Over on the Stranger reader forums, a reader (R.V. Murphy) points out that our municipal endorsements seem schizoid because we endorsed Nickels, but we also endorsed council candidates who oppose Nickels’s policies. It’s a good point. However, we addressed it directly in our Nickels endorsement. Here’s what we wrote:

While we’re fans of Nickels’s big-city vision, we’ve had to call bullshit on Nickels a few times. We busted him on the South Lake Union trolley plan, the Vulcan giveaway at Westlake Avenue Park, his cave to Harbor Properties, the KeyArena plan, and his exaggerated numbers about the wonders of biotech. But his biggest shortcoming is not forcing neighborhoods to accept more density. A whopping 75 percent of Seattle’s residential land is zoned single-family and unless that changes, his urban-center density plan will backfire. Instead of driving housing prices down through increased development, he will drive them up by creating unaffordable yuppie enclaves. Nickels’s agenda needs to be fine-tuned, and that’s why we want a watchdog council that would include dissidents like Richard Conlin and Linda Averill, and not sniveling, Team Nickels butt-boys like Casey Corr.

I should add, however, that we’re not feeling so great about our Nickels endorsement now—not after Nickels’s anti-monorail press conference. Both Dan S. and I posted about that yesterday. Scroll down to read those posts.