Tag: gender

City Council, Election 2017, Elections, gender, Media, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Women Should Get Credit for the Work We Do

1. Yesterday, in response to a Seattle Times endorsement that cited former Tenants Union director Jon Grant’s superior “experience,” “reasonable[ness], and “objectiv[ity], more than 100 women—including elected officials, women’s rights advocates and both of Seattle’s mayoral candidates, Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan—signed on to an “open letter to the people of Seattle” denouncing the Times’ dog-whistling dismissal of Mosqueda’s achievements.

“Women should get credit for the work we do, and for our hard-won experience,” the letter reads. “We must stop making excuses or standing by while others overstate their resumes at the expense of women whose qualifications, experience, and track record are indisputable. The Seattle Times Editorial Board lauds the ‘experience’ of Teresa’s opponent, yet Teresa spent years helping craft the minimum wage and sick leave policy and leading the state-wide initiative that her opponent was hired for a period to work on.”

As I noted in my primary election endorsement of Mosqueda, the longtime advocate for women, people of color, and workers has “a mile-long resume and an incredible track record fighting successfully for equitable health care, fair wages, and paid sick and family leave.” I also noted Grant’s propensity for taking credit for work he has done as well as work he hasn’t done, including his brief tenure campaigning for the sick-leave initiative Mosqueda helped draft (where—note to the Seattle Times—he worked for Mosqueda). “The most effective city council members,” I wrote, “aren’t the ones who grandstand and take credit; they’re the ones who do the unglamorous, nose-to-the-grindstone work of drafting legislation and rounding up support.”

When I wrote about the letter (and the Times’ seeming preference for a white person—any white person—over qualified women of color in this year’s council races), Times editorial board member Donna Blankinship demanded an apology and offered “data” (the Times has endorsed a number of women and a few people of color) as a refutation of my “opinions.” I hardly expect deep self-examination from a paper that called anti-Casa Latina, anti-El Centro de la Raza, and anti-development activist Pat Murakami a longtime “advocate” for “Seattle’s underserved communities,” but the fact that more than 100 prominent Seattle women share my “opinion” should give them pause, unless they’re going to demand apologies from every woman who signed the letter.

2. Throughout his campaign, city council Position 8 candidate Jon Grant has touted the Honest Elections initiative, which created a system of public financing for city council elections and imposed campaign spending limits, for “leveling the playing field and supporting grassroots candidates” like himself. Just yesterday, however, he requested—and got—his second exemption from the spending limits imposed by the Honest Elections program, allowing him to not only raise more money but raise it in larger contributions—up to $500, or twice what the law prescribes.

It’s unclear how raising the cap will close the fundraising gap between the two candidates unless Grant gets a sudden influx of $500 contributions, since the issue is simply that more people have chosen to donate to Mosqueda.

The first time Grant requested an exemption from the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, he argued that Mosqueda had raised more than the $300,000 cap imposed by the law, when independent expenditures made on Mosqueda’s behalf (but without coordination with her campaign) were added to the amount she had raised in conntributions. Grant’s campaign calculated that the total spending by Mosqueda’s campaign and on her behalf exceeded the cap by $118,000, and argued that “In digital advertising alone, $118,000 could reach hundreds of thousands of voters. Under the current spending cap, our campaign is constrained by our budget to respond to such expenditures.”
Less than a month after receiving his first exemption, Grant was back before the Commission, arguing that because Mosqueda has more donors than he does (4,952, with an average contribution of $83, compared to Grant’s 4,304, with an average contribution of $79), she has an unfair advantage over him. Once again, the amount Grant mentions is $118,000, although this time, it doesn’t include independent expenditures—it’s just how much Mosqueda has exceeded the $300,000 cap (which Grant initially petitioned to lift) on her own. The language, in fact, is identical: “In digital advertising alone, $118,000 could reach hundreds of thousands of voters. Under the current spending cap, our campaign is constrained by our budget to respond to such expenditures.” It’s unclear how raising the cap will close the fundraising gap between the two candidates unless Grant gets a sudden influx of $500 contributions, since the issue is simply that more people have chosen to donate to Mosqueda.
As she did last month, Mosqueda will have to follow up with her own petition to lift her contribution cap from $250 to $500 so that she can compete on an even playing field with Grant. She plans to do so next Monday.

3. Blankinship’s tweet did pique my interest, so I looked at the Times’ endorsements, and what I found was this: Out of 22 endorsements for this year’s general election, The Times endorsed a total of four women of color. Two were nonincumbents running for open seats—Jinyoung Lee Englund for state senate in the 45th District, and Janice Zahn for Bellevue City Council. Zahn is running against another person of color. So is Englund. Englund is an interesting choice to illustrate the Times’ support for women, given that she is opposed to abortion rights and even sent out numerous anti-Planned Parenthood and anti-choice tweets before she scrubbed her Twitter feed. Before moving into the 45th District in April, Englund was a lobbyist for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in Washington, D.C. Her opponent, Manka Dhingra, is a moderate Democrat and a woman of color.

As for the two instances where the Times endorsed an woman of color who is an incumbent: The first, state Rep. Vandanna Slatter, is a Democrat with no Republican opponent, and the second, My-Linh Thai, has an opponent funded almost entirely by a group suing the Bellevue school board over football sanctions whose campaign, the Times wrote, was full of “red flags.”

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Affordability, City Council, Density, Development, Election 2017, gender, gentrification, housing, labor, land use, Police, Renters, Women, zoning

The C Is for Crank Interviews: Jon Grant

Former Tenants Union director Jon Grant first ran for City Council Position 8 back in 2015, when now-interim mayor Tim Burgess was running for reelection and the field consisted of four straight white guys, three of them named Jonathan. Back then, Grant beat out the other two Johns on the ballot by arguing that incumbent Burgess had failed to act boldly on police reform and was in the pocket of big developers. This time, Grant faced a diverse group of primary opponents, including two women of color, the city’s first transgender council candidate, a lesbian, and a gay Egyptian-American Muslim man. His general-election opponent is labor leader Teresa Mosqueda, a Latina and renter who works as a lobbyist for the Washington State Labor Council. Grant says he considered dropping out of the race when it appeared that his frontrunning opponent would be a woman of color, but decided to stay in after he sat down with Mosqueda and realized they had different “theories of change” and visions for the city. A longtime advocate for public financing of local campaigns, Grant has raised $300,000 in democracy vouchers—publicly funded contributions from individual supporters.

I sat down with Grant at Eastern Cafe in the International District last week.

The C Is for Crank [ECB]: What do you see as the biggest policy difference between you and your opponent?

Jon Grant [JG]: The obvious answer is housing. When the city developed the Grand Bargain, it was a committee comprised of 28 members, of which I was one. Half of the committee was comprised of representatives from private developers, and that was really reflected in the final proposal. [Ed: Only nine of the 28 HALA  committee members work for private, nonprofit, or mixed-income developers; Grant declined to clarify which of the other HALA members he considered developer representatives.] Folks forget about this, but the conversation before HALA was around a linkage fee [a proposed square-footage fee, to be paid by developers, that would fund affordable housing], and council member Mike O’Brien had a proposal to max out the linkage fee [at $22 a square foot]. At the time, [the city’s Department of Planning and Development] did an analysis and they found that over the next 10 years, it would have brought in about $1 billion for affordable housing. My point being this: When you compare that raw number to the raw value of the Grand Bargain, it’s around $640 million, and that’s a pretty big difference. That’s letting private developers off the hook for millions and millions and millions of dollars, and I felt that that was a problem.

My opponent has criticized me for walking away from the table on the HALA process. That’s a mischaracterization. I stuck with that process for 10 months, and at the end of it, I voted my conscience. [Ed.: Grant actually abstained from the final HALA vote.] I felt it was important that there be a community conversation about, are we actually acting in the public’s best interest by striking the deal, and I thought abstaining from the deal created a space to have that conversation. And back in 2015 [when Grant ran for council Position 8 the first time], I put forward my own proposal that would have brought back the linkage fee. That’s unfortunately not how things worked out. We now have the Grand Bargain, and there are now these citywide upzones without any real discussion of whether we are getting the best benefit or the most for the public good. I think that’s a real concern, and I think that’s what’s at stake in this election.

ECB: HALA and MHA are now largely the law of the land in Seattle, with full support from the council—would you propose revisiting the process and reconsidering zoning decisions that have already been approved?

JG: I think that question—’Well, would you walk back HALA?’—is actually a distraction. I think the question is, why aren’t we asking for more in terms of affordability? My opponent won’t say what she’s willing to do in that regard.

 

“If you just allow for a citywide elimination of single family zoning, what’s going to happen is that the first properties to go are going to be rental properties, because if you rezone that area, the landlord who owns those properties will be very quick to sell it off to a developer to build a million-dollar condo or whatever.”

 

ECB: In our conversation, your opponent said she would like to bump up the MHA requirement, but that she thinks your proposal to require developers to make 25 percent of their units affordable is too high.

JG: I have yet to hear what that amount is, and there are opportunities for her to weigh in on that debate today, and she has not.

To me, there are signals that a candidate can give to voters about where they stand on these things, and not being vocal about this when the community has had real concerns about how these upzones are moving forward, and that the affordability levels are at the minimum—when you’re a candidate who’s had opportunities to be vocal and stand in solidarity with the community and you don’t do that, I think that’s a signal to voters. I think it’s also important to note that my opponent accepted a maxed-out donation from Maria Barrientos, who was a developer who was an architect of the Grand Bargain itself.

ECB: You mentioned this at a forum recently, and I have to point out that it was $250—hardly enough money to buy influence. [Ed: Barrientos is also one of the only prominent women of color in Seattle’s development community, and she has long incorporated below-market housing into all her buildings.]

JG: I think it really matters where your money comes from. It matters for voters to know who you’re listening to, who you’re accountable to, and for my part, I think taking a stance of not taking money from developers—it sends a clear signal to voters that you’re going to stand with them. When developers are having so much influence at city hall, what we really need is not another lobbyist at city hall that’s going to be cozy to developers but a community advocate that’s going to fight against the forces of displacement. I understand that when you’re talking about very complex policy issues, you campaign in poetry and you govern in prose. What I would really like to see is for the city to do an economic analysis of every upzone to determine what was the amount that the developer could afford before that tipping point where the developer walks away from the project.

ECB: Would you be open to allowing more density in Seattle’s single-family-only areas?

JG: If you just allow for a citywide elimination of single family zoning, what’s going to happen is that the first properties to go are going to be rental properties. It’s not really widely known, but one of the largest portions of our affordable housing stock is single-family homes. Now those are also the homes that are most at risk, because if you rezone that area the landlord who owns those properties will be very quick to sell it off to a developer to build a million-dollar condo or whatever. When we talk about changing the zoning, we have to acknowledge the fact that there’s 100,000 people moving to our city and they have to go somewhere, so we have to accommodate that growth, but I am very nervous and very cautious about the idea of eliminating rental housing that is currently affordable. If we don’t manage that we’re going to see widespread displacement of low-income people and people of color.

ECB: Do you have actual data to indicate that there are a huge number of people renting affordable single-family houses in places like the Central District who would be at risk of losing their housing if the city got rid of single-family zoning?

JG: Anecdotally, from my time at the Tenants Union, yes—the calls we would get from people in the Rainier Valley in particular and also in the Central District. I went to a forum recently and I asked people, ‘How many of you know someone who lives in a single-family home that rents?’ Like half the room raised their hand. So I think that it’s an issue that’s not really talked about.

[Ed: I searched Craigslist for houses to rent in both the Rainier Valley and the Central District and found none that would meet most definitions of “affordable.” A few representative listings included a four-bedroom house for $3,600 in Rainier Beach; a $2,500 two-bedroom in Hillman City; and a $2,000 two-bedroom in the Central District. In contrast, there were plenty of relatively cheap single-family homes near the University of Washington, including a $2,000 five-bedroom, a $5,000 seven-bedroom, and a $3,800 six-bedroom. Those rental listings, however, are obviously aimed at students, not families, and the University District is not a gentrifying, historically African-American area.]

“Police, as employees, stand apart from any other employees, in that they’re the only employees that have a license to kill. And for that reason, they need to be held to a different standard.”

 

ECB: You’ve criticized your opponent, including in this interview, for being a lobbyist. Teresa has pointed out that her clients are unionized workers, not big corporations. How do you respond to that, and are there any specific examples where she’s taken a position that’s out of step with working people?

JG: For my part, I stand in solidarity with rank-and-file workers. When we talk about labor leadership, I think it’s a different conversation. We’re in a moment right now where there is tremendous opportunity in Seattle politics to really push the envelope and get really progressive people elected, and [yet], the [Martin Luther King Central] Labor Council endorsed the same person for mayor [Jenny Durkan] that the Chamber of Commerce endorsed. We’re seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars being thrown into the race against me, even though I have a track record of being very pro-labor. I used to be a union member [at the Office of Professional Employees International Local 8]. I worked alongside Teresa on initiative 1433 to raise the statewide minimum wage. [UPDATE: Mosqueda says Grant did not “work alongside” her; rather, she ran the campaign and “I hired him for a few months.”] I’m very pro-worker, I’m very pro-union, but I just call into question these decisions that are happening at the higher levels. I think we have more than enough insider people at city hall who are more accustomed to making deals in back rooms than being out in the community and pushing the envelope.

ECB: One reason labor might not like you is that you’ve called for opening up police union contract negotiations to the public, which labor advocates worry will open the door to eliminating confidential negotiations for other public workers.

JG: Yeah, I don’t see that.

ECB: Why not?

JG: I think that what’s important to remember is that the police, as employees, stand apart from any other employees, in that they’re the only employees that have a license to kill. And for that reason, they need to be held to a different standard. And what I have seen through the negotiating processes with the union is that a lack of transparency in that process has led the public not to understand what is being bargained away, in terms of the right to have constitutional policing. I am 100 percent pro-union. I don’t think that the police labor contract should be completely open to the public. I think the provisions around discipline, especially, should be, because we’ve seen too many times where officers have been let of the hook. I think that if the city doesn’t take bold stances to actually address this culture of impunity that exists in our police department, we are going to continue to see more racial profiling, we’re going to continue to see more excessive force, and I’ve just got to call into question my opponent, who has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the same groups [unions] that are supportive of [the Seattle Police Officers Guild], and would call into question whether she’s going to hold them accountable.

ECB: How would you avoid opening that Pandora’s box and having all city union negotiations open to the public?

JG: If the city were to pursue this, we would craft legislation so that it’s specific to the police union. We have a reality where there is, every year now, a person of color getting shot by the police, and the idea that it’s not worth going out on a legal limb to try to save a life is not compelling argument to me.

 

ECB: As a white guy, how do you sit here and say, ‘Vote for me—I will represent the interests of women and women of color better than a woman of color’?

JG: I think this comes down to values and theory of change. Very early on in this race, I sat down with my opponent, and it was really clear to me that we represented different visions for the city.

 

ECB: Can you talk a little bit about what you’d do on as a city council member to promote gender equity, in terms of pay and opportunities?

JG: We’ve made some tremendous gains with the paid family leave legislation that got passed at the state level. The next thing I would work on is ensuring pay transparency. It’s kind of remarkable that we don’t already have this on the books. As I’m sure you know, women are paid 73 cents for every dollar a man makes. [Ed: 80 cents, and 78.6 cents in Seattle], and even less for  women of color. One of the big perpetuators of that is the fact that when you get a job, you have no idea if you’re getting paid as much as your male counterparts. And part of that is because when you get offered a job, they  ask for your salary history, but because of the existing gender pay gap, it just perpetuates that cycle into the next job that you get. So I would support putting penalties on employers [who penalize] employees who ask what their colleagues’ salary is so that they can see if they’re getting paid at same level, and prohibiting the disclosure of your salary when you apply for a job.

And then, secondly, I think that we really need to take into account child care. Right now, you have to pay as much as a college tuition for just getting basic child care services for your family, and that disproportionally impacts women. I agree [with Mosqueda] that we shouldn’t have families paying more than 10 percent of their income toward child care. We need to do some investigation into how it gets paid for, whether it’s borne by employees or a more progressive tax. I haven’t heard from my opponent about how she plans on financing it.

ECB: She’s talked about paying for it out of the next Families and Education Levy.

JG: Again, it’s a regressive tax. So I think to the extent that we can actually get more progressive revenue sources to pay for these programs—seeing whether or not the [city] income tax pulls through in court, imposing a progressive corporate tax, or implementing impact fees—I think that’s another thing we haven’t talked about enough.

ECB: You’re describing to me what it’s like to be a working woman, and I’m sitting here going, ‘Yeah, I know what it’s like to be a working woman.’ Isn’t it important to have more women, more people with that lived experience, on the council?  As a white guy, how do you sit here and say, ‘Vote for me—I will represent the interests of women and women of color better than a woman of color’?

JG: I think this comes down to values and theory of change. Very early on in this race, I sat down with my opponent. I talked about the concerns that I was hearing from the community, from women, from women of color, around police accountability, around housing affordability. And we had a conversation about our policy differences and how far we were willing to go to achieve the most robust outcomes for many different communities of our city, and it was really clear to me that we represented different visions for the city. I decided to stay in the race because I think that for those communities that are impacted, we have a platform that’s going to do more to advance social equity and to advance social justice.

 

 

Addiction, Affordability, City Council, Density, Development, Election 2017, gender, homelessness, housing, human services, land use, Police, Renters

The C Is for Crank Interviews: Teresa Mosqueda

As the lobbyist for the Washington State Labor Council, the campaign chairwoman for Raise Up Washington (which ran last year’s successful minimum-wage initiative), and legislative director for the Children’s Alliance, City Council Position 8 candidate Teresa Mosqueda has credentials in Olympia a mile long. Most of the causes she has championed involve historically marginalized or disempowered groups, particularly women and children; this year, for example, she worked behind the scenes to pass a paid family leave law that’s the most generous in the nation. Her work as a labor lobbyist, however, has led her opponent Jon Grant to criticize her as a pawn of “Big Labor,” a term that some on the socialist end of Seattle’s political spectrum consider synonymous with Big Business. Mosqueda has endorsements from every Seattle labor group and the support of a political action committee, Working Families for Teresa, that is backed by the grocery workers’ union (UFCW 21), the home health care workers’ union (SEIU 775), the Teamsters, and the AFL-CIO.

I sat down with Mosqueda at her office at WSLC headquarters on South Jackson Street.

The C Is for Crank [ECB]: If you win, the council will have a six-woman majority for the first time since the 1990s. Do you think a majority-female council will emphasize different issues or produce different policy results than the majority-male councils we’ve had for the vast majority of Seattle’s history?

Teresa Mosqueda [TM]: I hope so. I think part of the lived experience that I’m going to be bringing to this seat is one of creating greater economic stability for working families and women. Women are part of the workforce now. We do not have affordable child care. We do not have affordable family leave yet. Although Seattle has made some good strides to push the state in the right direction, [the new statewide family leave plan is] not going to start coming onto the books until 2019, 2020. And, frankly as women, we are often left out of conversations about what retirement security looks like. Because we have to step out of the workforce so many times [to do unpaid work as mothers and caregivers], because we tend to get tracked into lower-paying jobs, our retirement security also suffers when we don’t have people proactively thinking about how to create equity.

One of the things I want to do is help prevent folks from getting retaliated against for speaking about their pay on the job. Right now, there are zero protections. It says on the books that you have protection from retaliation, but the reality is, talking about your pay at work gets people fired, it gets them demoted, it gets their hours cut. So we need to make that a protection. Second, I’m also very interested in looking at the data in terms of [job] tracking. Let’s take an organization like Safeway, for example, or Whole Foods. If you look at who’s in floral versus who’s in meat-cutting, it’s women in floral and men in meat-cutting, and meat-cutting pays significantly more than floral. And you can see that people are tracked into certain jobs in various industries based on their gender, and I want to make sure that is something that we look at and do an analysis of and seeing how we can prevent that. And then, lastly, I do think that it’s important that we ask companies to display their pay, to give more folks transparency in the workplace.

ECB: You identified child care as an economic issue that falls largely on women. What’s your plan to provide child care for women and families?

TM: The principles are pretty simple. One: We’ve said that nobody should spend more than 9.5 percent of their income on health care. I want to apply that same principle to child care. Seattle, as you know, is the most expensive city in the country right now for a parent to have child care. Right now, it costs more to pay for child care for a year than it does to go to the University of Washington for a year. So there are a few things I would like to do. Number one is creating a sliding scale subsidy, especially for those on the bottom levels of the income spectrum. Number two is to really encourage or try to facilitate people going into the early learning profession, by working with our local colleges to make sure that we’re getting more folks into child care and early learning.

One way to do that is to actually pay them better. One idea I have is to actually subsidize or enhance the pay rate that child care providers receive in our city. I know everyone’s got their eyes on the [Families and Education] levy right now, but I do think there is a direct tie-in [between child care and education]. I also think we should work with the state on the square footage limits that we have on child care. Right now, an in-home child care provider has to have 35 square feet per child inside, and I think it’s 65 square feet per child outside. What home can you buy right now where, if you wanted to have a dozen kids and make it a sustaining business, that you could actually have that amount of square footage? I also think there’s a lot the city could do in terms of zoning and incentives for child care throughout the city.

 

“I’ve seen the Freedom Foundation use very similar tactics that I’m hearing, unfortunately, from some [on the left], saying that labor is not representative. I think it’s extremely dangerous for us to be using right-wing rhetoric when it comes to electing local progressive candidates.”

 

ECB: Your opponent keeps suggesting that you are a tool of “Big Labor,” while he’s the true progressive in the race. Should voters be concerned about the fact that labor groups are spending tens of thousands of dollars on independent expenditures to help get you elected?

TM: People in the labor movement elect their leaders. Those in the labor movement decide through a democratic process who to endorse. It’s workers who’ve endorsed me. Every labor union has endorsed me. The workers, faith communities, organizations from communities of color, environmentalists, health care advocates are behind me. So I say that it’s a false narrative. I’ve seen the Freedom Foundation [an anti-union advocacy group] use very similar tactics that I’m hearing, unfortunately, from some [on the left], saying that labor is not representative. I think it’s extremely dangerous for us to be using right-wing rhetoric when it comes to electing local progressive candidates. I think this is exactly what the right wing wants us to do—to fight against each other, fight over the scraps and to pull our community apart. I’ve seen that language be used in the halls of  Olympia and across our country, where labor is being demonized, and I think now is the time for us to find the commonality between movements and find common interest in fighting the -isms, whether it’s sexism, classism, racism, and uniting against the forces that are trying to divide us.

I entered this race when I was 36. I’m now 37. I am a Latina woman who’s a renter in Seattle. I am a progressive advocate who has proven credentials that I brought to the table, fighting for health care for all kids, including undocumented kiddos, standing up for the rights of all workers, fighting for retirement security and affordable health care for kiddos—the issues that I brought to this race stand on their own.

ECB: Would you revisit any aspect of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, and can you address Grant’s proposal to require developers to make 25 percent of all new housing affordable to low-income people?

TM: I’ll start with the 25 percent affordability suggestion. I’ve looked into this in depth, and what we saw in San Francisco, which passed an initiative saying they wanted a 25 percent requirement for all new buildings, is that it basically brought development almost to a halt during one of the biggest economic booms in history. Now it’s back with their board of supervisors. They’re trying to make a decision about what is the right number across the city, and they’re looking at what we did in Seattle [where the mandatory housing affordability proposal calls for different density increases] zone by zone. I’m not interested in grinding us to a halt. I’m interested in actually creating the housing that we need right now.

“The two-thirds of our city that is zoned for single family use has got to be reevaluated. We cannot create the affordable housing that we need for the folks who are living here, working here, retiring here, and those who are coming here, if we do not go back and add cottages, duplexes, triplexes, and affordable units.”

 

If there was something that I was going to push for on city council, especially with a new mayor and a new city council, it would be to say, did we lowball it [on affordable housing requirements] before? Twenty-five percent has obviously proven too much of a requirement to actually incentivize building, but instead of looking at [a] 2 to 11 [percent affordability requirement], is there a range that would allow us to move forward in this economic boom and get the affordable housing that we need without driving us back to either the conference room table or into court?

What I’ve been talking about is looking at every developable parcel of land that the city, county, and state owns, and that Sound Transit owns, and turning that into affordable housing options across the income spectrum— working with community land trusts, working with nonprofit housing developers, creating cohousing, coops, and subsidized housing models.

And in addition to that, the two-thirds of our city that is zoned for single family use has got to be reevaluated. We cannot create the affordable housing that we need for the folks who are living here, working here, retiring here, and those who are coming here, if we do not go back and add cottages, duplexes, triplexes, and affordable units for folks who probably rent but would like to buy one day. We have to be creative. We have to think out outside of the box. I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of your readers are tired of people who run for office who make these grand promises and then don’t deliver. What I’m talking about is getting in to office and then delivering the affordable housing that we need across the income spectrum. So it’s not going to be a one-sentence bumper sticker solution, it’s going to be a multifaceted approach.

ECB: The city’s Pathways Home strategy for addressing homelessness is based on a report that explicitly decouples homelessness and housing affordability, and concludes that people may just have to move outside the city or county to avoid being homeless. Do you agree with that strategy, and would you change anything about the city’s current approach to homelessness?

TM: I see them as interconnected. We have a crisis in the city both in terms of the lack of affordable housing and in terms of the number of folks who are living unsheltered on our streets. So I think that we need to take  a comprehensive approach and overhaul how we’re addressing the homelessness crisis. Number one, we have to stop the sweeps. It is retraumatizing people. It is not creating equitable solutions for folks who have already been failed by the system so many times. Getting moved from corner to corner is not a way to make sure they feel safe, and it is not a way to make sure they can access the services they need. We have to treat this as the health issue that it is.

 

“We are going to politicize the process and polarize the process, and it will not result in an actual [police] contract. The Freedom Foundation wants open collective bargaining  because they know it will result in stagnation and finger pointing.”

 

I’ve been talking about building the shelters that we need, building the permanent supportive housing that they need, and getting folks inside navigation centers [low-barrier shelters]. We obviously have to work with the community so people know where they’re being placed and why they’re being placed there, but they have to be placed throughout the city so that they’re in places where people can actually access them. It does us no good to place a navigation center ten miles away from where somebody can actually walk to where the services are needed. But in addition to that, making sure that we have actual inpatient treatment services in Seattle is one big priority that I’d like to address with the county. We do not have inpatient substance abuse treatment in Seattle that is sufficient. Folks end up going to Harborview and they’re let go 12 hours later. What they can do at Harborview is stabilize people. They can’t give them the case management and the substance abuse counseling and the long-term care that they need to be able to actually get sober. They should not be acting as our primary care providers throughout our city.

ECB: You’ve said that, unlike your opponent, you don’t want to open the police union negotiations to the public. Why not, and what would you do to increase transparency in police contract negotiations?

TM: I have constantly said what we need in this city is to rebuild trust. We need to make sure that people are not fearful when they call the cops  because they’re having a mental health crisis or because they are fearful that somebody broke into their home. And without a contract, I think a lot of people are concerned that we’re not going to get that trust. A contract can help us to that, but we’re not going to get a contract if you open up negotiations, like the Koch Foundation and the Freedom Foundation have called for. Because what that will inevitably create is folks sitting around a conference room table grandstanding. We are going to politicize the process and polarize the process, and it will not result in an actual contract. The Freedom Foundation wants open collective bargaining  because they know it will result in stagnation and finger pointing.

What I would commit to is saying, here are the things that I would want to see as part of a collective bargaining process: Be transparent with the public about how we’re going to hold folks accountable, how we’re going to create trust, and then be honest about what actually happens post-negotiations. The other thing I’ve said is, in addition to what the [Community Police Commission] has called for, which is the inspector general being in the room, the Office of Police Accountability being in the room, and CPC being in the room, I want there to actually be a community member at the table.

ECB: Are you talking about this community member being an observer or an active partner in contract negotiations?

TM: An active partner. I would like to see somebody sit in for the duration of the negotiations and be an actual part of the negotiations. Obviously, there’s things that come with that we need to be confidential and we need to be very respectful of the negotiating process, but I think we could have one or two community members sitting at the table bargaining in good faith. I think it can help us get to a base of trust.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue doing interviews like this one, which take an average of about 8-10 hours from start to finish. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers like you. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Council, Density, Development, discrimination, Election 2017, Equity, gender, land use, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank, Urbanism

Morning Crank: A Framework for Inaction

1. Nearly every candidate in this year’s Seattle elections, from urban planner Cary Moon to labor crusader Teresa Mosqueda to former US attorney Jenny Durkan, calls herself (or himself) an “urbanist.” (Moon was even endorsed by The Urbanist blog.) But what are the candidates telling neighborhood groups—the sort of organizations that too often stand in the way of the kind of new housing that would move Seattle toward an actual urbanist future?

At a recent candidate forum held by a group of Magnolia, Queen Anne, and Ballard homeowners, Moon said she would “restart” the process of allowing more housing in neighborhoods so that people already living in those neighborhoods—incumbent property owners—can make sure that their “culture” and neighborhood “character” is preserved.

Asked about Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, which allows modest increases in housing supply in non-single-family areas, Moon responded:

The HALA process was way too insular and top-down. It was a small group of people, behind closed doors, who decided that they had a compromise with each other that they unleashed on the world and said, ‘You shall do this.’ That is not the way we do things in Seattle. A better process would have been to go to neighborhoods and say, ‘We’re growing this much and we need to create a healthy society where people of all income levels and all ages and stages of life can live in your neighborhood. Here’s the target goals for your neighborhood. How can we achieve these goals together?’ And work directly with these neighbors around how they want to grow. Do you want duplexes? Row houses? Backyard cottages? Upzone your urban village? [Put] the whole range of tools on the table and work with neighborhoods to figure out, what is the right way for you to grow that preserves your culture and your character of your neighborhood that you care about. That is what we should have done. And I would restart that process at this point and have a new discussion based in those constructive approaches and that positive future vision, because that’s the only way we’re going to make change in this city.

Moon’s response parroted both anti-development activists like Jon Grant, who’s running on a socialist party platform for council Position 8, and property values activists like Marty Kaplan, the Queen Anne homeowner who sued to prevent the city from allowing more backyard cottages and mother-in-law apartments in Seattle’s single-family areas. (Not to mention former mayor Mike McGinn, who ran unsuccessfully this year on a similar message).

Although Moon has, to her credit, been consistent with this let-the-neighborhoods-decide talking point (she said something similar to Transportation for Washington, the political arm of  the urbanist Transportation Choices Coalition, in their endorsement interview, and to me), she’s savvy enough to know that promises to preserve “your culture,” “neighborhood character,” and even “your neighborhood” are dog whistles,  not neutral policy goals. Assuring homeowners that the neighborhoods belong to them, not newcomers or renters, and defining “character” as “exclusive single-family areas” creates a framework for inaction, not a blueprint for growth.

2. On a more positive note, it’s been fun to see Moon and Durkan try to outdo each other with proposals to advance pay equity for women and in jobs primarily held by women over the past two weeks—something I’ve never seen from any male candidate for local elective office, ever. (This, in case you’re wondering, is one of many reasons we need more women in local positions—try to imagine any of the male council members of the past 50 years adding “gender pay equity” to the mission of a standing council committee, which Jean Godden did, or expanding that mission to “gender equity” in general, as Lorena Gonzalez did after Godden left the council.)

The latest shot across the bow comes from Moon, who on Monday proposed a set of rule changes to promote pay equity and transparency from large employers and an ordinance that would bar employers from asking prospective hires about their salary history. Women in Seattle currently make just 78 cents on the dollar compared to men doing similar work, one of the worst big-city pay gaps in the country. Salary history requests contribute to this gap, because when employers base salaries on women’s current pay in a system that underpays them, it only perpetuates the problem. In addition to the salary history ban, Moon proposed working toward a local version of state legislation that would have banned retaliation against workers for discussing their pay, prevented employers from paying some people less for doing the same work as other employees based on their job title, and tracking women into lower-paying jobs.

The pay gap, unsurprisingly, is even worse in the tech industry, where female programmers make, on average, almost 30 percent less than their male counterparts. Durkan is supported by the political arm of the Seattle Chamber, which includes the Washington Retail Association and the Washington Tech Industry Alliance, organizations that opposed SB 1605 this year. The Chamber’s PAC, Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy, has poured $86,000 into an independent expenditure group, People for Jenny. I reached out to Durkan’s campaign yesterday afternoon to find out whether she supports a ban on salary history or a local ordinance that mirrors 1605 and will update this post when I hear back from them.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, phone bills, electronics, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

discrimination, Equity, gender, Mayor Murray, race, South Seattle Emerald

How Programs Like “Our Best” Fail Black Girls: A Conversation With Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

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This story originally appeared on the South Seattle Emerald.

The story of the school-to-prison pipeline is a familiar one: Nationwide, young Black men in both public and private schools are more likely than their White counterparts to be disciplined, tracked into special education classes, and suspended for the same infractions, contributing to higher dropout rates and subsequent incarceration. Seattle is no exception to this nationwide phenomenon. In Seattle public schools, African-American boys are nearly three times as likely as White boys to be referred to special education, and fall far behind their White counterparts on nearly every standard measure of success—from third-grade reading scores, to seventh-grade math proficiency, to graduation rates.

Earlier this year, Mayor Ed Murray announced a new initiative, called Our Best, that aims to close this achievement gap by doubling the number of Black male mentors, providing a clearinghouse and technical support for existing programs that serve young Black men, and creating a new special advisor to the mayor on young Black male achievement. The program, which is modeled on former President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper program, aims to increase the number of Black boys who graduate from high school, provide Black young men between the ages of 14 and 24 more pathways to “meaningful, well-paid employment,” and reduce the percentage of young Black men entering the criminal justice system.

Admirable as those goals may be, some advocates wonder: What about the girls? Young Black women face unique challenges that aren’t shared by young Black men, including pregnancy (four in 10 Black girls who drop out of school cite pregnancy or parenthood as the reason), lack of economic opportunity (the jobs that are available for female high school dropouts pay significantly less than those available to male dropouts), and abuse (girls are far more likely to be victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse, and harassment.) Black girls are also far more likely than Black boys to be single parents without other sources of support, which compounds the impact of lower wages. Little wonder, then, that the median net worth of single Black women is $100, compared with almost $7,900 for Black men and $41,500 for single White women.

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the founder and director of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Columbia University, was one of the first prominent African-American writers to ring the alarm bell about My Brother’s Keeper back in 2014 when she wrote a New York Times op/ed titled “The Girls Obama Forgot: My Brother’s Keeper Ignores Young Black Women.” (Crenshaw is also known for coining the term “intersectionality,” which describes overlapping social identities and related systems of oppression.) The following year, Crenshaw and the AAPF published a report titled “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,” which chronicled the “hidden toll of race on Black girls,” including the astonishing fact that Black girls are six times as likely as White girls to be suspended from school for the same infractions—a gap in suspension rates that dwarfs the gap between Black and White boys.

I sat down with Crenshaw in Seattle earlier this summer.

Erica C. Barnett [ECB]: Mayor Ed Murray has argued, essentially, that if the city can address the achievement gap for young Black men, the benefits will accrue to all Black students, including young women, without the need for a separate program addressing young women’s specific needs. Specifically, part of the argument is that when boys end up in jail, it destabilizes the African-American family structure and forces women to take on all the responsibilities in a family, including earning a living and taking care of kids and other family members. What do you think of the argument that addressing Black boys’ issues will ultimately help address Black girls’ problems as well?

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw: Where do I start? Trickle-down social justice doesn’t work any better than Reaganomics did. If there is a crisis with respect to Black families or Black communities, it is a crisis that can’t be fixed by trying to embrace a nostalgic desire for Ozzie and Harriet. That ship has sailed. It sailed a long time ago. What’s most important is to recognize the ways that boys and girls who are from socially marginalized groups are marginalized by a variety of factors.

Gender correction is not at the source of the solutions for African-American people or for any people. These frameworks are effectively foregrounding a framework that appeared in the 1960s, and even at that time it wasn’t really accurate to what was happening. This is [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan effectively warmed over and reproduced over 50 years later. [Moynihan, who served as assistant labor secretary under President Lyndon B. Johnson, wrote a now-infamous 1964 report called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” that argued for racial self-help and the restoration of the traditional family as the solution to racial economic inequality]. The Moynihan thesis was basically that equality would always outpace what African-Americans were able to expect as long as their family structure was non-normative. To think that the source of inequality is incomplete socialization to gender norms is to ignore a whole variety of structural and historical dynamics that impact both boys and girls, men and women.

“If there is a crisis with respect to Black families or Black communities, it is a crisis that can’t be fixed by trying to embrace a nostalgic desire for Ozzie and Harriet.”

So what about the job market? What about the under-resourcing of public schools? What about stereotypes about men and women, boys and girls? What about suspension and punishment that happens inside of schools and outside of schools? What about geographic isolation and segregation? All of these are structural, institutional, historical factors that together contribute to the wide variety of inequalities that African-Americans face? To essentially say that the problem is located in the individual, as opposed to the structure in which the individuals live, is to effectively let off the hook an entire history of subordination and do so by essentially saying that, ‘the inequality rests in you, Black boy,’ rather than in the society that constructs the situations in which people live.

ECB: If you were creating a program within a school system to address those structural inequalities more directly, what would it look like?

KWC: I think there should be targeted programs for socially marginal and struggling students, and those students come across all genders. It’s not just one gender that’s struggling. I think the measurement of what counts as a crisis is also a problem, because the conversation up ‘til now has assumed that the only students in crisis were boys.

We’ve heard all about the school-to-prison pipeline, the disproportionate suspension rates, and all that, but if you actually look at the data from the Department of Education, the disparities between girls of different races is greater than the disparity between boys. Basically, it’s the way that we frame social problems that is the problem. Assuming that the girls are doing okay, or ‘the girls can wait,’ is basically assuming that ‘whatever is going on with you is basically irrelevant; the racial disparity between you and White girls is something that isn’t the primary point of concern.’

“If you actually look at the data from the Department of Education, the disparities between girls of different races is greater than the disparity between boys.”

What we know is that the long-term consequences of being pushed out of school for girls are in some ways even more consequential over the long term, because the jobs available for girls without a high school diploma actually pay less than the jobs that are available for boys without a [high school] diploma. If you add to that the fact that the majority of Black children will, at some point in their lives, rely either wholly or in part on the income of their mothers—to ignore that, to ignore those real family formations [in exchange] for the ones that we fantasize about, is basically to say, ‘All of you can wait until we get the ideal family formation that we want.’

That kind of framing of families is almost only expressed with respect to racialized communities. Outside of that, we have a completely new idea about what counts as a family. We have a completely new idea about gender roles. But when it comes to remediation—treating Black folks as sort of in need of gender repair—we’re back to old ideas about that.

ECB: A lot of what I’ve heard from supporters of these kinds of programs is that Black women are strong; they can provide for themselves; they’re the rock for their families.

KWC: So what’s that saying? Black men and boys are weak? I think that’s the question that should get asked. Unfortunately, we have accepted this idea that there’s something uniquely vulnerable about the boy child, rather than saying, ‘okay, this is the way the entire system impacts boys and here’s the way it impacts girls.’ Sometimes they’re impacted the same, particularly relative to their White counterparts, but sometimes there are differences, too. There are a whole range of ways that girls are impacted by some of these environments that people aren’t even talking about because the point of departure is always the boy.

“It’s almost like, ‘This is a race thing, so we’re not going to apply the typical anti-patriarchy, anti-heterosexism, anti-transphobia frames to it. It’s a Black boy thing.’ And I’m wondering, okay, how can some of the same administrations have policies that are really progressive on gender and also embrace this?”

ECB: For example?

KWC: Harassment that happens in school. The way that Black girls are often framed as unruly because of a stereotype about both Black people and girls, and that comes together and it makes it more likely that Black girls will be seen as acting out, having attitude. Obviously, the consequences of single parenting are greater for girls than they are for boys. Sexual abuse is more common for girls than it is for boys. So all this stuff gets sort of swept under the rug by saying, ‘Okay, you, girl, can wait so we can create Prince Charming for you.’ We need boys and girls who actualize their best capacity. We need to create opportunities for both of them and not create this fantasy where the girls can wait until the knight in shining armor comes along. Some of them don’t want a knight.

And then you add to that: How can we even be thinking about his when we’re starting to understand that gender is fluid? It’s not just two! So how’s that work? And where are the folks who are advocating for gender diversity when it comes to these issues? Where is the gay community? It’s almost like, ‘This is a race thing, so we’re not going to apply the typical anti-patriarchy, anti-heterosexism, anti-transphobia frames to it. It’s a Black boy thing.’ And I’m wondering, okay, how can some of the same administrations have policies that are really progressive on gender and also embrace this?

Seattle is about to choose a new mayor from among two White women. Although neither of the two candidates, Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan, have expressed an opinion about Our Best specifically, both have had what Crenshaw would call “non-normative” family experiences—Moon as a single mom and Durkan as the mother of two boys with her partner, who is a woman. For now, the city’s focus will remain on young Black men, whose mass incarceration, according to Office of Economic Director Brian Surrat, has “been very destabilizing to the African American family.” Surrat acknowledges that this “sounds like a very conservative argument,” and says the city does “need to have a different set of initiatives and investments targeting young Black women and Latinas, as well as the Southeast Asian community.”

However, the city has no specific plans for such an initiative, nor any details about what it might look like. For now, the city has decided that Our Best is good enough.

 

City Council, Women

Here’s What the Council Should Ask about Gender Pay Equity

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The city council will get a briefing tomorrow on the latest report on gender pay equity, prepared by DCI Consulting Group earlier this year. The report concludes, in short, that there is no “pattern or practice of discriminatory compensation or employment practices by the City”—and that, in fact, city government is doing significantly better than the city as a whole. At the City, women make a little less than 90 cents for every male dollar; in the city, women earn an average of 73 cents for every dollar men earn. That’s an average salary of $81,059 for men, and $72,752 for men.

The report includes a lot of details (not surprising for an 836-page document), including how salaries break down by not just gender but department, part-time status, and ethnicity. It also examines what sort of jobs women tend to hold at the city (no surprises here—women are overrepresented in part-time jobs, overrepresented in the human services, human resources, and neighborhoods departments, and underrepresented in fire, police, IT, and City Light), how often they quit their jobs compared to men, and why women tend to be hired part-time far more often than men.

You can find all those details in the report itself, and in the presentation DCI will deliver to the council tomorrow, and I hope to dig through the numbers more closely later. For now, I’m going to highlight just a few that illuminate questions I think the council, and the city as a whole, should be asking about gender disparities that are happening on their watch. I’m not calling the city out for discrimination—thanks in part to a rigid “step” structure that requires specific pay for certain jobs, and in part to a fairly progressive city culture, the pay gap is far less terrible (to coin a phrase) at the City than citywide. But, as Mayor Ed Murray’s initial report on gender equity concluded back in 2014, “we can do better.” Here are some questions that might help the city map out how.

• Out of around 12,000 city employees, full- and part-time, 63 percent are men and 37 percent are women. What explanation is there, if any, for this overall hiring disparity?

• Of the ethnic/gender breakdowns considered in the report (e.g. white male, Hispanic female), six of the seven top-paid categories are men (the top-paid employees are, of course, white men), and six of the lowest-paid seven categories are women (the lowest-paid workers are Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander women). While white women make 91.3 percent of their male counterparts’ salaries, black women, for example, make 77.3 percent as much as white men, and NHPI women make just 69.6 percent of what white men make. What is the city doing, specifically, to address the intersection of gender inequity and racial inequity in pay?

• Why does DCI’s presentation emphasize the median male-female pay ratio, which is 96.7 percent (women make a median of 96.7 cents on the male dollar), instead of the less-flattering average pay ratio of 89.8 percent?

• Why does the report dedicate so much attention to “similarly situated” employees—that is, male and female employees in the same jobs—when the larger problem appears to be that women are hugely underrepresented in certain jobs and overrepresented in others? Given that the city theoretically has to pay all employees in the same position equally (every Strategic Advisor II is in the same pay band, for example), is it noteworthy that men and women with the same jobs are paid about the same? (And why is this gap, again, represented by the median gap rather than the average?)

• Although the report isn’t designed to deal with the issue of education and job preparation in society as a whole, isn’t it a little glib to spend so much time emphasizing that women aren’t “underutilized” at the city when considered in the context of the number of qualified women “available” on the job market? The conclusion that, as the report puts it, “the City has done an excellent job of hiring women and minorities in comparison to their availability in the relevant job market,” begs the question in exactly the same way as hiring managers who explain their all-male staffs by saying, “But we just couldn’t find any qualified women,” or “It’s not our fault no women applied.”

Why doesn’t the DCI report at least touch on the fact that big institutions have a responsibility to increase the pool of trained applicants put at a disadvantage because society pushes them toward low-paid caregiving jobs, or into lousy schools, rather than simply throwing up its hands and saying, “The city just could’t find many qualified women and minorities, but let’s pat ourselves on the back because at least we didn’t hire even fewer than we could have!”

Instead you get congratulatory slides like this:<

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Availability as an excuse for low hiring numbers is a self-fulfilling prophecy

• Why did the report specifically remove the Police, Fire, and City Light departments from the citywide numbers, rather than isolating those three male-dominated departments and providing specific data for them? The DCI report includes a reassuring chart demonstrating that, if you just remove police, fire, and electricity, the city’s gender pay ratio basically disappears. In this completely theoretical world where those three giant departments, which represent nearly half the city’s total workforce (around 5,000 employees) don’t exist, the pay gap magically “narrows from 89.7% to 98.2%… even before controlling for experience, specialized skills, bargaining unit, market scarcity, or tenure.

The presentation continues triumphantly:

“After removing Police, Fire & City Light from Citywide data set: Percent of females in City workforce jumps from 37% to 46%,” and “Without Police, Fire, and City Light, avg. hourly male salary in City decreases by over $ per hour but avg. hourly female salary only decreases by 70 cents.

So in a completely imaginary world where nearly half the jobs at the city are wiped out, pay is pretty equitable and the gender hiring disparity is pretty small! In the real world, meanwhile, pay isn’t equitable and the gender disparity is significant. So why are we focusing on cherry-picked data that seems designed to make the city look good? And why aren’t the abysmal numbers for the police, fire, and City Light departments not being pulled out and emphasized? (Women, for example, hold just 3.6 percent of the police department’s “premium pay assignments,” such as canine, hostage negotiation, and SWAT duties, and three premium SPD assignments—SWAT, diver, and police academy instructor, which total about 75 positions—are held exclusively by men.<

The consultants present their report in tomorrow's 9:30 council briefings meeting in council chambers.