The Seattle Times Responds

Last week some of us complained to the Seattle Times about their habit of writing stories that only report quarterly rises in rents without any reference to broader patterns of rent increases (the rate of increase is high but the rates have been slowing) without considering why the prices are up and getting a sense of where the trend is going in the future. The Rami Grunbaum was good enough to respond which is much appreciated. I followed up with an email below. I think the Times needs to open a dialogue with the industry and adjust it’s footing on how it reports prices, real estate, and development across it’s various pages. And by the way, if you want to see some well rounded writing about the latest rents check out Capitol Hill Seattle’s coverage of the same data. 

Hi, Roger, Morris and Sean. Thanks for your notes, which arrived when I was out of town; I’m just catching up on things now so I wanted to acknowledge getting these messages.

Looking back at our March 28 story on rents, I think some of the larger issues you allude to are cited. For example:

–          “… cities generally see overall rents slow when they add more housing; it just hasn’t happened here as the demand, fueled by intense job growth, has been so strong.”

–          “…property owners have complained of rising taxes, fees and other costs that they have been passing on to renters.”

Just like a story on what the stock market did in the latest quarter is going to emphasize the numbers, not the broader factors responsible for the underlying economy’s boom or malaise, I think a quarterly or annual numbers story on rents is going to emphasize the latest data; that’s the news. The forces that result in those numbers also deserve coverage but they aren’t going to get top billing in that numbers story.

With all that said, we as a paper are certainly interested in those forces as well; sometimes those are covered by the business desk, sometimes by the metro desk when it’s more to do with governmental policies and politics.

I have no doubt Mike is interested in hearing what property owners have to say on the subject. And I’m sure he’ll keep these contacts on hand for when he’s doing future stories.

Regards,

Rami

Rami Grunbaum
Business Editor
The Seattle Times

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A New Candidate for Mayor: Welcome Home!

We have no great candidates running for office in Seattle today. But I have this fantasy of a candidacy for the rest of us; a candidacy for hard working people that are open minded, want fairness and justice, but are tired of traffic, feeling unsafe, and wishing we could solve the problem of rising prices. This is the announcement speech my ideal candidate would give. It is substantially inspired by various speeches by Robert Kennedy, and you’ll hear his voice throughout. I’ve also seeded some Hayek and Burke in there as well. Of course it’s aspirational. That’s what these things are supposed to be. And compare it to Nikkita Oliver’s announcement as well. 

I am today announcing my candidacy to be Mayor of Seattle.

I do not run for Mayor merely to oppose any person or policy, but to propose a new path for our city. I run because I am convinced that this city is today on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can to restore hope and a direction to the work of our City government and because I love this place that has been so good to me.

I run to seek new policies – policies to end the scourge of homelessness and addiction in our city, to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, and between those that worry about the impacts of growth and those that are welcoming it.

I run for Mayor because I want our city to choose hope instead of despair, reconciliation instead of fear and anxiety, growth instead of building walls, opportunity instead of scarcity, especially now as our city grows.

I run because it is now unmistakably clear that we must change the disastrous, divisive policies being implemented in our city.

We can make our neighborhoods safe while also supporting and loving our neighbors who do not have traditional housing, who are different, and who make more or less money than we do.

We can work together, landlords and tenants, to improve rental housing.

Our police and our communities of color can collaborate to cure not the symptoms of crime and disorder but the root causes of those problems: abuse, addiction, institutional racism, lack of opportunity, and lack of resources in our schools. We don’t need a new precinct building that will cost our community $160 million dollars. Those resources belong in the community, working to solve the root causes of crime.

We can provide a helping hand for the person in our city that chooses recovery over addiction

We can make our roads, buses, bike lanes, and sidewalks open, useful, and safe. And we can make them efficient so that people in our city can spend more time with their families and in their communities rather than losing their lives commuting and creeping along in traffic.

Specifically, I support expanding the supply of new housing to welcome new people moving to our city, something that will benefit them and reduce competition between tenants for scarce housing among people already here.

I support building on the success of people struggling economically in our city who have spontaneously built community in tent encampments. I promise to work to make those encampments safe, orderly, secure, and to reduce the need for them by creating low barrier shelters and permanent housing solutions.

I promise that this city will not tow away one more persons home. Instead, people who are living in a vehicle will get a helping hand from the City they need to find a better, more sustainable housing solution.

I support safe consumption sites and will work to make them happen — in every quarter of our city. There are far too many needles on our sidewalks, alleyways, and parks. Needles are a sentinel of the pain and devastation, destruction, lost human potential to us all, and costs to us all from addiction. We can help people better if we reduce the harm of addiction and offer alternatives.

I support rent-restricted housing through tax exemption programs that have already created thousands of affordably priced apartments. We will expand and deepen those programs. And I support housing subsidies particularly in the form of direct cash payments from the existing levy for households struggling to make ends meet today, this week, and next month. As Mayor, I won’t waste time talking about housing, I will help pay your rent!

People can’t wait for 5 years or more for the Office of Housing and non-profits to build them a unit. We’ll work to change the way we fund and build subsidized housing so that we more efficiently use tax payer dollars and get help to people who need it fast. And there is only one way to reduce housing prices: build more housing. And we will. Lots and lots of housing, of all kinds, for all levels of income, all over this city.

I want this city to be the lighthouse in a storm for that family that has spent it’s last few dollars to move here with us; perhaps they’ll arrive in a car with an almost empty tank of gas, but hearts full of hope. Welcome home!

I want this city to be a sanctuary for the immigrant family, who tossed about by war and grief, settles here with us and will grace our schools with its children and our economy with their work, and our hearts with their friendship. Welcome home!

I want this city to be the incubator for newly born ideas of the successful entrepreneur, whose brilliance has made her enough money to retire; yet she still wants to create and contribute new ideas, new energy, and new jobs and opportunity for others. Creative minds help create wealth and more opportunity. Welcome home!

Today there is a prisoner in one of our jails in this state who has no place to go, no address to release to. That woman or man must wait longer in jail, hoping for something to change on the outside, for some one to come through with a place to live. We want you and your potential here, with us. We have a place for you. Welcome home!

And to those who have lived here all their lives, who have homes in our single-family neighborhoods, who worked hard, for years, to cobble together a down payment to buy that home in Wallingford, or Fremont, or in Hillman City and seen that investment grow – I will be your Mayor too. You’ve built this city with your hopes, dreams, love, and hard work. You deserve to pass the benefits of your hard work on to your children. We need you. This is your home!

The great cities of history, the ones we remember, that didn’t disappear into the dust, Alexandria, Rome, Athens, and London and many others, all have been global cities, vibrant, diverse, and welcoming cities. Seattle’s greatness depends on having no walls, but open borders and an open economy. All are welcome in our home, and all are welcome at our table!

This isn’t a dream; this is our comprehensive plan.

The Mayor’s policy of Mandatory Inclusionary will kill this hope. By fueling housing costs and punishing those who build housing and commercial space in our city, his policy will make sure that prices and resentments will rise, fueling more discontent and demands for more pain to be inflicted on those who build and do business in our city. The time for setting people who make their living from starting and running businesses and workers against one another is done. I will stop this abhorrent practice and rhetoric in its tracks. We will bring people together, not drive them apart.

Together we can do these important things. There are no villains and there are no victims, only a city that we call home and neighbors we must choose to love and understand, however difficult that may be. Too many people are struggling, suffering, and dying in a city with such prosperity. If we choose a path of divisiveness, division, of party and of ideology, we have chosen to pick winners and losers rather than opportunity, optimism, and hope.

I will not engage in a fight with our President. I will not indulge sanctimonious untruths about ourselves and how fair we are in Seattle. We have needles on our streets, it takes too long to get to work and back home again, and we have tent encampments scattered in our public spaces. I won’t shake my fist at a far off enemy while failing to fulfill our obligations here at home. Opposing the President is not local government’s fight, but solving the problems of homeless, public safety, transportation, and creating opportunity truly is the work of local government.

Our government can do best against any tyranny and hate whether it is down the street, at our nation’s capitol, or someplace else in the world by being an open, loving, and welcoming city. If you want to change the world, come and change it here. As Mayor I will support you making the change you dream about. We will pat your back not our own. We will celebrate you not ourselves. We will be proud of your real wins and the change you make in the world, not of our own empty words.

Finally, as we plan for our future together here in this beautiful place we call home, we must remember our past, even as far back as a time when this place belonged to the Duwamish people and to those generations of settlers that followed.

We are in a great relay race, begun long ago perhaps by people that did not look like us, talk like us, share our values, or even think we’d be here in this rainy, misty place. Our team mates from the past are native peoples, the first settlers, white men looking for gold, hopeful families that crossed the frontier, industrialists, farmers, sketchy politicians and businessmen, people who were systematically discriminated against, Chinese workers who were banned and killed, interred Japanese families, black families segregated in our city, millionaires, billionaires, and more. Each of them ran their race in this place, and now they’ve passed the baton to us. What will we do with it? Shall we keep it? Shall we build a wall around it and hallow it and try to make this moment last forever?

No. We will pass the baton to our children better that it was given to us. We will be spontaneous, and as adventurous as our forebears who took a chance, not letting ourselves ossify into a fossil city. Instead, to our children and to those generations of the future that we can only fleetingly see, like our majestic Olympic mountains off in the sometimes hazy distance, we will confidently say, “Take this place that we’ve made and changed for you. It belongs to you now. Take it and run!” Therefore, I will work each and every day as Mayor remembering that this place doesn’t just belong to us that happen to be here today, but I will uphold our heritage, work to solve today’s problems, and always remember this place belongs to the future too.

Letter to the Editor: Follow Up from Mike Scott

Yesterday I posted my letter to the Seattle Times about an upcoming story they appeared to be putting together. The story ran and it had the usual Mad Lib headline:  After brief slowdown, Seattle-area rents surge back up again; when will it end? Well not too long passed before I got this e-mail in my in box:

Hi Roger

Just want to clarify rent trends reported today…. Or rant …. Or both.

Today’s Seattle times headline “Seattle rents surge back up again” is technically correct the way the reporter worded things but it is misleading.

• He is right that King County rents rose 8.3% in the past 12 months.
• But how is it a “surge back up” when it is the lowest 12-month increase since the spring of 2015?
• And how is it a “surge back up” when King county rents increased just 2.4% in the past 6 months – making this the lowest 6-month increase since the spring of 2012 (rephrase: the slowest 6-month increase in the past four years).

Mike Scott

Dupre + Scott Apartment Advisors, Inc.

Scott, of course, is one of the regions preeminent experts in the rental housing market. The Times just doesn’t want to improve its reporting on this topic. Instead, the paper seems bent on adding to the price hysteria that powers the bad policy coming out of City Hall. Yet another chance to use the new term, “Fake News.” When it comes to real estate reporting, the Seattle Times is full of it.

Letter to the Editor: How About Asking a Different Question

Seattle’s MHA Program is a Cash Machine for Non-Profits and Activists

Sometime early in 2016 after the Grand Bargain — a deal between large developers like Vulcan who build in downtown and South Lake Union, the City, and non-profit developers — I scheduled a visit with Seattle’s smartest Councilmember, Lisa Herbold. Surely she’d get that the so called Bargain was letting downtown developers like Vulcan off the hook; in the Bargain they’d pay basically what the previous voluntary program of fees and incentives would charge. This fee is low enough that it means that Vulcan would just write a check and walk away. Everywhere else in the city, people who build housing would be saddled with an unworkable regime of fees that are, quite literally, all over the map, changing from place to place and from building type to building type. Oddly, Herbold didn’t seem to care. “We still get those fees, and I’m ok with that.” I had hoped Herbold would break that Bargain by boosting the fees. Well, now she’s trying.

From a recent blog post from the Councilmember:

So Herbold has come through in the end. Why would I support more fees Downtown and South Lake Union? Well, from the very beginning this has always been about the city’s tail that wags the city’s development dog, Vulcan and the desire to shake them and the broader development community down to give money to non-profit developers. I’ve said over and over and over again, that we were never involved in the discussions around the Grand Bargain. The fees and inclusion rates set for the rest of the city were arbitrary, while Vulcan was at the table bargaining based on their own portfolio of projects. They cut a deal that they new would work for them and non-profit developers get more cash. And based on Herbold’s estimates of leverage from fees, the non-profits wouldn’t make 1200 units but more like 500 based on the high unit costs I’ve cited before.

Political pressure is building however, as people are realizing that Vulcan et al are essentially getting a pass from the arbitrary fees and imposed on everyone else in town. In a Seattle Weekly story headlined, “Mayoral Challenger Calls for Rent Control, ‘More Aggressive’ Affordable Housing Demands on Developers,” reporter Casey Jaywork details Nikkita Oliver’s demands for more fees and inclusion from the City’s version of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ), the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program. Oliver is quoted quoting Jon Grant, a candidate for City Council.

As Jon Grant brilliantly noted, if we want to make housing affordable, it should be affordable to at least a quarter of all new apartments. Again, although Seattle purports to model certain programs after other progressive cities, it extracts the soul out of those programs. To wit, whereas San Francisco will require 25% affordable housing for new developments, Seattle’s can be as low as 3%.

Mark this on your calendar, because it’s the day you first read that Oliver has a very real chance of being elected this city’s next mayor. Let me say that again: Nikita Oliver has a very good chance of being elected Seattle’s next Mayor. Through a combination of being intimidated and just plain having no vision for the city, the Mayor and City Council have unleashed a mob that wants more and more and more cash for their notions of social justice. Some Councilmembers, like Lorena Gonzalez, have made their whole career on Council about trying to get in front of the mob. Others, like the Mayor, agree from the sidewalk. But the bottom line is that Dan Bertolet’s notion that, “MHA is a great idea if the fees are low enough!” is rather quaint. The fees will never be enough. The inclusion rate will never be high enough. We know this. When given an ATM card with no limit, the gambler will go back to the cash machine again, and again, and again.

The political pressure will continue to build on the Council to improvise higher fees and inclusion (as I’ve warned before), both because it apparently punishes greedy developers and creates the illusion of doing something about housing prices (prices will just get higher).  If Herbold is able to convince her colleagues, and she’s just the one to do it, to push up the fees it might snap the Grand Bargain and force the big developers down town back to the table and maybe into court with us. And more importantly, it simply isn’t fair that our people build most of the housing in this town, take most of the risk, and work the hardest to deliver an array of housing product to the market while Vulcan builds just a tiny fraction of housing supply. I always remember that when I asked Vulcan to weigh in on our battles to expand single-family housing supply with small-lot legislation or to defend microhousing against regulatory overreach, Vulcan’s lobbyist would tell me, “We don’t build single-family housing or microhousing.”

Well good luck Vulcan. We don’t build housing Downtown or in South Lake Union.