by Mike Blain
The Free Press
The majority of the residents of Seattle are tenants. But no tenants sit on the Seattle City Council. Most people in this city do not own property. Every member of the city council owns property. Something is wrong with this picture.
While the privilege of voting, and holding office, was restricted to property owners at one point in U.S. history, that is not the case in Seattle circa 1995. But you wouldn't know that based on the composition of our current city council. All nine of our elected metropolitan representatives own homes, with some of them owning more than one property. Some of them are also landlords.
Although our city council is ethnically and gender-diverse, it is totally devoid of people who have to pay property owners every month for the privilege of camping on their real estate for some finite amount of time. Tenants have no viable say in Seattle city government.
Why does this matter? There is nothing inherently wrong with owning property or being a landlord. There is nothing necessarily wrong with owning property and sitting on the city council. But there is something wrong with a city council comprised entirely of property owners that routinely makes decisions adversely affecting the property-less.
We're talking about a legislative body that shoots down a measure that would prohibit rent increases in buildings with code violations, but passes a law that outlaws sitting on sidewalks. Whose interests are being represented? Property-owning landlords in the first instance, and irate property-owning business people, for the most part, in the second.
And whose interests aren't being represented? Most obviously, tenants. But it's not simply tenants. Most of us who rent do so because that's all we can do. If all us tenants had an extra few thousand dollars laying around and tidied up our credit records and had decent-paying jobs and decided to sell our souls for a 30-year mortgage, we'd probably buy houses and condos so we could avoid flushing rent down the drain every month.
But we don't. So we rent. And renters are, by and large, younger and poorer than property owners. So it's not just tenants that aren't represented by the Seattle City Council. It's also people under the age of 30. It's also people making less than $25,000 a year.
The fact that there are no tenants on the city council, then, also means that low-income and/or young people have virtually no say in how their city is run. Maybe that's how some people think it should be. I don't.
The 1990 U.S. Census recorded 121,003 renter-occupied housing units in the city of Seattle, out of a total of 236,702. That's 51.1 percent. Bellevue, Bellingham, Spokane and Tacoma all had less than 50 percent of their residents living in rental housing.
While not every economic, ethnic or social constituency can sit on a nine-member council, is it unreasonable to think that a socioeconomic group (tenants) that comprises half of the city could have at least ONE representative? Not having any tenants on the council is the equivalent of having no women on the council. Half of the population is not represented. While the former raises nary an eyebrow, if the latter were true we would hear plenty about the patriarchal nature of the city council.
Who knows if one or two tenants sitting on the council would make a difference in a vote prohibiting rent increases if code violations exist. Maybe. Maybe not. But the debate certainly would be different. At least there would be a tenant perspective.
And attempting to get that tenant perspective on the council doesn't seem like it would be a totally futile effort. I'm no campaign strategist, but Seattle seems ripe for someone to run for city council on a tenant's platform.
The demographics of Seattle have changed in the five years since data was collected for the 1990 Census. A steady influx of renters in their 20s and 30s has not only upped the percentage of city residents who are tenants, it has also driven up rents in the city (from, for example, $240 in 1989 for a studio apartment in the building where I live on Capitol Hill, to $485 today). Average wages certainly haven't doubled over the last five years. But rent has, and then some, in many areas of Seattle. I would guess that there is a huge pool of low and middle-income tenants who would love to send some homeowning councilmembers packing.
Why doesn't someone run for city council and target residents of apartment buildings and rental houses? Run a populist, pro-tenants campaign. You wouldn't have to spend tens of thousands on television or radio ads. Nor break the bank on city-wide mailings. Just pound the pavement and target high-density neighborhoods with a lots of apartments.
Rental housing would be harder to track down, but it could be done to a certain degree. Ask around. People know what neigborhoods and streets have a high percentage of rental housing. Write off wealthy residential neighborhoods.
If someone ran a campaign targeted primarily at winning the vote of tenants, he or she wouldn't even have to win over a majority of voting tenants to capture a seat. If only 40 percent of tenants eligible to vote cast a ballot, and a little under half of those voted for that person (less than one quarter of all voting age tenants) he or she could still gather over 50,000 votes and have a good shot at winning a seat.
And maybe turnout might go up among tenants because many who might not otherwise vote would be eager to get a non-property owner onto the city council. Maybe tenants would vote in several tenants.
It wouldn't have to be a totally one-dimensional campaign, however. A candidate could be pro-tenant and "tough on crime." They could be pro-tenant and anti-open Pine Street. Hell, they could be pro-tenant and pro-pave Discovery Park if they wanted. The point is, they can take their stands on the hot-button issues of the season, but still make the absence of tenants on the council a campaign issue.
Maybe this has a faint smell of a call to inject a little class warfare into Seattle's staid and "mellow" political world. If so, good. Because this is also an issue of class. Property owners are not poor. They could be struggling or hitting hard times, but they are not poor. Renters may or may not be poor, but poor people are almost invariably renters. The young, the poor, and the otherwise non-mortgage worthy have a right to be represented in this city's government.
City council elections are this November. Primaries are in September. Several seats will be up for grabs. Think about running. Make a difference at the local level and get a good paying part-time job. Or comb your brain for someone you think should give it a shot, and then pester them incessantly. Talk them into filing.
I'd run myself, but I like my skeletons just fine where they are. Plus . . . I've inhaled.
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Contents on this page were published in the February/March, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1995 WFP Collective, Inc.