I had written a longer post on this topic but it disappeared. Maybe that’s a good thing since that post expressed a lot of frustration with where we’ve been in not just the last year but the last six years. So here’s another try and we’ll see if the hacker or internet gods let this one through. Mostly, after thinking about it, we should have learned what not to do, and have a better sense of our best options ahead to improve the environment for people who finance, develop, build, and operate housing in this city, state, and country.

Big Partnerships and Coalitions Won’t Save Us

The Chamber of Commerce and People for Seattle and Amazon all tried and failed disastrously to change the course of elections in 2019. It didn’t work because they didn’t really vet candidates or better yet recruit candidates that had a strong understanding of how market economics works. The field of candidates was weak and unprincipled when it came to supporting what people call, euphemistically, business friendly policies. We need candidates that not only believe in the market as a place of innovation and exchange but who can explain why they believe that to voters.

Too often, the business community, whether in the form of the Chamber, the Grand Bargain, or People for Seattle, doesn’t truly stand up for people in the real estate business or for the idea of a healthy housing market with lots of production to keep up with demand. Usually, what happens is some effort to support “nice people” like Egan Orion. Orion’s biggest selling point was that he was not Kshama Sawant, but he hadn’t a clue about how housing works and actually supported rent control.

Worse, when it came to the Grand Bargain, the “bargain” that gave us fees for new housing in the form of Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA), when business gets involved we end up with what I have called a bribery scheme where in order to be perceived as “good corporate citizens,” housing development is forced to pay cash into the bank accounts of non-profts. All this does is stoke housing inflation by slowing supply and passing on the costs of fees in the form of higher prices and rent.

Money with no principles behind it funding candidates that have no idea how housing works leads to bad outcomes not just when they lose but also if they win. In the case of Orion, Sawant and her colleagues are now emboldened to do even more damage with an eviction ban, impact fees, and a tax on jobs.

Voter Disposition is Unchanged

We’ve done nothing to mover voter attitudes. Throwing money at these candidates in 2019 actually affirmed the notion that developers and business in general have lots of money to throw around to fool people. I’m not so sure that that perception is wrong in fact. No effort has been made to persuade people that “We don’t need more housing, we need more housing so that it is affordable.” This shift is critical because without it the general sense is we need more and more and more money and even more rules.

Unless we spend real time and money to shift voter attitudes away from reprisals and revenge on people who produce and operate housing, we’re not going to get better candidates. Doing this won’t be easy, but it is a better long term investment that the money we saw spent on elections this year and in 2017.

A Path for 2020 and Beyond

There is a movement gathering around a voter initiative for rent control. The theory is that next session (which begins in days) will not produce a rent control measure. Instead, the thinking is, the advocates will put a measure on the ballot. The effort should therefore be on “winning” that campaign in November of 2020.

There are many problems with this premise. First, progressive and left leaning voters will be out in force to vote against Donald Trump. Trying to oppose a rent control measure in that environment will be next to impossible.

So why not join forces with progressive and left leaning interests that also oppose rent control to create doubt in voters on the left and kill the ballot measure? There are two reasons this will fail.

First, there will be a price, a big price, to be paid by people in the business of housing to get this deal. In some ways, it could dwarf the impact of the MHA in Seattle. The demand will be that in order to get opposition of rent control on the ballot, real estate and business interests will need to support more tax dollars and yes, fees, from developers for non-profit affordable housing.

Second, messages from non-profits and other so called, “White Hats” are unlikely to fool voters. Remember what happened with Egan Orion? People figured out that even though that Orion kid was sweet, he was backed by business. Trying to fool voters is a bad idea. I worked on a campaign in 1993 to oppose two anti-tax initiatives I-601 and 602. We tried to tie them together; the voters passed 601 and voted down 602. The effort failed because in spite of our efforts to confound them, voters saw the difference.

Our current system of over-regulating housing production, watching prices “skyrocket,” then imposing more fees, fines, taxes, and rules on the production of housing to fuel non-profit subsidies will only be reenforced by shoving more cash into the pockets of non-profits. They won’t stop demanding more and more, because the very measures that filled their pockets will make building their product even more challenging and make their waiting lists longer.

The Best Data, Good Ideas, and Telling a Better Story

How do we turn this around? I’ve been saying it all year. We need a War Room of sorts to push back on the sloppy reporting and rhetoric going on all over our city, state and country about housing. No, there is no “eviction epidemic.”

Second, we need to push for ideas that are both efficient and compassionate, like buying down cost burden with cash, not massive and inefficient investment in non-profit housing.

Third, we need to connect with voters, not try to fool them. People in our communities are smart, often wrong, but still smart. Today, they think that when sidewalks get built in a new development, for example, that they pay for those with taxes. That’s just wrong. What if we told them that? Would that change their mind about who pays for growth? That’s just one example of the kinds of conversations we need to have with real people.

It’s Up to You

I’ve made the pitch for your support over and over again. You can do nothing and hope this doesn’t impact you. You can get involved and pitch in on creating a policy center to change our course. Or you can tell us what you think we should do.

I think the worst thing to do is to invest in efforts that will fail and make everything worse.

As Bluto said in Animal House, this ain’t over until you say it’s over! This could be the greatest year ever!