Seattle City Council: More Housing? No. Of Course Not. More Money, More Money, More Money!

Granted the Mayor was introducing a budget proposal which is about money. But what I found interesting was two things, the lack of how we get more housing and a throwing up of the hands and expecting more money from the state. This text is from a Publicola story which sums up the mood pretty well:

Still, “homelessness and housing affordability are going to drive our agenda,” council president Bruce Harrell told PubliCola after the budget meeting. Activists and council members are likely to look for more money to address the homelessness crisis, but finding that money will be a challenge.

And,

Bagshaw said they don’t want to rehash a “divisive” battle and, like Durkan, believed it was up to the state now to come up with more funding. But she said she didn’t know of specific legislation in the works; she mentioned the capital gains tax and income tax, acknowledging that neither one would likely become a reality next year.

And,

“We are running dry with sales tax and property taxes here in the city, and we can’t do something like what we did last year,” Bagshaw told PubliCola. “I want to see a collective coming together and figuring out what’s the best option” [emphasis mine throughout].

I guess that Bagshaw and Councilmember Gonzalez agree that the Council [EXPLETIVE] this up. Royally. when it came to the effort to shake down businesses for money by taxing jobs. But they don’t seem to learn their lesson. Housing? What’s that? What we need is more and more and more and more money. Gosh. Where will we get it? We’ve already started to shake down developers with Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ).

When I think of the City Council’s relentless search for more cash, I can’t help but think of Winston Churchill’s phrase, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Except when it comes to the Mayor and Council it has become, “Never was so little owed by so many to so few.”

More money isn’t needed. Less restrictive housing policy is what we need. When the Council refuses to remove the choke hold it has placed on production of housing, things get worse and worse for people who need housing in Seattle, especially those who have fewer dollars to spend on housing. There simply isn’t any concern about housing supply at City Hall, only finding ways to subsidized their restrictive policies that pander to single-family homeowners.

We’ll be doing all we can to stop, stifle, and limit more efforts to extort and repurpose resources to subsidize bad housing policy in Olympia. A lot depends on this November’s elections. We’ll see what happens. But with bigger majorities of Seattle Democrats coming it’s going to be a tough fight. But legislators outside of Seattle both Republican and Democrat are also running out of patience — and money to give. We’ll be working with both to send the message, “No more money until you lower costs created by your bad polices.”

Separate But Unequal: How Subsidizing Units is Subsidizing Bad Policy

I’m preparing comments for the proposed changes to the way the Fair Housing Act is implemented. I’m out of town for a bit on Orcas Island. Here’s my opening thoughts. 

Denying access to housing based on race is unacceptable and inconsistent with American and basic moral principles of fairness and equal opportunity. The Fair Housing Act (Act) enshrined these principles in 1968, and the implementation of the Act over the years has made strides toward eliminating discrimination in housing access.

But this progress has hit a hard barrier: the economic interests of incumbent homeowners have taken precedent over the need for more housing, especially in thriving, prosperous, and growing cities.

The intention of the Act, fairness, has been undermined by housing scarcity created by local governments seeking to protect the rising value of investments in single-family housing by restricting housing supply with rules, regulations, and taxes. Less housing means existing property owners see their investment rise.

However beneficial this is to people who are already housed, when housing is in short supply, prices and rents go up consuming a greater share of household income. This, of course, disproportionately impacts households with less money. People of color in the United States own more poverty than white people; a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of Census data found that 22 percent of black families and 20 percent of Hispanic families are in poverty compared to 9 percent of white families.

Therefore, restrictive land use and housing policies are, in fact and practice, discriminatory housing policy. Each and every limit or slow down of housing supply enacted by local government that is not for purposes of health and safety of residents or the community will mean higher prices, and those higher prices hurt families of color harder than white families.

Furthermore, ameliorating these restrictive policies through subsidies is unacceptable; buying down the high price of housing created by policies deliberately aimed at limiting housing supply means families with less money must wait in longer and longer lines for vouchers or units. Today’s system of off setting high prices with subsidies is a modern day iteration of separate but equal, two systems of housing, one for people who already own their homes and one for everyone else. The problem is, however, that the two systems aren’t equal at all, one serves incumbent homeowners and the other inefficiently distributes public funding for housing to people who have less money.

So as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considers changes to the Affirmatively Furthering the Fair Housing Act (AFFHA) Regulations it must take into account the current state of local regulation: local governments are imposing restrictions on housing, calling the resulting shortage a crisis, then squeezing money for subsidies to off set the consequences of those restrictions. Not only is this illogical, it is unfair and discriminatory.

Seattle City Council: “We [expletive] this up. Royally.”

Would you like some honesty with your coffee this morning? How about this statement from Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez about the Seattle City Council’s recent efforts to tax jobs:

“It’s time for us to swallow our medicine. We [expletive] this up. Royally.”

This is in sharp contrast what the Councilmember said about why the measure was defeated right after the repeal: the Council would lose a campaign against “the richest man in the world to defend this policy.”

She and Councilmember Herbold said it was the lies of the business community, and not the general discontent from the electorate, that was behind their moves. In essence, the City Council felt that it was deception of the business community that fomented that discontent. It wasn’t their fault.

But clearly, behind the scenes, the backbiting and blame was clearly all at City Hall where it belongs. It’s too bad that City politicians couldn’t find the courage to admit that publicly. But you can read all the truth you can handle in this morning’s Seattle Times.

 

Surprise! Older Buildings and New Construction Mean Lower Rents

I’m not going to say much other than, yep, “We told you so!” Well maybe not you in particular, but the wide world in general. What’s the big shocker? It’s from Apartment List:

As cities across the U.S. debate ways to improve affordability, it is crucial to understand the important role that aging buildings play in providing a source of market rate affordable housing for those who do not qualify for subsidized options. In a healthy housing market, buildings become less desirable as they age, leading to falling rents. However, without a sufficient supply of new construction, demand will remain high for older buildings, preventing their rents from falling [emphasis is theirs].

If you want to read the gory details you can find all the data to back this up you can download it here. And here’s a chart in case that’s not enough.

Call it trickle down housing or filtering or whatever you want, but the truth is that as we build more new housing, all the other housing even if its just a few years older, becomes less likely to hold up a higher rent. As a market gets saturated with housing, yes, it’s true, prices do down. I know. It’s also hard to believe based on the world as we experience it that the world isn’t flat but a swiftly spinning globe whirling around the sun.

If you’re still reading this you’re either enjoying my sarcasm or you’re outraged. But as satisfying as it is to see data that validates reducing regulation and opening the market’s flood gates for new housing supply, the political reality in most cities, and especially Seattle, is that when prices go up local government must introduce more rules, more taxes and fees, and do everything it can to stomp on new housing construction. We’ll keep working on trying to change that until they turn out the lights.

Washington’s First Pro-Housing Political Action Committee: Fair Housing Washington