If 3d District reelects Sawant, you'll deserve the kind of Seattle you get from her and her ilk. Pass an income tax! Pass a wealth tax! Watch Seattle turn into Detroit before your very eyes.

"in my great and unmatched wisdom..."

Credit where due, that was pretty freaking funny. Well played, dumbass, well played.

I don't believe Detroit had a wealth tax. Now look at 'em.

Massive rent control! That'll guarantee plenty of older apartment renovation and new construction! Housing crisis solved!

My major problem with the cutesy crosswalks is that they put way the heck more paint on the roads and paint is slippery. This is also a problem with the painted green bike lanes. It seems like the paint compounds they use in Seattle are getting better, but on a wet day you can still definitely tell the difference in traction on a bike or especially on a motorcycle. The version in Iowa that is shown in the NYT article is fine though since it just changes the color instead of laying down more paint.

I belong to a Facebook page for Vintage Seattle (old pictures and whatnot) and it has recently become infected with people like Our Dear Swiftress. Indeed, one of their favorite assertions is that Seattle is, right now, just like Detroit.

They also have an obsession with poop, and seem to think that no one pooped in Seattle before 2010.

I'm no fan of Sawant - mostly because I think she's sort of a nitwit - but I'm under no allusions that she is driving Seattle to become Detroit.

The irony is that it was the mighty market that made Detroit “Detroit.” It was cheap over seas outsourcing, competition from foreign auto makers, union busting, and of course white flight. Not socialist council members. But the very force these blithering racist shitbag Trolls and sock puppets fetishize.

Just like it’s unchecked market forces driving Seattle to become an unaffordable mess that the very second there is the inevitable market contraction it will also indeed face a reckoning. Markets have no loyalty.

And allowing our local billionaire class to go on throwing their weight around, carefully lining their golden compounds and sewing their golden parachutes, without also meaningfully contributing to the city they exploit would be foolish in the extreme.

Markets pop because that is the nature of markets. Socialists or no socialists.

So get the money while it’s here.

@10 -Sawant is not driving Seattle to become Detroit. She is driving it to be, for example Berkeley in the '80s, where people who already had apartments became the big winners because their rents woudn't go up and everyone else lost. No new apartments were being brought onto the market, the existing rental stock was in terrible shape, and no one else could find a place to live. Landlords were resorting to "finders' fees" to make their money, which made moving into a new place even MORE expensive (if you cold even find a vacancy). This is the disaster toward which the Scarfed Menace drives us.

@13 “Detroit” is dipshit code for “I’m afraid of black people.”

Like “Chicago gun violence” and “gangs.”

@12 Oh. Come on. You omit the biggest recession since the depression up until that point from 1980-1982? Berkley was hit especially hard. Remember the measure passed in Berkeley in 1978. But it didn’t go into effect until 1980. Right at the start of the recession.

There were no apartments being built almost anywhere along the CA coast during that time.

Then of course as the economy recovered in 83 you had an unprecedented population boom in Silicon Valley. There would never be enough housing stock built quickly enough on a constrained geographical area during that kind of boom.

So. Come on.

@1 is correct, and I'll be glad to vote for her

Ohs noes! A mostly white country makes it more difficult for foreign immigrants to suck from the teat of their welfare state!?!

Sounds like it’s a policy for you racist rightwing shitbags for sure!

BUILD THAT RENT CONTROL!

If you’ve got enough extra cash to print up signs like that, you can afford rent control.

So why would I vote for somebody who's platform has to do with state, not city law? Maybe it's because they have no interest in governing and just like their soap box.

@15- I'm talking about 88, long after that recession. And even in the face of the Silicon Valley boom you discuss, people were not investing in Berkeley's housing. Wouldn't you expect that such a boom would inspire people to build new apartments and invest in the ones they had? The apartments that people I knew lived in mostly looked like crap. And it was very hard to find one if you were a new arrival. The law, as I understand it, was designed to prevent the cheap areas from being gentrified. So be it. They did manage to preserve some nice ghettos. And what was being built was in the neighboring cities.