now i want to imagine a want you to imagine all of you thank you members of the council that you have been dispatched on a mission to investigate housing displacement around the world and you're coming back to report to the president of the council  all right good evening yes good evening in keeping with the town hall format i don't know if i was given a report from chicago i should like to report from new orleans and so i was still thinking about it as i was standing over in the corner so what i'll do is i actually give a report from new orleans as a cautionary tale for the kinds of problems we're seeing in terms of our written sense of occasion across the country right now in all three the political scientists at the university of pennsylvania who just retired actually i think after this semester made the point during the katrina crisis in a series of articles that could train actually was a representation of the problems that all americans could possibly face it was just in the most compressed and condensed and dramatic form right and i think my comments are sort of based on that particular notion and so i want to reform that i also want to try to dispel some of the ideas about what happened in new orleans the dominant frame of course was the one that was largely shaped by media right by mass media what we saw unfolding on television which was true right we saw mostly black people stranded at the new orleans superdome we saw black people waiting outside the morri our convention center for help for assistance we saw people scribble in help signs on bed sheets writing out messages on the tops of houses demanding that somebody responds to the conditions in new orleans we also heard  then mayor ray nagin go online and basically you know stop just sort of cursing out george bush for not responding we also saw kanye west maybe in one of his best moments  even though it was limited as far as what he said call out bush as well and caught the problem of racism as a related to what was unfolding in new orleans the the response that i remember here a lot from people was this would never happen in manhattan like of lower manhattan flood in this way it would happen in other places you would see a much quicker response and so i'm not going to try to refute that i think bush didn't care about black people he certainly doesn't care about people who were not part of the same  investor class that he said he belongs to but i want to dispel some of that because what we've seen in new orleans over the last decade or so since the the the disaster is a dramatic remaking and what i want to insist on is that racism only tells us part of the story right no matter how we decide to talk about the weather situational racism whether it's some sort of structural account white supremacy which seems to be the term desire for a lot of people when i was a  teenager twenty something or people talked about white supremacy well like afro centrists and people kind of on the margins even of black political life so it's interesting to see academics down brace that term for variety of reasons that i won't go into but let's talk about new orleans and what happened when we think about the remaking i want you to think about it as a problem of class power and exactly building on read again one point the also makes about new liberalization on the liberalism what is it it's basically capitalism without working class opposition there's a lot of ways we can we can talk about it as a process we can talk about the specifics of it on the ground we can talk about the processes of roll roll back and roll out and so we can we can discuss that and kind of get into the finer points but in the broad sense it is a struggle for the restoration of capitalist class power particularly within the city and i like the term that was coined by the late geographer neil smith when he talks about you know urban  is about revenge it is about the taking back of the city by the investor class by openly mobile people who now want to live in cities again after a long period of decline and they collect in the ones what we saw was was tragic in the short run i mean what we saw on television was was heart wrenching but a lot of people turned off their attention you know once the news decided to start focusing on something else and so within a few weeks people were paying attention in new orleans anymore maybe they would return to it every anniversary and you know point to some things that happened in that will you know doing well the french quarter is back up and running you can go get a hurricane enjoy yourself you know get sloppy drunk or whatever else but the real story the slow moving multi layered catastrophe of the remaking most people have missed most people have not paid attention to it what i would recommend if you haven't seen it already is luis  the brazilian born filmmaker who also resides in new orleans now she grew up between rio and new york a kid they were better split half for us growing up but she did a film called land of opportunity which is excellent because it actually shows you the situated class experience of different new orleans in the remaking so you meet middle class black homeowners you meet public housing residents you meet community activists you meet this place teenagers now living in los angeles writes you get a sense of what this looked like on the ground for multiple people you also get a sense of what it meant for migrant laborers in this case not mexican undocumented laborous but undocumented brazilian workers who were also in the region doing some of the cleanup and recovery work i've had a long running conversation with the sociologist jay arena there's one thing we really shit pisses us the fuck off every time we think about it about new orleans and that's the fact that thousands of people descended upon jena louisiana about a year after the katrina disaster to protest against what was assisted a high school fistfight in conflict that unfolded over the course of a few weeks where black and white students got into arguments whites did intimidating in racist things blacks retaliated and kicked their asses like they should have and then they paid a stiff punishment for in terms of school there no comparable demonstration national mobilization for the residents of public housing in the city of new orleans which ask ourselves that why did we see the same outpouring of outrage knowing that that the city was sense to the downtown sewer score why didn't we see that kind of protest why didn't people get as upset about that pinning demolition as they did about a small sort of small scale racist incident in another part of louisiana that nobody even knew about until it made the news this is a problem what we saw post katrina was an orchestrated it simply to rid the city of its poor to remove the city of whatever opposition might various rivers state interest succeeded in firing public sector workers on mass in short order in a few months they were able to dissolve the city's public school system affectively firing thousands more public school teachers most of them african american women they were able to shut down the charity hospital which had provided you know health care to thousands of new orleans for generations and they were also able to the modest those last five you know the big four plus one last five public housing complexes so once you get rid of those constituencies right public housing tenants who active and actually stop some attempts to demolish public housing beforehand public sector workers unionized teaches as well as nurses and doctors who are committed to working with working class populations who's left to fight for a different city so it's no wonder that quickly you saw the wholesale remaking of the city the displacement of the poor the fact that only a you know you saw it about one hundred thousand blacks have not returned to the city within the st five years of the disaster that's changed a little bit but many people have moved back can't live in new orleans anymore like they have to live on the outskirts right so in effect we've seen you know a suburbanization of the black population in ways that that orchestrated right they were accidental and i think we need to be a lot a lot clearer about what we want to be clear about fighting for it right there was no reason why we should no fought not just to save public housing but to make it better right and it was always doomed to fail it was always hamstrung from the very beginning but there's there's ways that we could have moved differently the last thing i'll say and i don't know i'm looking on time do we have a time keeper all of this is just free flowing time all right so the last thing i'll say is that a lot of us did put dissipate in the remaking of new orleans in the sense of going to the city as volunteers right so within the st five years about a one million people cycled through the city to do volunteer work right college students church groups you know different organizations from across the country even some of the most densely left groups in gaze in a lot of volunteer labor right recruiting volunteers to come down to do rebuilding i don't want to knock that right because i participated in it as well it was one of the ways that i was able to get to the city when i was living in an isolated part of western new york without a research budget at a small liberal arts college so pulling together group of students and going down was one way that i was able to get down and start doing the work that i was interested in doing but it was in that process of being in the city amidst those thousands of volunteers that you got a sense of how the entire context was deep a little sized so volunteers could show up you know engage in painting of houses or stripping houses down to you know to studs clear now debris you know all sorts of task and you deal with really great for homeowners like these people are really happy to like in their worst moment they're still in shock and it's mutually beneficial life for the bleeding hearts who go down it's great because you get to have the story that you can write about in the graduate you know essay or whatever or you can write about and talk about it on panels like like i'm doing here but for people who would it had a number of different and really bad consequences that i just want to mention in a way that supported the sort of privatized recovery that have been set in motion by the captains class in new orleans but also beyond so one thing that volunteers labor does in the immediate is it drives down wage floors for paid labor force so you would have on the same street in some parts of new orleans within those for the st decade or so you would have on one side of the street a bus load of students who have tyvek suits they have water supplies they have gloves they have goggles all the things they need to do is dangerous and potentially you know harmful work on the other side of the street you would see you know a black contract worker with no supplies right with no supports being paid piecemeal for whatever he's doing bad a day under the table you also had you know an ism number of people who've written about this undocumented workers who were overworked who were underpaid in some cases not paid at all busy who were threatened at gunpoint in some incidents that have been reported and so you know those volunteers were existing within a highly unjust context and in part supporting right that unjust contex i give you want to list ration of this how you can be a volunteer you can do good but at the same time you can actually support a great level of injustice the st trip that i took now what a group of students we we spent some time in a place called st bernard parish which is one of the suburban terraces parishes county right for people  families and right now church bears so say bernard is adjacent to orleans parish so it's basically the suburbs and it had a bad reputation when i was a teenager i grew up in louisiana but not in new orleans st bernard pa one's place is older black people tell you not to go right because you you know it's not the place you want to be even though they were small populations of blacks in st bernard so we were working in st bernard parish the st time that i went down there which was a  source of contention for me in the person who organized the trip but as we work in talking to residents you know trying to get a sense of what's happening this is in october of two thousand and six you know less than a little  more than a year after the disaster st bernard parish had passed a blood relative ordinance which basically said that you couldn't read to anybody in st bernard parish unless they were your and it ended up being you know a revelation it's like you can go around and do good but if you don't engage in the political struggles that are happening right what good are you in that kind of context and so we were here helping people as individuals even as they're being racist and exclusionary to other folks who are trying to rebuild the area people looking for housing in devastated region where housing is in a shortage and so it's quite possible with this whole volunteer you know style of rebuilding for you to do good and do harm all at the same time we need to be mindful of that and i think a lot of activism and there's a there's a book by rebecca sold it called a paradise built in hell where she sort of celebrates the sort of post disaster spontaneity to kind of an artistic response which is like you know fuck the state we're going to do our own thing we're not going to worry about government and it was a lot of that since ability post between a people had reason to distrust government they had reason to believe that nobody was going to help them but at the same time there was a need to fight for real policy like saving public housing right which would have given people a material basis to return for thousands of new orleans right so i think we have to we have to push ourselves right you know we have to push ourselves beyond those immediate and easy frames of you know this is all about racism essentially into a more complex sense of what was happening because on the one side and this is my last point i promise on the one side you had a black governing regime which had led that city since i was like in maybe st grade housing in the city of new orleans and moving towards a market model was authored by a black man renaud rossana who later went on to become a sister to wilson good in philadelphia ra a poll and polls a different kind of alternative right i think it was difficult in retrospect to do something else in new orleans because of that clearing of all of the opposition in other cities i think we have more of a chance because you have people organizing around housing you have progressive unions in place you have public sector workers who know what new liberalization is about now with in the fight back so i think we have to look for that potential we have to build around it thank thanks so much for that subject so everybody's going to have the opportunity to ask questions once or other two council members have had the opportunity to speak we're going to use when we're taking questions something that my comrades on the seattle d s a use called progressive stack so if you are an able bodied white male who is used to having your voice heard at forums such as this i think this is a great opportunity to have a seat and listen to folks who might not have had the opportunity so i want to begin by i know that philip already made land acknowledgment but given that we're talking about displacement and the right to do well and who comes and takes places and who gets pushed out of places and as a visitor here i also want to acknowledge the land on which we stand today as the traditional home of the coast soulish people the traditional home of all tribes and bands within the do  muckleshoot nations i think the original caretakers of this land those who are still here and those who will be here in the future and i want to say that not just to give you know lip service to this notion of land acknowledgement but because it's crucial to what i want to talk about which is to do with mobility justice and right now our cities are faced with this  issue of elites seeking to preserve the status quo and continue urban growth despite a whole series of crises and a sense that we need some kind of transition in our forms of urbanization and especially the idea of sustainable urban is on one ecological urban ism and i want to talk about how that's implemented in our cities because many north american cities have policies that are promoting various kinds of sustainability and sustainable mobility in particular and they've become associated with gentrification and displacement of african american communities of immigrant communities and working class white communities and i believe that this has fostered a political mobilization in some cities against ideas about sustainable urban is and while our subject today is the neo liberal city i want to think about how the sustainability transition in our north american cities needs to be understood within the historical context that was on the spatial and racial formations based in white colonial settler societies and racial capitalism because our neoliberal urbanization is still based on those traditions of displacement and taking people's land and urban regeneration urban growth that decimated many communities so by locating sustainable mobility transitions within that deeper historical context i think we can better understand why there's so much resistance against seemingly commonsense policies such as building protected by cleans or walkable pedestrians a transit oriented development each of those things have generated intense political conflict on the one hand we have advocates for car culture what i call the system of auto mobility who resist any efforts to constrain or reduce the use of cars and partly those are suburban and rural constituencies who've used state level electoral politics to keep gas taxes extremely low and to keep investment in roads and highways very high but there are also many urban minority communities who distrust cycling advocacy and other kinds of urban improvement prop projects who have used city level and neighborhood including city council electoral politics to challenge urban improvements because they're so associated with processes of displacement so i'm going to suggest that american cities will not achieve a reduction in car use and a transition towards more sustainable urban mobility unless we recognize and directly address the racial class and colonial histories of uneven mobility s that have formed are racially segregated cities and are automobile dependent suburbs so i'm just going to draw a little bit on some of the arguments in my book mobility justice the politics of movement in an age of extremes and i'm going to say a few words here just to highlight the historical dimensions of what i call kindo political struggle that's the struggle over movement kuno politics as how we move who has power and control over movement and those keno political struggles are at the basis of north american white settler societies that are founded on slavery racial capitalism theft of indigenous lands displacement of native americans and mexicans labor exploitation of latinos and asian immigrants so whether we're dealing with the freedom to move or the right to stay in place which are closely intertwined race gender and class have been crucial to the uneven distribution of what i call mobility power and by mobility power i referred not just to the capability for movement in an all of the various potentials in the ways in which we move but also the self of when where how and whether or not we are mobile so the near liberal city is part of this system of political power which is who determines who gets to move and how they move and we see struggles over movement and welling right and staying in place happening all the time i just arrived in seattle i haven't been here that many times and just coming into the city  saw so many encampments of people living under tarps and i think i didn't see that in the same way the last time i was here which is quite a while back but it's a very visible issue obviously in the city and i understand that there are efforts that are made to sort of clear people to push them out fights over where people can you can set up the dwellings and where they're not allowed to and i haven't solved people sleeping under large trees right like just in the middle of the day you know those beautiful big pine trees become a place of shelter and sleep so that's linked obviously to real estate but it's also linked to mobility and the way in which cars and the dominance of cars and roadways have determine the shape of our cities in a way that's linked to white power and i know cedric was saying we shouldn't blame everything on white supremacy but certainly the histories of white supremacy have made the spatial forms of our cities as they are today so by uncovering the race the relationship between these historically spatial patterns and mobility inequities i think we are better placed to understand the kind of fault lines in the contemporary neo liberal city and what i what i kind of argue for in the book is the need to recover the concept of immobile commons of commenting mobility and that is the notion that there are forms of thinking about and organizing mobility that draw on the logics of common such as communal decision making practices openness to new forms of perceiving the right to mobility as a collective right as well as the right to do well the right not to be displaced also the awareness of the social production of mobility and the power relations inherent in it as well as the commitment to creating equity and working in the interest of the public good all of those are part of the idea of commenting mobility and until we sort of more deeply understand the way in which we have lost the mobile commons we have lost our right to be to do well and to move through public space we won't be able to take back our cities so we need to build the alliances across indigenous black people of color working class women gender and sexual minorities to understand that the control over mobility is that creates those divisions in the st place and that creates a kind of disempowerment of those who are not able to be in public space to gather to assemble to move together safely and that has to be the basis for forming the kinds of political communities that can take back the neo liberal city so i think i'll just stop there for my opening statement thanks  off sam you want to talk about gentrification yeah all right all right thank you very much thanks to my panelists i want to build on what mimi and cedric are both talking about and  get to the question of housing and question of real estate and why it's just getting so incredibly expensive to live nearly anywhere so this is a urban crisis that is clearly affecting  seattle but it's not affecting seattle alone i'm coming from new york city where we have a severe affordability crisis record homelessness i was just in l a many of the same problems are there was in philadelphia after that and they're experiencing many of the same things so this is a a bigger problem than any one particular city it's a bigger problem in this country and there's a lot of ways to explain it and a lot of the dominant explanations have to do with the mismatch between supply and demand which is a real thing you know gets it out a little later but i want to focus on a different factor which is not not just a shortage of supply but a surplus of finance capital invested into real estate who are living in a moment right now where a majority of the world's capital is invested in real estate and seventy five percent of it is in housing so it's not just land which could be agricultural land or other things specifically urban housing it's two hundred and seventeen trillion dollars which is pretty much an unfathomable amount of money the way that has been described to me and i'll describe to you to think about it is all the gold that's ever been mined anywhere in history all pooled together times thirty six dollars is the amount of capital that's invested in global real estate and as i said most of that is housing and most that housing is urban so why do we have an affordability crisis in our cities we have a huge amount of money riding on it and we can think about why there's so much money invested in real estate it has to do with falling rates of profit in other industries it has to do with financial deregulation it has to do with global wealth polarization where relatively small number of people are looking for something safe to put their money in perhaps in a different place than they live in now to spread it around and you get a situation where a ton of money goes into what seems like the safest and fastest reproducing commodity which right now is urban land so  yes there are issues of supply and demand yes there are demographic changes yes there is generational change but we can't get around this question of an over accumulation of finance capital in urban land and real estate if we expect to be able to do anything about it so that turns our cities into not just places where we live and work not just our communities our social relations but it turns them into investments and investments for a specific class and some of that is distributed fairly wife if you think about pension funds if you think about people whose only asset is their home that's that's a wider distribution but huge amounts of it are predatory equity funds that are buying up housing for the sole purpose of speculating on it and flipping it we have the world's largest landlord right now is blackstone global private equity firm that was already quite large in two thousand and eight but really exploded buying up foreclosed properties from subprime mortgages all over the u s and all over the world so those are the conditions in which each city is trying to solve this problem and each city kind of can't do it on its own but is in some ways to for a lot of reasons but one way to think about it is this double bind that cities are in on the one hands we've seen devolution as a key part of neo liberalism neo liberalism being responsibility from higher levels of government to lower levels of government from federal state and from state to city where there's less and less money coming in from the larger pools of money available at those larger government scales to pay for things that the urban level and one dollar of the most one of the one of the most deeply felt manifestations of that is public housing which was really supposed to be supported by the federal government federal government stop producing affordable housing in the early seventies and really stopped paying for it starting in the eighty's continuing its in the ninety's under clinton we had hope six which incentivize the demolition of public housing and under obama we got the red program which is a different way of privatizing the buildings if not the land on which public housing sits and so we've seen cities then having to respond to this crisis but at the same time as the responsibility is devolved  power and control is centralized it centralized within cities and in mayors in city council leaders who seem to be able to control the entire agenda but much more so it's centralized at higher levels of government the state puts limits on what cities can do the federal government puts limits on what states can do so cities are more and more responsible for fixing this project this problem and yet they have fewer and fewer tools to do it i mean one of the two best things that you can do to address gentrification and on affordability public housing and rent control the federal government put a moratorium on the construction of new public housing under nixon under the clinton administration we had the fair cloth amendment which said if public housing authorities have a net increase in units the federal government won't pay for them rent control in a lot of states as i understand it washington state included the state has put limits on what the municipalities can do in terms of rent control so cities might want to expand rent control to freeze rents to put a cap on run increases and the states are telling them they can't so then what's left what's left is land  and control over what kind of development happens where and that becomes in some ways the single tool that many city planners many city leaders mayors council members see as the way to get everything else as the way to get a grip on the housing question but also all sorts of other things if they want investment in parks and schools if they want increase transit access a lot of it ends up coming through land use changes incentivizing development in a particular place and then using the money that comes in for that for some other use but the thing is when cities incentivize that kind of development they also create windfall profits and they create them for whoever owns the land if you increase the development capacity from you know three storeys to thirty stories you have just multiply the lands value by ten and who keeps that is the it's the owner of the property who will in all likelihood tear down was there and either do it themselves or get a developer sell it to a developer to build something bigger bigger is fine i've no problem with larger size but once that value has been created the land becomes quite expensive and then what gets built there again because of the surplus of finance capital that's now in urban lent tends to be luxury realistic unless there's something else telling them that they can't do that and so then in the pursuit of all sorts of other things including afford ability we see cities incentivize the production of luxury housing and in that way they make the city more expensive in order to make it cheaper and sometimes this is done exactly for that reason and conservative and liberal politicians have no problem saying that they say we are purposefully making our land more valuable in order to increase property values we're going to build out the luxury city my former mayor michael bloomberg called new york a luxury products and he referred to it as the world's nd home as in the place where rich people can can buy a property and he love it and he said we want more all ago when he started to get criticized for this so we will more course want them here they're going to buy property they're not going to use our services and they're going to pay the taxes which is exactly what the mayor of providence rhode island said to me at my jewish elementary school graduation he said i love you people you pay your taxes and don't use the they include with these up zone it's also a great deal of tax breaks and so those rich people don't end up paying their taxes that's the thing they don't pay the taxes and then we don't get the the money and then used for the services the whole thing is a lie so that's the conservative approach or the  blatantly neo liberal but there is a progressive line on this too or a liberal line which is we're going to create value and then we're going to recapture we're going to make this land more expensive we're going to allow developers to build up the neighborhoods but then we're to demand something back for them they're going to have to provide some degree of affordability or in some small proportion of the property or we're going to get them to build the park that the city needs or we're going to get them to pay into a fund for public schools etc but it becomes this trap where nothing can get done in less we produce value for real estate investors there's no other way to get the affordable housing that's that's offered i mean there are other ways but they're not being offered there there's no other way that's being offered to get the parks that we need in the schools that we need in the transit that we need and so then we get the situation that dr shiller's talking about where communities will fight against these things even though they were very much want that right they want parks they want transit they want schools they want everything but they don't want a luxury development to come in then pay for those schools but in so doing the luxury development is raise the overall neighborhood land values which results in higher property values which will result in higher rents if you don't have a rent control system to keep a cap on all these and so then you basically can't get to enjoy the thing that you wanted and the thing that you suffered through many generations of not having so this  is is a paradox and the presentation that you know we often get is either it's great what are you complaining about or it's bad but what else are we going to do so we have to think about how we can oppose real estate capital how we can squeeze real estate capital rather than encourage it and try to get something back from that because any time we do that we're going to produce a city that we can't afford to live in and ultimately won't get to enjoy the benefits of the things that we're funding so you know the dominant model is the trickle down model build a lot of luxury housing and then either ask them to build some affordable housing along with it or then rich people will move into that housing middle class housing will become available the poor will move into there that kind of filtering does not tend to happen it certainly doesn't happen fast and it doesn't happen in many of the gentrifying areas of the cities and so that's not the answer  then but if that's not the answer then the other alternative that's usually presented is do nothing which is freeze everything and that's kind of like a hardcore preservationist argument both of these i would argue and these two things come to be coded as nimby versus you not in my backyard versus yes in my backyard not in my backyard crowd saying don't build anything keep everything the way it is which as we know is a terrible system or the crowd says build up the city let the developers provide the supply and the benefits will trickle out we don't really believe in leaving things up to the free market anyway so why would that be different in the case of housing and yet that argument attracts a lot of followers i think we should think of both of them a status quo arguments the argument sounds like it's not a status quo argument because it's saying you know we need to get rid of these zoning regulations and other things so we can encourage luxury development but that's what's happening in cities all over the country and all over the world that's the mainstream form of urban planning of development  that's what the neo classical economists are arguing for so that in a lot of ways is the status quo but so is the nimby right the leave everything the way it is and protect exactly what we have is also in trenching the status quo so if we're marxists if we're radicals we need to be thinking of other ways to do things than getting ourselves trapped in that fight over two versions of the status quo both of which completely fail the working class so the problem is not just an inadequate supply of housing overall the problem is there is not enough housing that's affordable to the people who need housing so building up luxury housing is not going to solve that problem especially because we have this crisis of over accumulation and i want to use my home city new york as a cautionary tale here new york over the last three years built up more housing then  would be demanded by the number of people who moved into this it right so we kept up with pace we built out beyond the pace of growth in fact but at the same time so we added seventy thousand dollars units of housing between twenty million one hundred and forty two thousand and seventeen in that same period an additional over sixty thousand dollars units went vacant and they didn't go vacant because there wasn't a market for them they went vacant because there was a market for vacant housing for housing that could be purchased not for the  use but for the purpose of holding on to storing your cash and then selling for more money or possibly putting it on air b n b or possibly staying for a couple weekends when you're visiting from paris or wherever you live but if you just build out luxury housing and you don't do anything about speculation you just create a new safety deposit boxes for wealthy people that in the process makes everybody else's housing more expensive so we have to actually attack speculation we have to be using our tax code yes to tax the rich to create new revenue which we can use for affordable housing but also to attack the practice of buying property for the purpose of selling it for more and we can do that with flip taxes we can do that with warehousing taxes you can do that in many different ways we need adding to the stock of public land and public housing rather than seeing public land as this sort of chip that the city has to encourage new development which is what it is in many places and as i understand it is a common practice in seattle as well we need to be holding on to public land and using it for public use but we can also be expanding the stock of public land in a few different ways one way of thinking about this is tax foreclosure the process of taking people's property when they don't pay their taxes that's common practice in cities all over the country often they're then taken by the city and then immediately offloaded and in new york city we put a lien on the properties we bundle those liens together and then we sell them off to a speculator who now has a lien on multiple homes which are largely working class families whose incomes just weren't keeping pace with the value of their properties and so it's just dispossession on dispossession so what we've been saying in new york is turn every foreclosed property into a community land trust as soon as the state takes possession of it they have the ability to do this we have legislation that's languishing in the city council that would make this legal you would then have a large stock of permanently affordable housing and it's not about building new housing that we should also be doing that is by making permanently affordable that which would otherwise go to speculators this city of paris which is not exactly a paragon of radicalis has a program over the last few years called the city's right to buy so in an in certain geographical areas any time housing unit whether it's a home or an apartment goes up for sale the city has the st writer fusil they can buy it and they can turn it into public housing we could be doing that washington d c has the x ten an opportunity to tenants opportunity to purchase act which says tenants in any multifamily building have the right to buy their property whenever it goes on sale before anybody else so the tennis can buy it out and the city will give them a whole bunch of subsidy in tax breaks if they make it a limited equity co op meaning a home that can't be sold for anything more than you bought it for so it becomes basically de commodified even though it's still privately held right these things exist we should be building on that we should be dreaming up more but we certainly can't just keep giving real estate capital more opportunities  to turn our cities into investment products because it's just not going to trickle down to us i'll leave it there thank you you thank you so much for that sam so while we're talking about the city as a speculative real estate investment i wanted to point out that we're actually joined here tonight by two thousand and seventeen mayoral candidate kerry moon who proposed the idea of a real estate thank you real estate speculation tax which we should absolutely implement and support candidates who propose implementing it so we we're going to turn it over to questions now if anybody has any questions they would like to ask of our four or three city council members question so feel free to step on up and ask a question yes while we're waiting for folks to step up and ask i just personally have a question about what the resistance has looked like to any number of urbanist or equitable or inclusive reforms that people have tried to put forward in the various cities that you represent some of us here are very very familiar with what that resistance may or may not look like i n seattle and it largely takes the shape of a largely white political block going to city council where there's a giant dial with chief seattle's face on it and them saying that they don't want anybody else to move here but i understand that new york might be different neurons might be different other cities might be different so i'm curious about whether or not the fight that we're sort of fighting here in seattle you know to sort of pave a rights of the city for everyday people looks do we have similar enemies i guess is what i'm asking straightforwardly yeah i'll just comment a little bit about philadelphia i mean we have a twenty six percent of the population live below the poverty line in philadelphia and we have one of the highest wealth and income gaps in the country at miami and philadelphia are the three highest and are comparable to the country of colombia and so we've had gro in wealth poverty stuck in a shrinking of the middle class we don't have the kinds of quite the crazy real estate prices that new yorkers seattle or vancouver experience but certainly huge amounts of development happening in central neighborhoods of the city that are gradually kind of spreading and driving up prices so we're we're just on the cusp of this huge crisis at the same time we have forty thousand dollars an empty lots and various ways in which i think some of the policies that sam suggested would be could be perfect to be taken up in philadelphia because we still have homeowners and renters who might be able to afford to hold on to their homes if some of those policies were in place excellent thank you so much  examples so one from new orleans and one from chicago the new orleans i was obviously not as as rosy there's been a lot of organizing around vacation rentals and you know attempts to try to change that and place restrictions on it because in some neighborhoods you can imagine some owners have moved towards normal offer in that as a rental to a family but it's all the use of as a vacation you know short term  rental through air b n b your home away and other services so that's been a real problem there and i think a lot of destination cities as been a major issue it's been tough to try to find it because you know now these these different providers organizing as well and oftentimes they've actually written some of the laws help to write the laws that you know the new pos they come into into being so that's a problem in in new orleans on a more optimistic note in  illinois we were able to remove that state restriction on rick controls right so now the city of chicago could possibly move in that direction and i think i think people are pushing for all of the things that that mention right you know in a place like like chicago so they're pushing for different ways of decon modifying housing whether it's you know more public housing that's that's a possibility community lends to us also cooperatives and then rick control sort of a you know a combination of different things that are happening you know we hope to happen all at the same time or in succession so and the the portrait in chicago is especially in the new york context i mean i'm not even sure i recognize the dynamic of the question because we haven't had movements to do the right thing that then wealthy groups would fight against agenda which is absorbing neighborhoods in and demanding that some of it be affordable but he's only done it in working class majority people of color neighborhoods that are already affordable or are at risk of gentrification and his program accelerates that and so yeah there was a lot of fight back but it wasn't coming from the wealthy predominantly white low rise neighborhoods which do exist in new york it's just no one is threatening them with anything they have been protected they were protected already there were acted under the bloomberg administration and de blasio is doing nothing to undo those protections and so they're kind of sitting quiet they have what they need from the city they're not asking for change they let you know other communities fight alongside you know fight fight for their own neighborhoods but they're not getting involved so what we see is really that the real estate industry as the real estate industry either supporting some of these projects or fighting back against the movement to expand rents stabilisation and rent control in the york and then setting up phony tenant organizations so that's the new manifestation is we already have sort of sell out non profits but now we have actually fake real estate fronts that are called like tenors and t united or something like that that is saying like we're tenants and we love our small landlord and they should be punished with these restrictions on how much they can raise the rents awesome first question there's three years span place it's been two or three years in vancouver i mean everyone in vancouver that i know supports that but wishes that they did it one thousand five hundred and twenty years ago you know it it's late now there's not so much vacant property or of well there's vacant internal proper there's not much undeveloped property i don't know the answer to the question of whether it's moving to toronto i don't know if anybody else has that but it brings up the problem of municipality by municipality creating potential solutions in the face of mobile capital  and this is part of how we got to the dynamic that we're in is with capital mobile even in something like real estate which is like the most sunk in land in place thing that you can imagine it's still mobile places can be disinvested from and investment can move somewhere else especially if it's for pure speculation and so we do need a larger scale than the municipal to deal with a lot of these problems this is again the problem of neoliberalism where every responsibilities push down to the local level then every locality has to sort of fight itself of course i'm coming from new york where amazon tried to move to from here and we saw the horrendous spectacle of amazon shopping around every city against one another and the politicians who supported in  york said of course this is bad but what were we going to do not participate and so we need you know a higher level of political activity on our side in order to force a higher level political action to prevent this sort of shopping around a city again city or else y will have one city that does all the right thing and then they'll lose all their investment and it'll be a capital strike and people will be punished for their own radical action anybody want to just to add one thing which is to do with air b n b which is that you know cities start trying to come up with policies to control the you know the amount of days you can rent a place out or how many you can hold but everybody's each city is sort of catching up as as it sort of takes so much real estate away but that is one dimension that while some people are using air b n b in a kind of business entrepreneurial way there's others who are  precarious in their housing and are relying on it to even be able to live where they're living so they're kind of like you know lift drivers and and you know kind of just trying to hold on to up a little piece of real estate not one that's driving down the road but one that's sitting still by having people to sort of coming through it all the time and it's like more and more urban dwellers are being pushed into that precariously of housing and i think in a lot of ways what you say is me reminiscent of what goes on with  contests around of zoning in seattle where we have seen a significant amount of that happening mostly in seattle at st as far as there being a lot of new real estate development there but it's displaced a lot of people of color but that the fights around of started to get increasingly vocal as the attention is turning to putting some more of that housing in areas that traditionally haven't had to absorb new development or certainly not affordable development or definitely not public development at all next