These West Seattle NIMBYs, protesting four new apartment buildings with a combined 122 parking spaces, don’t seem to want to live in a city:
Reifel is part of a community group called Neighbors Encouraging Reasonable Development (NERD). Organizers worry all those newcomers looking for parking places will find them in front of people’s houses. The way things are going, Reifel says, the walk from the car to the front door could become more like a hike.
When so-called neighborhood activists talk about “reasonable” development, they’re blowing a dog whistle for stopping development completely. Their strategy is burdening concentrations of new residential development by limiting where new buildings may go, shortening buildings in places they should be tall (like next to light-rail stations and in transit junctions), and requiring exorbitantly expensive underground parking garages. They file appeals and lawsuits in a never-ending campaign to thwart construction. Even if developers satisfy all of the NIMBYs’ demands, the apartments and condos they build are so scarce and expensive that they are only affordable to the wealthy. Maybe if they can’t have zero new neighbors, wealthy neighbors are the next best thing? Neighborhood activists act like the city’s character is under attack, even though multi-family housing is only allowed in a scant 11 percent of the city—places where we want lots of residents, in the pockets well served by transit and close to walkable retail cores.
Of course, buildings in that 11 percent of town don’t all need giant underground parking garages—look at Capitol Hill, First Hill, and Belltown, where the city’s character is alive and well. Many old buildings there have little or no parking. Some do, some don’t. That’s reasonable density.
But groups like “Reasonable Density Seattle,” which is trying to stop all construction of small, affordable apartments in high-density neighborhoods, is trying to reappropriate the words “reasonable density” to mean “obstruct density.” And this is apparently the strategy of “Neighbors Encouraging Reasonable Development” in West Seattle, where they want deep parking garages will drive up rents or could stop projects in their tracks. Neither of them are asking for something reasonable—their demands are ridiculous. The demand from West Seattle is to stop being part of the city. And if that’s how they feel, fuck ’em. Cut off that neighborhood from bus service except the bus service they pay for, and, god knows, we shouldn’t pay for their light rail, either, if they keep acting like they want to live in the suburbs.