Newcastle city council has four seats on the ballot for the 2025 election. Four of these candidates (Sarah Goodman, Kevin Kirkaldie, Maggie Lo, and Jim Quigg) are running on a MAGA-inspired platform of “Newcastle First: Small, safe, quiet.”
I’m going to refer to this group as the “Lawns Over People” party, or LOP, because their main goal is to deny building permits for lawnless housing. That’s also the main thing they have any actual power over. They defend the sanctity of home ownership as the union between a home and lawn, as opposed to the morally degenerate union of home and home.
The four sane candidates who were endorsed by the Democratic Party and who are running in opposition (Andy Jacobs, Chris Villasenor, Paul Charbonneau, and Karin Blakley) are also lawn owners. But you should still support them because they want to give residents an actual choice, and because they don’t view apartments as the anti-Christ.
The real reason city budgets keep getting higher
Roads and Infrastructure are cheap to maintain when the city is brand new, but gets more and more expensive with ages, just like with car ownership and medical bills. And this is even worse with low-density housing, since there’s so much more infrastructure to build support.
Here’s a map of Coal Creek Parkway, showing the 105 houses in the Delmar Woods HOA across from 105 units from Karbon Apartments.
The difference is staggering. The extra space used for lawn support requires several additional miles of confusing roads and underground utilities. Although lawn owners contribute more tax dollars per household, it’s nowhere near enough to cover the difference, making them a net drain on city budgets. Meanwhile, apartments can serve a lot more people and bring in a lot more tax dollars with minimal costs to the city, making them a net gain.
Republicans love to blame rising budgets on government waste and mismanagement, and yet they mandate that all neighborhoods be managed in the most wasteful way possible. The suburban experiment has only been around since the 1940s, and most suburban cities since then have either learned to embrace affordable housing, or they refuse and went bankrupt. The same way most people moving out for the first time will quickly realize that it’s cheaper with a roommate.
Affordable housing is more affordable for tenants, more affordable for builders, and more affordable for the city. It’s win-win-win, as long as you don’t have an unhealthy lawn fetish.
The hidden cost of the small-town fantasy
“Small, safe, quiet” is all about exclusion, and exclusion is expensive. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the small-town feel, but most small towns are small for a reason. “Beautiful open spaces” are cheap because no one wants to live there, and taxes are low because everyone digs their own private well and septic tank.
Trying to force the “small-town feel” in the Puget Sound during a housing crisis is like trying to force a golf course in the Arizona desert during a water shortage. Land in Arizona is cheap, but the water is scarce and expensive. For Newcastle, it’s the other way around, which is even more ridiculous. Artificial housing shortages also artificially inflate property values, and that means higher taxes.
Stop… in the name of lawns.
Low-density housing can only make traffic worse, because everyone needs a car to get around. The people at the bottom of Delmar Woods need to drive half a mile to reach the grocery store 200 feet away, because there’s no pedestrian route. The people in Karbon apartments can simply walk. Garbage trucks need several hours to serve everyone in the HOA, as opposed only needing several minutes for the apartments. All of this leads to more congestion.
Actual small-towns avoid traffic because no one wants to visit. But Newcastle was built next to two heavily congested highways, which is the main reason people move there, but then they make a shocked Pikachu face during rush hour. Even if “Newcastle First” lowered population density to zero, they still can’t block commuters from using Newcastle as a detour when I-405 slows down.
The only real solution is to bring people together to encourage walkability and public transit. That’s how every modern city in the world deals with this. High-density affordable housing also encourages more local business, which means people don’t have to leave the city as often, which means less traffic.
The Paradox of being Pro-Family and Anti-Children
The lawn fetishists promote Newcastle as a place for raising larger families, to the extent of outlawing 1-2 bedroom homes for childless adults, but they’re also campaigning to keep the city “small” because they view population growth as inherently evil. This seems a bit contradictory.
Where exactly are those kids supposed to live if there’s no affordable housing in the future? How do you keep traffic low when those children eventually need cars of their own?
If “Newcastle First” doesn’t even understand the link between children and population growth, or the link between highways and traffic, then how can you trust them to manage a budget?
What exactly is the point?
Lawn fetishists are trying to force everyone to have a lawn, but hardly anyone actually uses them. Drive through Newcastle on a beautiful day, and chances the only people you’ll see on the lawn are the hired landscapers.
More importantly, no one is taking their lawns away. No one is forcing them to live in apartments. No amount of apartment noise will ever be loud enough to reach the lawn owners. High-density housing, by its very definition, does not take up much space. So why do they care so much?
The lawn fetish is part of the bigger effort to “Make Newcastle Great Again,” by holding onto an outdated idea of the nuclear family from the 1950s. Evangelicals are trying to ban apartments for the same reason they tried to ban gay marriage, and for the same reason the town from “Footloose” tried to ban dancing. They see this as a moral crusade. Seattle area professionals rank near bottom for number of children, and that goes against the bible, because God told us to be fruitful and multiply.
These people were also lucky enough to buy housing while it was still cheap, so they assume that “affordable housing” means “unemployed reefer addict.” Today, a house in Newcastle can easily sell for $2 million, which amounts to a $10,000 monthly mortgage with a 20% down payment. Even most tech workers earning six figures can’t afford that.
Just as MAGA scapegoats trans people and immigrants for all the problems facing America, “Newcastle First” wants to scapegoat affordable housing for all the problems in Newcastle, because affordable housing brings in the “wrong” people and if you get rid of those “wrong” people the problem goes away. That’s how Trump convinced so many people that you can reduce food prices by deporting all the farm workers.
Final Thoughts
First, this article was largely inspired by an eye opening video series co-produced by “Not Just Bikes” and “Strong Town” on the failing economics of low-density suburbia. I highly recommend it. Second, Delmar Woods is technically in Bellevue across the street from Newcastle, but the comparison still stands.
On 9/30, Newcastle held a town hall regarding the budget. The conservative majority tried their best to cancel the town hall in defiance of city rules, claiming it would be a waste of time to hear from the public right before an election because they didn’t think the public would have anything useful to say.
At the town hall, the three conservatives who showed up still have no idea where to cut. The fourth conservative member, Jim Quigg, decided not to show until after questions were already over. Jim Quigg is also the only candidate on the 2025 ballot, but tragically missed the chance to explain his promise to cut waste and mismanagement.
Ultimately, they will never have an answer. As the video series explains, you can’t have urban level services with rural level densities. The only way to make good service affordable is through economies of scale.
