Now, before we start it’s worth noting that this piece is described as a “Special to The Times<\/em>” and the author is not a journalist. He’s not an economist, either. He’s also not an urban planner, and as you’ll see he’s obviously not a historian. He’s an architect whose primary accomplishments listed on his bio attached to the piece are having “served on public historic preservation and design review boards.”<\/p>\n So with that context, let’s get into it. Here’s the opening paragraph:<\/p>\n The current debate about major changes to single-family residential zoning has become politically polarized, like every other issue. Clearly much more affordable housing is needed, and as soon as possible, but because there is a housing affordability problem, single-family housing has suddenly been declared \u201cracist\u201d by some groups as a convenient but inflammatory and erroneous way to justify a radical, top-down, across-the-board redefinition of our residential land-use patterns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To be clear, I’m not suggesting that old white guys are all<\/em> prone to make self-serving, foolish, intellectually dishonest political arguments, but it’s not exactly rare among that particular crowd.<\/p>\n And to be clear on the point of single-family zoning and racism: Yeah, single-family zoning is an inherently racist practice. That’s not up for debate. It’s a documented, historical fact.<\/p>\n Single-family-only zoning was invented by racist white landowners as a way of keeping Black people out of their neighborhoods. When redlining and other more explicit methods were made illegal, zoning became the primary tool to enforce this kind of racial discrimination, and it has the same practical effect today. I’m not going to get into the whole history here, because this subject has been covered very well many times over by others. At the end of this post I’ve embedded a series of videos that explain the racist history and the racist modern impacts of single-family zoning.<\/p>\n Anyway, moving on\u2026<\/p>\n The fastest and most efficient way to develop housing is to build large, multifamily projects<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ahh so obviously every other way of adding more housing should be illegal. Got it.<\/p>\n Wait, no. That’s idiotic. To claim that the only two choices should be super-dense areas packed with large multifamily homes or sprawled-out single-family-only neighborhoods is absurd. The U.S. needs to legalize the “missing middle” housing. Again, I’m not going to get into this in depth, because others have already done the job much better than me. Here’s a video on that topic from the excellent YouTube channel Not Just Bikes<\/em>.<\/p>\n![\"Christopher](\"https:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/Christopher-Kirk_Seattle.jpg\")
He really comes in guns blazing right out of the gate, with scare quotes around “racist” and an angry defensive stance taken right off the bat. Given the tone of that opening, I am sure you will be shocked<\/em> to learn that Christopher Kirk<\/a> is a 73-year-old<\/a> white guy.<\/p>\n