To prepare you for this onslaught, I've put together a citizen's handbook of planner jargon, nice-sounding euphemisms they'll be spoon feeding you to neutralize any concerns you might have about the changes coming to your neighborhood. When you hear these phrases, watch out!
Vibrant
No adjective is more often used by the planners when they want to remove some amenity your community treasures, meaning a grove of trees, a little piece of open space, that row of older garden apartments down the street or your view, perhaps. These will be replaced by a "vibrant" new development, something lacking in a sedate lower-density neighborhood like yours.
Walkable
A neighborhood where you theoretically live within a stone's throw of amenities, shops and services you need. More commonly in Seattle, you are within walking distance of an expensive boutique or shi-shi bar. That family-owned hardware store you really need has long since been driven out by higher taxes and land values after your City Council caved to developers clamoring for increased height limits in your neighborhood business district. Now you must drive miles to the nearest mall for necessities.
Affordable
Housing that rents for hundreds of dollars above what you or anyone else you know can afford but slightly less than the monthly rent on a new downtown luxury apartment.
Workforce housing
Under that incentive zoning scheme, you'll get height restrictions raised from 40 to 85 feet. In return only 15 percent of the new units will be "set aside" as "workforce" housing affordable to those earning between 80 and 100 percent of median income. Turns out that rents even on these units are actually hundreds of dollars more than what most workers in Seattle truly could afford.
Smart growth
Who isn't for smart and sustainable growth in environmentally conscious Seattle? But these terms are cynically used to wrap the mayor's pro-development agenda in a patina of environmentalism. What's smart or sustainable about zoning downtown for the equivalent of 12 more Columbia Towers? No matter how many neighborhoods city leaders upzone, about half those 50,000 new workers expected to accompany those high-rises will choose to live in the suburbs, with many commuting by gas-guzzling, air-polluting car.
Public-private partnerships
Big-ticket capital projects the taxpayers are called on to subsidize, like football stadiums or convention centers. The public foots the bill while a private contractor, developer or corporation reaps all the profit. The city of Seattle has sold its land off to Paul Allen in South Lake Union and is pouring over a half billion in public revenue into that area for added infrastructure at Paul Allen's request. That's called a public private partnership. Most new "low income" subsidized housing development involves entering into "partnerships" with banks and private developers. Lucrative tax credits go to the developer for a handful of low cost housing units that in 20 years they can convert to market rate. That's also called a public private partnership.
New urbanism
Fifteen years ago, a cult of planners and architects decided curvy streets and cul-de-sacs were bad because they looked too much like the suburbs. They also had a fetish for front porches, old fashion bungalows and alleyways. This became a blueprint for some developers to simulate Disneyesque visions of the past in their planned developments. Unfortunately, in built-up urban environments like ours, new urbanism just became a cover for Seattle Housing Authority to wipe out more than a thousand public housing units, groves of beautiful old trees and lots of open space.
Mixed-income housing
A term used to convince you that poor people need to rub shoulders with the rich or they just cannot pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It doesn't mean going to well-off northend white neighborhoods and "mixing" in low income housing there. It simply provides the rationale for redeveloping, fragmenting and gentrifying lower-income and largely black communities. An increasing portion of new publicly subsidized buildings are "mixed income" which means fewer of your tax dollars from housing levies get to people most in need.
Stakeholders
Before the council obliterates your neighborhood plan, which took years to develop, they will call a "stakeholders advisory meeting." The mayor and City Council president get to pick the stakeholders, which means these groups are always stacked with their friends and campaign supporters some of whom just happen to be developers.
And, of course, neighborhood folks are underrepresented. Then the stakeholders rubberstamp the Mayor and Council's pre-determined pro-density agenda.
Visioning
What citizens are asked to do in a stakeholders meeting. Instead of discussing real impacts that a development may have on the well being of their neighborhood, citizens are taken through a visioning process, broken up into focus groups and given felt pens and butcher paper, then asked to list their "hopes and dreams" for the neighborhood. Everything is recorded. Once recorded, the information goes on a bookshelf to gather dust.
Dense
A common term planners have come to represent all that is good. Density curbs global warming and saves polar bears. Ironically, the term dense represents a level of growth that inevitably requires removal of the amenities it is touted to serve. We are about to pour billions of dollars worth of concrete to expand the 520 bridge in order to accommodate this city's downtown office workers who live in the Eastside. But very few things contribute to global warming more than the making, and pouring, of concrete.
Alternatively, "dense" connotes a high level of stupidity.
John Fox leads the Seattle Displacement Coalition. He can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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