Taking into account that the November electorate differs somewhat from primary voters, I’ll predict that both Sawant and Burgess will be reelected. Godden, 83, isn’t the dynamic force on the council (was she ever?) voters are looking for to deal with our rapidly evolving city, and whether or not she makes it into the general election, she’s been sent into retirement.I have mixed feelings about Sawant. The historically stodgy city council needs a shaker. She’s bringing life to a somnolent body. I don’t care that she’s a Trotskyite, because she’s not a council majority by herself, and can’t legislate anything without the support of several other council members. The $15 minimum wage is a useful piece of legislation, and it wouldn’t have happened without her.
Housing is a different problem. Newbies are coming to Seattle for jobs, including high-paying tech jobs, and unless enough new housing is built to accommodate them, Seattle housing will turn into a game of musical chairs, in which some people of lesser means inevitably will get displaced by those with more means. Rent control can’t and won’t affect either of these outcomes, because regulating rents doesn’t alleviate the underlying housing shortage.
Housing supply and affordability, while interrelated, are two distinct problems and issues. You can’t get away from the limited supply (and high cost) of land, or building costs, through legislation and policymaking. It’s much easier (within limits) to address housing affordability on the income side (e.g., by mandating higher wages) than on the pricing side (e.g., by mandating lower rents), because there’s no magic wand anyone can wave to lower costs.
There are certain things you can do with policy, for example by increasing density, that could make more housing units available given the available land; and those things should be done. You can perhaps have some limited impact on affordability by providing housing subsidies with public funds, but those resources are limited and far short of the need. In the final analysis, employers will have to pay workers enough to be able to live here, and if they don’t, those workers will leave the area and those jobs will go unfilled.
It’s not difficult for Sawant to tap into the high level of frustration, especially among younger voters, with Seattle’s housing crisis. (And Seattle DOES have a housing crisis. So does the nation as a whole, but it’s exacerbated here.) It’ll be much harder for her, or any other politician, to deliver real solutions. We can’t build a fence around Seattle to keep the migrants out. We can’t dictate lower land and construction costs. We can’t keep migrants coming here for high-paying tech jobs from waging bidding wars for apartments, condos, and homes. You maybe can prevent landlords from raising rents or converting apartments to condos by legislating against those things, but you’re still going to end up with more people seeking housing than the city can provide, and you’ll still have people who are left standing when the music stops.
I don’t claim to have a societal solution. I do have a nifty personal solution to my personal housing problem that works very well for me, but doesn’t solve the problem for anyone else. I don’t have a rent problem, because I own my digs. I don’t have an affordability problem, because I bought my house 25 years ago and paid it off, so my only housing expenses now are taxes, utilities, and insurance, which amount to roughly half of what Seattle renters are currently paying for a 1-bedroom apartment if they can find one. This is great for me, and is my reward for foresight and wise financial management, but it doesn’t solve anyone else’s housing problem.
This morning’s Seattle Times has an anecdotal story about a guy who left Michigan for a Seattle job, and ended up buying a Queen Anne house 1/2 the size of his Michigan digs and 3 times as expensive. That’s the reality of living and working in Seattle for new arrivals or young people starting out. Once upon a time, I was in those shoes. Housing was dauntingly expensive then, too. There was no silver-bullet solution then, either. I couldn’t go to my state employer and demand higher pay because it’s hard to live in Seattle on a public salary. (Well, I could have, but I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.) The only practical suggestion I can make is do what I did: Pay up, stay put, and pay it off. Think 30 years ahead. Someday you won’t be able to work anymore, and when that day comes, you’d damn well better have achieved the immunity from soaring housing costs that mortgage-free ownership confers if you want to spend your old age in this city.
I hope Roger is wrong about Sawant.
The question is how many votes can she get? A better questions is how many Swantistas are there? This is an affluent part of town .. ranging from working class people in the the ethnically mixed Central Area to the high salaried Amazon renters living along Broadway to the established neighborhoods that stretch from East Boston to the shores of Lake Washington. Most of that population is very different from the Seattle Community College crowd Sawant organized brilliantly to support her $15 minimum wage crusade.
The 8000 votes she got on August may represent most of the part of the red shirts who live in District 3.
Sawant’s red shirted throng is highly organized and does a great job of door belling but she spent $50 per vote to get to 50%. This was almost all money from outside her District ..all but 8% of her donors live outside her District!
Even that huge amount of money for a local City Council Race does not include in kind contributions from her outside support, most of that being outside of Seattle .. her Socialist Alternative Party, the SEIU, and other labor groups.
An inside source tells me that Sawant may be able to spend even more on the final election. As incredible as it seems, her money per vote could total $100!
So Pam Banks challenge is likely to come down to money.