Good morning, fellow activists and members of the media.
Thank you for joining us here for this important issue on affordable housing.
We are gathered here on behalf of the People's Budget Movement.
We all know there is a serious housing affordability crisis that has been raging in this city.
just to report one statistic that captures the depth of this crisis.
The Seattle Times reported recently that nearly 23,000 very poor working families are paying more than half of their income in rent.
And I mention this because these are families that haven't lost their housing yet.
They haven't come out on the streets yet.
But they are households that are working hard every single day to make ends meet.
But they are households that are one rent increase or one small financial crisis away from being evicted from their homes.
That is why many of us who are concerned about this crisis, all the way from my council office to Real Change, to Socialist Alternative, to labor unions and concerned individuals, we co-authored an opinion editorial earlier this year where we said we need to fight for the city that will work for ordinary people, a city that will be affordable for everybody, and that the repeal, the shameful repeal of the Amazon tax demonstrated that we cannot rely on corporate politicians to get this done.
That is why we are here to make our own proposals on affordable housing And to ask the council members and the mayor, when you repealed the Amazon tax, you said you were going to have a plan B.
Well, it's been months later and we haven't seen a plan B.
Moreover, we have seen a proposed budget where less than 1% of the total budget has been allocated for affordable housing.
This is not a serious approach to dealing with the biggest crisis that all our working people in this city are facing.
So we have collectively, as a people's budget movement, developed proposals to replace the $48 million that were lost through the repeal of the Amazon tax.
And as council member, I stand here and I urge all council members to support this initiative that we have raised.
But I also have another message for council members.
If you have other ideas for raising progressive revenues and using it to fund social housing that is publicly available, permanently affordable housing, I am happy to sign on to it.
I welcome those ideas.
What we don't accept as a movement is inaction on this crisis.
So that is the spirit in which we approach this question.
I wanted to quickly go over the options we have.
Hopefully all members of the media have received the memo that we have prepared.
And if you haven't, please let us know and my staff will give that to you.
Option number one, generate $48 million in the budget by cutting items that are less urgent than housing or in some cases actually harmful for our society.
And we have a list of those items that could potentially be cut.
Stop the sweeps of homeless people.
We know they don't give any good results, and they are inhumane.
Cut new computers in cop cars.
No tolls on city streets.
Tolls are one of the most regressive taxes possible.
Cut mayor and council member salaries to the area median income, which is roughly $70,000 per year, which is completely livable, and it is urgent to solve the crisis.
Cap city executive salaries at no more than $150,000 a year.
And these specifically, the cuts in salaries that we're proposing, it's in the spirit that Mayor Durkin said in her speech on the budget, she declared that we have to live within our means.
Well, when you say you have to live within your means and you don't act on affordable housing, you are saying that ordinary people have to take on austerity while big business will continue to make profit and elected officials and city executives will continue to take very lavish salaries.
We don't agree with that.
Slow new police officer hiring because funding affordable housing and other initiatives to address inequality will actually help reduce crime more than policing and reduce the number of city executives because everybody has too many bosses and eliminate vacant city executive positions.
So these are ideas through which we could generate $48 million every year and deflect it towards affordable housing.
Option number two, nothing new, but extremely important, just bring back the Amazon tax.
And it is not a silly thing for us to bring it back, because keep in mind that after the council members repealed the tax, we saw many critical developments.
We saw three cities in California put ballot initiatives for this November to tax big tech to fund housing and transportation infrastructure.
So even though the movement in Seattle had a setback, it had such a huge impact on consciousness everywhere that working people in other cities decided, this is what we need to do.
Every metropolitan area has become unaffordable, and in every city, Big corporations like Amazon and Google and Facebook are making massive profits.
So we say bring back the tax.
And we should also point out how wrong the council members were to buckle under the bullying of Amazon, because it was through the strength and courage of workers that Amazon recently announced that they are going to give their employees $15 an hour.
That shows that when you have a corporate bully, you don't back down.
You continue fighting back, because it does yield results.
Affordable housing option number three, the council could take out a bond to fund social housing.
Taking out a bond and borrowing against the future is not a new thing.
It was done for major projects like reconstruction of Mercer Street.
We could take out a $480 million bond, which will build 3,000 to 5,000 homes up front.
In other words, any of these options would also be a green jobs program that would generate unionized living wage construction jobs as a means to improving the lives of working people in this city.
And then the city would have to pay that bond off over time, which would be $36 million a year.
And that could be paid off either by using option number two, you know, cutting wasteful expenditure and putting it towards paying off the bond, or much better than that, instituting a progressive business tax like the Amazon tax to pay off the bond.
So these are three completely legal and valid options that our movement has come up with.
It's not rocket science.
What it requires is political will.
And the political will, unfortunately, is missing up there.
The political will is out here on the streets with the movement.
With that, I will invite Amy Tower and Dina Bracchio from the Tenants Union of Washington State.
Last weekend, tenants from all over the state gathered in SeaTac for our first annual Renter Power Leadership Assembly.
And there we talked about a lot of the issues that are facing tenants all around the state, but including and especially right here in Seattle.
There is a...
Huh?
Sorry, my name is Dina Braccio.
And I'm Amy Tower.
There we talked about the fear, the grief, and the trauma that comes from being priced out of your home, from being forced out of your home through arbitrary evictions.
And these are issues, again, that are all over the state, but especially here in Seattle.
But the tenants are, we are getting organized.
We are here, we are fighting.
And we are fighting for an end to these arbitrary displacements.
We are growing power so that we will eventually have collective ownership of our land, that there is no reason we should be subject to corporate landlords, and that the corporate landlords and the real estate industry are not going to solve our housing crisis.
They have no interest in solving our housing crisis.
And so we need to solve our own housing crisis.
And for that reason, we feel a proposal from Council Member Sawant is an excellent step forward.
We need more publicly funded, publicly owned housing to support all of our communities.
And that we should really all be living not under the thumb of a corporate landlord, but in housing provided by either ourselves or our government for our benefit and not for someone else's profit.
Please welcome Tim Harris, founding director of Real Change.
Good morning.
I was walking here this morning to come to this, and right down on the corner of 4th and Cherry, there was somebody who was sleeping directly on the bricks, using their tennis shoes for a pillow, all wrapped up in a blanket, and everybody was just, of course, walking by this person like this is a normal thing in our city.
And it is a normal thing in our city, and it should not be.
This person was covered up in a blanket, so he couldn't really see him or her, but I recognized the blanket.
And this is a new thing.
This is a blanket that is mass-produced to give to homeless people, mass-produced by prison labor that is made so that it's not designed to be washed.
It's just designed to be composted after a single use.
This, too, is normal.
This should not be normal.
This is a metaphor for everything that's wrong about how class works in this society.
You know, there's this thing that I keep hearing, which is that in a city this wealthy, nobody should have to live in a tent.
I hear that so often in City Hall that I think it ought to be just inscribed on the city seal.
But it's not enough to just say that.
We have to take action.
We have to do something about it.
Just noting the economic disparity in this city and how mind-bending it is, is not enough.
That just allows it to continue.
We have to take action.
Another friend of mine died this weekend, homeless.
She's been homeless for about 25 years.
Her name is Darcy Day.
She was living in a tent.
She had a heart attack, rushed to Swedish for surgery.
She died during surgery.
She was 51 years old.
51 years old.
This is a woman who's been on the street off and on for about 25 years.
She was a poet.
She was an artist.
She made it her business to take care of her street brothers and sisters.
She had a thousand watt smile.
Now she's gone.
Homeless people in this city are dying at an unprecedented rate.
This is unacceptable.
I support Council Member Sawant's proposal to fund the money that we lost in the betrayal that was the reversal of the EHT tax.
We have to do better as a city.
Thank you.
Zoe Sherman is a high school student and leader in Zero Hour Seattle, which is a youth climate movement.
I strongly support the plan that Council Member Sawant is putting forward.
The reason that this is being put forward, the housing crisis, is affecting all of us.
Not just the people without homes, not just the workers who, although they work in Seattle, can't afford to live here, including construction workers who literally build the city but can't live in the city that they build.
Not just the people who have lived here for decades or even their whole lives and are being uprooted out of their homes and communities, but all of us.
Did you know that there are almost 3,500 homeless kids in the Seattle school system?
3,500 kids with no home.
I know that my parents struggle to manage our care after school, helping us with homework, shopping for groceries, cooking, and just providing for us, but I can't even imagine what this is like for a family moving couch to couch, living out of a car, or worse.
I may have never experienced anything like this, but I'm not blind to the fact that it's part of the same system as I am and that those with the privilege to question the situation have the obligation to address it.
Adult health and success relies on a firm foundation in childhood.
We are not raising a healthy next generation with this number of children suffering.
On top of that, many kids cannot get to school on time, or sometimes at all, because Seattle is unaffordable to lower income earners and bus companies cannot get enough bus drivers to take children to school.
This is causing stress, reducing classroom time, and having a negative impact on their education.
My little sister's bus has been late or just doesn't come almost every day this year, and then my parents have to take off work or skip it entirely just to take her to school or pick her up.
In my middle school, I have friends who experience the same thing.
This is happening all over the district, and some of the kids are getting free ORCA cards, but that doesn't solve the problem because this option is less safe and less people want to do it.
All of this is a deterrent to using the public school system and needs to be addressed.
Me and my generation are already going to have to deal with climate change, a federal deficit, and we don't need this as well.
I hope that Seattle does the right thing in supporting this.
Thank you for letting me speak.
Emily McArthur, organizer with Socialist Alternative.
Mayor Durkin has used terms like pragmatism to describe her budget.
But pragmatic is basically a fancy way of saying practical, based on reality.
And the reality is that we've given the free market five years to solve the homelessness state of emergency.
And for the decade before, when the market decided the Seattleites needed, what they really needed, was 92% of all new housing to be luxury apartments.
And while I support everyone in Seattle having access to apartments with in-house gyms and roof decks, we have not seen rents go down or even stabilize in this period.
In fact, median rents for a one-bedroom apartment is currently at $1,800 a month.
No, the reality of this let the market fix it approach is a 26% vacancy rate in Belltown alongside a hollowing out of working class neighborhoods with working people being priced out, either moving out of the city altogether or being pushed into the streets.
Durkin and other Democrats on the City Council like to use progressive language and talk about resisting Trump from 3,000 miles away.
But here, in our town, where they actually could make a difference, last night we watched as LGBTQ seniors and Central District seniors spoke about being pushed out and erased in their own city.
The city we need is not one that runs on Seattle nice words.
The city we need is not one where struggled, oppressed communities can't make and get by.
It's one that confronts these struggles face head on.
The city we need is one that answers the call for affordable housing, rather than working overtime over the weekend to do the bidding of Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, and repealing the Amazon tax.
And I'm not here because I put my faith in Democrats or, frankly, any politician to make these changes.
I'm here because allies here with us today and the thousands of Seattleites living the grim economic reality of rent burdens will need to organize and come together to win these things.
And I urge all of you to join us on November 7th at the Yesler Community Center.
Yesler Terrace is ground zero for gentrification in Seattle, where promises were made with Section 8 vouchers that literally rotted on the vine due to a lack of apartments that accept them, all while Vulcan takes in millions.
The let-the-market-decide approach works exactly as it's meant to work, to enrich a few, to turn our city into a playground for the rich.
We need to be pragmatic.
We need a new approach.
We need one that doesn't shy away from taxing big business, and one that invests in high-quality, union-built, publicly-owned housing that we can assure is permanently affordable.
Jeff Bezos, under the pressure of the tax Amazon movement, donated $2 billion to philanthropy.
And I know that Mary's Place is providing a vital bridge to families left out in the cold by the market.
But it's also downtown, far from schools and playgrounds and neighborhoods.
And that's why publicly controlled resources are far better than private charitable donations.
Rather than housing our neighbors in a warehouse or a decaying hotel, we can employ our union neighbors to do what they do best, build high quality unions in our communities.
If you think that the city we need is a true sanctuary city where immigrant families aren't living in fear of eviction, if you think that the city we need is one where working people can afford to stay, If you think we can do better in helping communities of color, LGBTQ communities, and our neighbors stay here with a serious infusion of resources into permanently affordable housing, I urge you to join this movement.
Now we have Juan Jose Bocanegra from the May 1st Action Committee for El Comité.
Good morning.
Thank you very much.
Um, brothers and sisters, uh, you know, this morning I, um, had an opportunity to talk to one of my friends from Burien and, um, you know, concerned about all the problems the city of Burien has been facing with a lot of the juveniles and a lot of the violence that is going on and also the people in Tukwila and the people in Kent and the people in Auburn, you know, and, If I was in any way an official of any of those cities, I would sue the city of Seattle.
Because they're the ones that have created a lot of this problem.
You know, sure, people migrate to where there's possible more, possible lower rents.
But the problem here is that there's no programs.
For years, the city has been pushing immigrants, people of color, and other white workers out into the outskirts and try to gentrify the city of Seattle.
But that's really causing serious problems to other, and I know this is a regional issue, right?
The whole issue of housing and homelessness.
But the city of Seattle is better equipped with a lot of the experiences that they have gained over the years, which we as activists have given them.
We've fought them at every front in terms of giving housing for folks, in terms of trying to provide services to the people.
El Centro de la Raza is a good example of some of the work that has been done over the years.
And yet, it's like the ostrich.
They sink their head into the ground and don't want to do this.
There's so many indicators out there that there's a problem brewing out there.
You know, we have the most regressive tax structure in the country, and yet, and yet, We have a way of being able to amend that issue by creating a tax structure within the city to try to support the people in our communities.
And we're not doing that.
When you have 1% or less of your budget going out toward providing those services to our community, that's not equitable at all.
At this rate, we'll have everybody out of the city of Seattle, poor people, Elders because they can't afford to keep paying the taxes that they're paying on this housing issues on the on taxes on housing So their people are losing their homes, you know, and I think that we have the moral obligation To tell the city of Seattle to straighten out its act just like they did with this cops just like what they did with all the other things that they have been able to reform and The taxing structure in the city has to be reformed.
Housing has got to be a priority for the city.
You cannot have a crisis and have this kind of response to it.
Can you imagine if we don't begin to prepare for an earthquake?
And all the indicators are out there.
All the indicators are out there.
So it's on us, not the people that are in power.
to make these changes, to force them to make these changes, because they're using our monies to do nothing but pay for the rich to get richer.
And that is just not acceptable any longer.
We cannot continue to do this and say we're for migrants, we're in support of migrants, and all the migrants are being kicked the hell out of the city.
So who are you supporting?
You're not supporting immigrants.
You're not supporting undocumented workers.
You know, the people that are having to support them are people in other cities.
You know, I'd like to thank you and, you know, hopefully you guys, when you get back to your desk, you go back to your offices or go back to doing your work, you'll put a slant in our favor this time.
Thank you.
Next we have Sean Scott from the Democratic Socialists of America.
So when we talk about housing and the links that it has to the climate crisis in particular, I think it's important that we realize that housing is in a lot of ways a life or death issue.
It's not only for the people that are sleeping outside, for our houseless neighbors, but for all of us who call the Puget Sound region home.
As more and more people get priced out to Burien, to Federal Way, to other suburbs of Seattle, as working people are in a situation where they can no longer actually live in the city where they work, That's more cars on the freeway, people traveling much longer distances to get to where they need to go in the city.
More cars on the freeway, we already know, because of a phenomenon known as the climate loop, creates more carbon emissions.
More carbon emissions leads to more erratic weather patterns.
We just saw over the last week a lot of the fog that was trapped in our atmosphere.
Many people thinking that that was sort of a natural weather phenomenon, when in reality, a lot of that particulate that we saw in the air was coming from cars on the freeway.
And so it's important that we think about housing in a holistic sense, right?
That we can actually do something to avert the climate catastrophe that we're not going to experience in a number of years, but that we're already currently experiencing, right?
The IPCC report that was released recently indicated that our timeline or our horizon of time for actually doing something about climate change is probably 50, 75% shorter than we thought it was.
And so while we have politicians in Seattle that are sort of able to accrue political and symbolic capital for being climate mayors or whatnot.
It's really, really important to know that there's real substantive action that we could be taking on this issue, and it starts with housing.
It starts with housing as a human right, and it starts with housing as an avenue for alleviating the climate crisis that we're currently experiencing.
And last but not least, we have Sean Smith on behalf of Nicholsville.
Good morning.
My name is Sean Smith and I'm here representing Nicholsville this morning.
We're a community of homeless people who have fought hard to stay together and safe for the last 10 years.
Our efforts have resulted in sanctioned encampments, and some of those in sanctioned encampments along city ground.
We now need to stop the sweeps and redirect those resources to the people that are out on the street and put them in self-managed encampments.
The tipping point for sanctioning encampments came when Councilperson Swann defeated Richard Conlon.
Elections have a vision, matter of visions, Today, my community will make a vote on the specifics of the proposal that Councilman Swann has proposed.
Speaking personally, I can't imagine the community opposing it.
It's exactly what we need.
We also need to work together.
We and many others need to work together.
We need to organize more.
That's why we are honored to be here with all these fine folks.
Thank you.
Thank you to everybody who spoke and who have stood by everybody in this city who needs affordable housing.
Just a couple more points.
We have about a day and a half for any city council member to express support to any of these proposals or all of these proposals.
So I really urge council members, please look at this memo and act on this crisis.
and know that the vast majority of this city is looking to City Hall to address this crisis and will not accept inaction.
Yesterday, many senior citizens and working people from Gen Pride spoke about the dire needs of the LGBTQ community and we have seen young people from middle school speak today about homelessness faced by students in our public schools.
So this is an intergenerational problem And people from across generations are speaking out and saying we need to address this crisis.
And that is why I welcome everybody who is watching this.
If you think the city needs to do something about affordable housing, if you think that corporate politicians should be held accountable, then join us at the Affordable Housing Rally on November 7th at 6 p.m.
at the Yesler Community Center in the Central District.
Let's fight together.
The market has not only not solved the problem, but it has made the problem worse precisely because that is what markets do under capitalism.
They sell housing as luxury units to the highest bidder while amassing profits for big developers property management corporations, and Wall Street speculators.
This is not working for the rest of us, and the rest of us are hundreds of thousands of people across generations who are struggling to have a foothold in this city.
I welcome questions from the media, but just a note of caution, I need to go to the Budget Committee that has already started.
I'm happy to take a couple of questions, but I also invite media, if you have detailed questions about the proposals and the technicalities, please direct them towards Ted Verdone, the policy analyst in our office, and he can stay longer than I can to answer those questions.
And also please direct questions at community members who are here speaking up for affordable housing and for social housing.
Sharma, did you say council members have a day and a half to respond to some of these proposals?
What happens then?
No, I mean, that is just one technical deadline.
They can support it till the very final budget vote, which is the Monday before Thanksgiving.
Nothing's stopping them from doing that.
I'm just saying that that's the first step to make any of these proposals part of the upcoming budget discussions.
Specifically, two council members can agree to sign on to one of these options, and we'll have three council member signatures, which is needed to make it part of the discussion of the next stage of budget discussions.
But if they want more time to think about it, and they want to do it later, by all means, please come and ask me questions.
I welcome staff and council members both to my office so that we can discuss this, but let's actually end this crisis.
Council Member, how can you support slowing the hiring of new Seattle police officers when already we're going to have a deficit of more than 30 this year of officers and the chief has already said that it's a dramatic threat to public safety?
Well, I would say, and I'm not the only one who says this, that the most dramatic threat to public safety is the serious income, gender, and racial inequality that we see in our city.
The best possible thing that politicians in this city can do to improve public safety is to ensure that everybody has access to affordable housing.
I should go because I'm late to committee, but please ask more questions.