a lot of us in this room as well as up here lived through a lot of things we're going to be talking about in the ninety's and the whole point of doing this is true mind that for all of the crisis around affordable housing and re oning up zoning that we've gentrification that we face in seattle today a lot of these battles have been fought before many many times and we have lost some but we've also won quite a few and we can learn from both the successes and the failures that we've done in the past i've been assigned somewhat randomly the topic of the sports stadiums battles of the mid ninety's and that that certainly is something that even twenty years on you find activists who are still pretty bitter about honestly what happened with this was starting in the early ninety's the then ownership of the mariners started talking about a new record stadium trip place the king don't for mariners games they threatened to move september nineteenth one thousand nine hundred five and that was the seattle commons both the seattle commons and the mariners stadium were rejected by voters and in the case of in the case of the berner stadium not wasn't particularly close it was pretty close to the commons which was a proposal by spearheaded by paul allen and holcomb ventures to build a large community park in the area that now hosts the amazon headquarters in south union that was opposed and the mariners stadium were opposed for basically the same reason people objecting to giving huge amounts of taxpayer dollars in the case of the mariners stadium it was  about two hundred fifty million dollars to a private business and a fairly successful private business headed by extremely wealthy individuals who could well afford to be doing these projects themselves but that's how they got rich right was by forcing their costs on taxpayers while they kept the profits pile and of course went on to develop that area there are people who are also worried about gentrification and creating that park would drive up costs for the area around that park but  the the vote went to they reject that those both in the case of the mariners they went to state legislature and the state legislature approved it over the will of the voters and that's how we got safeco field that also prompted the seahawks to demand a similar deal and in one thousand nine hundred seven in june there was another vote that but this vote they learned from it and who was involved in the commons learned from those mistakes and from the mistakes of the mariners and so they had a statewide vote  the new stadium clear the seahawks was approved but it was approved because it was a statewide vote that was actually rejected in king county but suburban some pierce county and some of the outlying areas approved by more and very narrowly passed by state by state vote so that's how we got those two stadiums and now we're in an era where people want to build a new stadium arena rather for basketball there's going to be a refurbishing basketball or hockey there's a refurbishing of a key arena that's underway that's being held up right now by environmental impact statement lawsuit so there's going to be some battles over that as well and have them original proposal by chris hansen was was rejected finally but we're there back with more and news these issues never quite go away thank you thank you very much it's kind of overwhelming for me to be back here in seattle i left in one thousand nine hundred nine after living here for ten years and from the ages of twenty five to thirty five i'm going over my ten minutes i'm just going to tell you right now so deal with it deal with it ok ok i think i'm go to not it's not going to happen and this was a time a lot of folks were here in seattle who were in the room it was an unbelievable time for media an activism and i really don't know what's been happening in the town in the last twenty years because i moved around the u s and i've been living in berlin germany since two thousand and five so i out of touch with what's been happening i assume that there's a lot of the fights are still going on new fights transformations of old fights a lot of the same people doing the fights and i hope a lot of new people doing the fights but just the folks up here at this table and people like can't chadwick and lan people who i got to know and were very inspirational so i just want to say that that my time in seattle was was hugely gratifying and important and my life and the a lot of the work that we did would not have been possible without people like john pushing us digging up the dirt actually i have a shovel that charlie chong gave me this is dirt digger on it's in my backpack i want to show it to you fronts can france has his headphones on  nic pushing us to to write about the things that were being discovered and in the mid late ninety's it was the pacific place nordstrom fredricka nelsen parking garage retail cent mall atrocity that i worked a lot on while working for the seattle weekly and i don't have to go over all the history of what that project is or was but this was a forty million dollar retail project that was backed by one hundred forty four million dollars of taxpayer backed loans and when i went back i have all the articles that we wrote for the weekly and for the washington free press for the stranger notice i'm not mentioning the times and because they came very late to the party they did not write about what was going on in a timely fashion and over a period of about two years thanks to people like john and beirut jordan jordan brower foyer is digging through records at city hall myself other folks just found out an unbelievable and it's funny because in this article i wrote who won seattle the first line is it's not a conspiracy but this is how seattle works this was a conspiracy and i don't use that word lightly but when i went back and read all of all the articles that we read  astonished that this kind of behavior could could go on in order for the project to happen pine street had to be reopened which was something that the government previously had been against so this was put on the ballot in a referendum that was backed by the interests and manipulated by wealthy interests the city actually said that by opening pine street that actually would not improve the traffic flow to downtown so this is one one of many misrepresentations that were that were put forth at the time there were lots of interconnected players that worked on the project which was the the the eventually became impetus to write  this who run seattle article for example a fellow named jay rich who was the bond attorney for the state housing finance commission which is like the state version of hud and the housing finance commission gave a low interest loan to build a parking garage for forty seven million dollars and then we found out that the city paid seventy three million dollars for the parking garage where there was a huge overpayment for the parking garage which i'm not sure if that's ever been explained or not but lo and behold jay rich who was who wrote the bond documents to fund the parking garage was a law partner for the lead attorney who represented the developer who built the whole folks working on the project a lot of which which came out and the consultant who worked on this stuff was a guy named john finky and i don't love john think he's still around but this  guy was paid one hundred twenty thousand dollars one hundred twenty thousand dollars in fees from the garage over payment and then he went on to profit by building the parking garage he got a half a million dollars for that so it was there were incredible conflicts of interests in the course of the of the project also for the project to have gone through the state had to pass a law to exempt a certain type of hud loan from a constitutional ban on cities extending credit to private  companies and that was that was a tasty little there was a senate bill five to one one so they had to change the constitution to allow for the city to use hud money to go into the project this is my favorite the city made up fake crime statistics in order to qualify for this hud loan the city had to say that there was blight whatever spot blade is some kind of a bladed area so they said oh there's all this blight around the empty fredricka nelson building but they put in shoplifting statistics to support the argument there was spot blight while the building was closed there was no shoplifting even going on and they made up other fake stats to show and this was this was the smoking gun if they could not show spot blight around the fredricka nelson building the city led by mayor rice could not have gotten the hud loan doug my friend from the washington free press i assume from records that nick or peter steinbrck or rick around broo found out that the crime stats were fake and when they readjusted the crime stats by taking out the fake stats it showed there was no increas crime at all around f and building and there was no spot blight yet the lone went ahead and went through another one my favorites as we found some again from the work by john and everybody else that there was a city official named chuck to pew who had giving who had given notes to city council members to coach them on how to behave at the city council meeting where the whole project was approved  choreographed unanimous support this is his words choreograph unanimous support which they did a past nine nothing or whatever it was seven nothing don't ask questions about the loan to jeff rhodes jeff rhodes was a developer from chicago i make in the set up and this is my favorite avoid linking the fredricka nelson building to the parking garage well that was the whole damn thing that was the whole damn thing and they went along with it the city council went along with it and they followed the marching orders and the amazing thing is that you're seeing private interests telling the public officials what to do and the public officials saying ok so i hate the word lies but there were so many lies put forth in the in this project it's these are just the ones all the stuff i'm telling you right now is just the stuff that we found out about that we were able to write about and i was only a freelancer at the weekly was even working on the staff there and the free press was a very small publication that didn't have any money to state same thing k c m you know money at this radio station the deal for the whole thing was sealed over a by a p i reporter and a seattle times reporter jim erickson from the p r i and peter lewis from the times they covered a meeting actually in june one thousand nine hundred five and at that meeting  publicly complained about the overpayment on the parking garage why are we spending twenty three million dollars more the city why is the city spending twenty three million dollars more on a parking garage from what it's actually what it costs to build these reporters are at the meeting and they didn't write about it later when when i called i called peter lewis and i wrote an article about i called peter so why didn't you fix this later on he said well it was too late to fix so i didn't bother writing an article  to to fix the fix the thing is true and he also said that about fixing the fake crime stats they don't go back and fix that either there were ten memos that the city refused to give federal investigators from hu including memos untitled parking garage costs parking garage briefing f and then negotiations fredricka nelson status of garage negotiations and these were memos from the city finance director and one from j nolan these are ten memos that the city wouldn't give to federal investigators so you can imagine what what was in these little tasty items and then of course the overpayment for the parking garage i know nick tried to find out where did this money we got a internal budget on the parking garage which cost fifty million to build roughly and the city paid seventy three million dollars for this thing and i don't know we i cannot find out where the money went and again this is what we've been displayable to find out at the time with no budgets no money no nothing people have gone to prison for far less than this and since i left seattle and moved to europe i do a lot of work in the balkans in the former yugoslav countries i go to eastern europe i go to africa i go to parts of asia to latin america they lock people up in countries like that for far less than this so the problem was is that this story this story came out drip drip drip in the seattle weekly and because i was not a staff writer there i never got it on the cover so it didn't get the proper attention in order to really get to the bottom of it there were many investigations into the i'm wrapping up here and then i get to the ground point there are many investigations that were done at the local state and federal level thanks to john fox and jordan brower and  around and all the articles that we managed to write the and these investigations happened in rapid succession the state attorney general concluded that the state housing finance commission which gave the low income a low low interest loan to build a parking garage when the money should have gone to help build low income housing the state a g finally concluded that the that the city should eliminate as of conflict of interest well that's that's a helpful that's helpful pretty hard hitting stuff an internal hud memo that we found during the whole negotiation said that the case may be weak the case that the federal money should be used to build a parking garage and a shopping center so there was a lot of internal doubt about the project even at hud when it was being negotiated  inspector general of hud concluded the city's actions gave the appearance that it was purposefully keeping certain facts from the public in question whether the project had a public purpose so when federal government people say something that nuanced and cautious you know what they're really saying they're really saying that this was a scam the deputy director of hud said that city officials quote tried to obfuscate the true purpose of the use of the loan of the tribe sorry try to obfuscate the true purpose of the use of the loan funds that's what the deputy director of hud said why did the loan go through why wasn't any of the money paid back why isn't anybody in prison right now governor locke finally had it was forced to say that the state loan for the parking garage was inappropriate the city ethics director found that two city officials this truck depew character who wrote the coaching memo to the city council and mar ryan had violated federal state and local laws so if anybody i don't know if anybody got in trouble or not but but this this this this was and i didn't see really see the totality of these lies conflicts secrets until i went back and read all the articles that i dug out of my basement last week before coming to so in conclusion i know that's a lot to absorb but look this is just what we found out i'm sure nick found out a lot more being on the city council for many years and actually the last article i wrote for the weekly the last article i wrote for the weekly i think in the fall in the spring of  eighty eight said that nick and peter were still trying to investigate what was happening with the with the whole scam but long story short in many countries where i work now there are citizen that track procurement that track as many public contracts as possible and i don't know if there's a capacity in seattle for this kind of thing but there really needs to be a local angio maybe working with some researchers or even some academics to dig in to all big public procurement public works projects i know that's a big order in a city the size of seattle which is growing but this is a this is a conspiracy i mean this is a criminal conspiracy people intentionally withholding documents lying keeping stuff from the public and you know i used to feel bad that norm rice is when this was happening norm rice was a candidate to be the secretary of hud under clinton and one of the reasons he didn't get the job is because of this scandal was happening and hud was investigating it so you don't want to guy to run a federal agency that he just defrauded i mean you know you don't you don't really want that that's that that's not good you know and i always felt bad because i remember when all these articles were coming out i was young and stupid i called wolf blitzer and tried to get it on c n n and it was this big deal that what there actually was an article in the washington post about rice being investigated the the background check because he was a he was a cabinet post candidate it was either going to be him or cuomo to be the head of hud and two black suited investigators came to my apartment when i was living in ballard and knocked on the door and came in and asked no kinds of questions about norm rice and what was he doing with the hud thing i told him everything i knew and there was an article in the washington post and mayor rice did not get the job as hud secretary and i always felt bad because it is i mean journalists are not supposed to want anything we just tell the truth and get the facts out i didn't i didn't have a goal and i know that john fox did not have a goal of keeping mayor rice from becoming the hud secretary come on he's a nice guy well i know that norm did blame john for not getting probably but i think norah i think most i think the mayor got a pretty good job with the with the but i actually looking back on a given given what mayor rice did what he knew he was doing and all of the staff a lot of people had to keep this secret because it went on the planning the negotiations all the documents the applications to hud the applications to the housing finance commission and i got to tell you something i don't way over i really don't care i had gone then no this is my last i had gone into the housing finance commission again this is like the state version of hud i went in there for something totally unrelated to look up a file about something and it was at the time when this whole thing was coming out at that time no one knew that they had loaned money  jeff rhodes to build a parking garage no one knew that and i went in and i said oh i'm here to see the file and they said oh about the parking garage and i turn in the jon lovett's yeah the parking garage that's the ticket and i didn't even know what they were taught so i said yeah the parking garage you have that file and they gave me this file that showed me that they had actually gotten a loan to build a parking garage with state low income housing funds and that's how that whole story came out so again i don't know about the capacity but seattle needs a and maybe if it's cleaner now if this wouldn't happen today then mission accomplished you know if this and i don't know  if this if this if these scandals sent a message to folks not to try it again but i would strongly recommend citizens group to come together and pick one project a year that doesn't look right this never looked right the times didn't write about it that we all wrote about it we all wrote about it and we had no resources nothing so you can do a lot with nothing i encourage you folks to get together and set up a monitoring function to check these contracts to check these these projects and make sure that this thing which was a conspiracy doesn't happen again thank you thank you i'm maria tomczyk and i'm going to show you that actually city officials didn't really learn anything from the pacific place garage i'm going to talk about the yesler terrace redevelopment and i'm going to start off with a little bit of history of yesler terrace it was built in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine with about three million dollars in federal money from the roosevelt administration to help get the estimated four to five thousand homeless people living in hoovervilles in the city into permanent housing yes lower terrace became the nation's first racially integrated public housing project designed specifically for families so there were multiple bedrooms in a lot of these units there were front and back yards where people could have their kids play or they could plant gardens or whatever people do with their front and back yards in the one nine hundred seventy s however we're going to skip ahead quite a bit the federal government stopped providing funding in general for maintenance of public housing projects and those public housing projects around the nation began to deteriorate because there was just no money to do repairs replacements upgrades etc this led to the move to get quote quote unquote get rid of the projects by doing what is often referred to as revitalizing the neighborhood integrating people by income level rather than by race so instead of going to wealthy neighborhoods and saying we're going to build affordable housing there they said let's take this land that is assessed at a very low value very cheaply or in some cases completely off the market like public housing is in a lot of public housing projects and we will get private developers involved to build a mix of market rate housing and housing for people at different levels income levels so what happened of course is a lot of these poor neighborhoods and these quote unquote projects became redeveloped and gentrified in that process in that process so i want to talk about how that it's playing out in seattle how that's played out in seattle starting in i think it was about the early one nine hundred ninety s the seattle housing authority which is a public corporation it's not a part of city state or federal government but it works very closely with the city with city government has owned and managed four large housing communities in seattle yes they are terrorists which is the biggest one and their first project about twenty eight acres east of i five around yes we're way holly park which is now called new holly that's on beacon hill high point in west seattle and rainer vista which is west of rainier avenue south just north of the columbia city business district s ha has redeveloped all of these over time starting i think with the first one i think was rainer vista new holly about the same time and then high point and now yes there are terrorists and how they went about this is they came up with a plan to sell at least half of the land in this land was public housing land it was removed from the tax rolls it was owned by a it was not commercial or it was not zoned for anything but public housing ok they would they would go to the city the city council would pass changes and start working on the permitting process so that sh a could sell at least half of the land to private developers to build a majority of market rate units with a few usually around twenty percent of units set aside for people who make eighty percent of median income and just so you know what i'm talking about the median income for a single person in the city of seattle now is seventy thousand two hundred fifty of though i think once the numbers are run for two thousand and eighteen it's probably going to be closer to eighty thousand dollars for a median income low income housing when they talk about different levels of low income housing there's low income housing there's very low income housing and extremely low income housing low income housing which is sometimes now called workforce housing as if people who are very low income don't work is eighty percent of median income which is now set at fifty six thousand two hundred although it's going to be closer to sixty to sixty four i think this next year very low income is sixty percent of the median income that's now forty two thousand about forty two thousand dollars and extremely low income is when you make thirty percent or less of median income and that's currently set at about twenty one thousand although i think in next year it would be closer to twenty three thousand now people who make minimum wage in the city of c that minimum wage is set at eleven fifty to fifteen forty five an hour depending on whether you work for a small company or a large company means that you're making about twenty three thousand to about thirty two thousand dollars per year if you're working full time if you're not able to get full time hours at your workplace you're making well under twenty three thousand a year so you fall into that category of extremely low income the kind of person who could easily become homeless in our current housing environment and that's the kind of folks that public housing was meant for people who work at very low wage jobs or can't get full time hours who are disabled who have mental issues people who are seniors and not in the workforce anymore anymore and are on a limited fixed income those are the folks that public housing has historically served so sh a going back to what they're doing in seattle they sell about half of the land and then they use that money from the sale of the land to build units for the extremely low income families that's the idea right but not enough units really to replace the ones that were there in the public housing project before so for example in new holly it originally had eight hundred ninety six units of public housing for people at the extremely low end of the spectrum the redevelopment built only five hundred thirty units to replace those four extremely low income people and there were other units for people higher on the income scale but not enough to replace what was there before for the extremely low income people who are historically served by public housing high point in west seattle when it was first built in the forty's had thirteen hundred units of public housing a bunch of them had been allowed to deteriorate and been closed over time but the redevelopment so set aside zero units for people making thirty percent of median income not a single one there were four hundred twenty five units for people making sixty percent median but again you might not be able to afford that if you make minimum wage rainer vista had four hundred eighty one units of public housing left as of one nine hundred ninety five after the redevelopment only three  process of selling more than half of the land to private developers and when you look at a map of terrorists if you could see a color coded map you would see mostly private land north of yes it's been sold off or as in the process of being sold off south of us were two or three large tracts of land which have been have been already sold and are currently being developed now vulcan gets a lot of the media attention here because they bought three point seven acres in three parcels for twenty one and a half million dollars that's a little under six million dollars per acre and keep that number in mind here to build an estimated six hundred  fifty to seven hundred units total but only twenty percent of those units will be for people making eighty percent of median income none for people making sixty in the low in the very low or people making thirty percent in the extremely low and that's true for almost all of these private developments it's all market rate and a few for people who make eighty percent the first of these three buildings is now open the batik and it's renting one bedroom units at two thousand and twenty three hundred dollars per month two bedroom apartments which i guess you could argue are for families rent at thirty one hundred thirty four hundred dollars the building inland which  which cost about a little under six million dollars for them to buy the building and land are now assessed at forty one and a half million dollars by king county spectrum development solutions was the first private private developer to buy in yes terrace they bought about a half an acre for two point eight million dollars their building anthem on twelfth i think was the first one to open is now assessed at forty three points six million dollars it's one hundred twenty units ninety are market rate and thirty units only for people who make eighty percent of median income mill creek residential based in dallas bought one point two acres this is interesting because they've worked very hard to keep the price that they've paid for that land secret and it has they have not registered the sale yet with king county probably because they don't want to pay real estate taxes yet because they're not they have not finished building on that land but also it helps them to keep secret what they paid for that one point two acres they're going to build a first hill and i don't know if you know about apartment complexes opening up around seattle there's a moderen capitol hill there's a moderen south lake union there's a moderen on eighteenth in jackson and all of these are very similar to the vulcan development they charge high in market rate rents and of course there's only about twenty percent set aside for people who make eighty percent of median income and then the final developers low enterprises based in los angeles they bought two point five acres for thirty two point two million that's almost thirteen million dollars an acre about double what vulcan paid so you can see there that vulcan got a little price discount quite a bit of a price discount for being one of the early developers and being a local company and knowing people at city hall they paid less complex along alder street just south of harbor view those parcels can be used for anything there's no requirement the way they're advertising is there's no requirement to build any low income housing those  parcels could be used for luxury apartments they could be used for retail or for the preferred use that s h e s saying they want to be used as office towers for large office buildings so that they can make this neighborhood a live work environment that's what they say of course they could get some prime money for land that would be for office towers and they are marketing them not just for a national to national real estate companies but they're marketing them internationally as well so i want to also remind you too that for each of these properties sh a has paid to tear down the buildings that were there and to grade the land so typically want to develop or buys a unit to tear down they buy as is and then they have to put up the money to tear down the buildings and grade the land but in this case that's not happening sh a is paying to do all that and the number of units for extremely low income residents that sh a will build on the remaining about four and a half to five and a half acres they have kept from this twenty eight twenty nine acre community to build very low income housing is only two hundred eighteen units that have been built and designed so far to replace the five hundred ninety one units that were there before at that house at about eleven hundred low income people extremely low income people so even though they say we're replacing them one for one you know they've got one more building left to decide and they're going to have to take it really high and design it to you know to hold something like three hundred or more extremely low income units and they're not going to do that so there's not going to be a one for one replacement just like there wasn't for any of the other sh a properties that have been redeveloped and of course the vast majority of the units that have been built so far even the ones that are for extremely low income people are studio and one bedroom and maybe an occasional two bedroom apartment they're not a one for one replacement for families who want a yard for their kids to play in for immigrant families who want to have a garden maybe with their unit just not an equivalent replacement for them and by selling parcels of land well that's not true is using public taxpayer money for more than half of the project federal the federal government is giving them thirty three million dollars in hard money the city of seattle is giving them thirty million dollars some of it is from the parks fund to help build yes for park but also some of it is from the housing levy funds and from other city funds sources  sh expects to get one hundred fifty six million in low income housing tax credits and that's going to be about thirty six percent of the toll funding for the project and the rest of course is going to be a land sales of about one hundred forty four million maybe more we'll have to see what those two parcels that were just listed on the market will go for plus about seventy three million dollars in bond sales bond at in addition the city of seattle has to approve like i said new terrace a number of permits and vacate a street for the tenth avenue hill climb and park and there may be some more issues with street with the streets in that area too because i think they're going to be doing improvements for south washington street through the park in and around some of the private development that south of yesler and then there's the first street car that is a key part piece of the government infrastructure that has made the redevelopment work the main stop that serves the yesler terrace community is that yes lower and broadway a directly adjacent to the vulcan parcels there are three vulcan parcels is directly adjacent to the middle one that they purchased along yesler the total cost of the first hill street car line was one hundred thirty four million dollars and it costs the city and well the city pays about six million year to operate both the south lake union street car and the first street car because they will probably never pay for themselves the central city connector streetcar line is really key to connecting that workforce housing that being built in yes terrace to downtown businesses in south lake union and you can see by looking at the some of the buildings that have been built and yes there are terraces really being marketed towards tech workers and really is something that only they can afford that cities that center city connector streetcar line is over budget at two hundred million dollars to build it along first avenue and king county metro is estimating cost twenty four million a year to operate just the city connector part of the streetcar line so the overall impact of the yesler redevelopment is a major gift to real estate developers especially deval can but to the other developers as well who it appears of course vulcan appear it appears they now got their property at a fifty percent discount in it and in addition to market rate housing s h e s plan is for private developers to gain eighty eight thousand square feet of retail space and nine hundred thousand square feet of office space and if you could convert that into housing units you could be housing about fifteen hundred people maybe more than that if you have more than one person per unit and then also you know the city of seattle's own requirements for affordable housing has led to some of this some of this being a real problem because they've been completely in adequate to the need for the city of requires developers in just five areas of the city right now and that's set to expand when the city passes  revisions to to their development code to build some units for people who make sixty percent of median income or else pay a small tax into the city's housing fund most developers have been opting to pay the tax not to build the units and then if you see land that's been already removed from the land that's all been been removed and set aside for public housing which is what yes lower tariffs was it was not on it was not on the retail land roles if you look at that and then you look at that versus the city going around like like it is right now trying to find affordable land to build shelter space just to get homeless people off the street or to build land for affordable housing to try to buy that retail price is outrageous in today's market and yet we see this land being given largely given away to these developers they to take somebody year to build and then the land is suddenly double or triple what they paid for it it seems like a crying shame that we keep hearing over and over again about the number of homeless people in seattle that the one night count of the homeless found about twelve thousand homeless people in king county the majority of them in the city of seattle and you start to wonder why you look at yes or terrace you start to wonder what are the priorities here well clearly the priorities are to give developers a big gift so that they can reach quote unquote revitalize in other words gentrify the first hill neighborhood and drive a lot of the people who were formerly living there to can't in auburn in places outside of the city so ok and i just want to mention too there's the perverse incentive to private ties public land is a key part of that because the puck this public property had been removed from the tax rolls sh eight does not pay any real estate taxes any sales taxes because it's a public corporation in the state of washington so this land to private developers then means that state and city officials can say oh golly we're going to get all this additional real estate additional revenue in real estate taxes and the developers will pay sales taxes when they do there when they build their profit there their buildings etc so that provides this in perverse incentive for local officials to say yes maybe it's better to privatized that land than to just let it sit there and stagnate so that's that's all i'm going to say that that would be a great project for a citizens group that wanted to look at contracts because i'm sure there's going to you would find a lot of back and forth there between and conflicts of interest there between the developers on those projects the people who designed the sh a project because they did not design it they hired a private company to design it for to the ten figures the one billion dollars in public money being poured into south lake union and back  in the old days a neighborhood called cascade was whole home to many low income residents as well as many small manufacturing warehousing jobs blue collar jobs and seattle times newspaper columnist john hinton berger looked out from his office window and said we should raise this area and make a big park pitch been named joel horne came to town and said by golly we're going to do this or calling it the seattle commons and they approached one of the richest men in the world very own billionaire paul allen and said hey would you buy some land in this neighborhood and you know as part of the effort to get the seattle commons things rolling paul allen bought eleven acres and seattle commons failed and then paul allen bought fifty more acres to really bring his holdings to about sixty acres now this area had to be redeveloped and poor paul allen could not pay for it all himself just wouldn't be fair for a billionaire to have to pony up money to support his own development project so he went to work on local politicians and he really found his chief cheerleader in mare greg nickels and the pitch was we're going to have this be all biotech remember that biotech ok so they start to move the projects forward and already mentioned one of them to street car that little dinky line that runs from west lake to south lake union is of no use for no utility for public transit even now with all the thousands of people that that work in south lake union they don't get  enough riders to pay for the damn thing and we're still subsidizing it heavily when we were promised oh it's going to pay for itself we're going to have advertising the ridership numbers are going to be so great then paul allen felt that in order to develop really nice properties along mercer street and along next to the lake you really needed to change  those the way those streets are configured three hundred million dollars later we now have the same line of traffic that we had before getting onto the freeway recent study showed it's gotten three seconds faster and and paul allen has a bee yoda full street next to lake union on which to do his development and he has a very nice boulevard there on which you know the sides of which are all large buildings and it just looks terrific now to make things look even better they felt that you really needed to take all the overhead power lines that are such a blot on the world and burry them so we paid one hundred million dollars to bury them they also decided you know we're not getting that kind of power that we really feel that we need there's some surges sometimes it's not really good service so we're building them a new city light substation to the tune of two hundred million dollars we also fixed up the park for twenty million dollars and paul allen has had a field day didn't come right what came amazon right ok so suddenly we're subsidizing jeff bezos and amazon and you know we were told all along by politicians well you know what is going to be really great because these new corporations when they move in these new companies they're going to pay a lot of taxes and will will redirect that into social services that was the whole theory of why we should put a billion dollars into this neighborhood for a billionaire ok so last year twenty seventeen i noticed that for the first time amazon was spending heavily in local elections they put three hundred fifty thousand dollars into the chamber of commerce's pac previously they had donated nothing to politics in town and i thought well what the hell is that about stupid me right what it was about was about to head tax the way that amazon was actually going to have to pay some taxes as you probably know in twenty seventeen amazon had a profit of three billion dollars and they paid zero dollars in federal taxes when the city council decided ok we're going to make you pay twelve million dollars a year to help support increasing homelessness we're going to make you pay something back oh no no no no no no that that's not going to work right so they turned on the muscle and they got their political machine crank in and what do you know the city council turned around and repealed the tax on a seventy two vote so not only did we substitute ball alan but now we've got  amazon two it's like two for two for one we're getting out of out of all of this investment we put into south lake union so the fight goes on against corporate welfare it's very un acknowledged unfortunately as previous speakers have mentioned by the local press there are a small number of activists that keep trying to beat it back few elected officials come along now and then like nicholas try to beat it back but they're outnumbered and it's a very discouraging time in seattle for the battle against corporate welfare good question because you know most of the low extremely low income housing built on the yesler terrace site has all been very far east of the land that that provides beautiful views or far south now the pieces that have great views that are going to have the best views are those two plots that sh a just listed and wants to sell for any use including potentially building office towers but also some of the some of the vulcan property is not just beautiful view property but it's also the prime lots that straddle broadway where broadway broadway meets yesler and the third plot is where so they got the best lots really of the whole of the whole you know structure so no it's not for you property not at all the although sh a says well we're building you a park you know we've built you a beautiful hill climb you know and they have they are talking about all of the services that the city has been providing for a number of years not just now that the redevelopment has happened that they provide that the city provides for extremely low income people and then of course there is a community center and well there was a community center before but this is a new community center but the problem remains more than half of the land is being sold it's the best land there and the city desperately needs inexpensive land to build affordable housing and it's slipping  terrace development s h a is not a government agency so it can be difficult to get information from them there as far as i can tell they're organized as a public corporation in the state of washington so they and they have special tax exempt status in the state of washington but their federal organization they have a federal taxpayer id number but i don't think they file federal income tax returns because there are a state corporation and i think they probably have the federal tax id number to do payroll taxes only would be my guess i don't think so no they have a they have their own separate board of directors and i know that for years we've been trying or have tried to get people from the community on the board of directors of the city mayor actually