Liberal Talk Radio

Dan Savage tries to blame Paul Allen for the death of the Seattle Commons:

The Commons was a large park proposed for South Lake Union that Seattle’s citizens were asked to tax themselves to construct. There were two votes, both failed. The person most responsible for the failure of the Commons was Paul Allen, billionaire and South Lake Union landowner. Allen was prepared to donate a good deal of land and, if I recall correctly, about 20 million in cash. He also owned most of the land that surrounded the park. The tax hit on Seattle citizens? A quarter of a billion dollars. In the weeks before one of the votes Allen made a billion dollars in a stock rally–in one day. If Allen had any sense–if he acted more like a Carnegie and less like a carny–he would have cashed out a quarter of his take that day, given the money to the city, and asked that the park be named after his mother. [emph. added]

I’m not sure that Allen himself needs to get all — or even most — of the blame here. I didn’t live in Seattle at the time, so I can only rely on what I’ve read about the Commons project, but insufficient philanthropy on Allen’s part doesn’t seem to have been the main cause of the project’s demise.

Instead, the Commons proposal was defeated by the same small-bore, conservative (small “c”) reactionaries who oppose all large-scale public redevelopment efforts (see here for the typical class-warfare-fueled anti-Commons argument).

To a certain extent, I sympathize with these people. Back in the early ’90s, years before WTO, it would have been hard to foresee just how big Seattle would grow. They were trying to preserve the working-class fishing village they had grown up with, and it must have been hard to sit by and watch all that change happen so quickly. By 1991, though, economic forces beyond their control (globalization, trade, Microsoft) were making that vision untenable.

In fairness, Savage does include these folks in his argument:

Seattle’s working people were being asked to pay for “park views for millionaires”! So we voted the thing down. Twice. Yay! We saved South Lake Union from Paul Allen! And today South Lake Union is… pricey condos, biotech, office buildings. All those businesses we saved? They’re gone. And there’s no public park, no open space, no green space. Way to go, Paul, way to go, class warriors. We didn’t get the park, the condos came anyway.

The argument blaming Allen himself, though, is pretty thin. I’d like to see more evidence than what Savage provides.