Soon, Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Advisory (HALA) Committee, which has been meeting for more than seven months, will issue its oft-delayed recommendations on how to “chart a course for the next 10 years to ensure the development and preservation of a diversity of housing for people across the income spectrum” in Seattle.
Since absolutely nobody thinks that the development and preservation of inadequate housing options for the very wealthy is currently a problem in our city, the very fact that this is part of the committee’s bureaucratic mandate tells us what the committee’s priorities are likely to be.
So, too, should its composition. Among the 28 members, there are two representatives from neighborhood groups, one each from the anti-foreclosure group SAGE and the Seattle Tenants Union, and five from Seattle’s professional poverty nonprofit sector.
There’s also eight market-rate developers or development-oriented groups at the table, an environmentalist “new urbanist” advocate (whose ideological touchstone seems to be massive corporate welfare for developers) and two representatives from the construction industry currently hugely profiting from that welfare.
At least half of the table, then, is committed to a single perspective from the outset: that the problem facing Seattle is that not enough developers want to build here unless they are heavily subsidized.
Murray’s advisory committee — weighted as it is to define the problem in Randian, “free” market terms — is about as likely to recommend policies that would create any significant amount of local affordable housing as the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, launched a full decade ago, was able to remove the scourge of homelessness from our streets.
Of course, one of the bigger reasons that the Ten-Year Plan failed so spectacularly was that addressing Seattle’s skyrocketing housing costs wasn’t part of its mandate. It famously shunned shelters and tent cities in favor of (a little bit of) transitional housing — a drop in the bucket compared to the flood of additional people being forced out of Seattle’s rental market.
Oddly enough, when people can’t afford homes, they become homeless — who knew?
Taking action
Even before its recommendations are published, the HALA Committee already had a negative effect, by delaying actions that the city might already have taken to address the housing affordability crisis.
Last fall, the City Council was poised to pass a package of linkage fees, designed to assess fees to developers for some of the costs of creating new affordable housing. Once HALA was announced, the council — whose policies have been critical in creating this crisis in the first place — decided to defer action until after the committee issued its recommendations.
Not all council members have been so sanguine. Kshama Sawant and Nick Licata held an April town hall on the housing crisis that more than 800 people jammed into City Hall to attend. On June 8, the two introduced a resolution to call on state lawmakers to lift its ban on local rent control ordinances.
Sawant has also called for passage of linkage fees at the full legal limit: about 10 percent per unit of what it would cost the city to subsidize an affordable home, as opposed to the 3 to 5 percent the City Council contemplated last year and implemented immediately, rather than with a staggered phase-in over several years.
Sawant and several council candidates have also been calling for the city to use its billion-dollar bonding capacity to invest in publicly owned, below-market-rate housing.
Even City Council president Tim Burgess isn’t waiting for the HALA Committee’s recommendations. Last month, he introduced two separate tenant protection measures: the first increasing the length of time required for eviction notices; the second giving public agencies increased opportunities to purchase and retain existing affordable housing.
Vote for affordability
It’s no coincidence that Burgess, a close ally of both the mayor and the city’s biggest developers, is facing two strong challengers in this August’s primary, including Jonathan Grant, former executive director of the Seattle Tenants Union. With the new district system, every single council seat is up for election this year, and the six incumbents running are all facing multiple challengers.
With this year’s unique nine-seat council election and the city’s rapid transformation into a whiter, wealthier city — the same influx of professional money driving the city’s affordable housing crisis — there will never be a better chance for Seattle voters to elect a council majority interested in preserving affordability for all of Seattle’s residents.
If voters and the council members they elect follow through this year on that priority, there’s still a lot the city can do to stem the current exodus of the city’s working and middle class.
If not, by the time the 2017 elections roll around, too many of those voters may be living elsewhere for Seattle to reverse course.
GEOV PARRISH is cofounder of Eat the State! To comment on this column, write to MPTimes@nwlink.com.