Tomorrow voting ends in the most important election that Seattle has ever had, and I can’t make up my mind what to do. This year all nine council seats are up for grabs and there are 47 candidates running for those nine spots. When it comes to land use and housing issues, the ones that matter the most to me, the candidates fall along a continuum of knowledge about and positions on key issues. The problem almost every single candidate has said they support some kind of fee or tax on housing. For the first time in my 27 years of voting I am contemplating leaving the Council positions blank on my ballot or marking “present.” I’ll explain why.

The Voters Don’t Get It

A recent poll we commissioned found that voters both agree that increased demand for housing, not greedy landlords and developers, largely determines housing price. However, many voters also said that they support rent control. Voters say that growth is happening too fast, we haven’t planned for it, and they’d rather see growth go in multifamily neighborhoods not single-family zones. They those that think growth is happening too fast keep saying, “slow it down.”

Voters also believe builders are large corporations not family owned business, which I see as a huge educational opportunity. Most builders are small operators and even huge projects use smaller contractors to do work. But voters (and sometimes Councilmembers) think and act like they are Shell oil.

Voters aren’t just misinformed but they are mostly single-family homeowners and they worry about what growth might do to their investment. They’d rather tax new housing to pay for subsidies for others struggling with housing costs than do what we know will help overall housing prices: build more housing to keep up with demand.

All this means that the electorate tends to favor ideas that add more regulations and rules and thus costs to new housing. The voters don’t understand how the housing economy or the housing market works. They see their world changing and they want someone to blame. They want what they see as the growth rollercoaster to stop.

Politicians are Pleasers

As a recovering politician myself (I ran for the State Legislature back in 1992), I know the feeling of walking into a room wanting to leave it with everyone liking me. There is something about winning an election that draws people to politics, and winning means that voters have to not just agree with a candidate’s stated positions but like that person. I call it the Sally Field Effect. Or, as Lewis Namier a scholar of 18th century politics said of men who ran for Parliament,

Men went there ‘to make a figure,’ and no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of birthday cake that others may eat it.
From The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III*

This reality means that candidates have to appeal and make promises to an electorate that is tilted against expanding the housing market and making it easier to build. On the contrary, candidates must talk about how they are going to “fix” the housing price problem with taxes, fees, programs, and rules rather than the most obvious option: allow lots more housing everywhere, a view which would not get a lot of “likes” from Seattle voters. But this is how our democratic system currently functions, rewarding candidates who appeal to the sensibilities of who shows up not the best policies or even being most qualified for the challenges of making decisions that balance the importance of the past, people here now, and needs of future generations.

And the Mayor, who isn’t even up for election this year, backed away from his own Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committees recommendation to consider expanding housing supply in single-family neighborhoods. It only took two weeks for the Mayor to abandon almost a year’s worth of process in the face of the voters who will decide this year’s election. Erica Barnett correctly called this what it was, giving in to bullying from single-family neighbors. Some of us have seen this backing away as craven on the part of Mayor and Councilmembers.

Voting “Present”

So this year I will mark my ballot, “present” for the three Council races where I have a vote. I will participate as part of what I consider to be a liturgical civic duty of voting. But I take as my guide parliamentary tradition in which a member of the body could vote both “no” and “yes” on an issue as a way of participating but also not contributing to the outcome of the vote. This was usually done to ensure the body had a quorum present so the vote could go forward.

This is a personal issue for me. I have always voted and often voted for the “least best” candidate because I agreed with conventional wisdom that, cumulatively, my vote mattered. But there are times when one deals with the real human impacts and effects of terrible housing policy. I know builders whose projects were thrown into disarray because of poor decisions and thoughtlessness by Councilmembers who were more concerned about angry neighbors in their face today, rather than jobs and housing for people coming to our city. I’d rather know, that no matter how good a Councilmember is on other issues, that if they make bad decisions that impact people, I didn’t give my assent.

* From a review by Professor Peter Thomas University of Aberystwyth linked above:

“Namier, instead of viewing political history as the deeds of great men, concerned himself with the behaviour of ordinary MPs, revealing a political system of infinite subtlety, with the great majority of MPs simultaneously seeking favours from government and professing their independence, varying permutations of these two attitudes constituting political reality.”