing inspection law, which aims at creating a basic floor for housing quality below which the city says, "This apartment is not fit for human habitation."

Durning's premise is absolutely right, but his target is wrong. Of course we should make it easier for people to choose the kind of housing they live in—but not at the loss of the basic health and life-safety requirements that provide a minimum quality of life to every Seattle resident, not just those who can afford to shop at Nordstrom.

The "War on Cars" Is a Hallucination

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 14:40:00 -0800

A refreshing op/ed in today’s Seattle Times, which just came off a bruising series of election losses that showed it to be out of touch with its readership, acknowledges that the “war on cars” is a myth, that endless spending on ever-wider roads for single-occupancy drivers doesn’t work, that transportation is the primary cause of climate change in our region, and that endless highway spending is the real “social engineering.” “The era of big highways is over,” they declare.

Haha, just kidding! No, the Times just ran yet another in its ongoing series of increasingly unhinged editorials arguing that transit is the problem, that freeways are “freedom,” that the car is, and I quote, “an innocent and dutiful result of the basic principles of a free society,” and that limitations on parking and freeway expansion are poised to destroy Seattle’s economic competitiveness.

Instead of investing in “politically correct” transit, the author, guest op/ed writer Bruce L. Nurse, argues, the region should widen I-405 (“to accommodate the growth of the suburban cities”—how’s that for a chicken-and-egg problem?), eliminate voter-approved light rail from I-90 because it’s “reducing total lanes” (true if you believe lanes that are used by transit riders aren’t “real” lanes); and—this is my favorite—build a massive new “I-5 tunnel under the hills east of downtown Seattle.”

I don’t think any scoping has been done on that tunnel idea, but last I checked, building tunnels in Seattle is kind of expensive—and we can't afford to fix the roads we already have).

What’s more, if you spend billions on a tunnel, you take away money for other priorities, like transit—and we’re back to the chicken and the egg. Take the crowded local bus that runs every hour and is often late because of repeated budget cuts, or drive on the freeway the state just widened at a cost of billions of taxpayer dollars? What would you choose?

Nurse does offer one bit of evidence for his massive freeway-expansion program: The fact that people continue to drive—proof, Nurse argues, that “freeways work very well.” (Footnote: Actually, people, young and old, are driving less.)

But that evidence is, on inspection, mere anecdote. First, Nurse makes the classic mistake of confusing correlation with causation: Just because people drive on freeways doesn’t mean they do so because freeways are inherently the best way to get around..

There are lots of other reasons people drive on freeways, among them: Seemingly “cheap” housing in the suburbs (cheap only if you ignore the price of transportation); a lack of alternatives to driving alone; and a century-long commitment by public officials to invest lavishly in highways at the expense of other worthy projects.

Second, the presumption underlying this whole argument is the old “social engineering” canard: The argument that people naturally prefer to drive (because freedom), and that any effort to spend money to offer alternatives is insidious social engineering by “politically correct” governments. To the contrary. The interstate highway system is the largest social-engineering experiment the U.S. has ever undertaken, and its result—stormwater polluted with runoff, sprawling suburbs displacing farmland, deteriorating sidewalks, parks, and bus systems; and failing inner cities.

Finally, about that “freedom” claim. When I’m on a road trip, out on the open highway, driving does feel like freedom. (I prefer to drive far away from soulless 10-lane freeways and stick to the back roads, though). When I’m commuting, freedom is the ability to exercise my legs on a bike, or take a nap on a train, or catch up on my reading on the bus.

Sitting in gridlock isn’t freedom—and, no matter how many dozens of lanes we build, and no matter how neighborhoods we destroy for highways, and no matter how many farms get razed to make way for megamansions, we can't build our way out of congestion. If we don't invest in alternatives, gridlock is something we will always have with us.

Why the City Shouldn't Spend Another $2.5 Million on Eastlake Transit Planning, Part II

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 14:44:00 -0700

The C Is for Crank

Seattle Transit Blog's Ben Schiendelman and I are having a wonky blog fight about Mayor Mike McGinn's proposal to spend $2 million to study a streetcar on Eastlake. Ben argues that an at-grade streetcar on Eastlake should be the city's highest transit-planning priority right now.

I disagree, and so does the city council; they indicated they will delay spending the $2 million in McGinn's proposed budget that he'd put toward studying high-capacity transit on Eastlake for one year. Instead, the council has indicated that it plans to spend the money on other transit priorities.

That makes sense to me. Given finite resources, and a nearly infinite list of needed fixes to the city's transportation system, (accelerating the long-underfunded bike master plan, adding sidewalks to the city's north end, and improving bus service on some of Metro's most overcrowded routes), the city has to prioritize. That's what budgeting is about.Given finite resources, and a nearly infinite list of needed fixes to the city's transportation system, the city has to prioritize.

Proponents of rail on Eastlake point out that a rail line there is included in the Transit Master Plan. That's true—but so are hundreds of millions of dollars in other unfunded, and worthy, projects. If we could fund every priority in the plan, I'd be thrilled, but planning is aspirational, and budgets often come down to triage.

(Importantly, no one is suggesting that the money should be spent on roads; the debate here is between planning a streetcar on Eastlake and other non-vehicular transportation modes.)

Ben accuses me of "planning with anecdotes" and "armchair planning," then offers up a favorite anecdote of his own: Two city council members, Bruce Harrell and Tim Burgess, could run against the mayor next year. Therefore, the delay must be a concerted effort by the council "to keep him from having an election year success."

Really? If the mayor's success or failure in next year's election hinges on the delay of $2 million in transportation planning dollars while the council looks at other transit fixes, he's in more trouble than I thought. The council may not like the mayor. But that's hardly a phenomenon unique to this mayor, or this council. Council-mayor divisiveness is a built-in part of Seattle politics, not a grand conspiracy against McGinn.

(The Stranger's Slog picked up on my debate with Ben yesterday, taking Ben's side. Meanwhile, Ben's colleague at STB, Bruce Nourish, took mine.)

Since I love nothing more than a good transit debate, here are some more reasons I don't think an Eastlake streetcar that would share space with car traffic along much of its route—is the best use of the city's limited transportation dollars.

Proponents say we must build a trolley, not a bus-rapid transit line, because rail, according to the city's projections, would carry 25,000 riders a day. While that is certainly what the city's modeling shows, just 10,000 of those would be new riders. The remaining 15,000 would consist of existing Metro riders who switch to the trolley.

Among those existing riders: People who currently ride the 70 on Eastlake, which would be eliminated and replaced by the trolley, and people who use the South Lake Union streetcar, whose service would be "integrated" in to the new streetcar line.

Moreover, the city's modeling includes the entire corridor from Roosevelt in Northeast Seattle to downtown—which is one reason I don't think it's false, as Ben has suggested, to say that the line partly duplicates the planned Link light rail line from downtown to Roosevelt through the University District (not to mention the express buses that run from the downtown transit tunnel to the U District along I-5).

The estimated cost for the proposed Eastlake trolley is $278 million—more than three times as much as a BRT line (and at a higher operating cost per mile). Once it's up and running, the city itself estimates that BRT would cost $2.55 per ride over time, compared to $2.75 per mile for the trolley.

Under the city's transit master plan, rail would run less frequently—every eight minutes during peak periods, compared to every 5 minutes for bus rapid transit, and every 10 minutes during off-peak periods, compared to every 7.5 minutes for bus rapid transit.

Finally, about that support from bicyclists. True: The city's bike community (specifically, Cascade Bicycle Club) has joined in supporting the Eastlake option, on the assumption that it will include significant bike infrastructure (such as cycle tracks). While I certainly share that hope—Eastlake is a scary place to ride, with riders basically unprotected from passing cars—neighborhood residents tend to haul out the pitchforks when advocates suggest that the side of the road might be used for something other than storing their cars.

Dig even deeper into the wonkery in the comments over at STB; Bruce's post (which links back to Ben's) is a good place to start.

Koster: No Reason to Allow Abortion for "The Rape Thing"

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 13:30:00 -0700

The C Is For Crank

To paraphrase Tina Fey: What is it with Republican men and rape?

If you wondered what First Congressional District candidate John Koster thinks about allowing women to have abortions—a legal medical procedure, by the way, as long as folks like Koster aren't in power—in cases of incest or rape, now you know: He's against it, on account of "the rape thing" just really isn't that big a deal.

From video taken a fundraiser in Everett this past Sunday: "Incest is so rare. It's so rare. But the rape thing—you know, I know a woman who was raped and kept her child, gave it up for adoption, and she doesn't regret it. In fact, she's a big pro-life proponent.

"But on the rape thing, it's like, how does putting more violence onto a woman's body and taking the life of an innocent child that's a consequence of this crime, how does that make it better? Y'know what I mean?"

Spoken just like someone who has never been in danger of pregnancy from rape.

Aaron Ostrom, executive director of the Fuse Foundation, which supports Koster's Democratic opponent, Suzan DelBene, says of Koster's statement, "It certainly seems like the kind of thing that, if you're a woman voter, it should be cause for concern. ... You always wonder what [anti-choice politicians] are thinking, why they don't make exceptions, and when you find out, you almost don't want to know."

Watch the whole video here:

Why the City Shouldn't Spend Another $2.5 Million on Eastlake Transit Planning

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:16:00 -0700

The C is for Crank

City funding is limited, including city funding for transportation. The fact that we can't spend infinite dollars on infinite transportation projects—sidewalks on every block face in Seattle, separated bike lanes on every arterial, frequent transit to every corner of the city 24 hours a day, not to mention road expansions, bridge repairs, and pothole fixes—means the city has to prioritize.

Which brings us to the annual city budget process, in which the mayor suggests a budget, the council amends it, and everybody agrees on a compromise by November. Certainly, this year, one of the points of contention is the transportation budget, where Mayor Mike McGinn has proposed spending $2.5 million to plan a streetcar line up Eastlake and across the Ship Canal.

Advocates for other transportation options, such as cycling, have argued that that $5 million could be better spent, prompting elaborate conspiracy theories among McGinn sycophants: Those evil council members are trying to kill rail! They hate transit! And so forth. (No one, it should be noted, is proposing that those dollars should be spent on road expansion or other car-centric transportation planning; the entire debate centers on whether the money should go to transit, or bike and pedestrian projects, and in which part of the city).

"There is skepticism on the part of the council whether we want to begin a study for yet another line along Eastlake, when it may be many years before it could be constructed and when we have many other irons in the fire," council transportation committee chair Tom Rasmussen says.

The truth is, given finite resources, rail on Eastlake shouldn't be a top priority. The University District is already extraordinarily well served by frequent bus service on the 70 series of lines (70-77), and it's about to get light rail service as well (University Link, running from downtown to the UW campus, is scheduled to open in 2016.) A third mode, streetcar, would be nice if taxpayers' money wasn't an object, but it is, and there are many higher priorities, including bus service on Madison, increased transit frequency in West Seattle, and sidewalks in Northeast Seattle.

Given the resources that have been lavished on providing transit service to the north end of the city, it would make far more sense to spend our limited transportation dollars on projects that still lack funding—like the Broadway Streetcar extension, the 12 "priority bus corridors" the city has identified as needing more investment, or improvements to the city's laughably impecunious pedestrian and bike master plans.

The mayor's office would benefit politically from a win on Eastlake, but at a cost to other parts of the city's transportation system that have been sorely underfunded for decades.

Why The Times' "Experiment" In Political Spending Won't Measure Anything

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:42:00 -0700

The Seattle Times has justified its decision to make an $80,000 independent expenditure on Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna by calling it an "experiment" to prove that political advertising in daily newspapers is effective. In a statement, the Seattle Times Co. called the ad a "proof of concept for the effectiveness of a print newspaper campaign."

That's an absurd claim, for two reasons.

First, by making an unprecedented independent expenditure for a partisan candidate, the Times made itself the story. Currently, Google News lists 225 stories about the ad from around the nation. That's a huge amount of free publicity for an ad that would otherwise only be seen by the Times' dwindling base of print subscribers.

Second, the Times is shooting itself in the foot. By running a campaign ad for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, the paper has effectively guaranteed that no Democratic candidate will want to advertise in its pages in the future. In Democratic Seattle, those are the campaigns the Times should be going for—if its McKenna ad was really an "experiment" to show ads work, and not a cynical attempt to boost support for the candidate its editorial board endorsed.

If the Times really wanted to demonstrate that newspaper ads work for candidates in liberal Seattle, they would have run a free ad for McKenna's Democratic opponent, Jay Inslee.

Seattle Times Gives Free Full-Page Ad to McKenna

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:27:00 -0700

In a virtually unprecedented move for a (supposedly cash-strapped) newspaper, the Seattle Times Corp. is spending $80,000 of the paper's own money to promote Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna in its pages. The last time the paper gave away free space in its pages was in 1998, when the company ran several full-page freebie ads opposing I-200, the law that banned affirmative action for women and minorities in state hiring, education, and contracting.

According to a Times story on the $80,000 expenditure, the editorial side of the paper had no say in the decision, which "was made by the corporate side" of the paper to "demonstrate the effectiveness of political advertising." The contribution makes the Times the third-largest contributor to McKenna's campaign. (The paper is also running a discounted ad for R-74, the gay-marriage initiative).

How fortunate, then, that the corporate side just happened to go along with the editorial side's point of view.

Hmm. If spending $80,000 on its favored gubernatorial candidate proves that political ads are effective, does the corrolary hold true? If McKenna's Democratic opponent Jay Inslee wins, does that demonstrate that advertising in the Times is a waste of money?

The Times spend also raises another question about the role of newspapers in politics. What if "the corporate side" had disagreed with the paper's editors? Would they take out ads in their own paper for Jay Inslee, or against gay marriage, pitting the advertising side of the paper directly against its own editorial board?

How fortunate, then, that the corporate side just happened to go along with the editorial side's point of view.

Presidential Debate Fact-Check Roundup

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 12:21:00 -0700

The consensus seems to be that Romney blew it last night, ignoring facts, petulently complaining that moderator Candy Crowley wasn't sticking to the rules, and coming out with bizarre, off-point statements about marriage curing gun violence (forced pregnancies and forced marriages for all!) and "binders full of women." While both candidates played fast and loose with some facts, Romney was far more prone to fabrications and misstatements.

General fact-checks first: From the Washington Post, the Post again (with graphs!) Think Progress, which notes 31 "myths" Romney told in 41 minutes

ThinkProgress says Romney's main energy claim last night—that oil drilling on government land has gone down 14 percent—is "misleading," noting that oil drilling on public land is actually up from the last administration. They also point out that the vast majority of oil gas shales in the continental US are not on public lands, making it "geologically impossible" for public oil and gas leases to keep pace with drilling on private lands.

Meanwhile, in a piece bemoaning the lack of discussion on climate change and both candidates' stated commitment to increasing production of fossil fuels, Grist notes that Romney's "gas prices doubled under Obama" claim is specious, because the $1.86-a-gallon low reached in January 2009 was the result of the nation's economic free-fall, which zapped demand.

Everyone knows Romney was wrong about Libya, but I love the fact that Obama was all, "Please proceed, Governor," and Mittens was all, "Yes, Mr. President, I WOULD love the opportunity to step in it!" Explanation if you missed it at Pam's House Blend.

About those "binders full of women" (Romney's claim that after he failed to find one single qualified woman to appoint to any top position, so he asked "women's groups" for suggestions and received "binders full of women"): Not true.

According to the Boston Phoenix, what actually happened was that a group formed in 2002, before Romney was elected, to address the lack of women in top positions in Massachusetts government. During Romney's term, the number of women in senior positions actually declined—from a relatively equitable 42 percent to 27 percent when he left office.

Also, a Romney advisor said today that Romney would have opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which made it easier for women to sue for employment discrimination.

In my favorite gotcha of the night, Melissa at Shakesville points out that children of single parents—those people Romney said aren't part of the "American system" and are more likely to be a drain on society—happen to include not just the guy Romney was debating, but George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, and a dozen other past Presidents, all of whom were raised at some point by a single parent.

Finally, check out my live tweets from last night, and follow my personal feed on Twitter if you don't already, here. (And while you're at it, follow PubliCola and Seattle Met too!)

Some Caveats on That Sounder Report

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:28:00 -0700

The Seattle Times picked up today on a story first reported by Seattle Transit Blog nearly two weeks ago: Sound Transit's northern Sounder service, which connects Seattle and Everett, is running far short of expectations.

Today's mainstream media coverage hit the top lines, but glossed over more complictated reasons—public policy decisions that amount to antitransit social engineering.

First, here's the basic picture.

Currently, according to Sound Transit's Citizens Oversight Panel report, the north Sounder line has an average of just 1,100 boardings every day at a cost of a little over $32 per trip, compared to 1996 projections of 2,400 to 3,200 daily boardings by 2010 (and a goal of about $12 per trip systemwide).

On some days, as few as 700 people ride the northern Sounder route.

Additionally, an easement agreement with Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad ended up costing Sound Transit four times as much as the agency originally budgeted for fewer daily trips than initially planned ($258 million for four daily round trips, compared to the original $65 million estimate for six trips).

With farebox recovery—the amount of expenses Sound Transit makes back from fares—at an anemic 11 percent, that works out to a subsidy of about $29 per ride. In contrast, according to the report, Sound Transit Express buses in Snohomish County recover 29 percent of their costs from fares and cost the agency about $5 per ride.

That's a pretty damning picture, and the coverage today—from the Times, which reported there were "too many empty seats" on Sounder trains, to KING 5, which said the report "suggests [the] Sounder North train should end"—has reflected that waste-of-taxpayer-dollars narrative.

But the reality is a little more complicated.

First, as the report itself notes, a rail line that runs along a shoreline, as the north Sounder train does, inherently draws from a smaller population. (Draw a circle around a transit station that's bordered by water; half of your potential geographical "catchment area," to use the transit jargon, has no inhabitants.) So Sounder will never have as many riders as comparable north-south buses that run up and down I-5.

Second, there are a few built-in barriers to Sounder accessibility. First, the number of park-and-ride spots is clearly inadequate for a suburban commuter-rail service. I know, I know: parking bad. But at end-of-line suburban destinations, parking actually makes sense—especially in places, like Snohomish County, where funding cuts have decimated bus service.

Which raises accessibility issue No. 2: If you dramatically reduce bus service, you make it harder for transit-dependent people to use the train, even assuming they can afford the higher ($4.50 each way, compared to $3.50 on Sound Transit Express and Community Transit buses) fare. Want to convince more people, particularly transit-dependent people, to ride the train? Don't make it impossible to reach by bus.

And that, finally, leads to accessibility issue No. 3: Sounder runs just four times a day in each direction, with the last morning run leaving Everett at 7:15 and the final afternoon run leaving Seattle at 5:35—the same number it was making back in 2001, when I first wrote about flaws with the service. If anything, Sound Transit should add more runs to serve commuters who don't work during that narrow schedule, not cut, as some have suggested—lower service standards further, and lower ridership becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On the other hand (because there's always an other hand): As STB points out, light rail to Lynnwood is scheduled to open in 2023, providing "a fast connection into the hearts of the region’s biggest job centers that will be totally immune to traffic and mudslides, and run every 10 minutes or better, all day and into the evening, every day." That could make Sounder service redundant—assuming Community Transit provides good bus connections to the Lynnwood station (or, indeed, still exists).