Woo, Rivera, Moore Vote Against Cutting Red Tape for Affordable Housing

Dan Strauss Flip Flops and Abstains

Affordable Housing Opportunity - For Free

With Bruce Harrell giving up on addressing the housing deficit, and in fact, putting out a 20-year plan to make it worse, any legislation on council that is focused on housing is bound to draw my attention.

So I waited with bated breath last week when the land use committee looked at making it cheaper, faster, and easier to develop affordable housing. 

The plan would cut red tape for certain kinds of affordable housing developments in areas of the city that have been identified as high-displacement risk. Tammy Morales developed the plan with broad input from impacted groups, professional planners, and in consultation with other council members.

(Image credit: grassrootsinsitute.org)

But The Council Thinks Red Tape for Affordable Housing is Awesome

But Tanya Woo, Maritza Rivera, and Cathy Moore all voted against making it easier and cheaper to build affordable housing in Seattle. Their votes will keep affording housing development expensive, slow, and less likely.

Dan Strauss, who was apparently for the bill before he was against it–familiar territory for Dan–offered amendments that would undermine its efficacy, and then abstained from voting. Given Dan’s “hug Harrell” strategy, one can only assume he is taking orders from Bruce, who cut displacement prevention out of Seattle’s 20-year growth strategy. C’mon Dan, I know you can do better!

Councilmembers Defend Their Vote

The reasons offered by the rest were real head-scratchers. 

Woo made the absurd claim that adding affordable housing will displace people who struggle to afford to live here. This merely confirms that, even after having built homes herself, she doesn’t even have a basic grasp of how housing markets work. This yet again shows Woo is totally unfit for office. 

Moore wants to punt the issue to the comprehensive planning process. But the housing crisis is now, and that plan is inching along, way behind schedule. And worse, it ignores that Harrell overruled his own planning department and removed displacement prevention provisions from the draft plan, gutted his planning professionals’ ambition to actually address the housing crisis, and ignored the overwhelming super-majority of public feedback to their prior draft. Pinning hopes on Harrell is hardly a smart strategy. I am hopeful that Cathy will come around.

Last, somehow Maritza Rivera managed a straight face when she said her concern was that this bill–which will protect black families from high rents and displacement–tried to woke-wash her position by claiming the initiative isn’t good enough for creating generational wealth for black families. Recall that Rivera has a history abusing workers and driving out people of color at the city, and had zero equity-focused endorsements in the election. 

These people ran on cutting bureaucratic overhead, offering a fanciful future where savings will fall from the sky when they remove the red tape holding the city back.

But when faced with an opportunity to do so while simultaneously increasing the production of affordable housing, they refused.