Lost in OC: When the Levy Takes
by Jim Washburn
Seattleites vote to raise their own taxes to build affordable housing
Seattle: It’s my kind of town, aside from my probably not being able to stand living there. Seattle is teeming with culture, people, architecture, neighborhoods, street life, clean air, and a sense of possibility that I love, but I’m evidently willing to chuck all that aside for a reasonably Mediterranean climate. I’m a baby where weather is concerned. Along with the months of gloom, they get genuine cold and snow there. Sure, that makes the summers there that much sweeter, but I can visit in the sweet summer and leave the winters to the natives.
My wife and I went through Seattle in early November, on our usual way to see my mom in bucolic Sequim, Washington. We always see something different passing through town. This time it was a small Coast Guard vessel shadowing our Seattle-to-Bainbridge ferry, with a guy in black from head to toe manning a mounted machine gun at the fore.
My Seattle friends later told me they’d never seen such a thing. It was only later over the radio that we heard about the massacre at Fort Hood that day; maybe that upped the terror alert level. Though ferries make for photogenic victims in movies, I can’t see Washington’s being much of a target, since they are pretty well self-destructing on their own. Until two years ago, four of the ferries in the system dated to 1927. They were removed from service after it was discovered the keels were decomposing. That left the relatively spry ferries from 1947 onwards to take up the slack.
Washington politics can be as divisive and squirrelly as the other Washington’s, but they do tend to get things done up there. They’re building new ferries to replace the retired ones, and are trying to plan ahead to stave off a projected $3 billion shortfall over the next 20 years.
Another great example of Washingtonian can-do was accomplished on November 3, when Seattle voters overwhelmingly approved a $145 million property tax levy to support affordable housing. It will cost homeowners an average of $65 a year, and is projected to build or maintain over 2,000 low-income homes, along with supporting a variety of other affordable housing-related projects.
Living in Orange County, where residents wouldn’t approve a tax to pay for catchers’ mitts if monkeys were throwing monkey poop at them, this seems remarkable. Up north, though, it’s pretty much business as usual, this being the fifth such levy Seattleites have imposed on themselves since 1981.
Anna Markee
I spoke with Anna Markee, who, as Seattle Outreach Director with the Housing Development Consortium (a membership organization of affordable housing providers and related businesses), was instrumental in getting out the vote, in which over 65 percent of voters approved the levy.
“We’re excited. We’re pretty sure its got to be the largest voter-approved public funding of a property tax to support affordable housing. Other places have some funding mechanisms that we don’t have in Seattle, but I think we’re about the only place where the voters tax themselves so much for housing,” she said.
Markee wasn’t even born when the first levy passed in 1981, but she’s pretty up on its history.
“It started with the community and the mayor at the time, as a very focused and small project. It was a bond issue then, not exactly a levy, to help seniors, when they were really starting to recognize the need for senior housing. There was a lot of public support, because everyone wants a house for grandma and grandpa. They built a lot of housing, nice mid-sized apartment buildings scattered throughout most neighborhoods in the city. They were built well, looked good and the community accepted them. That started the community acceptance for low-income housing. From there it’s just been able to build and become more comprehensive.”
The previous successful levies didn’t guarantee a shoo-in this time.
“A big question going into this was how was the recession going to effect voters?” Markee said. “Are they going to say, ‘We’ve done enough. I’ve got to protect myself?’ What we found was that folks in Seattle—maybe because things aren’t that bad here—people had more of an attitude of compassion, of realizing that times are tough for everybody, but for some people times are really, really tough, and we need to protect them.”
There were also concerns about levy fatigue, of voters wondering, “Didn’t we already pay to fix this problem?”
“One editor of a local newspaper did raise that concern, of ‘When is enough enough? Shouldn’t we be done with this?’ But homelessness and poverty are persistent issues, and I think most people recognize that until we really solve the underlying issues, we’re going to need a stable, continuous stock of affordable housing.”
Seattle’s a city where about 50% of the residents are renters. The cynic in me had to ask if people hadn’t supported the levy because so many of them weren’t the ones directly paying it.
“It’s hard to say. Traditionally, homeowners are more likely to vote, so the voting base is skewed toward them. And initially we found that the younger, infrequent voters—mostly renters—were not as supportive of the levy as we would have thought. Our research before the campaign told us that, and that it was mostly because they weren’t informed about the issue, so we targeted most of our effort toward that group,” she said.
residents in housing built via previous levies
The campaign to pass the levy cost $333,000. They spent no money on TV and radio spots, instead going for information-based mailers and “a robust field effort of phone-banking and door-belling. We did about 40,000 phone calls and 4,000 doors. The mailers were targeted toward younger people who vote infrequently, so we really needed to repeat the message and kind of hit them over the head with it.”
It helped that they had a pretty good hammer: a program that’s worked in the city for 28 years and has been shown to more than pay for itself in savings elsewhere.
“That was one of the main arguments that helped us pass it,” Markee said. “We were able to show this long track record of success. And there’s a lot of information to prove it’s exceeded its goals in the past, just in terms of producing more homes than had been expected. The money also gets matched by other funding sources, so it’s bringing in all this other funding from the state or federal government that’s going into our communities, through jobs and taxes.
“There have also been a couple of studies. Not all the housing does this, but we have some housing that is specifically focused on the chronically homeless adults who have been using emergency services the most, showing up at the emergency room nearly every day, or the sobering center or jail. An organization reached out to those specific individuals, put them into stable, supportive housing. They tracked them for a year before they were in housing and a year after and compared their use of emergency services, which declined dramatically. They found that in that first year alone, they’d saved the public about $4 million that would have been spent on the ER and other services, while the investment in the project was only $2 million. So such projects more than pay for themselves.”
The levy will raise its $145 million over seven years. The money will mainly be allocated toward building new affordable housing and preserving existing units. In addition, Markee said, “there are two separate programs. One is rental assistance, geared at keeping people stable, preventing homelessness. It’s for people who have an emergency, or get sick or lose their jobs and may be facing eviction or homelessness: it can provide some short-term assistance to keep them stable in their apartment.
“Then there’s a home ownership program. That was added in 1995, and was renewed a few times. It’s the smallest part of the levy, about 7% of the funding, but it’s been somewhat controversial. It provides down-payment assistance for low-income families. We have such an expensive housing market that a lot of low-income families, particularly ones of color and immigrant families, just don’t have access to the credit market or to financial literacy or financial counseling. This helps those groups that are shut out of the housing market to get access. It’s like a second mortgage to help them get into that home.”
Markee has been an activist for most of her life. At age 15 she was named 1997 National Youth Advocate of the Year by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, in part for helping to get outdoor tobacco advertising banned in her hometown of Tacoma. She’s since helped out at one of my favorite organizations (and restaurants!), Fare Start, which trains Seattle homeless for jobs in the restaurant trade. She’s very involved in the Seattle LGBT community, and helped found the city’s Out In Front leadership training program for young gay and lesbian persons.
She doesn’t foresee any time in her life when she isn’t working to make a difference, but at the moment is feeling fairly content over the job they just accomplished. Then it’s back to work.
“I think the conditions that cause homelessness can be addressed: the lack of affordable housing is the leading cause, but at the same time, we need more living wages; we need more transportation and the ability for people to live close to their jobs. Housing is connected to so many other social issues that I don’t think you can look at it in isolation and solve it.”
jim@fourstory.org
Comments
No comments yet.
