It’s another one of those moments where Vancouver and Seattle undertake similar initiatives to respond to similar problems – in this case, both city’s mayors have launched task forces on affordable housing.
Ansel Herz in The Slog makes an intriguing point about the composition of the Seattle committee, quoting Sightline’s Alan Durning, also a member.
Will Mayor Ed Murray’s housing affordability advisory committee—charged with tackling the city’s housing crisis—stand up for Seattle’s renters, given its make-up? Though the committee appears pretty evenly balanced between developers and housing affordability advocates, the mayor doesn’t seem to have appointed many low-income renters, as I point out in last week’s paper.
That’s one way of analyzing the make-up of the 28-member committee, and of course there are others. … Alan Durning actually felt more surprised—and gratified, he told me during our interview—to have not found anyone on the committee representing NIMBYs (generally older, richer, whiter neighborhood activist homeowners). That’s notable, he told me, because they’re “a key part of the city’s housing politics.”
Durning took to his organization’s website to lament the council’s decision on microhousing and offer an analysis of who actually influences the city’s housing policy—and to what end. In the process, he made that good point about what he thinks is really lacking on Mayor Murray’s committee: voices from major employers.
Why is this lack of major employer voices a problem?The question reminds me of an essay that urban aficionado David Sucher wrote in 1998, when then-mayor Paul Schell organized a summit on housing affordability. Sucher wrote “Who really wants Affordable Housing? In terms of politics, basically no one.” Homeowners, mortgage lenders, investors, realtors, builders, property-tax-dependent governments, neighborhood associations: they all want housing prices to just keep rising, Sucher argued. He’s got a point. The local power blocs that have a big financial stake in housing affordability are renters and employers, and neither goes to bat to increase the supply of rental housing.
No Seattle-like major employers in Vancouver, you note? Durning covers that in his Sightline Daily post:
True, Boeing and Microsoft don’t employ many people in the aPodment (microsuite) demographic, but other large employers do. The biggest employers in the neo-rooming house districts of Seattle—Capitol Hill and the University District—are hospitals and universities, and they employ huge numbers of low- and medium-wage workers. …
The housing task force is notably lacking in representatives of major employers. When a Stranger reporter asked recently if the number of real-estate developers on the panel was troubling, I wish I’d said, “I’m more concerned that no one from human resources at Safeway or Swedish Hospital is on the list.”
Until we develop a power bloc—not just a righteous band of urbanists, sustainability wonks, real-estate developers, and advocates for low-income workers—I’m afraid elected leaders will keep getting spooked by NIMBYs.
