Letter to the Editor, Seattle Weekly

Knute Berger, in "Village Idiots" (March 30 - April 5, 2005), doesn't seem to have a good handle on supply and demand. The reason houses cost so much in Seattle (or San Francisco, or Manhattan, or Portland) is because there's a helluva lot of demand for those houses.

There are only two ways to do much about the situation -- put more houses in to increase supply (which means higher density), or pay a subsidy (thereby artifically reducing the net price). Of the two, increased density is the more sustainable in the long run, both for fewer resources consumed by building greener houses, and because sooner or later any subsidy will come to an end (jacking the price right back up to where it would've been in the first place).

He's absolutely right about education. As Warren and Tyagi show in their book, The Two-Income Trap, people are literally bankrupting themselves to pay for mortages in places they feel have better education. But that only shows how a slight increase in taxes for education not only gets you better schools, but also a more stable financial environment for families, far outweighing the costs of those bankruptcies.

Sincerely,

Hal O'Brien

And, while I'm talking policy...

Turns out the Census Bureau has a new report on commuting.

One of the mantras of the Seattle area is how bad the traffic allegedly is. Having lived in LA so long, I generally smile a bit at this.

The Census Bureau puts Seattle 16th in commute time (click on the .PDF report by "Place"), behind usual suspects like New York, Chicago, LA, Miami, Philly, etc., etc.

A feature of this report (picked up by the New York Times) is a breakdown of "extreme commutes". No, it's not the latest X-Games event, the term refers to commute times that average over 90 minutes, round trip.

As one might guess, Seattle isn't in the top ten table on that, either. Although LA metro comes in with entries in the #4 and #5 spots. (Why the Census Bureau continues to carve up LA into 4 or 5 separate areas is beyond me. They do the same thing with NYC.)

Goodbye, Mr. Korematsu

The Seattle Times reports that Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu has died. Korematsu was one of a handful of US citizens who practiced civil disobedience in the face of the US government's internment orders for Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

His case, Korematsu v. US, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), stands today as one of the darkest moments of the Supreme Court's history. A moment when expediency and hysteria were allowed to trump the birthrights of Americans.

The last of the Nisei who lived through the camps are dying. If Tom Brokaw was right about a "greatest generation," then I would say that the Nisei who fought so bravely and worked so hard for their country even as their families were in the camps were probably the most patriotic of all.

If you want to learn more about the internment, I recommend Peter Irons' book, Justice at War... Which, as it happens, I reviewed on Amazon back in 2001.