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.