I was sitting a meeting about affordable housing last week hosted by Seattle City Council candidate Lorena Gonzalez. The emphasis was “social justice” and housing. Gonzalez, after listening to a discussion about housing prices and City policy, concluded that the best way to understand and deal with rising housing prices was to look at the issue through a “social justice lens.” There may be people in Seattle who know that that means, but I don’t. In Seattle the words “social justice” have come to mean roughly what the words “family values” mean in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; code language to sort “us” from “them.” Social justice is rhetorical stick used to beat back perceived enemies and keep allies in ideological lock step. It’s useless for solving any problems; if we want to address price and other issues we need to use economics. Here’s a real life example.

Here’s what Tim Harris, founder of Real Change Seattle’s groundbreaking homeless newspaper, had to say on Facebook about my comments in the KING5 story featured above:

Has there ever been a developer slime that Roger Valdez won’t defend?

I get that it’s Facebook and not exactly a high flying intellectual forum for discussion. But I generally expect Harris’ comments to sharp, funny, but thoughtful. The truth is the whole story misses a key point raised by another person in the comment thread.

It’s odd, there was no mention of the rental inspection legislation that is coming down in the next few years and how that might impact renters, landlords and the safety of units across the city.

Exactly. The issue with this property has a lot to do with legislation requiring landlords to keep up their property or face serious consequences. That’s a good thing. The legislation, if we give it the benefit of the doubt, was designed to find exactly the kind of conditions at this property and get them fixed. After agreeing with this point, I followed with a comment.

I have never will speak of you without respect–because I do respect your work. Don’t expect anything from you but you’re smart enough to know the facts. Get them.

As far as I am concerned Tim Harris is one of the smartest and most talented and well read individuals I’ve met in the city over the last decade; principled, determined, and unafraid of taking tough stands and calling people out. He and I don’t agree on many things, but we’ve had good conversations in the past. That’s what makes his quick, knee jerk response so unfortunate; people listen to Tim Harris.

Anyone who spent time digging into this sad story about this property would find the irony that Councilmember Nick Licata, a champion of rental inspection legislation would show up, have a photo op in front of the building attacking the new owner for raising rents on a building with terrible conditions, call for rent control legislation, and then take off, leaving the tenants and the landlord with nothing but a news cycle of bad press.

Here’s part of the text I sent to reporters covering the story and it states what’s really going on here:

The previous owner deferred maintenance of the building, not spending money to keep it repaired. This meant lower rents, but a the expense of the quality of life of the residents.

Now a new owner has purchased the building and intends to bring it up to the standard required by the City for rental housing.  That costs money, and will mean higher rents.

What Councilmember’s Sawant and Licata and Sawant should be proposing in the upcoming budget discussions is a fund to help the new owners make the repairs and pass the savings on to the tenants. Otherwise the new owner has no choice but to increase the rents to help cover necessary costs.

Deferred maintenance often creates more affordable units, but new owners who have to raise rents to make improvements are doing it out of necessity to make the buildings habitable. The City, if it wants to help keep rents low in buildings sold with deferred maintenance needs a program to help with needed repairs.

It may feel good to look through the “social justice lens” because it shows a simple story of an evil, greedy landlord raising rents on horrible apartments and victims who are immigrant families. But when you look at the math and the policy, it’s an equally simple story. If you’re going to raise standards on rental housing someone has to pay for that. That someone is going to be renters both in the long run and the short run. If we want to avoid owners subsidizing rents with deferred maintenance, then we need to use public resources to make the repairs. It’s that simple. Otherwise we’ll see more sales of older run down buildings to new owners doing the right thing and fixing up the buildings but having to raise rents.

Investors and banks are not charitable organizations, if they loan money to buy a building they want a return. When a run down building turns over, eventually rents will have to go up to improve the quality of the building to meet the City’s standards. Rental housing is a product and is sold based on supply and demand and costs. If the new owner fixes the roof, she’s going to have to find the money to do that work from her operating budget. Where does the operating budget come from? Rents.

Forming a mob against landlords and developers won’t help the tenants in these buildings. It won’t. All the social justice lens does is needlessly polarize people into good people that “believe” in social justice (whatever that means) and cold hearted people that do the math. Holding press conferences in front of substandard buildings pushing for bad policies that have no relation to fixing the building won’t help the tenants. It won’t. Doing the math, raising the standards in our community so people don’t have to trade low quality for low rents is something that would actually help poor people having to make that trade off today. But that doesn’t fit the social justice narrative.

And to answer your questions Tim Harris, no there isn’t a developer or landlord I won’t defend from the social justice mob when the mob is wrong on the facts and wrong on the math.