Association of Washington Cities And Project 2025
Their tagline should be: “power for us, expensive housing for you.”
AWC Picks Power Over Affordability
The Association of Washington Cities has (re)declared war on housing affordability in the state of Washington, and for their fight they are pulling straight from the MAGA playbook. They are trying to kill what may be the biggest affordability bill, and best housing supply bill, yet - SB 5184 - through a pressure campaign targeting key Senators.
The bill reforms Washington’s bizarre, outdated, and arbitrary parking rules in a way that could unlock hundreds of thousands of new housing units without harming parking supply. SB 5184 largely lets property owners decide how much parking they need, rather than relying on arbitrary cookie cutter solutions that have been copy-and-pasted by bureaucrats from templates built by other bureaucrats in the 1960s.
SB 5184 is so consequential because it will cut costs for affordable housing projects, daycares, and small retail businesses all over the state. It will also reduce sprawl, protect urban tree canopies, and protect farms, forest and wildlands.
Because of this, it is supported by a breathtakingly broad and deep array of organizations that make for surprising bedfellows. This includes progressive social justice organizations, environmental nonprofits, big unions and the state labor council, affordable housing developers, right leaning real estate industry associations, and organizations working in transportation and urban planning. In addition, several cities have signed on, as well as electeds from additional cities.
But the Association of Washington Cities priorities its own power over the basic needs of everyday Washington residents. Despite a Trump takeover that was driven by inflation, they are fighting the biggest cost-containment bill in Olympia this year.
Worse, they are doing so using rhetoric taken straight from MAGA. They sent out a talking points document to their mailing list that borrows straight from Steve Bannon’s (early MAGA strategist and Trump sidekick) “flood the zone with shit” strategy. And then they followed this up with language that could be pulled straight from Project 2025.
First, the shit with which they are flooding the zone.
From their memo: “This bill is one-size-fits-all. This might work in some cities where transit is widely available and families aren’t as reliant on vehicles, but not in all communities.”
The lies are of two types.
First is the Trumpian-style projection (e.g., “crooked Hillary” and “The Biden crime family”). Here, they use the term “cookie cutter.” But the truth is that right now, almost every city in Washington forces arbitrary, cookie cutter, and harmful parking rules down the throats of every single person, and on every piece of property. This bill merely stops them from doing that!
Despite that, they turn around and mendaciously declare this bill to be a cookie cutter bill because it requires every community to stop applying cookie cutter solutions. What a bunch of knowing, cynical bullshit.
The second lie is another MAGA favorite–innuendo over expertise.
They know their rhetoric about transit has no basis in reality. (Ditto for another line in their memo about commercial cores, which actually thrive better when these cookie cutter rules are eliminated.) All this rhetoric is designed for deception.
I’ve sat in the room with AWC as they listened to experts testify that most parking reform in this country and our state reform has happened in small communities with little or no transit.
I’ve sat there as they heard how parking reform does not create shortages in communities of any kind including those with little transit, because people still build plenty of parking–they just don’t overbuild.
And I’ve heard them listen to city officials–and these are from the cities they claim to represent– testify and say that parking reform works well in their suburban and small town areas too.
AWC has never once offered a rebuttal to these arguments because there isn’t one.
Instead, they just ignore the experts and go with intuitive appeal (this only works with transit!)–just like Trump when he told the nation to inject bleach to curve covid. The difference is they aren’t as stupid as Trump–there is no way they are foolish enough to believe their own lies. But they will keep telling tall tales anyway, so that they can grasp onto power, even if it starves our neighbors of housing.
They don’t care about the truth. They only care about power.
AWC and Project 2025
After flooding the zone with Trumpian projection and embracing innuendo over expertise, their memo went a step further and parrots the Project 2025 agenda:
From the AWC Talking Points Memo:
“City residents should have a say in how to address real impacts of development on their daily lives. This silences their voices by removing those decisions from the leaders they elected . . . ”
From Project 2025, Page 511:
“American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations, and a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning.”
After it became unpopular for conservatives to admit that they wanted to exclude certain types of people (always nonwhite and/or poor) from their neighborhoods, they turned to exactly this kind of rhetoric to keep people they loathed out of their communities.
AWC has embraced this barely closeted racist and classist tradition–although their reason is probably different. It’s not that their lobbying team is necessarily ideologically classist or racist - it is that they are willing to be so if it helps them hold on to power. I’ll let you decide which is more morally problematic.
Please email (by bcc please–if they know it is a mass email, the Senators are less responsive) the following Dem Senators and their staffers and ensure that they vote with their caucus and for a more affordable, clean future. And please email your Senator if they are not on this list:
john.lovick@leg.wa.gov, vandana.slatter@leg.wa.gov, javier.valdez@leg.wa.gov, annette.cleveland@leg.wa.gov, rebecca.saldana@leg.wa.gov, bill.ramos@leg.wa.gov, claudia.kauffman@leg.wa.gov, bob.hasegawa@leg.wa.gov, drew.hansen@leg.wa.gov, lisa.wellman@leg.wa.gov, tina.orwall@leg.wa.gov, kevin.gordon@leg.wa.gov, connor.prieve@leg.wa.gov, britt.pomush@leg.wa.gov, sarah.ellerbrock@leg.wa.gov, Jade.Sierra@leg.wa.gov, Jackson.Hoppis@leg.wa.gov, mary.soderlind@leg.wa.gov, cory.christopherson@leg.wa.gov, teresa.arciniega-ruiz@leg.wa.gov, maryann.lara@leg.wa.gov, johana.guerrero@leg.wa.gov, noah.burgher@leg.wa.gov
Thank you!