the Federation for sprawl

From the Publicola blog:
"the Seattle Community Council Federation—an umbrella group for anti-growth neighborhood organizations—is mobilizing in advance of Mayor Ed Murray's April "neighborhood summit" for a February 25 summit of their own at the Central Area Senior Center.

The group is planning to come up with a unified agenda to check what they see as a city plagued by "runaway development, upzones, gentrification, small lot development, skinny houses, high-rise development, loss of tree canopy, lack of adequate services/infrastructure etc."

The group, which includes the Seattle Displacement Coalition, Livable Ballard, Reasonable Density Seattle (a Capitol Hill group), and Seattle Speaks Up (a new group from Phinney Ridge), is planning to hold a press conference a week before Murray's summit to frame the city's agenda with its own "tough growth controls" agenda."

There is palpable opposition to development and increasing density in Seattle. It's not hard to understand this reaction to seeing South Lake Union transform before our eyes in the last few years. On top of that rent prices are rising very rapidly in neighborhoods around the city, leading to many people feeling that they are being forced out of their communities.
These two occurrences are linked, but it is not the case that the first is driving the second. Rather both phenomena are caused by the same thing: the desirability of urban living in the post-millennium in general and of Seattle in particular. And rather than high rents being the result of increasing development, it is the lack of development that drives up rents. The alternative to greater density in the city is sprawl in the suburbs, and it is the rightful disdain for suburban sprawl that is leading people to want to living in the city.

What these neighborhood groups are fighting for is increased suburban sprawl. They are rightly happy to have had the luck to have a place in the city and now they don't want everyone else coming in and ruining it for them. They like things how they are thank-you-very-much, and everyone else who wants to be able to live a low-car life in a vibrant, walkable, diverse community can go screw themselves.