AFFORDABLE AND ABUNDANT HOUSING

In two special elections, voters have affirmed that they want the City to build publicly owned, permanently affordable housing for people and families at a range of incomes.

Unfortunately, Bruce Harrell chose to be the face of the opposition campaign funded by Amazon and the Chamber of Commerce.

As your mayor, I will work energetically with the new Seattle Social Housing Developer and make sure it has the technical support and capacity it needs to succeed.

A growing, mixed-income social housing sector won’t just provide affordable housing for its residents, it will create a public option that corporate landlords must compete with, helping to moderate rents across the city.

We need bold action to build more homes faster and rein in escalating housing costs so that the people who make Seattle run — janitors, grocery workers, baristas, rideshare drivers, hotel workers, security guards, social workers — can also afford to live here. King County is currently studying the feasibility of a $1 billion bond to create thousands of new units of workforce and social housing; Seattle should do the same.

Beyond accelerating our new social housing developer, the City can do more to support Community Land Trusts like Homestead and Africatown, creating opportunities for affordable homeownership and rental housing in communities at risk of displacement.

56% of Seattle households rent their homes, and that number is growing. You shouldn’t need to be a homeowner to have stability and community, to raise a family or to age in place.

Right now, too many corporate landlords are exploiting a tight housing market to impose unfair costs. And instead of doing something about it, Bruce Harrell is working with landlords on a plan to weaken existing protections.

As your mayor, I will bring down costs for renters by championing legislation to prohibit rental “junk fees,” deceptive landlord practices, and algorithmic price-fixing. And I’ll work to strengthen Seattle’s economic displacement relocation assistance law to discourage rent increases larger than 5 percent.

I will pursue local legislation inspired by Senate Bill 5496, which aimed to limit home buying by private equity firms.

I’ll work to create a new City office to enforce renters’ rights, modeled on our highly effective Office of Labor Standards. The current enforcement mechanisms are not working; in 2021, only five fines were issued from the 3,285 complaints and questions filed by renters with the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI).

And I’ll work to create an accessible rental unit availability database, so that people with disabilities can more easily locate available ADA units without having to contact each individual property.

A major cause of our affordability crisis is that our housing supply hasn’t kept up with the growing population. It’s long past time to remove the barriers to housing production that lock most of us out of Seattle’s most desirable neighborhoods, with access to great public transit, parks, schools, grocery stores, and small businesses.

Instead, Bruce Harrell watered down early drafts of Seattle’s growth plan to preserve the status quo. I’ll fight to cut the red tape, reforming permitting, design review, and other bureaucratic hurdles that make it so expensive and difficult to build right now.

I’ll also work to build inclusive neighborhoods and incentivize housing types that support aging in place, people with disabilities, and young families — especially near public transit.

At the same time, I will work with communities at risk of displacement on policies and programs to ensure that our legacy communities and immigrant communities stay anchored and stable. Some neighborhoods, including the historically Black Central District and the racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods of South Seattle, have already absorbed a significant amount of development in ways that have often proved harmful.

Too often in debates about development, housing density and trees get pitted against each other. We can have both, and we need both — especially as climate change brings more extreme heat. We can protect more trees through the use of shared walls, stacked flats, setback reform and tree preservation — as well as planting and caring for new trees, especially in lower-income neighborhoods with inadequate tree cover.

It’s understandable that many people look around and conclude that new development means ugly buildings. But this is largely about our land use law. We can make different choices that lead to gentle housing density that is interesting and beautiful throughout the city.