Seattle is shrinking and that’s a good thing, columnist Danny Westneat opined in the Seattle Times, making a very big deal of one year of pandemic-era Census data. Making that shaky conclusion from one data point that is already one year out-of-date, Westneat proceeded to propose an entirely new policy regime and seek opportunities that a shrinking Seattle purportedly would entail.
“Pretty much everything in Seattle politics, from tax levies to transit planning to social and housing policy debates, has been predicated for decades around a core sense that not only will growth keep coming, it’s a runaway train we are perpetually struggling to catch,” Westneat wrote. “It’s also central to our identity. We’re No. 1, one of America’s Best Places, remember?”
And it being the Seattle Times of course the pivot is to the boogeyman of crime and disorder as the likely explanation.
“So it’s a punch to the civic plexus to hear that in fact people are splitting. Missing is any evidence of why, as it hasn’t been studied yet,” Westneat continues. “It’s the pandemic, or the high cost of living, or soaring crime and street disorder, or insert-your-specific-urban-gripe-here.
Westneat proceeds to ridicule Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti for claiming it was “housing, housing, and housing” that were the top three reasons Los Angeles’s population has shrunk for five straight years.
This is nothing new for the Seattle Times opinion and editorial crew, who consistently beats the drum against adding apartments and townhomes in single family areas. Westneat occupies a very specific space in Seattle housing debate after railing against Seattle’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) in 2015 and leading the charge to torpedo broader changes to single family zoning — and not without some hypocrisy and privilege. Westneat and his wife own a $1.8 million Madrona single family house and are also landlords for 13 units in a $3 million investment property near Columbia City Station. In short, Westneat benefits from the skyhigh housing prices and gentrification he bemoans, as Publicola‘s Erica Barnett pointed out.
The astounding thing about the column is that Westneat admits that he is extrapolating from King County figures because the Census Bureau hasn’t yet released city-by-city figures. Those countywide figures have King County population down 20,266 residents, which represents a -0.9% growth rate.
Westneat’s laziness is also on display here as the Washington State Office of Financial Management (OFM) has already released its city population estimates for 2021. The State OFM had Seattle’s population up 5,385 residents to 742,400, as of April 1, 2021, which is still down from the city’s highwater estimate of 761,100 for April 1, 2020 — before pandemic population shifts registered. Meanwhile, OFM had King County’s population up slightly — just over 17,000 residents — to 2,287,050, which is higher than the Census Bureau’s county population estimate of 2.25 million. Furthermore, the downtown disorder narrative was interrupted by OFM’s finding that growth rate was even more anemic in Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland, and Mercer Island — places that never flirted with defunding police or earned finger-wagging columns from the Times. The OFM April estimate is from three months earlier than the Census Bureau’s July 1 figures, but it’s likely the discrepancy is due to differing methodologies rather than a major county population shrinkage event in spring of 2021.
The wheedling about past population estimates is largely a distraction, however. If growth skeptics like Westneat want to posit that Seattle is amidst a prolonged era of stagnation they should be able to point to a lot more than a pandemic hiccup.
Nonetheless, the degrowthers persist even with scant support for their views, and they are installed in high places. Councilmember Alex Pedersen’s senior aide Toby Thaler has long fought housing density and advocated against population growth, following an eco-fascist line of reasoning. Clearly, the degrowthers are gearing up to fight missing middle housing in single family zones and the zoning changes that would allow it. These changes will be debated during the big update to Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan due in 2024, and degrowthers are already trying to muddy waters.
