Wealthy developers again pulling one over on Seattle residents

Taken from The Dori Monson Show on KIRO Radio.

Residents of the University District in Seattle are reportedly filing an appeal on new zoning guidelines that will allow buildings up to 34-stories in the area.

KOMO reports neighbors are worried about losing the funky feel and character of the neighborhood around The Ave.

So if neighborhood residents don’t want it, why are they doing this?

Because as Sound Transit is extended to the University District, the wealthy property owners want to have high-density, high-rise housing, apartments and office buildings around there.

Related: Quit your job if you want a home on shores of Lake Washington

This gets to the heart of what I’ve been telling you for 20 years now. Sound Transit has never been about regional mobility.

People wonder why they don’t have more park and rides along the Sound Transit lines. Well, because that would be about regional mobility. But what they have is property owners who want their property around the station to be worth a fortune with no benefit for anyone else in the city. The property owners in that area who supported Sound Transit, they saw this as a way to make collectively hundreds of millions or billions of dollars off of the people’s investment.

The people are not well served by Sound Transit. You see how jammed I-5 is every single day. They sold it as congestion relief but then we saw in their own environmental impact statement where they admitted there was no congestion relief. That’s not what it’s been about.

Sound Transit is about exactly what the Seattle tunnel is about. The Seattle tunnel isn’t about improving mobility through the city. It is about very wealthy, very well-connected property owners, many of whom have just bought off the politically powerful in our region, getting billions of dollars in increased land value.

That is what is happening in the University District. Nothing for regional mobility, but the developers are going to make hundreds of millions or billions of dollars collectively. It’s a giant transfer of wealth from the taxpayers.

What’s so funny is the gullibility of the liberals around here who say they care about income inequality and yet they support these programs and schemes to take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the wealthiest among us, the developers.

The little people will get screwed by all of this. The wealthiest will get even more wealthy off the backs of the taxpayers thanks to Sound Transit, and thanks to the Seattle Tunnel.

Taken from The Dori Monson Show on KIRO Radio.

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