If the city discontinued using millions of tax payer dollars in punitive activities towards the unsheltered such as destroying peoples personal items and forcing them to move around the streets they would have more $ for decent shelter.

They have admitted that they provide little healthy options for the unsheltered other than harassment and death in the streets.

As an aside, I'm always curious why the choice is made to sell the land, rather than turn it over as a long-term (e.g. 99 year) lease. I doubt whether owning the land vs. owning a decades-long lease makes much difference to the property developer. Chances are whatever is built on the property would be torn down long before the lease expired. And then, future generations still have an asset that remains in the hands of the city.

Better check back later to see if they actually spent the money on public housing. There's also a small issue of where 'affordable land' is. I know King County has been attempting to buy and construct more public housing in semi-affluent areas because it has been well demonstrated that when you concentrate all the poor people in a couple of neighborhoods you end up with under-performing school districts and further entrenching poverty.

@3:

Seattle City Light already offers some of the lowest electricity rates in the country, due primarily to the fact that it's a publicly-owned, non-profit utility AND owns most of its own power-generating and transmission infrastructure. In addition, it's been 100% carbon-neutral since 2005. Why would you expect a private, for-profit utility to do better, especially when the evidence shows both have about the same outcomes in terms of cost, efficiency, and delivery of services - AND SCL is already doing better-than-average in all of those areas already?

In short, if it ain't broke why "fix" it?

https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/private-versus-public-electricity-distribution-utilities-are-outcomes-different-end-users

How the hell did we end up with Mayor Jerkan?

This is possibly the most short-sighted capitalist decision I’ve ever heard of.

How much is Mayor Jerkan being paid for this? This is a lot of land that we could lease or recycle rather than sell to the lowest bidder.

@7 - Here's an experiment. Go to California and sign up with PG & E. See what your rates are. Then take a look at how many forest fires their "well-managed" operations are causing. I've lived in both service areas and can tell you that City Light wins hands-down for service and keeping rates down.

Knee-jerk privatization is not the answer (although privatizing prisons & ICE detention was sure a good idea, no?)

This should fuck up the Dexter bike lane for half a decade (more).

It's hard to say anything, I'm all for density but I also know Seattle politicians are "in bed" with developers. I just hope they build thousands of new parking spots in those buildings along Mercer so commuters can bitch until it reaches an inaudible pitch.

@3, @7 - you're subscribing to the underpants gnomes theory of capitalism

Step 1: Privatize the thing
Step 2: ¯(ツ)/¯
Step 3: Everything is better now

RE: the sale - honestly, I think this is pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. They got a good price ($175 / developable sq ft as opposed to the going rate of $150), added some requirements around affordable units, and got out of the development business for the most part (just monitoring contract terms being met at this point). Clean break.

The long term effects remain to be seen.

One only has the look at the empty lot where the Public Safety Building stood to see how abysmal the city is at real estate development. It’s been empty for probably twenty years.

And while I don’t think City Light should be sold off (and not only because I work there. Rates wouldn’t be any lower if there’s an investor class to satisfy, and the city’s franchise tax would probably be tripled) I think I should be taken out from under the city council and governed by an elected utility board.

@7:

Inre: liquor sales, well, actually that's a very good example of what happens when something previously run as a public/government service is privatized. People are paying more - a LOT more - for booze these days, but the trade-off is that they aren't "inconvenienced" by only being able to buy booze at state-run stores during their set business hours. Is convenience more important than price? Some would say "yes" others (such as myself) "no", but I think the comparison is still apt. We haven't really gained anything other than increased access, and we've lost a great deal in terms of how much extra we now have to pay in exchange for that access.

@16 Disagree, not just the convenience the selection is way better now..

I don't mind paying more for the better choices including some very good locally produced product.

@16 I don't know if 'convenience' was the primary reason for closing the state run stores. I for one am on principle opposed to the perversely puritanical basis for states being in the liquor retail business, mostly a relic of the prohibition (or rather immediately post-prohibition) era. I think they went needlessly overboard with the taxes in a dubious effort to compensate for lost state revenue, but I'm willing to pay more if that's what we had to accept in order to jettison a ludicrous vestige from the age of temperance hysteria.

@17:

The selection may be better if you prefer bottom-shelf or generic brands in 1.5 liter plastic containers, but unless I go to one of the higher volume booze specialty stores such as Wine World or BevMo, most of the Single Malts and small-batch rums I prefer are nowhere to be found on grocery shelves, whereas they were readily available at pretty much every WSLC store pre-conversion. And of course they cost about 25 - 40% more than they did under the old system, because they have to maintain profit-margin on what tend to be relatively slow-sellers.

Is there a downside to this?

@4 this is a city that can't bring itself to tear down the woefully underheight Showbox space. Any developer would piss on a 99-year lease.

@19 - Here's the key part of your capitalist fantasy: "...just imagine if we got a few billion dollars for SCL and then got our power at the same or lower rates. " Sure, I'll buy the "same or lower rates part." And the new private utility owners are going to make me breakfast in bed, too.

Let's look at another private company that owns a utility type service here. Let's call them, say, "Comcast." Everyone in town is, of course, delighted with their rates and service.

I am not sure why you think any investor-owned company is not going to squeeze every dollar they can out of their rate base. No idea where this hypothetical rate cut would come from. I realize that the hypothetical non-City LIght would be subject to regulation by a utility rate commission, but you can't tell me that they could not figure out how to justify a few more dollars here and there.

I have always had good responsive service from City Light. They are generally run in an environmentally friendly manner. I don't understand why you want to mess with that.

@19:

If you had bothered to review the data on the link I provided in @6 above, you would see that rates do not in fact tend lower in private versus public power utilities.

The question I addressed had specifically to do with Seattle City Light, not Con-Ed or PG&E, so characterizing this as "simplistic" appears to just be your way of trying to throw the argument into a completely different venue that was never intended. As the results of the study to which I linked more than aptly demonstrate, privatization won't change any of your hypothetical outcomes to any significant degree; and in fact would most likely result in an increase in rates, because private utilities have to generate profit for investors, something public utilities are not obligated to do; and in fact they stand a better chance of maintaining lower rates, because they tend to sink any excess revenue into maintaining and upgrading infrastructure, and improving deliverables, rather than having to use it to bolster shareholder value. You seem to be staking out the position that Privately-owned is always > than Publicly-owned, which, in this instance at least (and I would posit in most others where there is a large public interest in outcomes) is simply not born out by the evidence.

As for liquor stores, well the higher tax rate was another of the trade-offs made in exchange for privatization, as the State had to use this as a means to to recoup the revenue it was losing as a result of no longer controlling sales. You can kvetch all you want about how unfair that is, but that's the price people said they were willing to pay in order to be able to buy large plastic jugs of Monarch Vodka at 1:45 a.m. on a Sunday.

mistral dear, I wouldn't be accusing people of having a "child's understanding" of anything if I were you - especially the utility industry.

City Light's electricity is something like 90% hydro. Roughly half of that comes from the utility-owned sources, and the other half from the Bonneville Power Administration, which sells power to public utilities at lower prices than investor-owned utilities.

What is putting upward pressure on rates is not labor (SCL generally pays lower salaries than other utilities here in the region), but the reduced value of hydro-produced energy on the open market. For decades, hydro was one of the cheapest generation sources out there, and SCL kept rates low by selling power to California. With the onset of largely unregulated fracked natural gas, that messed everything up. Hydro is still a better deal than coal, but not by much. And California doesn't need as much power, thanks to cheap to construct and operate natural gas peaking plants, the growth of renewables and energy efficiency.

In Seattle, where building codes and conservation programs are very aggressive, customers are using much less electricity than they did a generation ago, which also has a negative effect on rates.

Sale of SCL to a larger utility might mean certain economies of scale, but it would wreak havoc on the city budget (many programs are directly or indirectly funded by the utitlities, and they are contributors to the general fund) as well as the city's pension obligations. Local taxes would have be be increased because of the loss of that revenue, and many popular programs - such as the utility discount program - would disappear.

I wouldn't call SCL "bloated", and I agree that there is room for improvement on the management level (another reason to get the utilities out from under the council and mayor's office). But the alternative is just silly. You'd literally be killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Piling onto this tangent—as far as utilities go, Seattle City Lights is a dream. In addition to reasonable rates, SCL haven't caused a massive catastrophe* every 5 or so years like my current (publicly traded) power provider, PG&E.

*Most recently, the a) San Bruno pipeline explosion, 8 dead (a miracle considering the damage), PG&E found negligent; and, b) the Camp fire, 85 dead, PG&E found negligent again.

Mistral derailed any conversation about this large property sale that extremely undervalued the land by mentioning some bullshit idea about selling a public utility. And you guys took the bait.

Good job.

Meanwhile, Mayor Jerkan is still going to sell valuable land in the hopes of getting a little bit of a one-time payment to address the homeless problem if only she can keep her grubby mitts off it.

@24-26

There's really no arguing with this guy. He's a satisfied Comcast customer, and he wants the same low rates and quality customer service from his electricity provider.

TheMisanthrope dear, we were just having a little fun with our slog. But I'll bring it back around to my original point.

The Seattle Public Safety Building lot has been empty since 2005 while the city tries to be a real estate developer. They've floated various plans, but the hand wringers have wrung their hands over the lack of "affordable housing". Murray had a plan, but it was discovered that there was some shady dealings associated with it. So the lot still sits there, some of the most valuable land in the nation, off the tax rolls.

Durkan is smart to just sell off surplus property, because city government - or rather the political class of city government - has shown the they are incapable of acting in a a rational manner when it comes to development of surplus property.

@27 Back on track then— It's not like the city sold off a public park or school building, 800 Mercer is literally just weeds and gravel bringing in zero income for the city. I didn't know the history of it that @29 pointed out, but cities are generally terrible and projects like this. It would probably sit empty as one project after another suffers a death by committee until the next economic downturn, at which point they might let it go for a steal. No better time to offload it than now.