Two weeks ago I was honored to be a on a panel at the first Crosscut Festival, a wide ranging two day event with panels covering an array of national, regional, and local issues. My panel was called, Growth and Gentrification in a Tech Boomtown. I’m not sure exactly what the term “gentrification” means qualitatively or quantitatively. I get that there is a sense that the city is changing; it is. Some people feel the change is for the better and others think it’s for the worse. But how do we define and measure gentrification. If we take it literally, people of color moving out of a neighborhood and being replaced by white people, then we can measure that. I started my comments with some data showing that while indeed, in the Central District and Rainier Beach, an almost equal number of black people left the area to the number of white people moving in, other parts of the city saw increases in black households and decreases of white ones.

This doesn’t sit well with some, especially when I cited US Census data for the same period indicating that Seattle is becoming less white, one percent less white, that it has been. I also found that the median income of newcomers to the city is about $35,000, roughly half of the Area Median Income (AMI) of the whole city. So the notion that rich white people are squeezing out poor people of color just doesn’t pass the test.

Something is going on: housing scarcity. I tried to explain that if we want families of all races and economic status to have more choices about where to live, including staying where they are now, the best way to accomplish that is to build lots of housing. That way, price pressures on existing homes and buildings lessen and people in search of housing that are new to the area don’t bid up the price of existing and currently affordable housing.

The crowd wasn’t wholly receptive to this notion, with some clapping when I talked about more fees and fines being added to the production of housing. I told them if that’s their attitude, the problems of people with less money will only get worse.

It was a good conversation although I suspect it was mostly confirmatory of what people came in believing; it take a lot to change people’s minds. But I hope what I left was a bit of doubt about why things are happening the way they are. It isn’t the new growth and new jobs that are the problem, it’s our City policy makers who aren’t acting fast enough to give more incentives and encouragement to making more of a good thing, housing of all kinds, in all parts of the city, for people of all levels of income. You can listen to the whole discussion below.