Ron to Seattle: Quit finger-pointing and build your own affordable housing

Mind if I kick a dead horse for a minute?

I just got back from a weekend in Las Vegas. We can talk about the fun and games another time, but this trip I rented a car and drove around quite a bit. Surprisingly, I didn’t see a lot of homeless people. I say surprisingly because if I was homeless, Las Vegas seems like a better than average spot to post up. It doesn’t rain or snow much, there seems to be a lot of relatively cheap food options, and maybe a tourist gets lucky and gives you a hundred bucks from time-to-time.

It could be the triple digit temps keeping the Vegas homeless population out of view from the streets, I don’t know. This is now my part time hobby when I travel. Count the tents under bridges and in parks in cities around the world and compare them with Seattle. In my trips over the last year, nowhere has even come close to the Pacific Northwest.

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What makes it even worse is a stunning new revelation from the King County Assessor John Wilson. He did a study that looked at vacant land owned by the government that was at least 20,000 square feet and relatively close to public transportation. The complete map isn’t done yet, but care to guess how many parcels of land already fit that bill? If you guessed 300, you win.

Think about that for a minute — there are at least 300 chunks of land that currently sit vacant; owned by various government departments. And it doesn’t seem like that they were all that hard to find. Meanwhile, local officials brow beat us about taxes and big business not doing their part because we’re in a state of emergency.

I know this is a slight oversimplification, but not by much. Hey Seattle: get building. What exactly is holding you back? Your own assessor has already found the land for you. You control the permitting department. You have a levy in excess of $300 million dollars. You have all the tools to fast track building affordable housing units.

Yet Seattle chooses not to do it. Why is that exactly? If you built even 30 units on each parcel, you’d have almost 10,000 affordable housing units. Some of these lots are over 2 acres and could accommodate hundreds of units, and yet you do nothing but finger pointing.

Quit passing the buck onto developers, and Amazon, and everyone else but yourself. Until you have built affordable housing on every available chunk of land that you control, I don’t want to hear about it.

You can hear “What are we talking about here?” everyday at 4:45 p.m. on 97.3 FM.

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