WA still has a libertarian bent that despises red tape. We have no state income tax due to that.

As a former resident, I hope you can see the tides are shifting rapidly. How long can you keep things that way? Didn’t Seattle elect a socialist? Their policies are the opposite of libertarian.

Councilwoman Sawant is a single city councilperson; she isn't a majority of city government (who are mostly pro-business) and definitely isn't representative of the state as a whole, which is pretty purple. Outside of Seattle, especially on the east side of the state but also in some of the smaller metro areas, folks tend to be extremely libertarian. (Not to say there aren't libertarians in Seattle as well, it just skews left of the state average.)

The Seattle metro is a weird microcosm of the state in that it's so vastly bigger than any other metro in the state. Seattle and surrounding metro have about 4 million of the state's 7.5 million residents. So yes, Seattle has a big influence, but it's far from the only voice in Washington.

I would not call getting rid of these regulations as progressive. They exist to protect the environment and enrich the lives of the residents. We just need better, cheaper solutions to construction even if it's something as far fetched as robot labor.

It sounds good in theory that "They exist to protect the environment and enrich the lives of the residents". Then I'm reminded that environment protection laws have been used to build larger freeways (because we don't want to have cars idling too long!)

> enrich the lives of the residents

Mostly, it’s retaining residents’ property values. By not building any new housing.

That's literally Elizabeth Campbell's entire motivation. She doesn't want to have to look at the poors in her neighborhood.

> progressive

I really don't want to get deep into this topic on HN of all places, but limiting the government's ability to interfere with new construction is not progressive.

And in before someone says that the opposite is "conservative" because "NIMBYs" want to "conserve" the status quo, such a transparent abuse of language. People figured out that supply/demand applies to housing too and now want to pretend that allowing markets to lower the price is somehow progressive because progressive means good.

It's almost bordering on "Orwellian", where a word can become nearly meaningless, you can just start calling anything progressive to justify the policy rather than thinking about the functional principle of what is being done--limiting the government's interference in the market, in this case, and that's not to say that is always a good thing.

However you want to define progressive, its certainly not progressive to have skyrocketing 4k+ USD a month rents and groups making it essentially impossible to build more housing.

I think you're replacing "progressive" with "good" again.

'progressive' usually is the opposite of enriching wealthy entrenched interests, to the detriment of basically everyone else.