Comments

1
beep boop beep
2
Roger Valdez makes my skin crawl, so smarmy.
3
This is getting better. As difficult as he is to listen to, I'm glad you had that unctuous Roger Valdez for a dose of debate.

Question - why do you cut off the bumper music after 10 seconds? It's great that you feature local bands, but it's not fair to give them so little airtime. It's not too much to ask to play at least one entire song between segments, am I right?
4
@3, if they start playing full length songs they'd need to be licensing for broadcast. There's debates/a lot of opinions about the lengths you can use as "fair use" without paying money/asking for permission.

It was nice hearing Valdez get pushback... too often I read his scribbles at Publicola where they tend to not question his incessant "fewer regulations, let developers figure what they can rape the market for" position.
5
It was nice hearing the housing debate, but I felt like most of the "pushback" was a bunch of empty platitudes.

I never heard a complete answer for "how do you keep the programmer from competing with the Journalist for the apartment without new buildings?" I never heard a serious answer for "How does restricting apodments help Seattlites?". And I never heard a valid argument about why we should be preserving single family homes with sprawling lawns, rather than allowing them to become apartments.

There has to be someone who can better represent the "no more building" side - someone with real answers.
6
@5 you don't hear the "no more building side" becuase it's a fiction and strawman invented by the developers and thier apologists.

Nobody has ever said "no more building."

What people have been saying is the developers and bankers have been running the show so far and we're still in this mess. What's happened IS a result of the mighty market.

THIER solution is to get rid any all regulations they determine to be harmful to some nonexistent right to always have a profit at the expense of healthy communities.

That's why, if you had listened to the actual podcast, that Valdez scum bag never answered a single question. When John tried to correct him that aPODments aren't "affordable" and are on average OVER $800-1000 a month, Valdez just cut him off and kept talking over him.
Eli should be ashamed. That was some shit moderation.
7
If there isn't a "no more building" side, why the fight to preserve every last inch of single-family zoning? Why the fight to prevent height increases in areas that are already multifamily?

Keeping Seattle's 1950's suburban zoning forever preserved in amber only enriches existing building owners and landlords, at the expense of developers. Upzoning enriches speculators and developers, at the expense of existing landlords. Rent control enriches the lucky few tenants who "got here first."

That's why it bothers me when people complain that developers might make some money. No matter what, someone is going to make money off of the housing market. Right now, it's landlords who are doing the gouging, gouging they can only get away with thanks to zoning that restricts apartment buildings to a whopping 8% of the city.
8
There is a no more building side. Every house on Brooklyn between 75th and 77th NE had a "no more monster homes" (or somesuch) picket on their lawn. Except the two new builds on that block
9
@8 That was not a coherent comment.
10
Could you put these on iTunes? Soundcloud as a system isn't quite so awesome.
11
@8/9

The funny thing is that under current zoning, there's no way to stop "monster homes". The height & bulk limits on single family buildings in single family zones are exactly the same as the height & bulk limits on townhouses & apartment buildings in low rise multifamily zones.

And if you're a developer trying to build a single family house in Seattle, the only way it even comes close to penciling out and breaking even is if you build a 3000 sqft monstrosity with the same footprint as a modest apartment building - something the zoning allows and encourages.

But actual small apartment buildings, even ones that fit the same silhouette as a perfectly legal McMansion, are banned from the vast majority of the city, even in areas near transit. I have never heard a good argument as to why this should remain the case.
13
Holy shit I think @12 might have just stumbled upon a sensible solution to this heretofore unsolvable issue! Surly $89/hour is a perfectly accepted and sustainable living wage! I can't find the flaw in his logic.
14
Make this available via itunes! That way you can subscribe, listen via the podcast app, and not use a bunch of cellular data (at least for A T & T folks). Please?

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