There are two seemingly unrelated items in yesterday’s online Seattle Times. First, FYI Guy’s post about the relative whiteness of Seattle compared to other comparable cities in the United States:

Seattle’s “whitening” doesn’t buck just the national trend. It also runs counter to what’s happening in King County as a whole. Outside of Seattle, the county’s white population decreased by 13,500, and now stands at 61.1 percent of the total — a drop of nearly two percentage points in one year.

FYI Guy isn’t willing to hazard a guess about why this is happening in Seattle. But I am. It’s pretty simple, lack of housing supply for families. Part of what’s happening here is that it’s getting harder and harder to find housing in Seattle for families with children. While that family demographic is diversifying it is also running into a wall of high prices and inappropriate typologies. Families of color are like most families, but there are more families of color now than in the past. So, those families are having to live elsewhere. As we’ve pointed out, the best way to get the city to be diverse is to build more housing and increase housing choices!

But Councilmember O’Brien’s solution is to tax new housing as a way to subsidize housing that people can afford. His idea won’t work because it will simply increase the costs associated with housing. A view that the Seattle Times editorial board shares. Here’s what they wrote yesterday:

In reality, increasing the cost of producing homes could stop some projects from getting built, thus limiting supply and pushing prices higher over time. Prices keep going up because residents are competing with each other for the available housing stock and the city has a limited supply of land.

Rising housing demand stems directly from a boom of new jobs and residents.

Nonetheless, the majority of the City Council has painted new development as a culprit in pricing out people on the lower end of the economic spectrum and that a linkage fee is just one way to get developers to pay their fair share.

Add to this that Councilmember O’Brien wants to use the money he gets from the linkage tax to fund housing for people who earn 60 to 80 percent of Area Median Income (AMI), a level of income that doesn’t need any help with housing.

Councilmember O’Brien casts himself as a champion of social justice, but what he’s really doing is reversing a positive trend of housing construction that is actually creating stable prices for people who earn 60 to 80 percent of AMI and doing nothing for the families of color who are choosing today to live outside the city, either because of price or lack of the right kind of housing or both. Also, it’s important to note that programs like the Multifamily Tax Exemption are creating thousands of units prices for people earning 60 to 80 percent AMI, units that are integrated into market rate buildings.

Yesterday’s Seattle Times shows pretty clearly that impartial observers who aren’t trying to pad their political resumes, play Robin Hood, or ensure their own re-election get it: our city isn’t diversifying, and driving up housing prices by adding costly taxes will only make that worse.