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.”