Tag Archives: danny westneat

Op-Ed: Savor Our Waterfront Streetcars, Don’t Sell Them

June 27, 2012 Michael van Baker

800px-SeaWaterfrontStreetcar_OccidentalPark — Ex-Melbourne W2-class tram/streetcar 272 eastbound at the Occidental Park station, on Main Street, on the Waterfront Streetcar line in Seattle (Photo: Peter Van den Bossche/Wikipedia)

Of all the great ideas floating around for the renovation of Seattle’s waterfront, the decision that seems most willfully destructive is the refusal to consider bringing back the waterfront streetcar line. When asked, architect James Corner has said it makes more sense to run a streetcar down First Avenue, but has so far not argued that point persuasively.

Alarmed by the potential sale of the mothballed cars, streetcar supporters are making a new push. The Save Our Streetcar group is asking for public support at a July 12 waterfront design meeting (5:30 p.m. in the Exhibition Hall at the Seattle Center). They also have a petition you can sign.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has been trying another tack — one near and dear to my heart — of trying set a fire under a local, motivated moneybags: Could the new arena builders get on board?

“I didn’t hear a peep of support from anyone named Schultz, Ballmer or Hansen. Or from a McGinn or a Constantine,” writes Westneat. (I know the feeling, Danny.) How about the owner of Dave’s Appliance Rebuild instead? He wrote in to tell Westneat he’d pay to keep the cars in Seattle, at least.

In a story about the grassroots streetcar movement, a former Metro director told KING TV: “It would be a shame, putting it bluntly, for us to work to produce the kind of waterfront park we’re going to have with the opportunity to use streetcars, only to find that they were gone.”

Not so long ago, the George Benson Waterfront Streetcar was lauded — even extended in the early ’90s. But the construction of the Olympic Sculpture Park “required” the removal of their maintenance barn, and the line was shut down in 2005. Not to worry, residents were told, it’s just temporary, until a new barn can be built.

“The duration of the shutdown is unclear, as details were sketchy yesterday as to when a new barn would be completed in Pioneer Square,” reported the Seattle Times, ominously, in 2005. Then in 2007, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution to put a new streetcar maintenance facility in a new, mixed-use development, but…you remember how the rest of 2007 turned out. That development didn’t happen, the recession dragged on, the streetcars stayed in storage.

Does it feed more than nostalgia to entertain the idea of bringing back these particular waterfront streetcars? Yes. The line was a success for twenty years, and the infrastructure for it remains in place. Though most of the track runs along the waterfront, the .4-mile extension takes riders to the International District, where they can transfer to Central Link Light Rail or King Street Station’s Amtrak trains, or walk to the stadiums.

In short, it’s perfect for tourists — the 90-minute transfer let you hop on and hop off at points of interest. With Seattle’s booming cruise ship industry and waterfront congestion expected for the next several years, it would be canny to provide a very popular transit system to help fill the gaps. That’s without getting into the cultural import of the streetcars — it remains a deep irony that a museum’s sculpture park not only displaced a great way to bring people to the park, but displaced working history as well.

Crime, News

Two Seattles Endure a 2012 Murder Spree

June 11, 2012 Michael van Baker

This weekend the Seattle Times was home to an impassioned response by the Blue Scholars‘ Prometheus Brown to the recent shootings around Seattle. Brown hits on a lot in his commentary, but one long-time complaint is voiced very clearly: “Shots fired in the south end, nobody cares. / Shots fired in the north end, everybody scared.”

If you read the Rainier Valley Post, which excerpted those exact lines, you’ll see that the concern of southend residents cuts across color lines when it comes to the nagging suspicion that they’re supposed, simply, to be used to homicides. As one contributor paraphrased it: “The Rainier Valley will always have crime, so it’s no big deal when it happens.”

A Crosscut writer notes that there’s the Rainier Valley and then the Rest of Seattle, where the Rest of Seattle indicates a place where you can be upset about a particular shooting, and demand police action.

From a safe distance, one imagines, The Economist looks up from its statistical tables to reassure:

“Seattleites, we are losing it,” wrote Danny Westneat in his column in the Seattle Times. Many agreed. But the city is a long way from lost. It is wealthy, well governed and relatively safe. For a big American city, its rates of murder and violent crime are low.

The magazine diagnoses the damage as psychological: “What has been lost this spring is the sense of Seattle as a cosy cocoon.” We might need to amend that, then, and substitute “the Rest of Seattle” for “Seattle”–it seems like it must feel ages since Rainier Valley felt like a cosy cocoon.

So the Cafe Racer mass murder and suicide, which left six people (including the gunman) dead, is in part troubling precisely because it violates that sense of containment: both geographical and also social. Social, because gang shootings result in the “accidental” deaths of bystanders. It has to be cold comfort for the bereaved, but the larger populace seems to derive something from the notion that a dispute didn’t concern them.

The horror of the Cafe Racer shootings is that they were purposeful executions–only one person survived being shot. Many may feel outraged at learning that an apparently mentally ill man “had legally purchased at least six handguns, and his licence to pack heat was valid until 2015,” as The Economist puts it, but the deeply unsettling chill comes from his predatory, methodical slayings.

After the fact, after Stawicki’s death, people still want to know how he managed to get from Ravenna to downtown, want to know why, if he could get that far, he needed to kill to someone else in a car-jacking.

Asking why of the mentally ill is a rabbit hole that it’s better not to go down. But we can ask why of ourselves. We can ask why we treat homicides as if they differ in kind, when surely what’s wanted is a city in which people aren’t shot for any reason. Brown asks another good question, which is what we expect the police to do that we aren’t willing to do ourselves. What does it say that we sort Seattle into places where violence is “expected,” and not. Unexpected violence is hard to prepare for. What is our excuse when it is?

News, Politics, Transportation

Nick Licata’s Costly Car-Towing Battle Set for a July Joust

May 15, 2012 Michael van Baker

The City Council’s Nick Licata has just published an update on the effort to regulate towing company fees in Seattle. As you recall, this was something we were all spitting mad about last December.

Every once in a while, diffuse populist outrage coalesces around an easy target, like a plague of potholes or Kardashians. Last winter, it was towing companies. Danny Westneat over at the Seattle Times has since made a mini-cottage industry out of reporting on towing horror stories, from the “$800 tow,” to the “$800, that’s nuthin‘” story, to the “$800 tow reversed by court,” to the capper, where a couple’s car was towed from their own condo (they parked in the “right” space on the wrong floor) and sold at auction.

After reading Westneat’s initial story, Mayor McGinn jumped in with both feet: “That day, my staff began working with the City Attorney’s office and the Department of Finance and Administrative Services to determine what action the City could take to regulate or curb these rates,” he declared, adding a little limply: “We also reached out to the City Council about working together on this issue.”

Council members Tim Burgess and Nick Licata were on fire, too. After hearing from the City Attorney that capping Seattle towing fees was feasible through legislation, they announced they’d look into that. Burgess also wanted to work on how car owners are notified of a tow.

Because caps for towing companies were being considered at the state legislative level, Seattle had to wait to see if any preemptive legislation would be passed. You may be shocked to learn that while much work was done in the House and Senate on separate bills pertaining to this issue, they were never voted on, clearing the way for Seattle to try its hand at local controls.

Here’s Licata, who sounds fired up still, on the latest:

Mayor McGinn sent a letter to towing industry groups recently seeking their collaboration and meetings are scheduled to begin next week that I plan to monitor or attend. Earlier requests for information during the state session didn’t receive a response from towing companies, making it difficult to determine a reasonable fee.

Frustrated in trying to move legislation forward, I let the Mayor know that if he could not reach an agreement by the beginning of July with the towing industry, I intend to introduce legislation regulating the industry.

Crime, News

Talking Crime Rates and Seattle Police Deportment

November 4, 2011 Michael van Baker

Columnist Danny Westneat had a much-maligned piece in the Seattle Times this week, where he “investigated” claims of depolicing–the idea is that, much like a 7-year-old who has been called onto the carpet, the Seattle Police Department is “showing you” by refusing to do anything but the necessary required to their jobs.

It’s an impression actually fostered by the head of the police union, who can’t tell the difference between proactive policework and shooting a well-known public nuisance/wood carver to death in the street.

As it happens, this latest accusation of depolicing is internal, and stems from the ongoing Department of Justice investigation of the SPD for civil rights violations. So even though the outburst is hyperbolic and disgruntled on the face of it–“You have only maybe 20 or fewer officers in patrol that are doing any proactive work right now,” said Officer Ernest DeBella, Jr., suspected loudmouth–people are reacting to it: My god, is this true?!

Westneat asked for data, and found this:

Seattle police released figures Tuesday showing that officers have done 101,058 on-views through nine months this year. That’s down 6 percent compared with the same period a year ago — a drop, but not one big enough to indicate widespread job-shirking.

So maybe DeBella, Jr., got it turned around; maybe it’s 20 or fewer officers who are depolicing.

That said, when Chief Diaz points to 2011 major crimes being down seven percent, even compared to the low rate of 2010, it’s worth looking into major crimes more closely. It’s not as good as it may sound.

Downtown is where the SPD is under the microscope–as south Seattle residents often complain–but it’s hard to shake the impression that there’s a fairly persistent base rate in both property crime and violent crime in downtown the past four years. (So it’s not “the worst it’s ever been,” but you can forgive people for getting fed up with a chronic, dangerous problem.)

When you look at citywide data over the past ten years, you see 2010’s violent crime was down nine percent from a 10-year average, and property crimes down 15 percent. Violent crimes ranged from a high of 4,150 in 2001 to a low of 3,447 in 2008, property crimes 46,306 (2003) to 32,820 (2008). So far, 2011’s violent crime rate is in step with 2010, and property crimes are “lagging” seven percent to 2010’s finals.

You might feel better about that but let me ask you this: Would you rather be robbed than assaulted, raped, or killed? Because, individually, aggravated assault, rape, and homicides are up; only robbery is down, but sufficiently so that in aggregate, violent crimes haven’t risen.

Education, News

Bow Down to the University of Washington’s Budget Woes

April 11, 2011 Michael van Baker 4 Comments

The Seattle “Shocked, we’re shocked!” Times has been running stories about the failure of the University of Washington to admit in-state students ahead of out-of-state students this year: “Why straight-A’s may not get you into UW this year,” with the AP’s more pointed “Budget cuts means fewer Wash. students get into UW.”

Why, those out-of-staters are coming here and taking our UW degrees!

A letter to the editor calmly points out the reality:

Accepting higher-paying out-of-state students allows it to accept more in-state students. The university is required to charge Washington residents less than its cost.

When the state reduced the subsidy that fills this gap, it effectively put a cap on the number of local students that could be accepted. If not for the out-of-state students, the university would operate this year below its physical capacity. Accepting profit-generating out-of-state students to fill some of this unused capacity allow the university to fill the rest with more local students.

On his blog, Cliff Mass repeats this economic truth bomb: “The State is cutting funding so substantially that economizing (getting rid of TA, bigger classes, less profs) is not enough to maintain the current in-state student body. So by increasing the number of out-of-state students in-state student support can be partially stabilized.”

He also says that roughly one-quarter of UW students aren’t UW material, and notes that out-of-state students have “math SAT scores that were 76 points higher.” But this is all part of the greater transition, he argues, of the UW becoming a private school. If the state is unwilling to fund the UW in the manner in which it has become accustomed, then so be it:

But after roughly five years we will be on our own…no longer dependent on the vagaries of the State legislature and state coffers..and no longer worried about the next ill-advised initiative. Tuition will rise to perhaps 12,000-15,000 a year…a bargain for such a excellent education (thankfully we starting with very low tuition compared to comparable schools).

Wait, the UW a private school? Danny Westneat gives the outraged the written equivalent of a long, measured stare:

Twenty-five years ago, students paid only $1,500 a year to go there — the state’s share was more than $8,000. That’s why it was called a public school — we picked up 85 percent of the tab.

Today it’s only 45 percent taxpayer-subsidized. The student pays $9,000, the taxpayers $7,000. In two years, it’s projected to be student $11,500, state $4,500. None of these figures is corrected for inflation, meaning the erosion in public support for the UW is even more dramatic than these numbers imply.

Well, parts of the UW are more profit-driven. I feel compelled to include this aside about the hiring of a new women’s basketball coach for $475,000 per year, also from the Times:

“We wanted to pay market, but not pay crazy,” Woodward said. “We have expectations and hopefully with fans coming back, it’ll ameliorate that difference in what we have to invest.

“The fiscal considerations were not paramount. They were a factor. But it was getting this program back and being successful and winning at the highest level. That was the most important thing. Fiscal considerations were part of that whole mix.”

The coach’s salary isn’t coming out of the UW’s budget, I just am thrilled to see someone talking about the need for investment over immediate returns when it comes to anything connected with the UW. Who would have guessed it would have to do with sports, though? Oh, right.

Cliff Mass says he’s “optimistic” about the UW’s transition, and it’s hard to argue that this moment hasn’t been long in coming. Somehow, our state legislature reads this in the state constitution: “It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex,” and decides consistently to defund higher education.

I am less optimistic about the long-term prospects of higher education, whether public or private, as the cost of college education looks very much like a bubble funded by easy, government-backed loans written to people who have not shown the ability to repay.

(Peter Thiel on TechCrunch: Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”)

The bubble would likely have popped by now, except for the dubious legal classification of student loans as non-dischargeable through bankruptcy (unless you can prove you’ll never be able to pay the sum back). The distinction between this arrangement and indentured servitude is narrow. It’s hard to understand why government-backed mortgages can be discharged while government-backed student loans can’t. (I know that you can’t repossess an education, but to the extent that people have one, it’s a public good; to the extent that it is a fungible asset, if you graduate and can’t get a job, it’s worth exactly nothing, market rate.)

The economic fact is that almost nothing except for CEO salaries is roughly commensurate with the cost of higher education over the past two decades. As with healthcare, unless we can gain control of costs, in the longer run it matters little whether we debate endlessly the merits of public vs. private financing. No one has pockets that deep.

The SunBreak