Workers Driven Out of Seattle by Rising Housing Costs

This year has seen the continuation of Seattle's breathtaking growth, but that story of growth has another side that is as persistent as the dual meaning in Labor Day. As the Seattle Times so gleefully reported earlier this year, prices in Seattle's housing market have rocketed skyward in breathtaking fashion. But the Times failed to cover in equal detail how this trajectory is crushing the budgets of those who keep the clock hands turning. This year, the National Low Income Housing Coalition reported that Seattle's "housing wage" (the hourly wage for a full-time, year-round job at which it becomes possible to afford a market-rate apartment in Seattle) has soared to over $14 per hour. On the other hand, hourly wages in Seattle's service sector seem "permanently stuck" at $9 or less. The Mayor's Office reports that just 4 percent of the city's urban housing stock is affordable to people earning less than $19,000 a year (roughly $9 per hour in a full-time job), and a total of just 14 percent is affordable to families making $31,000 or less.

Like Labor Day, Seattle's "coin" of prosperity has several sides: people who can't afford housing near their jobs downtown necessarily commute from remote, low-cost suburbs, contributing to traffic congestion, sprawl, and the destruction of watersheds. Meanwhile, we continue to pour gasoline on this fire: millions of square feet of commercial and hotel development are in Seattle's permit pipeline, and the city acknowledges that every one of these structures will produce hundreds of low-wage jobs for building engineers, janitors, room cleaners, and other service workers. And somehow, it has become the role of government, private charities, churches, and the taxpayer to fund the housing, the health care, the child care, the food, and the transportation for workers whose employers don't provide adequate wages.

The director of a church-based non-profit housing agency told us the other day that room cleaners who worked at one non-union, four-star hotel downtown occupied half the units in his group's publicly-subsidized apartment building. Scarce public resources and our community's social service efforts should not be used to subsidize wealthy hotel companies when they don't pay their workers a decent wage. The Church Council of Greater Seattle last year spent 50 percent of its budget responding to the needs of low-income people in our community. We need to have an urgent conversation about the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. We need to talk about the kind of community that we are building in downtown Seattle. We cannot continue to build a downtown community that virtually guarantees injustice and a growing disparity between rich and poor.

Our union represents hotel and restaurant workers, and we support a strategy of responsible growth that includes an expansion of the tourism and hospitality industry. But as employees in the hospitality industry, we join with others in questioning the wisdom of the city's current development strategy. The city's attempt to solve our housing problem by only supplying more affordable housing just won't work. We also need to look at the wages that people make. The city's failure to accommodate its low-wage workers places an undeserved burden on surrounding jurisdictions and threatens our region's fragile watersheds through inappropriate growth.

Seattle is at a crossroads and we have two choices. The first is the "low road," which is the road that we seem to be on right now. That road is made up of low-paying jobs, growing economic inequality, public subsidies for businesses without sufficient accountability or return for public support. The "high road" consists of affordable housing for all, quality jobs, health care, and a voice at work for employees through collective bargaining and union representation. Service sector jobs can become good jobs that pay a living wage, just as manufacturing jobs became good jobs in the 1930s through the efforts of working people, the unions, the government, and a sound industrial policy. Let us struggle to make this history part of the meaning of Labor Day again.

Dana Wise is a researcher for the Hotel Employees, Restaurant Employees International Union (H.E.R.E.).

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