Do They Read Their Own Paper

Today’s Seattle Times has some interesting articles on population growth in Seattle and Phoenix. There are many more important issues in both articles however in this brief note I simply want to ask the question: Why don’t they read their own articles before they put the paper to press?

In the Seattle article is the following:

Nickels favors the most aggressive of four growth scenarios envisioned by planners, one that would add 350,000 people to Seattle’s population, which now stands at about 575,000.
……
Planners generally agree that the four-county Puget Sound area will see its population swell by 1.6 million in the next 34 years. But skeptics question the purported benefits of Nickels’ plan and the city’s ability to pull it off.

Richard Morrill , geography professor emeritus at the University of Washington, doubts Seattle could attract 20 percent of the region’s growth by 2040 no matter what Nickels does.

“That magnitude of change hasn’t happened anywhere except maybe Beijing,” Morrill said.

For the city to reach such a goal, Morrill said, likely zoning changes and “somewhat astounding density” would reduce the number of single-family homes and families with children in the city, leading to “some kind of rebellion.”

And in the Phoenix article is this:

But since growth chased the Sperlings to Phoenix in 1990, the population of this desert metropolis has jumped 50 percent, to about 1.5 million; …..
….
The United States’ sixth-largest city, and expected to grow another 50 percent in the next eight years, ….

Some basic arithmetic shows that Phoenix will have grown from 1,000,000 in 1990 to about 2.25 million in 2014 or about 125% in 24 years.

This is, of course, significantly greater grown than the paltry 60% over 34 years that Morrill is analyzing.

Surely the ST’s reporter, Bob Young, and the slew of editors that they have should have noticed that an example contradicting their expert was in the same edition of the paper.

Or, gosh, directly tied the Seattle story to the Phoenix story.