It’s Almost Painful To Witness The Seattle Times Editorial Board Continue To Flounder Towards Total Irrelevance. Almost.
And the kids over at SLOG get to have so much fun with it that it’s almost too cruel. Almost.
Here, Erica Barnett disembowels James Vesely for his stupendously dumb plea for the taxation of bicycles. And here, Dominic Holden exposes the Seatimes’ curiously passionate fear of proposed incentive zoning, and how their main argument — that if you tax a thing you tend to get less of it — flies smack in the face of Vesely’s call for a bicycle tax. Not to mention that they offer no other ideas about how we might address the lack of affordable housing in Seattle.
Though the Seatimes editorial board appears to be oblivious to the fact that incentive zoning for heights above 85 feet will have zero impact on housing outside of downtown (or have they suddenly become hyper-density advocates?), they are correct to point out that it will be a tricky business to craft code that works as intended across all city neighborhood contexts.
The topic is worthy of another post one of these days, but perhaps some of y’all out there already have all the answers?