Rantz: Sawant owes Seattle $5 million after saving The Showbox

It’s a good thing Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant apparently doesn’t really give up her salary like she promised: she owes the City of Seattle a whopping $5 million thanks to her hypocritical position to #SaveTheShowbox.

RELATED: Save The Showbox? Should have saved Arena, too

Sawant, a Socialist that villainizes corporations, has decided to back AEG Live – and their conservative owner – in her effort to keep a developer from adding 442 apartments to a market with a vacancy rate so low, that it’s keeping apartment rents very high. As a consequence of her activism, she cost the city about $5 million that would have gone into the city’s affordable housing fund. Sawant should cut the city a check.

Perhaps she can also throw in some help for the family-wage jobs the construction project would have provided to some of her constituents?

For all her bellyaching about the housing crisis, Sawant chose to #SaveTheShowbox to save her career. Her attempt to pass a head tax backfired spectacularly and she became the villain. It turns out, Seattleites love taxes — except on jobs. Sawant overplayed her hand in her anti-Amazon rhetoric and she paid the price.

Sawant is currently deciding if she’s going to run for re-election again. And if she decides to stay in Seattle, passing up a national role with the Socialists (a move she’s rumored to be considering), she needs to win back some goodwill. How does she do that? By siding with AEG and The Showbox, preying on the emotional attachments to a music venue by 30- and 40-somethings who remember a concert they went to, long ago.

Not wanting to give up too much of her brand as caring about housing, Sawant is pretending this will actually lead to more housing. You see, in order to create more housing, you have to stop the housing from being created in the first place … or something.

“We need to come back to organizing, so please stay in touch with us,” Sawant told The Stranger. “We will succeed in saving The Showbox but … this could be the catalyst for the future struggle for affordable housing. Maybe we can win the Amazon tax that was repealed, maybe we can win a tax on big businesses. Why should we stop with just saving The Showbox?”

Over at Reason, Christian Britschgi noted the absurdity (and untenability) of Sawant’s position:

The idea that saving a music venue will ultimately lead to more affordable housing seems far-fetched. The city is obviously out the $5 million fee that would have subsidized new housing. And while the apartments that Onni wants to build would not necessarily be affordable for low-income renters, killing the project will only serve to raise rents further across the city as the tenants who otherwise would have lived in the new building bid up prices for the existing housing units.

Indeed, by placing more empty units on the market, you’re freeing up units that aren’t nearly as pricey. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but surely Sawant knows that.

So where do we stand? A council member — with her colleagues/enablers — helped kill housing units that would address our crisis. But I suppose it’s okay, because it personally serves her career, instead of her constituency and the city.

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