The real issue with the light rail yard is that the inept Bel-Red rezoning ripped out the last areas capable of supporting industrial growth in this city, preferring a vision of pretty pink castles full of niche tech startups and artisan pet food shops.

A healthy city needs a diverse range of businesses if it is going to survive. This includes the kind of blue collar jobs that a rail yard, or an expanded transfer station in Factoria will bring, yet these developments are seeing resistance at every turn, simply because they are not pretty enough for the city’s ‘vision’.

Well, I don’t think that empty shop units and shuttered apartments are all that pretty either. Yet it’s what they’ve been building in Redmond and Seattle and Renton and even in our own downtown for years now, and they are not generating much tax revenue.

Perhaps if our city planners would look out of their windows, they might learn something.

Lyndon Heywood, Bellevue