I discovered something this weekend, a new website created by the socialist party in Seattle called Affordable Seattle. What would be funny if it wasn’t so serious is how wrong the website is about who is actually running Seattle. The website is sort of Orwellian in its narrative of “big business” and promising that if Jon Grant and Nikkita Oliver are elected to office that things will get better because of some sort of redistributive scheme. The site’s tag line about “people not profits” is not only trite, but is a false dichotomy; I suppose Sawant would have people who build housing work for free? And developers and landlords aren’t running the city; if we were would we have Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) and legislation forcing landlords to help tenants register to vote? Here’s Affordable Seattle’s “solution” to the problem of high prices:

• Massively Expand Affordable Housing
  Build tens of thousands of quality city-owned homes, paid for by taxing big business.

• We Need Rent Control!
  As a first step, require at least 25% of new private sector development to be affordable. Organize a movement for tenant collective bargaining rights to lower rents.

• Make Landlords Pay for Economic Evictions
  Stop the displacement of low-income households! When renters are forced to move due to major rent hikes, landlords should be required to pay moving costs.

First, I have no problem with the City of Seattle building subsidized housing on its own property. In fact, we’ve touted this idea before because the City could easily create thousands of units this way. The problem is the Councilmember Sawant has done exactly nothing to advance this. Zero. Nothing. She asked for a study and the City staff produced a desultory report essentially shrugging and saying using City debt to build on City owned land was just too hard. They responded to the proposal like a twelve year old would to a command to clean his room: “C’mon! I don’t wanna!” I urged Sawant to get an independent and outside consultant to run the numbers. She did absolutely nothing.

Rent control is an incredibly bad idea as we know, but at least the socialists acknowledge that the MIZ scheme is a form of rent control. They just want more control which is why they want an inclusion rate of 25 percent. And as I pointed out last week, there just isn’t any evidence to support the notion that there are massive numbers of people being forced out of their apartments. In fact, the United States Census data from the American Housing Survey show that only 6 percent of people who moved in the metro area cite “forced out” as the reason for their move.

That is dead last, and keep in mind that respondents to the question could cite multiple reasons. The notion that people are being “forced out” just isn’t supported by real data.

But the funniest paragraph on the website is this one:

City Hall is dominated by corporate developers like Vulcan, owned by billionaire Paul Allen, landlord lobbyists, and the Chamber of Commerce. They are profiting off the affordable housing crisis. To protect their profits and block popular demands for affordable housing, they are spending big on city elections to maintain their political control. To make Seattle affordable, we need to break the corporate stranglehold over City Hall by organizing our neighborhoods and electing our own candidates.

The Chamber? Insert laughing-till-I-cry emojicon here. The notion that the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce has any influence on the outcome of this election is absurd. Over the period of time that Sawant has been in office the Chamber has ceased to function as anything other than a booster for tourism for the city. That’s important, but their effect on issues related to wages, work hours, tenant regulation, and housing development has been zero. And an endorsement from them in Seattle probably loses as many votes as it gains.

But the site is correct that Vulcan does control City Hall, at least when it comes to the execution of the Grand Bargain. Mayor Ed Murray looks over his desk and sees “the development community” when he sees Vulcan lobbyists, even though Vulcan builds a teeny tiny percent of new housing in Seattle. Still, they wrote the numbers into the Grand Bargain that we all have to live with now. And landlord lobbyists? Jamie Durkan in an interview with George Howland said what we’ve known for years, City Hall is in the bag for the socialists. Land lords aren’t even consulted just to say they were when the City Council passes legislation.

Yes, it’s true that Jenny Durkan is raising lots of money, but she’s far from being assured election because of money. Polls show her in the mix, but not dominant. If anything, you’ll see Durkan starting to mouth the socialist party line in oder to neutralize charges that she’s a corporatist. It’s what politicians do. Just look at the wide eyed City Councilmembers who do Sawant’s bidding without much question other than to passively aggressively complain that, “Some people say that we’re corporatists, but those people would be wrong,” just before they vote for the latest Sawant scheme.

Councilmember Sawant is not a politician, she’s a performance artists. Like Donald Trump its all about telling a good story about the corporations and the greedy developers and landlords and getting big cheers. That’s all. She doesn’t have the first clue about policy and how to make it or implement it. It’s not that she’s stupid, but she’s a performer looking for audience approval. If policy gets made from her story about the Chamber running City Hall, that’s just great. But it’s all about the applause lines, not solving real people’s problems. If only her 8 colleagues would get that the screaming mobs in their faces are just that: a mob. Ignore them. But they just don’t have the courage.