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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
I'm not going to tell you not to vote for Spears (my preferred outcome is for her to get 49.9% of the vote, hopefully incentivizing Chopp to take his base more seriously in the future) but you need to look into the research on rent control a bit more. The aims are laudable, but rent control has a terrible track record of delivering them, and often results in an increase in racial discrimination. It often locks people into the same apartment forever if they want to stay in the area, which inceases sprawl (if they get a job across town) and waste (if they can't afford to move to a smaller apartment once the kids are grown). Rent control's biggest beneficiaries tend to be upper middle class educated white people. Landlords respond to it by pricing the first several years of rent increases into the initial rent price, pricing out poorer people initially. It depresses investment in new housing stock, and divorces a big chunk of renters (the primary constituency for increasing affordable housing options) from the need for keeping the supply/demand ratio in balance, giving the NIMBY's an even bigger upper hand.
If rent control could deliver on it's promises I'd support it in a heartbeat. But it has a terrible track record.
Fuck.
Sawant's only achievement is fucking up the economy(temporarily) and raising unemployment(permanently) until equilibrium is achieved once more.
I doubt they taught her that in absolute equality world.
Republicants should be seen and left standing at the side of the road ...
I invite you to reflect a bit more deeply on some of the differences between the Seattle city council and the Washington State legislature. Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but I'm confident that with some modest effort you can figure out where your reasoning has led you astray.
I just like voting for socialists until that stops working out for us.
This is pandering of the lamest kind. Whether you think rent control is the bee's knees or not, you have to know that it's illegal in this state and will be until both the house and the senate vote to repeal that law. Which means never. It doesn't matter if your rep is Frank Chopp, Jess Spear, Jesus Christ, or Adolf Hitler -- it's not a possibility.
Jess Spear knows that. She's pandering. But Paul apparently doesn't; he thinks she's an "expert".
She's pandering to the mush-headed people who think that if we all just whine and stamp our feet and pout, those naughty Republicans will take pity on us and give us milk and cookies. And laws.
It's fucking embarrassing is what it is. She's an embarrassment to this state she barely knows and this district of which she is wholly ignorant. Are there enough similarly deluded morons to get her elected? Let's hope not.
You know who shares your anti-corporate chatter? The tea party. Spear's rhetoric is similar to that of the tea party kooks in a number of ways. You know, if you go far enough to the left you'll eventually meet people who've gone a similar distance around to the right.
That's correct. Politics isn't so much a spectrum as it is a sphere.
@3 I really don't think that sexism and racism have a place in these comments
Collectivism_Sucks, is that you?
That was very shrewd.
Hurray for Fnarf!
Page back through the online archives and read what the Times, and the wise heads here at the Stranger even, had to say about Sawant's $15/hr goal. Back when she started, $15/hr was a bad joke. Even people who believed in $15 thought it was a silly, unrealistic promise. They lumped it in with other Socialist bullshit like collectivizing Microsoft.
Beating Conlin was a huge upset. Having $15/hr catch fire was another huge upset. It had nothing to do with the real power of one Socialist outnumbered by 8 Democrats. It happened because the idea spread, and the Democrats were rightly scared. Look at all the punditry back when Sawant started.
Nobody saw it as a realistic goal. Every wise pundit thought Sawant would be irrelevant even if she could somehow eke out a win.
So Spear is no different. There is no goal she could put on her sign that would be true to her values and her constituents' values, yet strike an conventional handicapper as "realistic". She's at least as much of a longshot as Sawant was -- and still is. Neither could have gotten anywhere without a grassroots movement behind them making the powers that be pivot to avoid the voters' wrath.
I agree it could be a better sign, but forget about a goal that is realistic enough for the likes of Tim Keck or Fnarf. They're going to stick with Chopp's pipedream of a moderate coalition and some kind of incremental crawl toward Swedish liberal democracy in Washington some time around the year 2250. In the long run, Keck and Fnarf will be proven right. But in the long run, we'll all be dead.
A vote for Spear or Sawant is about saying "Fuck that losing game. Let's test just how strong the 99% is right now. If we lose, it's back to the status quo stalemate, which is all Chopp has to offer."
You do know that a lawmaker makes law right? Any candidate for the leg is going to have a platform that involves changing law. That's what they do. That's what they're running for.
Any campaign promise they make is a promise to make something legal that is currently "illegal in this state". It's seriously begging the question to attack a statehouse candidate for supporting action to make what is currently not the law into law.
And of course, if Spear ran on something that didn't involve making law, you'd attack her for being a naif who didn't grasp the duties of the job she was running for.
That's a lot better than Frank Chopp only passing regressive center-right laws and blocking all progressive left-wing legislation.
Everything old is new again.
Chopp has no Republican challenger, let alone a credible one, let alone a challenger in a neck-and-neck race. If you're going to make a Nader 2000 comparison, you should at least try to grasp why voting for Nader* was harmful.
* In Florida
You know that anti-postering ship has sailed, right? It's not 1998 any more, bud. But good luck trying to vote against everything that puts up posters on poles in Seattle. Guess you're not what they call a "likely voter".
And unlike Paul (who imagines he is a progressive voter just because he wants progressive outcomes), I am a progressive voter.
Genuine progressive voting ain't Candyland, and it ain't beanbag, and it sure as hell ain't Hungry Hungry Hippos.
you're buying into the right wing "free market" koolaide...
@35 So. You don't want more of the fastest growing and highest paying jobs in the world. And you don't want more apartment stock built in Seattle.
That sounds like some air tight logic for a thriving city right there.
Reckonings; A Rent Affair
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 7, 2000
Economists who have ventured into the alleged real world often quote Princeton's Alan Blinder, who has formulated what he calls ''Murphy's Law of economic policy'': ''Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.'' It's flip and cynical, but it's true.
Consider, on one side, really tough issues -- where there are plausible arguments on both sides, where nobody really knows how to measure the tradeoffs. Should Microsoft be broken up and, if so, how? Should Britain adopt the euro? Let's ask the economists! And those economists who are prepared to express strong opinions on such inherently ambiguous questions command rapt attention.
On the other side, consider an article that appeared in yesterday's New York Times, ''In San Francisco, Renters Are Supplicants.'' It was an interesting piece, with its tales of would-be renters spending months pounding the pavements, of dozens of desperate applicants arriving at a newly offered apartment, trying to impress the landlord with their credentials. And yet there was something crucial missing -- specifically, two words I knew had to be part of the story.
Not that I have any special knowledge about San Francisco's housing market -- in fact, as of yesterday morning I didn't know a thing about it. But it was immediately obvious from the story what was going on. To an economist, or for that matter a freshman who has taken Economics 101, everything about that story fairly screamed those two words -- which are, of course, ''rent control.''
After all, the sort of landlord behavior described in the article -- demanding that prospective tenants supply resumes and credit reports, that they dress nicely and act enthusiastic -- doesn't happen in uncontrolled housing markets. Landlords don't want groveling -- they would rather have money. In uncontrolled markets the question of who gets an apartment is settled quickly by the question of who is able and willing to pay the most. And so I had no doubts about what I would find after a bit of checking -- namely, that San Francisco is a city where a technology-fueled housing boom has collided with a draconian rent-control law.
The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial. In 1992 a poll of the American Economic Association found 93 percent of its members agreeing that ''a ceiling on rents reduces the quality and quantity of housing.'' Almost every freshman-level textbook contains a case study on rent control, using its known adverse side effects to illustrate the principles of supply and demand. Sky-high rents on uncontrolled apartments, because desperate renters have nowhere to go -- and the absence of new apartment construction, despite those high rents, because landlords fear that controls will be extended? Predictable. Bitter relations between tenants and landlords, with an arms race between ever-more ingenious strategies to force tenants out -- what yesterday's article oddly described as ''free-market horror stories'' -- and constantly proliferating regulations designed to block those strategies? Predictable.
And as for the way rent control sets people against one another -- the executive director of San Francisco's Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board has remarked that ''there doesn't seem to be anyone in this town who can trust anyone else in this town, including their own grandparents'' -- that's predictable, too.
None of this says that ending rent control is an easy decision. Still, surely it is worth knowing that the pathologies of San Francisco's housing market are right out of the textbook, that they are exactly what supply-and-demand analysis predicts.
But people literally don't want to know. A few months ago, when a San Francisco official proposed a study of the city's housing crisis, there was a firestorm of opposition from tenant-advocacy groups. They argued that even to study the situation was a step on the road to ending rent control -- and they may well have been right, because studying the issue might lead to a recognition of the obvious.
So now you know why economists are useless: when they actually do understand something, people don't want to hear about it.
YOUR apartment? Right there is your problem.