Density advocates can greenwash trickle-down economics all they like, but it's still the same old supply-side Reaganomics - you've simply replaced his mantra about the wonders of tax cuts with density-at-all-costs boosterism that rationalizes upscale new development and the displacement of affordable housing.

A market awash in easy money and the resulting speculative bubble had a huge role in artificially driving housing prices up - the sacred "free market" cited by density advocates is anything but.

@14,

So does that mean everyone who lives in Seattle and commutes to the Eastside should move over there? After all, Seattle commuters are emitting just as many greenhouse gases as Eastsiders driving into the City to get to their jobs are.

@16, excellent point - and the City of Seattle is exceeding its GMA-mandated density goals by orders of magnitude (even if it is failing dismally to fund infrastructure and amenities concurrently except by increasing the tax burden on existing citizens. The idea that "growth pays for growth" in Seattle is, to say the least, a myth)

@ 17 - sizable majorities of Seattle voters twice defeated the Commons at the polls because they thought the City had about 1000 better uses for $400 million tax dollars, and that Paul Allen's development projects ought to pay their own way rather than having the rest of us subsidize them (oh, yeah, and the counterpoint to that is that Commons supporters said no one would ever build in SLU if the public didn't pony up for the Commons).

Oh, and I would hardly call South Lake Union Park "no park" - lots of public money is being invested there, and most Commons opponents always said that the waterfront park was a worthy project (the $200+ million plan to reconfigure Mercer/Valley Streets to Paul Allen's liking, though, not so much)

John Fox responds:
Our point is that you cannot just consider the alleged positive benefits of promoting these levels of unmanaged growth whether around TOD's (Transit Oriented Development areas) or in other existing built-up urban areas without also factoring in and giving consideration to conditions on the ground within these areas and associated costs including environmental. No such analysis has been done by the proponents of HB 1490 who read in a book somewhere that 50 units per acre is a "tipping point" to reduce VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and on that basis they want to impose a one size fits all 50 units per acre. Check it out, these rail stops don't have capacity to support that density.... that's not responsible planning and even serves to push VMT the wrong way.

We're not saying clustering isn't good. It just has to be tailored to conditions in each area, and managed to encourage responsible levels that infrastructure can support and mitigation measures put in place first to prevent displacement, loss of trees, and preserve streams, and open space. These areas must grow to be sure but modestly as they are doing now (meeting their growth targets needed to support rail stops in fact) but with more not less resident involvement and tools in place that reinforce rather than destroys existing character. We think that's a better way to serve the environment (including the human environment) than slapping excessive one-size fits all holier than though density mandates on our communities.

There is something inherently wrong, inherently anti-environmental in the argument being made by the proponents of the Futurewise bill(and a few of your bloggers who dismiss the environmental costs we've cited in our most recent column) who tell us (lecture us in fact) that in order to save farmland, wilderness, forests, prevent sprawl, and now reduce are carbon footprint and save our planet - that in order to achieve those critically important values out there, those very things must be sacrifice here in our own urban communities. We must give up our urban tree canopy, embodied energy of older affordable housing and historic buildings, open space, urban streams, our cities affordability, its existing low income housing stock, long time small businesses, first generation immigrant shops...whatever it takes - all must be sacrificed... With the zeal of a fundamentalist preacher, that's pretty much what I was told by a Futurewise representative at last nights debate on this bill. It's blind faith without the science and its arrogant and being done at the expense and no regard for our communities. Heck, to them, all that other stuff just gets in the way. They're on a mission.

Ten years ago, there would have been no debate about the Futurewise Bill, it'd be called what it is - a pro-developer pro-development special interest piece of legislation...and a giveaway at our expense.

There is an alternative to sprawl on the one hand and excessive density mandates for Seattle with no regard to its impact on our communities. It's a poly-centered or multi-activity centered approach to growth. Half the downtown office workforce lives in the burb's and will continue to do so and one third to one half of those folks will continue to take their cars no matter what we do. Let's limit office expansion in the core - relocate some of those jobs to the other underutilized activity centers around the region and closer to where those folks are choosing to live anyway. Lets say no to carbon emitting gas guzzling 520 expansion(why aren't the anti-parking get-people-out-of their-car-enviro's joining the nabe's in this important fight or our fight against Mercer expansion - strikes me as hypocritical)... Then lets plan and spend more to provide flexible vans and buses and other mass transit alternatives to and from these other activity centers and at the region's margins so they have a real choice other than driving - flexible small scale service that would go where people are choosing to live and increasingly work (far from rail and our urban environs where we are trying to literally force them to live). Then we might also get land use patterns out there aligned with those transit routes running to those activity centers. The greatest cost to a transportation system - and the most energy consumptive is the cost of moving people longer and longer distances from home to work and this condition may actually be exacerbated if in the process of cramming too much growth in Seattle, pouring what funding we have for transportation systems serving them with none left over for everyone else and the bulk of the regions commuters. There is nothing more gas consuming and carbon emitting and less sustainable than land use patterns and "transportation choices" like these.