May: happy hour, headlines, and keeping Edmonds vibrant
Join our May happy hour, read between the headlines on budget stuff, and learn more about efforts to keep Edmonds vibrant.
Hi friend,
Mackey here. It's been a while!
There’s a lot happening in Edmonds right now. This email is a quick roundup.
Included: recent headlines that explain a lot about Edmonds’ financial woes, a CARE happy hour this Thursday from 6-8pm at Edway Tap House, and some news about keeping Edmonds vibrant.
(FYI: starting now, I’ll try to be in touch every two weeks or so. This stuff deserves a little more continuity than I’ve been giving it. Unsubscribe at any time.)
Thanks for caring about Edmonds.
May happy hour with Jeremy Mitchell, Planning Board
This Thursday, May 8th, I’m hosting a little happy hour at Edway Tap House in Westgate from 6-8pm. I’ll be joined by Jeremy Mitchell of the Edmonds Planning Board, the volunteer body that makes recommendations about transportation and land use policy to Edmonds City Council.
We’ll chat about Edmonds’ ongoing “missing middle” and “hubs and centers” code updates, which will legalize the construction of modest numbers of homes across Edmonds’ exclusionarily-zoned residential land, and its existing commercial nodes (like 5 Corners and Perrinville), respectively.
Come hang out on Thursday, or just swing by and say hi!
A tale of two headlines
In case you’ve missed it, Edmonds has been in the headlines for a few things that you typically don’t want to be in headlines for.
What’s even more interesting is that while these headlines look like they belong to different stories, if you zoom in, they’re really about the same thing.
First: over the last few weeks, MyEdmondsNews, KOMO News, King 5 and others have extensively covered community backlash over conversations by Edmonds’ city council/administration to evalute the sale of Hummingbird Hill Park and the Frances Anderson Center, among other city-owned assets, as one-time bandaids for our operating deficit.
Second: The Urbanist’s Ryan Packer covered recent meetings of the Edmonds City Council, where several councilmembers advocated for minimizing the number of new homes permitted under our draft “missing middle” and “hubs and centers” codes, which will allow a modest number of new homes to be built across Edmonds.
Self-inflicted scarcity
These two stories are not about separate issues. They share a common origin in the defining objective of the last 50 years of governance in Edmonds, and cities like it: a commitment to the preservation of self-inflicted, artificial scarcity, rather than the (harder) work of planning for organic growth and adapting our policies to meet the needs of a changing community.
Since at least the 1970s – after the last cohorts had the opportunity to buy homes built out of newly-cleared forests in Edmonds – our city council has has largely endeavored to limit in the number of homes and businesses allowed here, while disregarding the financial implications of this choice (or kicking them down the road.)
Why we chose scarcity
When a city deliberately restricts the organic development of new homes and businesses in areas of high demand, it is making a choice to slow population growth and constrain taxable economic activity.
Edmonds made this choice a long time ago, choosing to ban attached homes (or “apartments”) and the mixed-use, organic development pattern that our downtown is so well known for, across nearly all of the rest of city in our land use codes. Why? To satisfy the preferences of incumbent residents, concerned that their neighborhoods might someday change.
(If you’d like more context, I’ve attached the 1971 Seattle Times article “Edmonds Shuns the Growth-Happy Syndrome”, for educational purposes.)
Their wish was granted, and in recent years, we’ve had to pay the piper: facing tighter budgets, dwindling reserves, a growing share of our resources funneled away from capital improvement projects and redirected towards deferred maintenance, and mounting pressure to sell off assets (like parks) to keep our budget balanced.
This scarcity makes homes (and land) in Edmonds more expensive than they would otherwise be. It makes our revenue base small and brittle. It has built a fragile city.
Edmonds has had increasingly arbitrary zoning policies for both commercial and residential land use on its books since the adoption of our first zoning code in the 1950s. In other words, fiscal shortfall isn't just bad luck: it’s a predictable outcome of policy decisions made years ago, and reinforced today.
The alternative is abundance
Edmonds needs to shift from scarcity thinking to an abundance mindset: the idea that we can, and should, have more of the things that a healthy society needs (homes, community centers, sidewalks…), and that it is worth adopting policies and priorities (land use, transportation, economic development…) that reflect our commitment to doing the hard work to ensure they will be built.
This seems to have worked remarkably well for Edmonds in the early years of the 20th century, as we transitioned from a smoggy mill town to a bustling city (and built many of the assets, like the Frances Anderson Center, that define life here today) by allowing more enterprise and development in the places that made sense.
Why don’t we return to that approach?
It doesn't require endless sprawl (which we ran out of land for in the 90s) or building skyscrapers. It does require allowing more residential & commercial activity in places where markets indicate the greatest demand – near transit, near nodes of commercial activity, near existing public improvements – and planning for investments in infrastructure that can be shared, and sustained, by many users.
Each new home broadens our tax base, pays for its own costs, and reduces the upward pressure on housing prices in the long run. Each new business creates new taxable dollars, mostly from thin air. These outcomes allow us to support robust public services without asking too much of any single stakeholder. We just need to allow them to happen here.
Growth is the character of Edmonds
Right now, Edmonds doesn’t need austerity or nostalgia. We need to develop a respect for our history.
We need to stop treating growth as a threat to the “character” of Edmonds, and start recognizing that constant, organic, incremental growth is what gave this place its character to begin with. Perhaps equally important is that nobody should be ashamed of our history of growth and change: people need cities, and cities need people.
We can either return to the approach that built the economic core of Edmonds as we know it today – allowing more homes and businesses to take shape in logical places – or we can decide which public assets to sacrifice next.
One path offers us an Edmonds that will contribute in a more meaningful way to the economic dynamism of America, continue to serve as an engine of economic mobility, and pay its bills on time.
The other offers a certain decline in Edmonds’ ability to meet to the demands of our age, disguised in the language of “preservation”, to satisfy the preferences of incumbents.
Which path do you think we should take? Let me know.
Help “Keep Edmonds Vibrant”, and chart course for a stronger financial future
Last month, prompted by the above news about short-term, scarcity-thinking approaches to balancing our budget, some friends and I started a group called Keep Edmonds Vibrant. We’ve been exploring long-term solutions for our operating deficit (hint: we need more revenue, and probably not just from higher property taxes.)
Over the last month, we’ve hosted two community conversations (view recaps on our website) to brainstorm strategies for growing City revenues, and ensure that we have a robust plan for sustaining today’s public assets and investing in the future that we want.
This month, we’ll be engaging all of Edmonds in an online project to evaluate community support for various strategies for growing revenues, as well as to build a long-term vision for what Edmonds should be: more soon.
If you’re interested in supporting this effort, or getting involved, please send us an email: team@keepedmondsvibrant.org
That’s all for now. Let me know if you have any questions (you can just reply to this email) and feel free to forward to a friend who might like it.
Take care and talk soon!
Mackey