As a single family home owner north of the Ship Canal, I want to thank the commie for opposing rezones.

Toby Thaler also authored Charter Amendment 19, which created district elections for the Seattle City Council, arguing that district elections “will finally have a councilmember advocating for the specific needs of your community.” Toby lives in Fremont and so is now an aide for a councilmember not in his own district. Kind of hypocritical.

Toby is a nice guy who is totally resistant to Seattle's 40-100 story future Downtown and our 6 story MFH rezone of all SFH zones.

Other than that we get along fine, even though history will run over him with a massive steamroller called Growth, which will happen, and even faster than any of you realize.

Public housing is stupid. Housing projects fail again and again. Use the money for vouchers instead of trying to run a government real estate company. Also, I know under the law it was the "only" option, putting low income housing at Discovery Park and Magnuson Park is the dumbest thing of all time. No grocery store. No jobs. Surrounded by million dollar homes on priceless land. That same area could have been leased for enough money to help 10,000 people instead of 1,000.
Rent control decreasing the housing supply. Period. That's what it does. Sure, a few lottery winners get cheap rent for eternity, while the rest of the city gets higher prices and mom & pop renters leaving the rental market in droves. Rent control does not work. It has never worked. And there are literally hundreds of other options that we could use instead of this stupid talking point that is unconstitutional, immoral and wrong. Rent Control will never happen in Seattle, and if it does, overnight thousands will lose the place they call home.

Housing the homeless: tiny house villages -- yes!
Airbnb -- ?

I go way back with Toby and he is on the side of the angels.
I know a lot of Slog's readership wishes we would have just caved to the developers back in the '80's and '90's, but we didn't. Toby is one of the authors of that resistance.
It turned out to be a losing battle, but one worth fighting.
Pedersen is off to a good start with his personnel but his predisposition to talk in city hall jargon is a little disappointing.

Kalli fails to comment that, when you look at Seattle north of the Ship Canal, you see a few well-off neighborhoods resisting upzoning, which drives up property values and keeps Seattle white (and, surprisingly, since we're in a majority Hispanic state) and Hispanic, while driving out Asian and Black citizens to the suburbs.

Everything we do has consequences, like increasing the minimum wage which increases GDP and creates jobs, permitting some to hang on, as they would otherwise be forced to other counties they can afford to live in. You can see that happening in Tacoma now, as rents and housing skyrocket, soon to be just like Seattle, so that we can move our artist community to Eastern Washington in a mass exodus.

You literally can see the changes as they happen. Resistance just drives those not in the top 10 percent out of our city, increasing climate change far more than any ZPG alterations, and driving up pet ownership to substitute for the former middle to low income families with small kids.

@7-Well, it's a fruitless argument at this point, we will obviously be talking past each other. And upzones are happening all over so the big experiment is underway.
I'd just like to emphasize that the opposite of resistance is surrender, and surrendering to developers is surrendering to the 1% and remember those people don't give a fuck about you or about artists or livable cities or any of that. If their collective actions end up turning neighborhoods into shitholes where quality of life plummets, that's fine with them.

@10I'm assuming the question was asked in good faith so I'll answer it.
Yes, definitely Seattle is going to need to add apartments as light rail builds out. But I'm old-fashioned. I would like to see developers have to provide parking and observe setbacks and preserve light and view corridors, adhere to rigorous design review, etc.
I know this adds to cost, and I would further burden developers with providing below-market rents on projects above certain thresholds.
But I accept that my desired policies are not going to put huge numbers of low-rent options onto the market in a hurry.
I don't think Seattle has an obligation to absorb a disproportionate share of population growth if that growth is demonstrably corrosive to quality of life in the city. Presently I think that is the case in some neighborhoods, certainly not all.
It is a regional problem and Seattle's suburban neighbors need to step up and do more.
You don't think Lynwood needs more apartment buildings?