Speaker 4: Agenda Item 18. Resolution 32015. Regarding the impact of Seattle's Urban Renewal Program in displacing black community members from the central area, supporting community demands to fund quality, affordable social housing to prevent and reverse displacement. And urging the Office of Housing to fund the Affordable Housing Project. Proposed by New Hope Community Development Institute.
Speaker 0: Thank you. I move adoption of resolution 32015. Is there a second?
Speaker 2: Second.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember Swan. Councilor Swan, as sponsor of this item, you're recognized in order to address it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, President Pro-Tem Peterson. This is a resolution that my office worked on with Dr. Reverend Jeffrey of the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Pastors of other black churches and the United Black Clergy as a whole. The Church Council of Greater Seattle and the Low Income Housing Institute and many Central District community members. By approving this resolution, the City Council will acknowledge the city's past policies of racist displacement, such as redlining, urban renewal. And we don't seed and urge all city departments to look for opportunities to make reparations for those past injustices. Urged the Office of Housing to fund the new Hope Family Housing Project, which will create 86 affordable homes in the Central District to their families with historic roots in the neighborhood. You know, the working families who are displaced because of these redlining policies and also in the ensuing years, because of skyrocketing rent, can afford to come and I can afford to stay if they're at risk of displacement or they can afford to return. With the new affordable housing available. Commit to expand city funding for affordable housing projects made available in 2021 and forum support for increasing progressive taxes on big business and the rich to develop more quality, affordable social housing. I thank the new Hope Church community and so many others for helping to organize and for speaking at the amazing rally we held on Saturday, July 31st, in support of the resolution, in support of the Affordable Housing by the New Hope Church, and in support of expanding funding for such community projects so that we are not forced to compete with one another over pennies while the wealth gap in this city continues expanding at a stunning rate. All affordable housing that can be built is needed right now, given the steep affordability crisis, and it is the obligation of elected officials to expand the progressive revenues available for this. Special thanks to former King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, who spoke at the rally and who spoke today in public comment and also in public comment last Monday. And also I wanted to recognize against some resistance and the new executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute, who also came out to speak at the rally that Saturday. Members of the public may also have seen an excellent op ed in the Seattle Times on July 16, authored by Reverend Jeffrey, who, as you all know, is a senior pastor of the New Hope Church, which is the historically black church in the Central District. And in that op ed, Reverend Jeffrey notes that in 1969, the city forced the new Hope Church and black homeowners. In this very area to sell their land under the threat of eminent domain for Spruce Street Mini Park, the city's establishment at the time sought the elimination of the Central District's vibrant black neighborhood, which included working people and also black small businesses and the political establishment at that time, both in Seattle and nationwide, but put massive resources into what they called urban renewal, which is a very deceptive, euphemistic storm that has that spelled displacement and destruction for black communities in the Central District. This so-called renewal project was named the Atlantic Urban Renewal Project and then later named the U.S.. Neighborhood Improvement Project. Which again, is misleading because it basically destroyed the neighborhood that existed at that time. The man and the city council at the time literally passed literally dozens of bills spanning over a decade, gathering federal grants, contracting with consultants and forcing black homeowners and judges to sell their land. And the report from the consultants, the Seattle Urban Renewal Enterprise, made their intention clear. It describes the Central District as, quote, home to the colored, the poor, the ignorant, the unfortunate, the undesirable, the weak and the undeserving poor. This is all quoted from the report. In 1961, the Seattle Urban Renewal Enterprise submitted to the city its funding report and summary, which claimed that, quote, to preserve this community for, quote unquote, decent folks and families, three things are needed assistance to those who need it and improving their way of life in every respect. Encouragement to middle and upper income whites to move into the community. And three relocation of those undesirables. The purveyors of mice and crime. The chronic troublemakers. The undeserving poor who are the source of the most social blight in the area, end quote. And following that report, city officials used the threat of eminent domain to force the new Hope Church and the neighboring black homeowners to sell their properties. The city created, quote unquote, incentives, as they stated in their intent for middle and upper class white families to move into the area to supposedly, quote unquote, revitalize the area. In other words, the city's political establishment committed a stunning outrage and egregious theft of black resources, of working people's resources and legalized racist redlining and gentrification. This is a resolution which means that it only has the power to state an intention from the city council. It is extremely important as the first step, but I would also make sure members of the public and community, members of the Central District recognize, as many did in public comment today, that this is not the budget legislation and that our people's budget movement will need to follow this up in the autumn with a real struggle to win funding for to compensate the community members displaced over decades. And my office, of course, is dedicating to support that struggle. And we will be building the people's budget campaign, as we have done every year for the past seven years. The property that the New Hope Church was forced to relinquish to the city in 1969 is estimated to be worth $2 million today, over eight times the inflation adjusted amount it was sold for. We know that those those injustices need to be corrected, but it's not just about what happened in the past. It's about today. The city being unaffordable and the new hope effort is very much part of the thousands of community members who are fighting for an affordable city. We need to continue to tax big business and the super rich, which is basically expand the Amazon tax in the city. We also need statewide efforts for taxes on wealthy household households, all those billionaires who have profited immensely of the injustice of capitalism in general, but also have pocketed tremendous amounts during the pandemic when hundreds of thousands of households statewide were impoverished because of loss of jobs or income. As a first step. This resolution urges the Office of Housing to fund the new Hope Family Housing Project. But as I said, that is just the first step. We also need our dad Thomas on Movement to continue pushing for funding. We did that last year explicitly for anti displacement, affordable housing in the central area. And that victory was particularly won by the activism of the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, along with other black clergy members like Reverend Bell, as well as who also spoke today. Many community activists, Reverend Young, who also spoke today and has been shoulder to shoulder every step of the way with the black community in the Central District and many socialists, particularly members from Socialist Alternative. We were all together demanding that the city establishment support the central area housing plan. I also wanted to recognize a real change by Seattle, the Tenants Union and Lehigh, all renters rights and housing justice organizations that have supported this effort. I also wanted to just before concluding Hank, of course, the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church community, the New Hope Community Development Institute, the Church Council of Greater Seattle, and Michael Ramos from the Church Council, United Black Clergy. Seattle King County, ACP. Seattle. Japanese American Citizens League. Bethany United Church of Christ the Black Lives Matter. Seattle. King County Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle. El Centro de la Rosa. Low Income Housing Institute. Of Course, MLK Junior Committee Members, The Anemia Project, Women Rising and the Clean Greens Farm and Market Program that is supplying affordable, fresh food to our most vulnerable community members. Thank you all so much. I hope you will all be voting yes on this.
Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember Swan. Colleagues, any other comments on this resolution? 32015. Councilmember Mosquito.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much. Council President Pro Tem. I want to thank Councilmember Salant for working with my office. I don't think it was mentioned that we did a lot of work with her office, with Ted and Aaron House, working together on the no fund language on this resolution to reflect the language we already passed in the Jumpstart Seattle Protected Fund legislation. You might remember just a few weeks ago, we passed legislation to make sure that all of the funding coming in from Jumpstart went into a siloed fund so that we can ensure accountability and transparency, and that the spend plan that we all jointly worked on together that passed unanimously was fully adhered to. In that bill, we expressed our intent to increase the 2021 no fund through this year's budget process. The current no amount sits at around $35 million, which the legislation in front of us fully acknowledges is not sufficient, not sufficient to fund all of the projects that are shovel ready as we continue to work to scale up affordable housing investments, especially in the wake of COVID. So very much in support of the effort to make sure that we are forward spending the no fight investments that we know are desperately needed right now. And this is a great example of what we should be funding now with the expected revenue to come. I also want to recognize the importance of funding affordable housing that is rooted in and driven by communities, especially communities of color, especially communities in the Central District, our black communities that have been disproportionately impacted by discriminatory and racist policies of the past, like urban renewal, like redlining, like our current exclusionary zoning strategies. This is part of the reason that I sponsored and we passed the 2018 Racial Equity Toolkit that was just discussed in the Land Use Committee. Finally, last week excuse me, last month, and it explains a lot about how the lived experience of those who've been testifying, meeting after meeting in support of this effort today have been caused by and perpetuated by our city's exclusionary zoning policies and how important it is for us to use public policy tools to really change those those exclusionary policies that may have had name changes over the years, but are still very much just as harmful. The Council also passed legislation making sure that we were expressly directing the executive department to every time that we had the opportunity to use public dollars to make sure that they were going into community focused acquisition and development for communities that were formerly red lives. Communities that are still dealing with the legacy of that redlining. And folks who have been shut out of previous home ownership opportunities and thus also had limited ability to acquire generational wealth because of those racist lending policies of the past. Some of the ways that we are hoping to continue to couple efforts like today's resolution with public policy and funding policy is to make sure that the funds are going to those who have been disproportionately affected by discriminatory lending practices of the past. So one example is in the 2008 Housing and Administration Finance Plan on page 59. It says the objectives of the department, meaning the Department of Office of Housing, should be to prioritize partnerships and prioritize development proposals submitted by organizations led by and accountable to communities most impacted by displacement whenever available sites are located in neighborhoods with high risk of displacement. We then followed up this legislation with your efforts this year, colleagues in the Seattle Rescue Plan, one in Section eight. We built upon that language from the administration of finance plan specifically for our efforts to try to house more folks who have been disproportionately affected by COVID. And that includes high proportions of folks from our black communities in Seattle. Section eight says the city will prioritize opportunities to partner with local community based organizations that are culturally relevant and historically rooted in and founded by communities that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID, have organizational leadership, staff and board composition that reflect the communities they serve for the purposes of direct grants and or allocations of grants. And you'll remember that we put about $50 million in the Seattle rescue plan. So we're trying to really tell the department, tell the departments and the executive to target those investments so that we can have more black communities, really have the opportunity to access those funds first . I greatly appreciate the organizing that has happened with New Hope and the community at large, which heard from a number of folks over the last few meetings about how this project is ready to go. And I look forward as the budget process starts to make sure that we are funding these efforts in the fall process. We know that the project is somewhere between pre-development and shovel ready and that they're likely to apply for all of the funds. And with additional funds available through Jumpstart, we will be able to really prioritize the community driven projects like this through an plan, through jumpstart, through resolutions like the one we have in front of us today to make sure that we're supporting and and and expanding our commitment through Office of Housing Investments to make sure that these projects get the funding that they need. We also need to make sure that we're reducing and removing partnership requirement barriers. This is something I've heard directly from communities that have met with me, from black clergy, who've also echoed many of the things that I've heard from communities like in the Latino community and the Filipino community who have been trying to create more affordable housing across this city. And they have been faced with this requirement for a partnership that really removes the ability for them to have ownership and control and direction over the land and the housing that they're trying to create. So in addition to supporting efforts like this and the funding that's required, we will be working through this year's budget to remove those covenant requirements, remove the partnership requirements that have been a major barrier to especially communities of color who've been trying to create housing, self-directed housing for communities hardest hit by displacement. I am looking forward to also continuing conversations about expanding opportunities for progressive revenue. I've been long in support of making sure that we have all progressive revenue options that we can advance. And the city that and the state that has long been plagued by one of the most regressive tax systems in our country. And I see this effort as a broad statement to say that we will continue to advance progressive revenue strategies so that we can layer current progressive sources to make sure that we actually create that scale of funding needed to invest in affordable housing and so many other crises that are affecting our communities, especially our black community, that has been disproportionately affected by redlining, previous racist covenants in our existing zoning strategies. So thank you for bringing this forward and thinks, Councilmember Swan for your office's work with with Aaron House to include some language regarding the Nova. Appreciate that.
Speaker 0: Thank you. Any comments from any other council members and with the council, our final word on on our resolution. Councilor Swan, any final comments on the resolution?
Speaker 2: Thank you, President Petersen, and thank you, Governor Mosquito, for working my office on the no foul language. I wanted to reiterate my gratitude to all the working people faith leaders, community members, socialists, renters, renters, rights advocates, and union members who have been part of this and will continue to be a part of the People's Budget campaign in the autumn. You know, a lot of black community members who who were there, who were around in the sixties, including Reverend Jeffrey, but many others have told us that at that time, when they were sold this program as urban renewal, they recognized it was black removal. In fact, novelist and activist James Baldwin famously dubbed this urban renewal program, which was a nationwide program, urban renewal of Negro removal in the 1960s and. I just wanted to point out that this is not an artifact of history. As horrendous as it was. It is happening again today, not in the same legalized racism kind of way, but because of skyrocketing rents. And we know that skyrocketing rents are absolutely decimating the lives of working people as a whole in every metropolitan area in the United States. And disproportionate effect effects are being felt by black community members and some of the other communities of color. We know that in Seattle, rents have gone up 21% just since January, which is an annualized rate increase, a just eye popping annualized rate increase rate of 42%, and that is double the national average. That is how scary life is going to be for people in Seattle once the eviction moratorium is lifted. And that is absolutely why I would urge all members of the public who are listening right now to join us. And if you've joined us already, then to keep fighting with us to win rent control in Seattle. In our rent control legislation that my office is bringing forward would go into effect as soon as the state lifted its stay. The it's absolutely unjust ban on rent control and we know that we need to provoke that battle at the state legislature and it is not going to happen if we allow Democratic politicians, the free and Democratic politicians state to give each other cover by passing the buck saying, well, we can't pass rent control here because the state has banned it. And the state legislature, politicians say, well, we can't pass this because nobody's pushing for this. So let's break that logjam. Working people have to fight. We have to start the fight somewhere. Let's start in Seattle. In addition to that, as people who are listening would know. My office has also brought forward two other bills that are extremely important for renters. Rights, again, will disproportionately, positively affect the lives of our black community members, which is a six month notice for any rent increase that will require landlords to give a six month notice for any rent increase. And another bill extremely important to give any, you know, for landlords to be mandated to give economic eviction assistance of three times the rent if they end up causing the tenant to economically evict themselves because their rent went up by 10% or more. All of these bills are going to be extremely crucial. They are crucial elements of a renter's bill of rights, which we have made tremendous progress to the renters rights movement and my office throughout this year. We need to keep that progress up. We need the new family housing project. We also need to end the displacement that is happening today by sky rocketing rents. And so those who are fighting for new hope, as they stated today, they understand very clearly that that is only part of the fight, that we need affordable housing throughout the city. In addition, I'll also mention another incredible victory that the renters rights movement has won. Just days ago, actually during the weekend, because of collective raising of collective voice, we had a working family, David and Latisha Levy. Lakisha is a black American working person in Seattle, and she's a mother of a nine year old. David And like you said, together are parents to a nine year old. They lost their rental home at the start of the pandemic and ended up spending nine months in hotels and paying through the nose just to have shelter in the hotel. And ultimately, it came to a point where because of various struggles, including losing their jobs, of course, during the pandemic, getting injured in the workplace, not having their locations of employment show up, unemployment benefits show up, all of that landing on them, they ended up, despite all the efforts that they made, despite all the mortgages paid to the hotel, they ended up with a debt of $3,384 to Homewood Suites managed by Hilton Worldwide, which are managed as a major global conglomerate. And they reached out in desperation to my office and we carried out a public campaign through which 400 emails reached the Hilton Hotel from ordinary people, from many of the people advocating for new hope, urging the hotels to eliminate that debt. And within an hour of receiving those emails, we got a rapid response from the hotel managers saying that they have canceled that that that is the impact of collective voice and fight fightback. I hope renters throughout the city are inspired by that story and that we redouble our efforts when we come back in September for all of the renters like that, as you mentioned. And we use that momentum to then, you know, increase the Amazon tax because that's how we won the Amazon tax in the first place. That's how we really won being able to win rights for our homeless neighbors as well. Thank you so much.
Speaker 0: As a council member, Charlotte was a clerk. Please call the role on the adoption resolution.
Speaker 1: Lewis.
Speaker 5: I.
Speaker 1: Morales. I. Ms.. Gather I so want. Yes. Strauss. Yeah. Strauss.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 1: Thank you. Herbal? Yes. Juarez. I think Council President Fred Chan Petersen.
Speaker 0: High.
Speaker 1: H in favor and unopposed.
Speaker 0: The motion carries the resolutions adopted. The chair will sign it. Will the clerk please affix my signature to the legislation on my behalf? Item 19 Will Clerk please read item 19 into the record?
A RESOLUTION regarding the impact of Seattle’s Urban Renewal program in displacing Black community members from the Central Area; supporting community demands to fund quality affordable social housing to prevent and reverse displacement; and urging the Office of Housing to fund the affordable housing project proposed by New Hope Community Development Institute.