SS

So, you know, not to get too academic with it, but “The Right to the City” is a phrase that comes from the Marxist philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, who has done a lot of thinking about cities and cosmopolitan cities, as a site of resistance against capital. But the operative verb in the slogan is “fighting.” It’s the fact that we know that it’s going to take a contest, a contest for space, a contest for resources, a contest for revenue, to actually have that right to the city manifest.

And so, the question of public housing speaks to that fight on two fronts. Number one, the revenue solutions are not going to be given over easily. We had a very long, very public, contentious fight around public revenue for housing last year in the form of the employee head tax, dubbed the Amazon Tax, in which we saw major corporations push back vigorously against movements that originated on the ground to tax big business, to pay for housing and housing services. And so that fight is going to have to involve identifying where the revenue is to actually build the public housing that we need.

The fight is going to have to involve taxing our richest corporations. It’s going to have to involve implementing a real estate speculation tax on the same order that we saw implemented in Vancouver. It’s going to have to involve a real push to make sure that the corporations and companies that the city has incubated are paying for both the human infrastructure and physical infrastructure that they themselves benefit from.

But that fight is also going to have to be one for space, because we can raise all the progressive revenue that we want, but currently our zoning laws make it so that there’s only so many places that you’re able to put that housing.

In Seattle, it’s literally illegal to build apartments. It’s illegal to build multifamily housing. It’s illegal to build duplexes, for crying out loud. It’s illegal to actually build condos, even, in much of the city. So, even if you were a neoliberal housing hack, which I am not obviously, you’d still have to confront our zoning regime to do dense private construction, to say nothing of building public housing.

We need to do better and — at the municipal and the national level — we need to put public housing back on the agenda to solve the housing crisis, and in general big social problems back on the agenda to solve other ills, as well. Those are the kinds of ideas my campaign is about.