By JANE LOTTER

Short platting. What is it? Why is it? Or, to put it simply: Why, why, why!?

Short platting is the carving up of one residential lot into two. Where once there was a small house and a big yard with perhaps a swing set and laughing children, there are now two houses (one small, one gigantic) and no yard.

I don't know what happens to the laughing children; I suppose they get sent to their rooms. "Hey, you kids! Wipe those smiles off your faces and climb down out of those trees. We're grown-ups with chain saws! Ha, ha, ha! Power tools of destruction! Those trees are toast! They're history! And if you don't climb down pronto, you're all going to end up in the paper pulp display at the school science fair!"

Short platting is part of the overall trashing of Seattle (nothing new there!) and is, of course, perfectly legal. Whether or not it's desirable is another question entirely. Either way, short platting is perhaps best explained with the aid of the following chart:

Life Before Short Platting

1. Yards

2. Sunlight

3. Trees

4. Children playing

Life After Short Platting

1. Driveways

2. Shadows

3. Tree stumps

4. Children playing Nintendo

During the next decade, North Seattle is scheduled to get a gazillion new housing units. That's right: a gazillion. From the city's point of view, the miracle of short platting is that it will allow those housing units to be built in YOUR backyard. Or in your neighbor's front yard. Or in everybody's side yards. Short platting means big bucks for developers while at the same time allowing the city to cram as many people as possible into the smallest conceivable area. It's a win-win situation for everybody except you and your entire community.

Short platting is simple, easy, and over before you know it (that's why they call it "short"). "Darling," you'll find yourself saying one morning, "last night, just before we went to bed, wasn't there a flower garden next door? I distinctly remember opening the window and drinking in the sweet scent of honeysuckle."

"Snookums," your sweetheart will no doubt rejoin, "you are SO observant. Yes, dearest, there was a garden. But overnight somebody built a four-bedroom, three-bath house the size of Spokane. It features a two-car garage, state-of-the-art security system, and an asking price of $485,000 - not exactly pocket change. By the way, angel - not to change the subject - but have you surveyed our lot size lately?"

Personally, I grew up in a small house with a big yard. "Go outside and play," my mother would say to us. I don't recall her ever saying, "Go outside and short plat."

In the end, short platting is nothing less than the destruction of trees and mini green spaces all over this city. Short platting ruins residential neighborhoods. And I suppose the only reason we let it continue is that, somewhere along the way, we accidentally short-platted our common sense.

The writer is a Maple Leaf resident.