What Does The Seattle Election Mean For Housing? Unfortunately, Not Much.

Seattle had an election recently that has been touted by one side as a “whupping” of the progressive left and as the result of “media fear mongering” by the other side. Fought largely over homelessness and last years street protests, the analysis of the results is predicable. Those who lean toward “cleaning up the mess” felt vindicated. Those who see the solution to encampments as more money squeezed from businesses saw the outcome as a result of manipulation by the “right wing.” Each of these zero-sum takes, of course, are wrong, missing the point that voters frequently do vote to “send a message,” but that message, especially in Seattle, is usually against something rather than for something. The former does not indicate the latter. It’s worth a look at some history.

In general, city government needs a mayor with a strong clear vision for the future and a firm footing on what has gone before. Lacking that, a city needs to be well run. Voters will forgive lack of vision if city government functions well for them; when it doesn’t, they’ll lash out. Voters can’t impose a vision, but they can shake up the Etch a Sketch. This has been the pattern in Seattle for most of the last 30 years. This history is my take from having watched and been in city government for that period; it is based on lived experience.

The 80s and 90s: Process and Bureaucracy

In 1989, 12-year incumbent Charlie Royer was succeeded by Seattle’s first African American Mayor, Norm Rice. Rice was a member of the City Council, was charismatic, and was as invested in the status quo as it was in him. When I first arrived in Seattle politics, Rice was hugely popular and presided over city government without controversy. When there was a dust up over a parking garage downtown, Rice and the council weathered the storm.

Most important during the Rice era was the beginning of neighborhood planning, a response to the passage of the Growth Management Act (GMA). What is important about GMA to this day is its mandate to avert low-density sprawl by pushing growth into cities, including Seattle. Many neighbors resented this, but Rice’s answer was to take away the question of whether growth would come and replace it with an emphasis on a process to engage mostly single-family neighbors on how growth would look. This led to what some people felt was numbing and endless process, derisively termed in years ahead as the “Seattle Process.”

As plodding as it was and seemed, it worked. By the end of Rice’s time in office, 1997, the city had spent most of the decade planning for growth, not fighting it. Outsider Charlie Chong’s candidacy for mayor was crushed by long time insider and former real estate developer Paul Schell, a mayor who would end up being the champion of neighborhood plan implementation. Voters in that election affirmed what was working, a slow, steady but stable process to absorb and deal with growth. It was inclusive but had a certain outcome, more housing, development, and growth in the city.

2001: Bureaucracy Beats Chaos

Last summer’s chaotic Seattle streets captured national attention. But this wasn’t the only time tear gas and smoke-filled Seattle’s streets and the national imagination. Remember the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999 held in Seattle? Along with the chaos that swept the streets in 1999, there was a very public beating death in the streets of Pioneer Square, and Mayor Schell’s canceling of New Year’s Eve celebrations in 2001. About a month later the city had an earthquake. A week after the 9/11 attacks, the city had another earthquake: Mayor Schell failed to make it out of the primary election.

This would be the first time in contemporary times that a Seattle Mayor would be punished for perceived or real incompetence. Were all the things that happened in 1999, 2000, and 2001 the fault of Schell? Not really? But his response showed a lack of preparedness. People voted Schell out resoundingly because they wanted a return to something predictable. Schell seemed weak and out of touch. When they embraced Greg Nickels in November, they chose a long time County Councilmember and lifelong politician. Did they embrace Nickels’ vision for the city? Probably not. I don’t remember that he really had one.

King County government was a paragon of machine-like bureaucratic top-down process. The same GMA that pushed growth into cities also incentivized incorporation, leaving the County government with many large swaths of low-value land that produced little tax revenue. Nickels was a politician who had little actual power at the county but who delivered with good constituent service and mastery of the Democratic power structure.

2001-2009: Competence and Predictability

Nickels did two important things when he became mayor, delegated authority to competent staff and he chose to focus on big issues. Nickels was a leader for regional light rail, something that Seattle had never been able to accomplish before. And he was an early and relentless supporter of addressing climate change. These things kept him in the media as a visionary, while his deputy mayor ruled the details with a tight fist. Nickels could always come across as the “good guy” while his efficient staff delivered results and picked sure bets that would reflect positively on the Mayor.

Seattle hardly ever gets big snow storms, but anyone who remembers the snowfall of December of 2008 and was paying attention to politics, knows that it meant the end of Nickels political career. As with Schell’s swarm of problems, the mayor can’t be blamed for the storm, but the gridlock and chaos created by Seattle’s complete lack of snow removal equipment created a fatal backlash. When the mayor climbed out of a City owned SUV wearing tasseled loafers to talk to reporters he was finished.

Nickels became the second mayor in a row to be defeated in a crowded primary election, a stunning rejection of chaos. The two candidates left standing were a light weight cell phone salesman and a bike riding environmental activist, Mike McGinn. Mike McGinn had a low-budget and earnest campaign anchored to his opposition to a massive tunnel project to replace the crumbling viaduct highway damaged by the earthquake in 2001. Did voters vote for McGinn and against the tunnel? Hardly. McGinn stood for something while his opponent did not. McGinn won because he had a vision, not because of what that vision was. The tunnel was built and is functioning without controversy today.

2009-2013: “Three Feet and a Cloud of Dust”

I was a big supporter of McGinn in 2009. Still, I called him the Pig Pen of Seattle politics. He lacked discipline of message, approach, and execution. Everywhere he went he created a big cloud of dust, but by the time he moved on, and the dust settled, things mostly went back to the way they were before he walked in the door. In stark contrast to the very disciplined and efficient Nickels administration, the McGinn years were marked by improvisation and even bumbling. He hired a guy who had a fake PhD, sat down in the Council Chambers like he was just another Councilmember, announced a major bond initiative while the City Council was in session down the street, and even somehow tried to mail his election ballot for a school bond election in interoffice mail.

By the time the shenanigans were brought under control, it was too late. McGinn was seen as hopelessly unable to run the city. Again, it was chaotic. And when it came to housing policy, McGinn didn’t deliver changes to zoning and land use that matched his high-flying rhetoric on climate change. He presided over the end of affordable microhousing, small-lot development, and the rise of a mob rule approach to new development that empowered NIMBYs all across the city, distinctly not the approach that was needed to counter rising housing prices as the economy recovered from the collapse of 2008. So, in 2013, the same year the city elected a socialist to the City Council, it fired Mike McGinn. Once again, the story was Seattle voters saying what they did not want, chaos and uncertainty from City Hall.

2013: Novelty and the Land of the Blind

By 2013, Washington state had passed a measure legalizing gay marriage and recreational marijuana and had voted overwhelmingly for Barak Obama. I remember people saying that they were “proud” of these votes. I’m convinced that Seattle voters were a bit drunk with this “pride” when they voted to elect Kshama Sawant to city council over seasoned veteran Richard Conlin. Having a socialist in city government would be a nice addition to the city’s political charm bracelet. It would be the last time Sawant would stand for election city wide because the city would shift to district elections and she would subsequently run in the leftist enclave of Capitol Hill, the location of the now infamous Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) Zone.

But the voters also elected to replace McGinn with a more conservative state senator Ed Murray, who would go on to become Seattle’s 4^th failed mayor in a row when he was consumed by a scandal involving his abuse of minor 30 years ago. But before that happened, Murray countered the pressure from Sawant to raise the minimum wage to $15 by treating the proposal as if it was legislation in Olympia, the state’s capitol. He put people in a room and locked the doors, demanding that all the different interest groups arrive at a compromise so something could be passed. This is typical at the legislature, but at the city level it seemed coercive to many participants. And Murray was quick to frustration and anger when he didn’t get his way.

In the end, the interest groups, Mayor, and Council agreed on a phased plan for raising the minimum wage. At the same time, NIMBY groups were fomenting opposition to microhousing and development of houses on small-lots in single-family neighborhoods. Oddly, these NIMBYs grafted themselves on to the social foment around minimum wage and social justice, arguing that their opposition to new housing was about affordability: new housing isn’t cheap and therefore it isn’t affordable! By 2015 there was a mob mentality forming about how to manipulate City Hall; show up with enough people making enough noise and with enough signs, and the Council would capitulate.

As the saying goes, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Sawant had and has a vision of communism for Seattle. She has terrible ideas, especially about housing. But she has ideas. Her colleagues on the Council when faced with angry mobs started to respond to them, rudderless, carried by the growing tide of rancor in the Council Chambers every week. Council members would sit for hours being yelled at by Sawant’s assembled mob, meekly assert their discomfort with that behavior, then vote versions of Sawant’s notions – like banning eviction based on the calendar – out of Council unanimously.

Jenny Durkan: Another Failed Mayor

Former United States Attorney Jenny Durkan was touted by many as the “adult in the room,” a stabilizing presence in the face of yet again more chaos and shenanigans at City Hall. Some people even said she was “pro-business” whatever that means. I knew otherwise and said so publicly after the election. Durkan had handed the keys to the chicken coop over to the fox, Paul Lambros head of the sprawling Plymouth Housing Group, a non-profit housing agency. Plymouth and Lambros were the beneficiaries of the inflationary Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning scheme, an extortionary policy aimed at essentially taxing new housing development then pouring that cash on grossly inefficient non-profits like Plymouth. I said,

“Lambros is a huge red flag, and the choice indicates exactly what I was concerned about: Durkan has bought into the non-profit housing industrial complex. Lambros is a signer of the so called “Grand Bargain,” a deal between big downtown developers and non-profits like Lambros’ to shake down market rate developers to fund his projects, housing that is ringing in at as much as $500,000 per unit.”

The reaction was swift, and I was under tremendous pressure and threat from some developer funders who were terrified that the new Mayor would somehow take vengeance on their permits and who truly believed she was on their side. But she never was. In a post after I survived the reprisals, I said this about the new regime at City Hall,

“We simply have to stop thinking that by being nice and collegial to the Mayor and Council will result in them doing the right thing; in fact, when we don’t confront them for their bad actions, we’re sending a clear message that we’re ok with it. Being co-dependent with the cash addicted non-profits and the Mayor and Council that do their bidding is not the answer. Being principled, sending a clear message that we won’t sit still for bad housing policy, and building relationships with others outside the Seattle bubble will.”

This was after Durkan agreed to go with a tax on employees pushed by Councilmembers like Sawant who not only wanted the money but wanted to punish companies like Amazon for creating jobs. And it didn’t stop there. Later, the Council rushed ahead with what they called the “Amazon Tax,” a boondoggle based on the idea that new jobs cause homelessness. After public outcry, the Council repealed the measure only to pass it yet again during the rioting after the death of George Floyd.

Durkan was sort of an accidental Mayor, and if she was the “adult in the room” she was the babysitter that was too busy texting her friends to notice that the kids had set the curtains on fire. When a city park was occupied by protestors and business owners were complaining about the mess on Capitol Hill, Durkan said it might be the “summer of love.” The people around her were smart enough to look back at the history I have just outlined and Durkan decided not to run. If she had, she would have suffered the same fate as two of her predecessors, defeat in the primary election.

What Does the 2021 Election Mean for Seattle and Housing?

The Seattle voter is generally a Democrat, a social liberal, and in favor of an array of taxes to pay for social services and education, including an income tax. Seattle is a white city (about two thirds white), and has a population that sees itself as highly educated, affluent and possessed of what Alexis de Tocqueville called noblesse oblige. Being “open minded” makes the Seattle voter, in their own mind, better than everyone else. But apart from a gauzy sense of the general goodness of taxing the rich and giving to the poor, Seattlites have never devised a consistent or sustainable strategy for dealing with issues like chronic homelessness.

Dealing with Seattle voters and media is a lot like dealing with a person with dementia; voters and the local media scene endlessly repeat the same arguments over and over again with almost no reference to what’s happened before. Seattle has had a housing “crisis” for years without any clear quantitative definition of what the crisis is or what success looks like other than arbitrary and subjective counts of apparently homeless people and absurd goals for units of housing.  And voters seem to love bashing on housing providers, expressing little if any concern about the endless eviction bans promulgated by fiat or legislation. So, will any of that change because Bruce Harrell defeated Lorena Gonzalez?

It won’t.

As I pointed out before the election, Harrel will remain firmly in the thrall of the non-profits as Durkan was before him. The “answer” to housing problems in the city, including encampments will remain pouring more and more money into subsidized capital construction of housing units, an endeavor that won’t solve price pressures created by increasing demand and lacking supply – assuming that demand continues. Rents actually fell, and anecdotally, most Seattle housing providers are seeing losses, lower rents, and higher vacancies.

(Here's a thought: If prices for rental housing stay flat and fall after Covid-19, will there still be a housing crisis? Will the tents and encampments melt away?)

What voters did was hold Lorena Gonzalez, President of the City Council, accountable in the same way they would have Jenny Durkan had she run for reelection and just the way they did every previous Mayor for over 20 years. “Stop the chaos!” is what they said. Was this an endorsement of “cleaning up the mess” or a rejection of various interventions in the tenant landlord relationship? Of course not. It wasn’t an endorsement of anything, just a binary statement of “stop what’s happening now.”

We live in an age of politics in which politicians no longer step forward with an assessment of the challenge a community faces, a statement about what they would do to address that challenge, and arguments to say why they are the best person to do that job. Instead, the goal of politics today is to mouth the words that voters want to hear as frequently and loudly as possible – louder and longer than the other candidate. It is a race to the bottom in which voters get a quick hit of satisfaction followed by a long hangover of dithering and misdirection.

What’s the solution? If politicians can’t articulate a vision because they’re more worried about their own egos (Sally Field Syndrome), then competing visions for a city can’t be tested. The only answer is deep research into voter views about homelessness and housing. Why do people think what they do about housing and how can they be persuaded to engage in a debate over competing solutions and be encouraged to demand that policy makers articulate and defend a vision and path to achieving it? If every election comes down to a choice between “things are fine” or “stop the chaos” Seattle at least will face a continuing series of failed mayors aimlessly lurching from sound bite to sound bite, accomplishing nothing.