“Meditate on this,” San Francisco activist Sonja Trauss tells a crowd in a conference room overlooking Lake Union. “What’s the difference between being able to afford something that’s not available… and not being able to afford something that is available?”
The room sits in polite quiet.
“Nothing,” Trauss says emphatically. “There’s no difference. These are both ways that [housing] shortage manifests.”
Trauss is preaching to the choir: a room of mostly white, mostly male Seattle developers working on plates of steak and green beans. You don’t have to tell this group twice about the rules of supply and demand. But in another way, Trauss is screaming into the void.
All across Seattle, small fights are playing out over whether new buildings—new housing—should be built. These are fights about the scale and height of new buildings, neighborhood character, and whether Seattle is losing its “soul.” They are tedious and they are hurting housing affordability in this city. But for the most part, the only people paying attention to these fights are the people who want to stop the growth. People like the developers in this room, who believe Seattle needs more growth to meet its massive influx of new residents, rarely show up to advocate for new housing unless it’s their own project in question. The rest of the city’s residents—who, if recent city council election results are any indication, favor new density over parochial NIMBYism—don’t often show up, either…
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