Seattle won’t suffer from ‘Detroitism’
Once again, John Fox and Carolee Colter take on City Hall and “pro-density apologists” in their advocacy for the poor, both working and on welfare (“There’s No Trickle-Down for the Poor with Upzones, Density,” April 10). The problem with their arguments is that they weirdly seem to relish the prospects for continued bad economic times.
They observe that low-tax-revenue households — their favored demographic —tend to persist in-city so long as a bad economy retards residential redevelopment pursuant to demand. But City Hall has no interest — or socioeconomic justification, really — in allowing run-down neighborhoods and marginal businesses to persist, much less spread. Fox and Coulter have a lot of cheek in suggesting that, in a depressed economy, “city-levy dollars” (i.e., socialized subsidies) be provided to that end.
Fox and Coulter wrongly suggest that no-growth policies inevitably lead to the Detroit syndrome, a straw-man fallacy at best. What brought down the once-great Motor City was the loss of manufacturing’s middle-class prosperity, followed by the takeover by desperate, clueless bureaucrats, incompetent Michigan governors and corrupt, liberal mayors with the same advocate-for-the-poor sensibilities as Fox’s and Coulter’s. In-city or short-commute jobs for high-density urban dwellers under a business-friendly climate is the only way to stave off Detroitism.
I, too, hate the creeping densification of Seattle, but for the transportation gridlock, community degradation and loss of life quality to which it must lead. That they are a direct consequence of state- and county-wide “growth management” policies is generally ignored. Ironically, such policies might now be disavowed by those who unwisely labored so hard to institute them in the first place.
Alex Templeton, Magnolia