Members of the Seattle City Council sat motionless for about two hours yesterday while they were bombarded by an overflow crowd demanding that the City not build a new $160 million dollar precinct building in north Seattle. After completely losing control of the meeting on more than one occasion, Council President Bruce Harrell shut the meeting down. After the meeting reconvened, the shouting, yelling, and hectoring by opponents of the precinct resumed. Interestingly, most of these people are great allies of the Council on minimum wage legislation, controlling how private employers schedule their employees, and on Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ). Somewhere between the boisterous crowd’s protests and the Council voting 7 to 1 to build the precinct anyway, the Council passed the Framework of MIZ.

I’ve been watching the Council for 20 years now, and I’ve seen it debate a lot of issues. But the last few years have seen Council meetings flail about and get shouted down by angry lefty groups. What’s so odd about yesterday’s meeting is that these angry people opposed to the precinct (I don’t think it’s a good idea either at this point and I’d have voted “no” if I was on the Council) are the very ones pushing terrible housing policies like MIZ and rent control. The Council can’t seem to meet their whims fast enough on those things, yet on an issue with such a huge price tag and opposed by so many, the Council sort of waved it through. Strange.

It’s worth scanning through the first part of the video.

Also strange is that Councilmember Rob Johnson spent less than 5 minutes addressing the passage of the legislation. He pointed out that some people had concerns (i.e. making sure housing built with in lieu fees is near the project paying for it and extending rent restrictions from 50 to 75 years) and those concerns had been addressed with amendments. Councilmember Herbold hailed the fact that now there is a way to offset displacement caused by new development (something that is not really happening) and that her amendment will somehow help poor people. It won’t.

It was irritating to see the Councilmembers and press parroting the line about the passage of legislation “historic” because for the “first time ever” developers will have to include affordable housing in their projects. Not true. The Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) Program requires performance at a higher rate that MIZ would and it creates more rent restricted housing more effectively.

At no point did any Councilmember acknowledge or refute any of the points we’ve made about the inflationary nature of MIZ (adding costs will boost overall prices) or those of neighborhood groups who are already opposed to more housing in their back yards or even down the street. It’s mystifying what political calculus, if any, is at work on the Second Floor of City Hall. The Council today set up the newspaper and gasoline to ignite inflation in the housing economy and angered Black Lives Matters and many other progressives. All I can say is, “I don’t get it.”

Our next steps will be to get prepared for the many battles over the various zones that the Council will have to upzone in order to wring fees and units out of new development. That’s not likely to happen until next year.