Initiative 135 has taken a step closer to putting social housing on the ballot. House Our Neighbors, the campaign behind the effort, says they turned in 7,543 signatures on Thursday. They expect their submissions to put them over the top, with King County Elections needing to accept 5,033 of them as valid to close the gap in their threshold to qualify.
Anchored by the homelessness-focused newspaper and advocacy organization Real Change, the House Our Neighbors (HON) coalition formed in response to Compassion Seattle, which, among other things, sought to codify sweeps (shorthand for homeless encampment removals) into the city charter. The coalition succeeded in winning a legal challenge that blocked the poorly crafted charter amendment from appearing on the ballot last year. Buoyed by their success, HON didn’t just want to block rival policy efforts, they also want to present their own policy vision, and they arrived at I-135, a ballot measure that establishes a public developer to build social housing in Seattle, as detailed in The Urbanist‘s primer. The Urbanist Elections Committee (on which I serve) endorsed I-135 last month.
The dueling campaigns have underscored the fissures in Seattle politics around the issues of housing and homelessness.
While a judge did block Compassion Seattle from appearing on the ballot, Mayor Bruce Harrell endorsed the effort and has said he intends to implement the plan. Harrell hired Compassion Seattle mastermind Tim Burgess, who served with Harrell on the Seattle City Council for many years, as his “director of strategic initiatives,” a senior cabinet-level official. Compassion Seattle promised to build 2,000 emergency housing units in one year with no new taxes. Mayor Harrell reaffirmed that pledge, but appears to be a little behind based on his own housing dashboard reporting.
Successful or not, Compassion Seattle did effectively define the centrist approach to homelessness, at least in this particular moment in time. With I-135, HON is seeking to provide a progressive alternative that addresses the fundamental issues underlying the housing crisis.
Bound by the single-issue limitations of citizen-led ballot measures, I-135 does not authorize new taxes either, but unlike Compassion Seattle it does direct City Council to seek new progressive revenue in order to ramp up production once the public developer is in place. The hope is that a social housing developer, once properly funded, could produce a lot more lower-income and middle-income housing that would be permanently affordable, ultimately providing a long-term fix to address longstanding lack of housing affordability in Seattle. That said, some affordable housing developers have not been convinced by this approach and the Housing Development Consortium, which represents them, came out against I-135.
