Mayor Murray’s cowardly attack on media and use of race card

In a desperate and cowardly move to shift the blame over a bad housing policy recommendation, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray is turning his attack on the nefarious, but unnamed “sensationalized reporting by a few media outlets.”

On Wednesday afternoon, we learned that Murray would not recommend what could have dramatically impacted 94 percent of single-family zones in Seattle. Originally, his activist-stacked Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) committee argued, “as Seattle expands rapidly and experiences massive economic and population growth, we are held back by policies and historical precedents that are no longer viable for the long-term survival or our city.” They wanted to move away from the idea that all families can live in their own home on a piece of land.

It was a preposterous position that only extreme activists could take and it was rejected by Seattleites. But the mayor claims this bad idea wasn’t so bad at all, it was simply attacked by the media. In a press release, Murray said:

The Council and I created the HALA process because our city is facing a housing affordability crisis. In the weeks since the HALA recommendations were released, sensationalized reporting by a few media outlets has created a significant distraction and derailed the conversation that we need to have on affordability and equity.

Actually, the reason he create the HALA process was because he wanted to pretend to find consensus to push some of his extreme ideas. So he stacks a committee filled with people who think like him to craft a proposal that pushes ideas he wanted. It gave him the appearance of consensus building. But in this case, it failed because no one in their right mind would back half the recommendations they put out there.

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Rather than admit his idea wasn’t popular, he’ll go after the evil media in the most cowardly of ways. If there is a media outlet out there that is incorrect in their assessment of his recommendation, he can reach out to them and invite them to a discussion. He couldn’t defend his plan &#8212 a plan he didn’t think you would read &#8212 so he retreated. You mean to tell me if he had a brilliant, game-changing plan he’d simply abandon it because “a few media outlets” were unhappy? How many times has he moved forward with plans where more than a few media outlets were unhappy? This is a rather pathetic argument by someone trying to save face for pushing such a deeply unpopular plan.

But what’s worse is Murray tries to play the race card and guilt trip his progressive fans into taking action on his perceived problem.

We also must not be afraid to talk about the painful fact that parts of our city are still impacted by the intersection of income, race and housing. Look at a map and take a walk through our neighborhoods. We can move beyond the legacy of the old boundaries of exclusion that have remained largely unchanged since nearly a century ago when neighborhood covenants were used to keep people of color south of Madison Street.

Should you feel bad because progressive policies by a progressive city government have kept minorities poor? Perhaps their policies are failures and there should be a change in the way we look at the issue. These recommendations are hardly unique; they’re not even unique to the city.

Related: Skyrocketing rents? How about you live within your means?

The irony here is that Murray and his supporters in the Seattle City Council routinely push programs and policies that make the city expensive to live in for even the upper-middle class. For example, every time Murray and the Seattle Department of Transportation take lanes away from cars, purposefully making traffic difficult so that you might give up your car, they’re simply forcing people to live closer to work. And when the jobs in Seattle are mostly tied to high-paying tech jobs, like the ones at Amazon.com, they’re making it expensive to live here because rich people will be moving here and developers know they can charge high rent. You could allow the developers to build higher up without getting hit with astronomical fees that the city will squander, which would, in turn, create a higher supply of apartments at a lower rent. But the city won’t do that.

The mayor says he wants a conversation about affordable housing. Great. Start by being more open to alternatives to your ideologically driven policies. And you have an open, in-studio invitation to come on my show anytime to discuss. Let’s come up with solutions together.