They were the best of times; they were the worst of times. Okay, looking back over the last year at the actions of locally elected leaders, more often it was the worst of times.
Sure, if you are a developer or a higher-income earner, likely things are just peachy but if you’re low-income, homeless, a person of color, senior citizen, retail or service worker or even an average working class person, likely 2017 was not your year. Nor was it a good year for those who care deeply about preserving the livability and affordability of Seattle’s neighborhoods.
Yes, Seattle's job picture has remained strong, and thanks to a required increase in the minimum wage, workers at the bottom earn more. But real wages continue to lag behind rising prices, especially Seattle's record rent increases. And if you’re poor, you're getting hit with much higher taxes and bearing more than your share due to the most regressive state tax structure in the nation.
Our city’s leaders have only accentuated that regressivity by covering the cost of new infrastructure demanded by growth with special property tax levies, increased parking meter rates, car tab hikes, utility rate increases, increased user fees, and tax hits on small businesses.
Yes, Seattle electeds in 2017 adopted an income tax on high-income earners. But everyone knew it was a trial balloon facing enormous legal and state constitutional hurdles. it looks like grandstanding when the same officials sit on legally viable progressive options they could adopt tomorrow, like developer impact fees, the office head tax, and increased utility rates for large users.
Our Council continues to upzone the hell out of our neighborhoods which has brought us more gentrification and displacement, not to mention loss of tree canopy and other green space. Yet record levels of new market rate housing haven’t lowered rents or brought down vacancy rates one iota.
To most of our leaders that only means we haven’t upzoned enough or built enough luxury and market rate units. Under the phony rubric of “HALA” (Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda), in 2018 the City plans to pass citywide upzones that would add capacity for another 65,000 to 70,000 units.
In 2018, also expect more mudslinging from pro-density zealots, calling “racist” or “exclusionary” or “NIMBY” anyone who stands against this give-away-the-farm developer-driven agenda.
Since 2005, over 8,000 low income and affordable existing rental units have been removed directly due to demolition to make way for luxury and market rate redevelopment. Thousands more have been lost to speculative buying and selling (and refinancing) of older apartments that push rents on these above affordable levels. Upzoning greatly accelerates these trends and also drives up land values and taxes that are passed on to tenants via higher rents.
We’re spending $100 million over the coming year to add subsidized units, but for every new unit we’re losing 3-4 times that number of existing affordable units to these redevelopment forces. No amount of funding will be enough to aid all those who are and will be displaced as a direct result of city leaders’ pro-growth, pro-development policies.
And this is why it’s a certainty we’ll see more homeless on our streets in 2018. To make matters worse, city leaders cut funding for basic survival services like shelter, transitional housing, and hygiene centers in favor of an untested voucher system dubbed “rapid rehousing”. But merely giving someone a voucher to help pay rent for a few months when there are few affordable rentals simply means when their voucher runs out most will wind up back on the streets.
With more homelessness, we’ll also see more reactionary neighbors calling for more police, more sweeps, more get tough measures met by a commensurate push back from homeless advocates.
And expect more hand-wringing over “what went wrong” and more changes in how homeless programs are delivered. But don’t expect another “rearranging of the deck chairs” to work; not as long as city leaders remain incapable of tracing the problem back to their own policy decisions that promote redevelopment at the expense of our existing low-income housing stock.
There are a few bright spots as we look toward 2018. Councilmembers Herbold, Sawant, and O’Brien have advanced tenants rights with controls on short term rentals, mandatory code inspections and code compliance before rents are raised and stronger protections against discrimination.
We’re also seeing “affordable housing” coalitions forming to demand rent control, and the rise of groups representing communities of color making displacement a priority — such as the emergence of Black Lives Matter, the People's Party, and exciting new leaders like Nikkita Oliver and Kirsten Harris-Talley.
And there’s now a valiant effort by over two dozen neighborhood groups across the city to challenge the HALA upzone plan in hopes either of turning it back or adding measures to mitigate its effects on our communities.
These efforts hold promise but ultimately it means identifying, running and electing new councilmembers in two years who put first our neighborhoods and small businesses, tenants, working people, seniors, and communities of color. Until then, expect things to get worse before they get better.
JOHN V. FOX and CAROLEE COLTER are coordinators for the Seattle Displacement Coalition, a low-income housing organization. More information can be found at www.zipcon.net.