The Demolition Men Cometh

Today the Port of Seattle will meet to decide the fate of the Lora Lake apartments, and unless the moon turns to cheese Commissioners Bob Edwards and Alec Fisken will fail to carry the day and the Port will hold fast to their demolition decision.

An opinion piece by Port CEO Tay Yoshitani in Tuesday's PI sums up their reasoning succinctly.

• Burien fought the third runway tooth and nail, and in the course of things agreements were made. If the Port does not honor these, they will lose credibility.
• Seattle has an affordable housing problem and a condo conversion issue, but Burien does not. Most housing in Burien is affordable. This is not their problem.
  
• An agreement is an agreement. A contract is a contract.

King County Housing Authority has used both the carrot and the stick, offering $18 million to buy the property and threatening the use of eminent domain should that fail. Additional legal action has been brought in the form of a lawsuit from Citizens to Defend Affordable Housing. Seattle clergy almost committed civil disobedience, and SHARE/WHEEL actually did it and no one cared.

Seattle Housing Authority CEO Tom Tierney has also called upon the Port to preserve the units, but has also said that should they decide otherwise, they should take responsibility for the lost housing and rebuild elsewhere.

The Lutheran Public Policy Office sent out an alert that articulated this position a bit more fully:

Although LPPO has consistently advocated for the preservation of the Lora Lake apartments, political realities have made this option difficult to work out. Instead, LPPO and many others working on this issue are in favor of a $30 million package funded jointly by the Port, King County, and the King County Housing authority which would fund the building of replacement units for the 162 units of affordable housing which would disappear with the demolition of Lora Lake.

This position has been challenged by some, who point out the obvious: Were we to spend $30 million on housing AND keep the apartments, we'd be getting ahead and not just staying even. Who wants to spend $30 million to stay even?

It's been suggested that the strategy here is to offer the Port an alternative that is so unattractive, it makes reneging on Burien look great by comparison. Clever.

Too bad it won't work.

Lora Lake has shown us that Ten Year Plan targets for housing development can't end homelessness if we're losing units on the other end. The visual of perfectly good housing being torn down to make way for a big box retailer makes for great symbolism, and Burien and the Port Authority are, for politicians in Seattle, relatively safe targets.

Sooner or later, however, Lora Lake will be behind us, and we'll still have the same issue to contend with. And we'll have to face that the real problems, and the real targets, are right here in Seattle. Developers are making a killing at the expense of affordability, and our corporate liberal political class is, for the most part, too weak-kneed to get in their way.

Some real hardball has been played against the Port Authority and Burien to preserve this housing, but the 162 units in Burien are a drop in the bucket to the 3000 or so units lost locally to condo conversion.

House Speaker Frank Chopp, who allowed a condo conversion bill to die in committee last spring, has pledged his support for addressing this during next year's legislative session. We need to marshal the outrage we've mustered over events in Burien to ensure that this legislation offers a meaningful market intervention, and doesn't just settle for some relocation assistance that masquerades as a victory while the core problem remains untouched.

Class Warfare's a Bitch

This from The Stranger's SLOG. Creighton's email came three days after the premature declaration of victory at Lora Lake a few weeks back. When these guys push pack, they basically shove you through a plate glass window and then piss on you while you bleed.

The Port will vote on whether to demolish the Lora Lake Apartments this Thursday. While the Burien building has become an important symbol for the loss of affordable housing in the region, it's still just a symbol. The actual problem is much larger than the 162 units at stake here.

From: “Creighton, John” Creighton.J@portseattle.org
To: “Edwards, Bob” Edwards.B@portseattle.org
Sent: 7/27/2007 5:13pm
Subject: Lora Lake motion

Bob,

I want to touch base on our next meeting. I agree with Lloyd that your actions in bringing up the Lora Lake matter without notifying your colleagues (even Alec who supports your position) were disrespectful and contrary to any sense of collegiality or building trust with your fellow commissioners.

In the last two years, you have at different points criticized each one of your fellow commissioners for allegedly keeping information from you or blindsiding you. In my opinion, your actions are of an exponential magnitude worse than anything any other commissioner has done to blindside the commission in the last two years. Unlike other instances, your actions were blatantly premeditated to embarrass the Port and to embarrass your colleagues, all for selfish personal gain at our expense. If you truly had cared about building a coalition to save the Lora Lake apartments, you would have gone about it in a much different way.

Lloyd is a very patient, forgiving and tolerant soul, much more than I am. I want to assure you that I will be back in town on 8/9 and very much in full control of commission meetings. I am the chair of the commission, and will remain chair until replaced by a majority vote of my colleagues. Until that time, I am in charge of the meetings and will not tolerate any bullshit, neither from you or any other commissioner.

It will be my perogative as chair (1) whether we hear any sort of motion on Lora Lake, (2) in what form and language any such motion will take, and (3) whether or not we have any public testimony. If you object to any of that, you are free to form a coalition with 2 of your fellow commissioners to replace me as chair. If you are disruptive in the meeting, I will not be afraid to either gavel you down or take other action.

I hope that I am making myself crystal clear, but if not, I am happy to follow up with you in person.

I believe that your blatant political grandstanding has done a huge amount of damage to the Port at a time when we were moving beyond all the bullshit and scandal of the last half year. I am looking forward to January, when I hope that we will have a new commissioner in position 2 who has the maturity and the integrity to help move the port forward on the important issues of competitiveness that we really need to be focusing on. But, alas, that is the subject for a separate email.

Sincerely, John

The Definition of Insanity

On Tuesday, I went to a press conference at the Lora Lake Apartments in Burien, where, for once, the news was good. Representatives from King County, the Committee to End Homelessness, and the Church Council of Greater Seattle stood behind Port Commissioner Bob Edwards and offered a united front on the question of preserving affordable housing.

If Edwards can bring the other Port commissioners and the City of Burien around, there will be 162 fewer units of affordable family housing lost to market forces this year.

This region now has less rental housing available than two years ago. Over that time, 4,000 rental units were lost to condo conversion. Add another 3,000 for this year, and you have a market where vacancy rates are at a 20-year low, and rents are up by 10 percent or more.

One may visualize the housing market as a huge ladder, where more and more people are struggling to hold onto fewer rungs. When housing gets more expensive, those who have more resources but can’t afford to move higher begin to occupy the lower rungs. Those with the weakest grip fall off. Some landings are harder than others.

Market forces do not stand still for the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness. As the years go ticking toward the number 10, it is plain that the King County goal of 950 new and upgraded housing units each year, without any real assist from the federal government, is somewhat beyond our reach.

This is a symptom of a larger problem.

For more than a decade, homeless advocacy has suffered from a pathetic absence of vision. The 20th anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act, the landmark legislation that provides nearly all federal funding for homeless services, offers the perfect occasion to revisit basic assumptions.

While federal funding for housing has been cut by $52 billion since its 1979 peak, McKinney-Vento funding to mitigate homelessness has never been more than $1.5 billion annually. We win minor battles while we ignore the larger war.

But the war doesn’t ignore us.

The consensus statement released last week by national homeless advocates is a welcome breath of fresh air. There is explicit recognition that McKinney-Vento is necessary but not sufficient. There is a call for the feds to dramatically expand their role in providing housing. There is recognition that the attack on poor people's programs must be halted and reversed. The civil rights crisis that exists for homeless people is named for what it is, and there is a call for a wage-led strategy to reduce poverty.

At one time, advocates approached homelessness as an extreme symptom of the broader issue of poverty. We all instinctively know that extreme poverty and ridiculous excess do not mix. Homelessness in America is a sweeping indictment of the federal priorities that privilege the rich over the poor.

But one rarely hears homelessness discussed in these terms. Federal funding priorities place our focus on the chronic homeless: the mentally ill, addicted, and alcoholic homeless who, in less enlightened times, were known as “bums.” In other words, it’s not the system that’s seen as screwed up. It’s the people.

Advocates need to stop playing into the federally-driven strategy of divide and conquer. We must instead look more to our natural allies: kids, single parents, the elderly, the uninsured, and the disabled. Homelessness is mostly about low wages and high rents. It was true three decades ago, and it’s true now.

Our movement has little commitment to addressing race and poverty. We act as though the prison-industrial complex, which is also about structural unemployment, doesn’t even exist. The selective blindness of most white people in this regard is nearly unforgivable.

Meanwhile, the growth in family homelessness is accelerating. The answer to this is already starting to emerge from Washington. That would be, of course, the Ten Year Plan to address family homelessness.

I wish that were a joke.

Philip Mangano, President Bush’s point man on homelessness, likes to defend the narrowly focused 10-year plan strategies to end homelessness by saying the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing year after year when we know it doesn’t work.

That’s rich.

Federal policy on homelessness is designed to distract, stigmatize, and divide. McKinney-Vento in the absence of a broader federal anti-poverty and pro-housing strategy just sets us up to fail, and 10-year plans that narrowly focus on chronic homelessness while ignoring the structural realities of poverty and inequality are cut from the same cloth.

A Little Movement, A Lot of Spin

"It's a beautiful thing when someone changes his mind, said the Church Council's Sandy Brown at this morning's press conference. "Bob Edwards has changed his mind." Up to now, the Port Authority's response to calls to save 162 units of affordable family housing could be summed up in one or two words. Those would be "No," or "Fuck No," depending upon your interpretation. Today, that response became much more ambiguous.

While this is good news, we are still some distance from declaring victory. Today, Commissioner Bob Edwards will introduce a resolution to his fellow commissioners that opens the possibility for compromise. Should a majority agree, a proposal will be drafted for broader approval that "directs staff to explore compromise. This is not exactly the win we need, but it's a great start.

Edwards has shown admirable moral courage in taking this first step. The Port Authority has "come into the family," as King County Executive Ron Sims so graciously put it this morning, due to immense pressure from the County and the broader community. Like all development that happens at the expense of the poor and powerless, this is about money, opportunity, and power. We need to keep our guard up and the pressure on.