Those Who Own Labor, Those Who Labor Rent

By Jeff Boone

Talk centered on what incentives might prompt a developer, landlord or tenant to create affordable housing, such as relaxing parking requirements associated with new development and giving tenants an option to buy their building before it goes on the open market. One participant suggested a landlord tax as an incentive to stabilize rents and create affordable rather than luxury housing.

But missing from this discussion was the city itself. What has the city done to precipitate the housing crisis, and what can the city do to ease it?

The city has more workers than homes.

Seattle works hard to create a climate hospitable to business. Impact fees, which are intended to help pay for infrastructure necessary to growth, are low. And the city has become notorious for its development subsidies.

We built a parking garage with HUD money to "revitalize" our downtown. We permitted the Washington State Convention Center big box-and-skybridge expansion so that we might remain competitive with other mid-size cities building, expanding or redeveloping their convention centers. Wright Runstad and Amazon did well with Pac-Med on Beacon Hill. To keep Immunex from fleeing the city to Renton, or, god forbid, the Eastside, Seattle is shouldering much of the cost of a $20 million dollar overpass at Galer Street so that Immunex workers can reach a piece of waterfront the Port of Seattle sold Immunex. Port of Seattle land on the central waterfront has been redeveloped as office towers and tourist facilities including a cruise ship terminal for the supertankers that cart tourists up to Alaska and back.

The next fifteen years will bring more office towers to Lake Union, the Denny Triangle, Northgate and perhaps, University Village.

Another 10-year expansion plan for the University of Washington is on the table, which means 10,000 to 14,000 more people in the University District daily.

And Seattle, well-represented on the Sound Transit board, got the first segment of the Link light rail corridor, which is intended to provide another connection between the region and the city. Call it another way to get the workers here.

In the face of this strategy intent on fostering and sustaining the city's economic growth, solutions focused housing developers and landlords may not gain much for renters as long as business growth outstrips residential growth and homeowners direct the nature of development in our neighborhoods. What you learned in Econ 201 is true: when demand exceeds supply, the price goes up. In Seattle, worker demand for housing exceeds supply.

So how do we bring Seattle to the equilibrium point, where demand and supply meet?

Perhaps one measure might be to increase impact fees.

Perhaps another might be to increase the B&O tax.

We might consider the consequences of not looking hard at the effects of pedal-to-the-metal growth. What makes a city attractive to business besides subsidies? Workers priced right. If a city cannot house its workers or drives up wages beyond what is efficient for the business, employment will move elsewhere. The good times will move somewhere else, somewhere cheaper. Witness the growth of industry and housing in the Green River Valley, Kent in particular. That growth came at the expense of Seattle; it has cost our neighborhoods families and our industrial areas diversity.

This is the city's stake in the future of housing, growth and how much of it we can comfortably permit. It's a quality of life issue--making Seattle a city where people work, play and live.

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