I went on the airwaves to talk housing with Bill Radke of KUOW’s The Record and John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition. My main point is not that we are having a housing crisis but that we are having a housing shortage, and that we don’t need to make more affordable housing, we need to make more housing so it will be affordable. Here’s the rundown from the show’s website:

For Fox, keeping affordable housing means halting teardowns of buildings that are already affordable, even if that means losing out on potential new units in the city.

For Valdez, making affordable housing means building a lot more buildings, even if that means tearing down buildings that are currently affordable. The idea is that if more units are available for everyone across the income spectrum, then low-income people won’t have to compete with the middle-class for a paltry number of affordable homes.

In the past, Fox and Valdez have been called arch-nemeses for their differing views on how to address Seattle’s growth. In this conversation, they at least agree that the ultimate goal is to have affordable housing in Seattle for those who need it (even if they can’t agree about how to do it).

I have always thought Fox to be a principled opponent on the housing issue. We don’t agree on many things but we do agree that the priority for housing subsidies should be on people who are truly struggling in our economy. The City’s emphasis on so called “work force housing,” that is housing for people earning around $60,000 is, in my view, an indication that their policies that constraining housing supply are just pushing prices to the point that people with higher earnings now qualify for subsidy.

I think you’ll hear me make that point frequently during our segment: the more we limit and constrain market rate housing, the more pain spreads through the economy, and the fewer dollars we’ll have in subsidies to help people with the fewest dollars. You can listen to the whole exchange below.