Which means you shouldn’t, because she’s wrong about everything.
Social housing refers to “a range of housing ownership, subsidy, and regulation models [which] often go far beyond what’s known as ‘affordable housing’ to promote permanent affordability, democratic resident control, and social equality.” Social housing seeks “to provide every person in the U.S. with safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable housing.”
Who could be against that? But the devil, as they say, is in the details; and the problem is that, whenever progressives decide they like something, it turns out to be ridiculously expensive, and they never have any way to pay for it, except to tax the middle class (in a socialistic redistribution of wealth).
Fife “unequivocably support[s]” social housing, she tweeted the other day. She included links to the hottest political issue in Seattle lately, a bill the voters will decide upon on Feb. 14, when they weigh in on Initiative 135. That legislation proposes to create a “Seattle Social Housing Developer”—a brand new bureaucracy—that will seek $20 million a year “from someone, somewhere” (according to a Seattle Times analysis). I-135 would establish a big new city department; would require “city start-up [financial] support” for the first 18 months; and would identify which lands would be donated or seized for the purpose of erecting affordable housing. The project “will be public forever…and governed by renters, community members, labor and subject matter professionals.”
That sounds perfect for Oakland, doesn’t it? A huge new People’s Democracy at City Hall, run by appointees of Carroll Fife and Sheng Thao (and, of course, friends of Cat Brooks), accountable to no one but unions and homeless activists, to oversee massive development projects--forever.
Only one problem: I-135 doesn’t say a thing about where the money will come from. Instead, the Yes on I-135 website says “The City Council will decide the amount of subsequent City support for the Public Developer, which may include funds from any source available to do so including, without limitation, the general fund, grant funds, and by issuing Councilmanic Revenue Bonds.” That’s the kind of language Fife loves: “funds from any source…without limitation.” Free money for her pet projects!
Yet the Yes people themselves have no idea what instituting their project will cost. The number of homeless people in Seattle-King County, according to the 2022 point-in-time count, was 13,368. Building cheap housing for that many people is clearly impossible. Even if you assume a totally unrealistic cost of $100,000 per unit (far, far lower than anyone thinks is possible), it still comes to $1.3 billion. Seattle’s 2023-2024 budget is $7.4 billion, so the social housing initiative would suck up about 18% of the total amount Seattle spends on a year on everything, including public safety, education and human services, arts, culture, recreation, transit, utilities, garbage collection, firefighting and infrastructure. This is why the liberal Seattle Times strongly urged voters to vote NO on I-135. “Its business model,” editorialized the paper, “is unrealistic. Its governing structure [is] unworkable… I-135 is a distraction at best, a money-pit at worst.”
Which, when you think of it, is another reason why Carroll Fife loves it. Money pits have never stopped progressives from spending money they don’t have. This is why she authored Measure Q, her own ballot initiative on social housing that overwhelmingly passed last November, 80% to 20%. It authorized Oakland to develop 13,000 low-rent apartments under a social-housing scheme.
That poorly-conceived project currently is mired in red tape, with no housing produced and no visible staffing. Yet homeowners already are being taxed $148 per parcel a year to pay for yet another unaccountable, secretive bureaucracy, run by people we never heard of, doing things of which we’re unaware, in cahoots with the union bosses who really run this town, uninvestigated by a media that built up Measure Q before the election but has completely ignored it since. (Hello, Darwin Bond-Graham.) Meanwhile, Carroll Fife and her cronies have gigantic piles of public money to play with, with no one looking or asking questions—except here.
P.S. Please contact the mayor’s office and demand that she reappoint LeRonne Armstrong as Chief of Police! And do it today! Unless she hears from a lot of us, she’ll continue her woke war on the police, and Oakland will lose the best police chief we’ve had in years. Here’s her email.
Thanks.
Steve Heimoff