Pro-HALA folks paint San Francisco as our nightmare future if HALA doesn’t pass, where all housing near jobs costs millions of dollars. Anti-HALA folks paint Ballard as our future if HALA passes, where existing residents are driven out by a construction tsunami and we are left with luxury housing that is 95% tech bros (plus 5% reserved for a few token “poor” people that win the MHA lottery).

I sat down with some Wallingford HALA proponents, looking for win-win solutions to housing affordability in Seattle. Here are some ideas we came up with:

Collaborate with homeowners on affordable ADUs and …

The effect of the upzone to urban villages that HALA proposes is clear as we have already seen it happen in Ballard. Older homes and apartments will be shredded and displace thousands, driving out current residents and turning neighborhoods into unlivable construction zones as the transformation takes place. Further, all the new people that move in will swamp our already overloaded transportation systems and schools, driving up property taxes as we try to catch up and further damaging housing affordability and livability in our city. Do we really need to destroy Wallingford in order to save it, as Rick argued?…

I started writing for Wallyhood this past spring when Jordan took off because I valued a Wallingford community site and wanted to explore writing as a creative outlet. I was also hoping to form constructive relationships with the city in getting good things to happen for Wallingford.

Constructive relationships with the city proved impossible, largely because the city no longer has anyone assigned to support neighborhoods. It’s all downtown meetings based on city functions without visits to neighborhoods when making plans. To be successful with advocacy, you must be like the Seattle Bike Blog or the Seattle Transit Blog and …

Ducks are returning to our streets as of today. Ducks were approved for road use during World War 2, so due to inertia they remain street legal today. The fact that their new mission is to amuse tourists and that they’re going to crush Wallingfordians instead of Nazis and their allies is irrelevant.

The specifics of the accident on Aurora are being addressed, just like specifics from several previous fatal accidents have been addressed. These are the latest changes:

I’d like to apologize for language I used in an article I posted here this morning. It was offensive and hurtful to the community.

The article used a pejorative term for Japanese people when spoofing how people spoke during World War 2. I had never heard the term used outside of World War 2 documentaries and should have done a better job researching it. While I knew the term had a racial component (see internment camps), I believed that the term was primarily used as shorthand for the Japanese empire in World War 2 and that its use was anachronistic …