After 18 Years, I’ve Had It. I’m Done with Whiners Who Hate Seattle
An op-ed in the Seattle Times claims that the rich and the poor are pushing the middle class out of Seattle. Here’s why that argument is baloney.
A Seattle Times editorial by science writer Alex Berezow shamelessly titled “After 14 years, I’ve had it. I’m leaving Seattle” has been the talk of the town.
It begins with a claim that Councilmember Debora Juarez called Berezow’s idea to “involuntarily” treat mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless people something out of “Nazi Germany.” (I would love to hear Juarez’s account of this conversation, and if I were the Seattle Times, I would’ve reached out to her for a rebuttal or confirmation of his side of the story.)
Despite Berezow’s stated love of “stubborn facts,” he sure does throw around a lot of suppositions in the piece. Get a load of this reason why Berezow is supposedly leaving town:
Though I have never been a victim of or witness to a crime, some of my neighbors have been, and they believe homeless camps are the reason.
The only fact—stubborn or otherwise—in that sentence is that some of Berezow’s neighbors have been victims of or witnesses to crimes. Do they know that homeless camps are the cause of those crimes? Nope. But they “believe” it, which is apparently good enough for Berezow—who is, I would like to remind you, a science writer.
It should surprise no one who has read previous writings by Berezow that his new editorial leans heavily on the conservative side of the political spectrum. His greatest hits include headlines like “Regulation Too Often Shackles the Hands of Innovators,” a book about “the left’s fear of science,” and claims that Chris Matthews, “and the American left-wing in general, has a peculiar obsession with racism.”
That might explain why Berezow then detours into a series of random potshots at local left-wing politicians for turning Seattle into “an angry place.” It’s not so much a cogent argument as an opportunity for him to vent his partisan spleen. Later, he accuses the City Council of “virtue signaling,” which is a term that conservatives love to use when describing people who say they’re concerned about issues that conservatives are not concerned about.
Before you think I’m just interested in taking him down, let’s point out that Berezow gets a few issues right! He says Seattle suffers from “a restrictive housing policy that artificially caps supply.” He points out the unfortunate fact that the middle class and millennials “can forget about homeownership entirely” because Seattle’s housing has grown far too expensive. This is all true.
But then, immediately after his best point, Berezow takes a truly bizarre turn:
The $15 minimum wage has added gasoline to the fire. Though it hasn’t even been fully implemented yet, the most recent study last summer revealed that when the minimum moved from $11 to $13 an hour, low-wage workers lost about $125 per month. That means that the law raises costs for businesses and customers while actually harming employees it was meant to help.
Okay, what? You’d think that a science writer would know not to base a conclusion based on one outlier of a study, but maybe Berezow is unaware that the study he’s citing—the one compiled by Jacob Vigdor and other economists—is rapidly losing credibility among the economic community.
See, the Vigdor study on Seattle’s minimum wage, which uses unreplicable, proprietary data, seems to contradict all the other available evidence. Just this January, one of the biggest economic conferences hosted three reports that seemed to conflict with the claims of Vigdor’s study. Another comprehensive study from census workers this April said that the positive effects of raising the wage “persist and indeed grow in magnitude over several years.”
And perhaps most tellingly, respected MIT economist David Autor, who was an early champion of Vigdor’s study, in January told the BBC that he has done an about face and is “rather sceptical of the results [of Vigdor’s study] at this point.” The BBC explains:
By only sampling data from Seattle, Mr Autor says, Mr Vigdor’s study may have been skewed by the rapid economic development in the region.
But to bring the focus back to Berezow, I really believe he overreached when he attacked the $15 minimum wage. He’s arguing that the city is too expensive for working Seattleites—which is true—but he also argues that raising the minimum wage is not the way to help those working Seattleites.
So, to summarize: in Berezow’s estimation, Seattle has too many poor people. And somehow, we’re paying those poor people too much.
Berezow doesn’t seem to realize that many of the homeless people he’s fretting over are part of the workforce, and many of those workers earn the minimum wage. How, exactly, are those workers supposed to find housing in a city where the rents are rising higher than the rest of the country—even after a recent slowdown?
This is a common affliction among Seattleites like Berezow. They scream to the heavens about the growing homeless population—using anecdotes about crime and cleanliness issues that are rarely backed up with statistics—and then they scream to the heavens when anyone suggests a solution.
The truth is that we can’t just expect Seattle to house every homeless individual with the resources we currently have. We need far more housing — public and private — and we need more resources to serve the growing houseless population. We’re trying to solve a crisis in 2018 with a budget straight out of the 1990s.
Part of the problem is that Seattleites like Berezow tend to “other” the homeless population. Berezow says that Seattle has too many homeless people. He also says that the middle class can’t afford to live in Seattle. But he never seems to realize that in both statements he’s talking about the same people—that Seattleites barely clinging to the middle class often fall into homelessness.
Too many Seattleites are one rent increase away from living on the streets. A study by the Washington Department of Commerce (PDF) finds that “a $100 increase in rent is associated with an increase in homelessness of between 6 and 32 percent.” So far as I can tell, nobody has seriously investigated how many more Seattleites would be on the street if employers still only paid $9.50 an hour, but I suspect the number would be considerably higher.
The thing that Berezow doesn’t seem to understand is that these aren’t two different types of people—there is a one-to-one correlation between Seattle’s struggling middle and working classes and our growing homeless populations. His plan to forcibly detain addicts and those with untreated mental ailments certainly wouldn’t solve the crisis—it would, at best, just make the crisis less visible for average Seattleites. Maybe that’s all the solution Berezow wants.
At the end of his piece, Berezow claims “my wife and I are heading to the Eastside…where quality of life and civility still matter.” He fails to provide any facts to back up those claims, and if he expects to find a paradise east of the lake, Berezow might be in for a rude awakening; the truth is that the east side is struggling to meet the demands of rising costs and a growing homeless population, just like Seattle.
But I hope the facts don’t keep Berezow from fleeing Seattle. In fact, I say good riddance.
Seattle is a city with big problems. Our traffic is out of control and we’re not building public transit fast enough to keep up with demand. We’re not putting anywhere near enough resources toward housing the homeless. Our tax structure is painfully regressive.
But these are problems that come from being a dynamic, fast-growing city in a ridiculously wealthy state that has outlawed the income tax. Seattle has chosen an economy that takes the high road, not the low road. We don’t want to be low-wage, low-regulation Kansas. We want a city that pays high wages and plans for the future. And, yes, we’ve got a long way to go to reach that goal.
But the great news is that we know how to get there. Seattle can be affordable for all — those who work in the skyscrapers, and those who clean the skyscrapers. We have to shrink the divide between the very rich and the very poor. We must build a more inclusive economy to address the challenges created by a growing homeless population. And we need a progressive tax to make all this possible.
I’ve lived in Seattle for 18 years. I’ve cheered on the beginnings of one of the most ambitious transit systems in America. I’ve helped small businesses recover from earthquakes and riots. I’ve happily voted for tax increases on myself to fund libraries and parks and better education systems. This is why I love Seattle, and it’s why I’m never leaving.
I live in Seattle because I believe we can solve these problems. In fact, I believe that only a city like Seattle—forward-facing, empathetic—can confront these challenges, and thereby lead the way for the rest of the nation. I want to include everyone in Seattle’s growth and prosperity, because I believe that’s how you build a city of the future.
If you disagree, if you want to make Seattle more prosperous by excluding others, I respectfully request you get the hell out of our way.
