On a mild November night I took a stroll through the neighborhood. To my surprise, there was a giant new plaza that I had never seen before, so I walked in and sat down. It was an eerie feeling, the kind of feeling you get when you go to Bellevue– that you're not supposed to be there unless you live there. The entire space was empty except for the occasional resident jostling with the overcomplicated key card entrance machine. Up above the plaza were countless security cameras watching the uneventful night. The security guard stared me down from afar, as I was the sole person in the whole plaza. Then a white cis-het couple engaged in PDA on the way to their Uber. This was the last straw. I had to get out of there. I left feeling icky and lonely, walking across the street only to find another McMansion tower development just like the last.

New developments are being completed left and right, with increasingly dumber names: The Accolade, The Standard, Theory, The M, ōLiv… (tag yourself.) These developments market themselves as selling a luxury college experience. ōLiv’s website really says it all, greeting you with language like “Go, Live Your Best” and “residents come home to be revived,” accompanied with pictures of their rooftop swimming pool. Looking deeper on the website you’ll find a video titled ōLiv Seattle, which we are not going to attach here because we are not horny for developer-landlords the same way The Daily is. The video follows a resident through a day in their life, showing us them studying and hanging out with friends. The ōLiv marketing team knows that students want to feel successful and popular, and knows that they capitalize on our insecurities. It’s working. And pay we will, rents at these places are not cheap. ōLiv boasts monthly rents starting at $1,500 per bed going up into the $2,000s, reiterating that sharing a bedroom will not cut rent in half.

Photo Credit: ōLiv Seattle

How Everyone Else Lives

These new towers signify an increasing divide between how students are living. Those who cannot pay the premium to live in the towers are forced to increasingly unmaintained and often unsafe buildings. Really bad landlords continue to do as they please with no regard for tenant protections and building safety standards. As a friend once elegantly said after another friend had to move for the third time due to unsafe living conditions “U-District is where tenant rights go to die.”

Over the last few years, housing has exploded in price, forcing many to have to take on long commutes from distant suburbs to attend class or work at UW. It’s also forcing many UW students into housing and food insecurity. Back in 2019, the UW commissioned a study into housing and food insecurity across the university’s three campuses (which we could write a whole article on.) They found high levels of housing and food insecurity among students. In classic UW fashion, they then formed a committee to look deeper into the issue and then quickly disbanded the committee, never taking actionable steps toward addressing the problem. Since then the pandemic has likely made the situation even worse for people. 

Photo Credit: Report by Fyall, Stevens, and Manzo: Link

UW and the state’s high tolerance for student suffering is exemplified by the excessive cost of the UW dorms, despite them being publicly owned. The state government would rather continue to provide austere services and cut workers’ wages than actually invest in housing the UW community and providing living wages. State austerity has made UW’s dorms almost as expensive as the new luxury towers as UW HFS tries to break even every year with ever-decreasing state funding. This leaves students with fewer affordable options for finding housing. We need more affordable housing.

Developer-Landlords, YIMBYs, and Hedge Funds

Despite what your ECON 200 professor might tell you, housing prices are not based on supply and demand economics. The argument goes that simply building more housing will increase supply and decrease the price per unit. This is unlikely to happen as developer-landlords are not in it to increase supply, instead they aim to make as much profit from their upfront cost as possible. Developer-landlords will never build us out of the housing crisis as scarcity provides more profit per unit.

In the fight for housing for all, very many make the misstep of wanting to just build more housing, often not asking questions like, who is building it? and, how affordable will it be? These people often categorize themselves as YIMBYs standing for yes in my backyard. However, green lighting and incentivizing development all or even most of the time is not great, often taking the form of tax breaks and other ‘blank checks’ to developers. These blank checks are just subsidies for massive hedge funds (Blackrock, Baupost Group, etc). These developers do not have the best interest of the community at heart as their sole goal is increasing the share prices for their investors and upcharging tenants to do so. It should be clear to us by now that this is not the solution, as seemingly the more we build, the more expensive housing gets.

Developments often replace affordable, organic, and culturally significant spaces. It allows them to erase communities systematically and replace them with a sterile and non-rebellious uniformity. Organized gentrification of this nature is occurring all over Seattle and most American cities, allowing suburbs to come into the city and forcing urban communities into the suburbs. Development, thus, is a tool of state and industry control over communities.

UW is a Development Lobby

As established, the government has a vested interest in funneling money to developer-landlords. UW is no different. The university continues to support developers in all stages of construction.

One way UW does this is through their role in the U District’s business improvement area (BIA), or the U District Partnership. Several UW employees sit on the board and work to endorse development in committee meetings. BIAs also work to make our neighborhood more attractive to developers. Eliminating the wealthy euro-centric perception of crime and displacing marginalized groups to do it, is often a good place to start.

Another way UW helps is with paid advertising for developer-landlords. It is no secret that the list of our UW student emails is given out to the highest bidder, as we get more and more emails trying to get us to live in McMansion Towers. Then there’s The Daily, which as mentioned earlier, is just horny for that corporate cash. Imperialist corporations? If they pay enough–  Landlords? Yes more!– Amazon? Oh my god, yes!

UW, The Daily, and all the neoliberal institutions in our neighborhood have an entrenched history of supporting an industry of displacement originating from the theft of the land we now call U-District as part of a settler colonial project. Development and further displacement on this land is unjust. 

A Better Future…

As part of my vow to keep the articles I write more positive so that I  don’t leave you all super sad, I thought I’d close us out with a brief discussion about what we could have instead.

For most of human history, development was organic and focused on the people who would use and live in the space. Imagine a return to that in the modern day, instead of an arbitrary system of land ownership and zoning, the community would support each other in building houses and maintaining current ones. Systems of mutual aid would replace services that landlords once charged an arm and a leg for. We could replace lawns with abundant farms growing fresh produce to be shared with the community. We could tear up paved surfaces and use our excess road space for beneficial uses like housing, gardens, bioswales, and more. We would destroy industry and return the land and its resources to indigenous communities. We would break free from a culture of consumption and fully use what we already have. Continuous growth would not be incentivized and yet people would have more than they did before. No government, no state, no authorities, and no corporations suppressing and stealing from the people. Together, we would be left to cultivate abundance.

The future does not have to hold McMansion towers overlooking widespread-suffering. Corporations and the state will fight to keep it like this– working within their rules will yield nothing. 

As always, be wary about the propaganda you consume, you are not immune to it and we are all subjected to propaganda non-stop in this neoliberal capitalist hellscape. The state wants to control us with fear, and they’re succeeding. The first step is escaping the state’s propaganda machine and if you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance you’ve already done this. Now all that’s left is to go out into the world and build community in anarchism and revolt. If we do this, anarchism might just be closer than it seems.