It took all of three weeks for Crosscut’s Knute Berger to rediscover his voice and pick up where he left off at the Weekly. In his column today, he takes on (for the 126th time in the past two years) local environmental think tank Sightline regarding their support of urban density (simply put, an urban dense environment contains more multi-family homes than single family homes). Says Knute:

“We know that these green-backed policies are making the city more unaffordable. They are helping to drive the poor out of town. They are displacing long-standing communities. They are changing the scale of a once-egalitarian city that featured few poor people, few rich people, and a lot of folks in between. This old middle class Seattle is now seen as unsophisticated, not worthy of protection, backward even.”

Looking beyond our city limits for a moment helps me to see that urban density is likely not the driving force behind the poor being forced out of town. Nor is it the sole reason long-standing communities are being displaced. And I certainly don’t think that whatever is left of Seattle’s middle class is seen as unworthy of protection. These are real issues the city is facing (or avoiding, as the case may be) and an old Seattle stalwart like Berger is uniquely qualified to weigh in on them. Unfortunately, he’s chosen to rail against a red herring. Seattle’s economic situation hasn’t developed in a vacuum no matter how isolated we think we are up here. The middle class is shrinking across the country and the poor are being driven out of, well, everywhere. The rising tide is not lifting all boats and it’s myopic, to say the least, to claim that localized urban density is to blame.

Sightline’s blog, The Daily Score, promises a full rebuttal of Berger’s claims soon.

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