When I first visited Seattle way back in 1983 I fell in love with the city. My affection for the place grew from afar; I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico where I would finish high school. After high school I set out for Tacoma, and the University of Puget Sound, largely because of its proximity to Seattle. And eventually, after two years of graduate school in California I came back and this time to Seattle where I’ve been ever since. For the first time in all those years, almost 30 now, I am beginning to feel like I don’t belong here anymore. The upcoming election has started to solidify this feeling.

How much The Stranger reflects the broad viewpoint of the people and voters of the city is a question I can’t answer. But I think their language and coverage of housing issues reflects some significant part of that view. Here’s the headline from their recent story reporting their own election endorsements:

HELLO, ANGRY PEOPLE! Stranger Endorsements! Are! Out!

That’s right, the headline speaks directly to the “angry people,’ angry one would suspect at all the jobs, economic growth, and increasing opportunity for everyone as that growth continues bringing with it more demand for housing. Angry not because of the growth, they’d argue, but its unequal distribution.

Hence the move by the City Council to pass an illegal tax on income; illegal not just because of previous court interpretations of Washington’s Constitution, but existing law that doesn’t allow local jurisdictions to impose taxes without the approval of the legislature. It’s pretty simple. They can’t do it.

Angry Seattle believes that if someone is doing well financially and having success that the success and the money must have been swindled from poor people who, presumably by some measure are more deserving. It’s the notion that the pie is of fixed size: if your slice is bigger, then mine will be smaller. That’s not fair or moral. Angry Seattle doesn’t believe in baking more pies. That would be “trickle down baking.”

The Stranger goes on in their more detailed endorsement to bemoan the fact that their endorsement board, and the angry people in Seattle, can’t vote against Republicans. They say there are only 6 viable candidates.

But it can be hard to tell the six incomplete-jokes-to-serious candidates apart. All six want more affordable housing, reformed police, and better options for the homeless. All six say the rich don’t pay enough taxes and the poor pay too much. And they’re all pissed off, card-carrying members of The Resistance.

For someone who understands basic economics and how Seattle broadly denies the function of supply and demand, reading this paragraph is like biting into a donut filled with nuts and bolts. Ouch! And imagining Jenny Durkan and Jessyn Ferrell as The Resistance is worthy of an eye roll and a face palm and shaking my head. I’m trying to imagine them throwing the tear gas canisters back at the cops while their faces are wrapped in a bandana.

In reading through the answers of these two candidates in particular, the pain continues. One would have guessed that whatever membership in “The Resistance” (whatever that is) had by Jenny Durkan, a United States Attorney, and Ferrell also an attorney and recently a State Legislator, would be ameliorated by their knowledge of basic economics and their confidence in their own depth of experience. But their answers on housing are pabulum stirred together to create the sense of satisfaction for a hunger for strong answers and also enough of the right words to appease Angry Seattle.

Here’s Durkan (from the Downtown Seattle Association’s (DSA) candidate page):

One of the most critical issues facing Seattle is the lack of affordable housing supply. This problem will only grow as our population grows. I will look to leverage City and regional tools and partnerships to help meet this need. I strongly support the implementation of the HALA recommendations. I will focus on the “highest impact recommendations” first as identified by HALA. At the same time, we must ensure implementation delivers the promised benefits and that impacts on neighborhoods are mitigated.

Supply of affordable housing? See, housing is affordable when the supply keeps up with demand. There is no such thing as creating “affordable housing supply.” When the market produces (whether it is market rate or subsidized, new housing or old housing, individual units or shared ones) more housing that there is demand prices go down, and it becomes more affordable. But Durkan knows she has to say those words “lack of affordable housing supply,” a formulation that doesn’t fool me or, really, Angry Seattle. I know she doesn’t mean it or understand it, and so do they.

Ferrell seems to know what she’s talking about (from the same DSA page).

Housing affordability is an area where the current administration has made important strides, but we can do more. Every day we’re generating only about 30-40% of the housing supply needed in Seattle to match the demand of newcomers to our City. To keep our City affordable and inclusive, we need the right set of policies that ensure that our housing supply keeps up with demand.

Pretty good, right? But the problem is that Ferrell supports Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) fees, and she supports impact fees both because she says that developers need to “contribute” to you guessed it, “affordable housing.” When we met with her, I told her she had to change her thinking if we truly want to get at this problem; we already contribute, as much as $75 million per year for infrastructure through Real Estate Excise Taxes (REET) and the current system to producing “affordable housing” is creating units that cost as much as $500,000 per unit.

These two women got into law school, finished law school, passed the bar exam, and have had stellar careers. But when people so smart run for public office, they end up reduced to babbling out buzz words and phrases designed to reassure some while appealing to others. In this case, these two were on their best behavior, trying to sound business friendly. When they’re out in the general population their language gets even more sloppy and desperate. There’s nothing like an election to turn otherwise bright people into contestants in a “Me Too” tournament.

What’s left? Not much. We’ve got Mike McGinn who said that he doesn’t want the endorsement of the development community. McGinn seems to be counting on his name familiarity and his pervious experience as Mayor and the promise that time, as he puts it, mellowed him out. Here’s what he says on the same DSA page.

If elected I would immediately start a broad based public process to identify how to address housing prices. This will include a discussion of how neighborhoods can accommodate housing growth, and how to accompany growth with appropriate investments.

Wow. Right answer. I’d give anything if the City staff had bothered to do a little work, maybe some extra reading on their way home on the bus, or even just lazily accepted supply and demand as they did the idea that taxing housing would somehow help prices. Instead, the City simply went the route of squeezing developers for cash to give to non-profit housing builders, something that will raise prices and ensure more fees and taxes in the future as a response. I wish I could trust McGinn; but I worry he’s just pandering to Angry Seattle, this time the neighbors who don’t want anymore housing.

And almost everyone in town, including the candidates, keeps calling the MIZ scheme “HALA” when we know HALA is just a raft of recommendations. Whatever. I give up on that one. In our interview, I even asked Durkan to tell me the difference. She never did.

So out of all the “serious” candidates, two look like they might be close, Ferrell and Durkan, but say things that make it clear that they know that to win, they need to be members of The Resistance to appeal to Angry Seattle, and that means proposing bad policy. The other candidate, McGinn, sounds like he’ll put a break on the MIZ scheme. That’s great! But why? To allow Angry Seattle to make it even worse? He’s not very clear on that topic, suggesting that he understands making the fees higher won’t work. Then why have fees at all? Again, he’s sketchy.

As for me, there are no candidates in this race I find personally or intellectually resonant with what I value. The closest is McGinn, and it maybe that he’s the best bet to at least slow down the disastrous spiral we’ve begun. All the candidates want to appeal to Angry Seattle.

And here’s the thing, I’m not angry that other people are making money. It makes me feel good that we have more money in our economy. I think it is a hopeful sign for people less fortunate and for those who are trying to make it. What does make me angry is when well meaning, mostly white, housed, educated people get angry about other people doing well, then propose and implement horrible policies that will make life worse for those people striving to dig out of poverty or to get further ahead in the economy. I don’t see anyone running for Mayor at this point that understands that the pie is not one size, it can get bigger and we can bake many more pies. I’m tired of well off, educated, white people in a great city with great opportunity complaining and being angry. I wish we had a viable candidate that would tell them to get over themselves and support a real solution: more housing of all kinds, all over the city, for all levels of income.