1. Mayor Bruce Harrell told members of the City Council that he opposes Initiative 137, which would fund social housing by imposing a tax on employers who pay workers more than $1 million a year. Instead, he wrote in a Tuesday email, he supports putting a competing alternative on the ballot that would provide no new funding—for example, an alternative proposed by the Seattle Times editorial board that would force the social housing developer to “compete for Housing Levy dollars.”
The housing levy, funded through a property tax, primarily pays for low-income housing built by nonprofit housing developers; the social housing developer hopes to build mixed-income developments where higher-wage workers’ rent would help subsidize housing for lower-income residents.
“Social housing as a concept may prove to have benefits, but the City has also been advised that Initiative 137 comes with legal risk,” Harrell wrote. “Voters interested in exploring the concept of social housing ought to have an option to do so that allows social housing to be established as a successful proof-of-concept before further increasing taxes.”
In the email, addressed to Council President Sara Nelson, Harrell said he had “spoken to you and members of the City Council individually last week and this week.” But Tammy Morales, the council’s most progressive member and a supporter of social housing, was not among them. In an email to Harrell’s deputy chief of staff, a staffer for Morales said Harrell has consistently “iced out” Morales, despite the fact that she is one of the council’s two longest-serving members.
“The Mayor has never returned a phone call from Councilmember Morales, hasn’t reached out to meet with her (at least not this year, I can’t speak to previous years), consistently does not invite us to events, and does not seem interested in even trying to extend an olive branch to our office,” the staffer wrote. “We have been working hard to pass the Mayor’s legislation through Land Use Committee. The very least he could do is meet with her.”
Morales challenged Harrell, then the District 2 council member, in 2015 and lost; she was elected four years later.
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2. King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay has proposed his own potential funding measure that’s strikingly similar to the social housing proposal, except that it would not require a new development authority or taxing source. Instead, Zahilay’s legislation would ask County Executive Dow Constantine to establish a “regional workforce housing initiative” that would develop a plan to use at least $1 billion of the county’s $9 billion in available debt capacity to build permanently affordable housing at a variety of income levels.
Much like the social housing proposal, Zahilay’s legislation anticipates that higher-income renters would subsidize apartments for their lower-income neighbors through higher rents.
“If we are going to have a functioning society, we need our workers, especially essential workers, to live closer to where they work,” Zahilay said.
Instead of creating a new public developer, like the one voters approved for social housing last year, Zahilay’s plan would rely on existing public developers, like the King County Housing Authority, and nonprofits that already develop and operate housing. He said he doesn’t consider his idea a competitor to social housing, although it would fill a similar niche in the market—permanently rent-restricted housing for people making up to 120 percent of the are median income. The rents would be set “at whatever monthly cost it takes to maintain and operate the buildings and pay down the interest and principal on the debt,” Zahilay said.
Also like social housing, the new housing Zahilay envisions would operate essentially outside the housing market, with rents that would remain “constant, other than to reflect interest rate changes on debt service,” according to the legislation. How all this would work, what kind of rents would be required to make the plan feasible, and how much housing the county could fund with $1 billion are all to be determined: Zahilay said he’s “asking [the executive] to do the analysis and create an implementation plan in a way that pencils. I think there would be some pushback if it was directive.”
RE Tammy Morales’ staff whining about Bruce Harrell not responding to Morales. Touche! He’s treating Morales like Morales treats her constituents. Ever since she was elected in November 2019, and upon taking office in January 2020, the same quote applies to Morales. “Tammy Morales has never returned a phone call from me or others who supported other candidates, hasn’t reached out to meet with us, consistently does not invite us to events, and does not seem interested in even trying to extend an olive branch to any of us.” May she rot in the wasteland she created.
Watching the Harrell administration along with his “hand picked council,” and the various handfuls of zealots who support them, it has become clear the poor are their sacrificial goat for all of the city’s problems. It’s the poor they have decided to wage war on, so to expect this fanatical group to support social housing is really beyond belief. They want to toss non-white johns in prison, not give them non-market valued housing.
Zahilay has been a major disappointment. He’s more interested in which way the winds blow than justice for his community. What’s to support when your representative is a moral and political chameleon? Why does it matter who fills those smelly old shoes?
Well obviously what we have going now is not working and has been a catastrophe, and yet the mayor is squelching new ideas with no basis in fact. Social housing has been proven to work over and over and over again, this isn’t freaking news.