- Ansel Herz
- The second of HALA’s public meetings, held last night at the Garfield Community Center.
People give a shit about Seattle’s affordability crisis. Enough to pack a room and talk housing data with city officials on a cold Thursday evening after work at a community center. About 65 people—that’s like, more than five dozen human beings—showed up last night at the Garfield Community Center for the second of a series of public meetings hosted by Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda committee. (Known as HALA, pronounced Holla!)
I arrived late, so how do I know that about 65 people participated? As one attendee pointed out, public meetings have come a long way from their previous life as low-tech, plodding affairs. In this one, city staffers handed out wireless electronic voting buttons, then asked the audience to vote in a series of questions about housing affordability.
The questions and the answer choices are a bit leading. For example: “Would you be comfortable with increased density in your neighborhood if housing prices were more affordable?” In answer to that question, 54 out of 68, or 80 percent, said yes.
Nearly half of the attendees said they were from the Capitol Hill/Central Seattle area and about one third were between the ages of 26-35.
Twenty-four out of 64 respondents, when asked to describe their housing situations, chose, “I rent housing and struggle to afford my rent.” And they chose, by wide margins, displacement and surging housing prices as their top two concerns related to growth.
- Ansel Herz
- Rental costs are on the rise. (Click to enlarge.)
A series of placards were placed around the outside of the room, some with housing infographics and others with invitations to stick on post-it notes. “In a six year period,” said one, posted by Jaimie Stroble, who works for a local nonprofit, “I had to move 9 times.”
Stroble told me that a few years ago, she came back from studying abroad during college to her U-District apartment, only to find that the landlord had cut her lease short by three months in order to re-develop the building. Suddenly, she said, she “had to find a room at the last minute.” She lamented that tenants are kind of fucked by the power imbalance between them and their landlords.
Another attendee, who asked not to be named because she works for a housing provider, said she appreciated all the data on display, but was disappointed that the presenters didn’t discuss the solutions she’s interested in: tenant-controlled housing, rent-stabilized (or “rent controlled,” depending on your preferred parlance) housing, income-restricted housing, and land trusts. Are those ideas under consideration? One hopes. Committee co-chair David Wertheimer told me last month that no housing solution is off-limits from discussion.
The next public meeting is at Olympic View Elementary in Northgate (map)
Thursday on December 4, from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. You can also holla at HALA—I’m going to keep saying that because it’s fun, and because the public wasn’t given as much of a chance to holler at previous minimum wage and transportation committees convened by the mayor—online at the bottom of this page.