waterfront

I was very much amazed recently when a Seattle Transit Blog post about the streetcar provoked 64 comments, some of them very angry indeed.

I can remember when I was that angry. It was about the Vietnam war, which claimed the lives of two million Vietnamese, 50,000 Americans, and caused 500,000 Americans to emigrate as a matter of conscience.

It’s not hard to see that the real cause of the anger is a feeling that Paul Allen is making shady deals with the city. I can remember when shady deals actually were made with the city, and it was before Paul Allen.

In the early 70s Seattle was run by men like Wayne Larkins and Gordon Vickery. Deals were made behind closed doors with no public record by a ‘good ol’ boys’ club to which no women, people of color, or young people needed to apply.

How well this worked was easy to see around you at the time. South Lake Union was an amalgam of parking lots, failing businesses, and vacant buildings. The highest aspiration of the time was to build a new freeway through all of this, and more parking lots for the cars.

Polluting businesses around the lake leased public lands for pennies on the dollar or simply encroached on and used them for free. In open defiance of the law, the City Building Department issued permits for Roanoke Reef and the promoters began construction with absolutely no fear that the rule of law might actually apply to them. The only real enforcement efforts of the time were the attempts by the city to get rid of the houseboats- they feared, and rightly so, that public eyes on the lake would expose their actions.

What we see today is an open and transparent public process, and the results we gain from that rule of law. I personally haven’t profited from that development, but as a citizen I can only applaud the final turn away from another freeway, and towards modern public transit.

Many of our streetcar-haters think their angry comments on the internet should rule over this public process- a point of view I consider so deranged that I can only characterize it as schizophrenic paranoia. I can’t promise to reliably confront them in comment threads- that would be buying into their delusions.

I can promise to generally and reliably support open public process, and the results of that process- which include, naturally, the South Lake Union Streetcar. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.