Running for Seattle City Council here in District 3 was one of the more interesting, challenging, and fun experiences of my life. But also it has given me a unique insight into our current candidates, Egan Orion and Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant, as I spent many hours across many forums listening to them answer similar questions and refine their positions.
Sawant, for example, is a master pivoter. At forums, she keeps a short list of points on a sheet of paper and picks one as her answer to any question. My favorite pivot as at the MASS Coalition forum where her answer to the question, “Do we need more public toilets?” was “Rent control!”
Having watched both Orion and Sawant refine, revise, and repeat their talking points and positions, fend off attacks, respond to many different audiences, I gained an insight into what each of them values, what they hold constant, and which positions they bend to suit the audience. With that perspective, I’m endorsing and supporting Orion, because he has always emphatically and consistently supported tackling Seattle’s most important issue.
Seattle has one issue that looms large over many others facing us: everything, especially housing, is too damn expensive. Fully 33 percent of Seattle’s working-family households are cost-burdened, meaning their rent is over 30 percent of their income. Seattle’s median income is over $93,000, while households in neighboring bedroom communities such as Renton, Kent, and Federal Way are all making under $80,000. This isn’t a good thing. It means lower wage workers are being squeezed out of our city. Worse, many of those who are marginalized, be it by circumstance, mental illness, or addiction, end up squeezed out of housing entirely and homeless on our streets.
This problem is as urgent as its solution is simple: we have too few homes for the number of people who live and work here. In the last eight years, we added over 100,000 new jobs to downtown Seattle alone, but only added 46,000 housing units citywide. Where are these new workers and their families supposed to live?! We’ve seen what happens: higher paid families squeeze out lower paid ones as everyone desperately bids up the prices for limited housing units.
Tens of thousands of our neighbors are desperate for affordable housing in this city, and thousands are newly experiencing hardship or poverty every year because of it. We can’t wait, we need more housing. The decision to have more housing in Seattle—or not—lies 100 percent with the City Council. Right now they’ve chosen to make it illegal to build new housing units in over 70 percent of the city. Our population is booming, but, since modern families are smaller, that 70 percent of land has fewer residents than it did 50 years ago!
Orion gets this. From the beginning of his campaign, he has supported more housing in 100 percent of Seattle. Like me, he supports at least allowing quadplexes citywide, a policy that will end our housing shortage and give everyone who works here, regardless of income, a place to live in our city. Orion also supports changing the incentives to encourage more development of family-sized units in new duplexes, triplexes, and apartment buildings so that parents can afford to raise their children here.
These forms of housing were banned in most of the city starting about 70 years ago as a deliberate attempt to keep people of color out of majority-white neighborhoods by making housing unaffordable to working class people. It has worked all too well, and to this day, 70 percent of the city is reserved for million dollar homes. Sawant says she supports upzoning in the abstract, but only Orion has been bold enough to explicitly commit to reversing this injustice.
By contrast, Sawant has a middling-to-poor track record on addressing our housing shortage. During her six-year tenure, the city developed a 30,000-unit housing shortage, displacing tens of thousands of residents. When the Council was deliberating Mandatory Housing Affordability, Sawant was largely absent. When it passed (with her vote of approval), her statement on the bill boiled down to, “it’s better than nothing,” but did she lift a finger to try and unwind the racism and classism in the zoning code? No.
When she bullied through the Council a moratorium on redevelopment of the Showbox, she displaced over 1,000 people from the city that would have lived in those 442 new units. As recently as the Seattle Club forum three weeks ago, Sawant was refusing to take on our housing shortage. Twice, the moderators asked about revising single-family zoning in Seattle. Twice, Orion took the tough position that it’s time for more housing in the single-family zones. Twice, Sawant demurred she wouldn’t commit to anything beyond vague “upzones.” Sawant has never gone to the mat for new housing the way she’s gone to the mat to block it. To me, she hasn’t demonstrated she has the interest, capability, or inclination to solve the greatest, most pressing problem facing our city the only way that can deliver results: unlocking the 70 percent of the city that the Council has reserved for wealthy white people.
Dozens of people are squeezed out of housing in Seattle every day. We cannot afford to delay adding all types of housing. I was asked online who’s vote I trust more to be on the Planning and Land Use Committee. After spending many hours with both our candidates in D3, the choice is clear. I unequivocally support Orion over Sawant. I think you should, too.