Seattle has a major housing crisis. It has had one for the past decade. The crisis has one cause and one cause only. The violent, extremist hatred of the poor that the Seattle suburbanite nurtures.

The Facts

Seattle's housing crisis is one of the worst in the world. In a decade, we've seen a 60% spike in homelessness, and a house costs on average 750 thousand dollars. I don't need to tell you this though. You can already feel yourself being bled out like a stuck pig every month when your rent comes due. I could list a million different statistics on a million different metrics that all point to the same thing. What I want to show is something different. Throughout the history of urban housing, there has never been a time without a housing "crisis". Since the dawn of capitalism in the early 19th century, the conditions in cities have always been disastrous. The tenements of New York City, the apartments of London, the suburbs of Paris, inner city Moscow. All of these cities had a perpetual housing crisis throughout the 19th, and into the 20th century. This was not by accident either.

How Housing Extortion Works

The inhumane price of your rent is perfectly logical from the perspective of the market. Building an apartment is not cheap after all. You need to pay a premium for materials that are constantly in short supply on account of the constant construction of housing. You need to pay for labor that the scumbag government tells you must be paid $20 an hour. You need to pay for the land which your apartment sits on, which costs a million dollars up front. I did a couple of quick online calculations, and to just pay down interest on a 200 unit apartment with 600 square foot rooms, you would need to charge each resident 1250 dollars a month. This is not even taking into account maintenance, utilities, staffing, just to pay down interest on the loan you would have to take to build this apartment. It is logical to charge you the amount you pay, in fact it would be insane to make you pay less. This is why capitalism will never solve the brutality of the housing market. The brutality is created by capitalism's own logic. This is why the only times that the housing "crisis" has been solved is when socialist parties take control of governments and decide to develop housing in a way that doesn't follow market logic. Paris was made livable by the PCF, London by the Labor party, and Moscow by the Communists. 

The System of Housing Extortion in Seattle

So now we take ourselves to Seattle, and examine our own blossoming crisis. The cause is the system of economy, but what is preventing us from enacting the obvious solutions to the crisis that have worked? The answer is rich suburbanites. In every municipal and county election, the most wealthy pacific northwestern businessmen pay millions upon millions of dollars to make sure that no politician can come to power that would enact any systemic reform that would result in the destruction of our cruel and brutal housing market. In the last extremely small Seattle municipal election, real estate tycoons paid $1.5 million to ensure that no housing socialization became possible. The way they convert this money into political sway is through political propaganda in every newspaper, tv station and mailbox that broadcasts to the array of rich suburbanites that live in Seattle. You know the neighborhoods. Magnolia, Laurelhurst, View Ridge, and Seward Park. The class of people that live in these neighborhoods are probably one of the most indoctrinated in the entire world. Millions upon millions of dollars are dumped into convincing this class of people that the world works in a certain way, and that they consequently need to vote for the rich oligarchs that pay for their indoctrination. The propaganda that they distribute prays on the worst impulses of the rich suburbanite, and has created a class of hateful misandrists

The Nature of the American Suburbanite

So what does this suburban class believe? Since the invention of the car, the wealthy have been able to live physically apart from the poor. Ever since then, suburbanites who live far from the poor become paranoid about them. I call it paranoia because, at least in Seattle, the farther you live from high crime areas, the more you care about crime as an issue. Why is this? Part of it is 24/7 propaganda about crime from the super rich who want to sell suburbanites safety with their political candidates, but part of it is the separated nature of suburban housing itself. The result is a situation where suburbanites equate crime to the presence of poor people. Since few suburbanites regularly interact with poor people, they only see stories of deprivation in the media, and they do not have any experience with actual crime, in their mind being in proximity to the poor is the same as crime. This is why right wing politicians harp on police, homelessness, and crime. What they really mean is that they want to invest in police to play security theater in poorer areas that rich people go to to ease their nerves, and they want the police to move any homeless person or poor person who speaks too loud, acts too erratically, or looks too poor (See Footnote). This makes the main elements of the suburban political program essentially a program of institutionalized hatred and fear against an 'other' created by an oligarchic class.

How This Intersects With Housing Policy

Since suburbanites view the poor with nothing but spite, fear, and hatred, and the rich would stand to lose their position of exploitation, any policy that would create a non market housing program will be viciously resisted by the rich and their suburban lackeys. The rich oppose the concept of public housing for material reasons, but suburbans have more aesthetic reasons. Any housing that would introduce the poor into their neighborhoods is criminal. It would put environments that they have seen on tv and radio and in the news too close to them. I have campaigned for housing in neighborhoods like these, and the sneers and looks of fear that I get are shocking. They do it because they hate the people that would benefit from public housing. Even if they think something needs to be done, they cannot stomach the thought of interacting with the people they feel they have the obligation to help. Let me make it clear, they hate the people that would benefit from affordable housing, they're rich, they don't care about the costs, or expanding the size of government, or making sure its a sensible policy. They will be ok. Their mind jumps to the idea of a pauper, in their neighborhood, and they think that he's going to shoot them, or harass them, or assault them, and they can't stand it. So as long as the suburban housing form that continues this segregation of rich from poor continues to exist, you will continue to have your veins opened every month for your rent.

Footnote: All of this analysis misses race, sexuality, and disability as factors as well, but needless to say, not only are these categories disproportionately poor, but they are constantly demonized in the media. Any category that doesn't conform to the white ideal is targeted for removal by the police disproportionately. These suburbs are also some of the whitest places in the city, and many of them still have racial covenants. These were also the areas which were highest graded in redlining schemes. So these Meccas of exclusion, racism, and classism consistently vote for policing that is meant to soothe their own paranoia in areas that are not populated by them.

Published: 3-26-24