If you thought the drubbing the City Council took over the head tax taught them to avoid bad ideas, think again. Councilmember Herbold is willing to try anything to “solve” housing prices except allowing more housing, including mandating who gets to live in what neighborhood. This is from an email she sent this week:

Community preference polices are a different type of tool to fight displacement. The common approaches to implement community resident preferences include:

• A portion of rental or ownership units in affordable development are set-aside
• Preferred applicants may be local residents, workers, former residents, people who have been displaced
• Lottery used to select affordable housing residents/buyers
• Policy must affirmatively further fair housing- explicit analysis of racial impact.

Community resident preferences could address historic and current displacement by providing preference for community residents.

Nobody has come up with a measurable definition of displacement or gentrification. Two things are often cited, falsely, as an indication that displacement and gentrification are happening, demolition of housing for more housing and the growing whiteness of Seattle.

In the first case, over more than 20 years there were 40,000 permits for housing projects given and only 5,ooo demolitions. While these numbers are getting older they do tell the story that thousands of people are not being “displaced” because of new housing. It is new housing, of course, that any rational person would realize we need not mandates that control where people can live.

 

 

The other thing that is often cited is the mass exodus by people of color out of the city of Seattle. I wrote an article at Forbes that showed that while parts of the city that had been largely black have become much whiter, other parts of the city have shown the opposite trend, becoming more diverse and with increases in black residents. And, in fact, the city of Seattle has become less white over the last decade.

So it is questionable whether the problem that would be “solved” by Councilmember Herbold even exists. And to the extent people are unhappy about moving, we don’t know why they are moving, where they are moving, and we certainly do that what would help them stay in Seattle no matter why they moved is, yes, more housing.

But for Councilmember Herbold more housing simply can’t be the answer. The answer for her and her colleagues are more rules, more taxes, fees, and exactions to generate money for costly, slow, and inefficient non-profits.