This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
Aubrey Cohen at the Seattle P-I lets loose on urban NIMBYs. It’s a good piece, and while I have no doubt that the NIMBYs will come out and vilify him, they should re-read the piece first. It’s actually quite moderate and constructive. As I wrote recently, many folks that you’d normally consider left-center liberals (and who would certainly think of themselves as environmentalists) are passionate defenders of suburban, car-centric lifestyles.
The challenge is that re-shaping the built environment is exceedingly difficult. Much more difficult than starting from scratch. The much-loved car-free city of Vauban is car-free largely because it was built that way 60 years ago. Which is why Cohen writes:
It’s a lot less trouble to allow different types of development where there aren’t already neighbors, which is why it’s easier to build small-lot cottages in Issaquah than in Seattle.
Without condemning entire city blocks, it’s hard to reshape the landscape. And when large lots do become available (Northgate, Dearborn), they tend to be developed by a single developer, which often leads to a certain monotony. I don’t know how you untie this knot. Backyard cottages, which Cohen mentions, are a pretty neat trick, but probably not sufficient on their own.
Finally, I’ll also note that I enjoyed the tone of the article, which was a pseudo op-ed, presumably a new degree of stylistic latitude afforded by being a web-only paper. If the paper is still going to have straight news, though, it might be worth clearly labeling separately from “opinion.” If they want to mesh them, that’s totally fine (and very bloggy of them), but they need to be consistent about it.
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