Last Monday, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved amendments to the Holly Park Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) relieving the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) of 20 more units of its low-income housing replacement obligation. Compounding the problem, the Council also allowed SHA to give away a portion of Seattle's finite allotment of Section 8 rent subsidies to King County.

Using little more energy than it takes to put pen to paper, SHA signed away these subsidies to the County and in the process avoided an obligation under the MOA to create 20 newly constructed very low income units in Seattle. This is the second time in six months the City Council has approved amendments to the MOA--relieving SHA of at least 85 of their 421-unit replacement obligation.

Council member Richard McIver was the most ardent supporter of the Council's recent action, calling it a great example of regional cooperation. Evidently the loss of these Section 8s is no big deal to him, even though it will mean that the 6,000 people (about 50 percent of whom are people of color) in Seattle on waiting lists for those limited subsidies will now have to wait that much longer. Handing over Seattle's limited housing subsidies to another jurisdiction is unprecedented--a move that SHA says they would like to repeat. It could spell the loss of more of Seattle's housing subsidies--especially now that it's been sanctioned by the City Council.

No Council members spoke out forcefully against the loss of 20 units of housing under the Holly Park Agreement, nor did they speak out about the loss of Seattle's Section 8 subsidies. After the council approved the deal, however, Nick Licata did secure passage of an accompanying resolution (by a 7-1 council vote) stating that until there was a more thorough review of the implications of this action, the Council saw this as a one-time-only giveaway. Such resolutions, however, are non-binding and are almost always ignored. After all, it was a Council ordinance that originally bound SHA to replace 421 units lost at Holly Park. McIver tried to block it, casting the lone vote against its passage.

But McIver was not the only council member to dance an SHA tune. Before the vote on the Licata resolution, Council member Jim Compton looked out on the Council audience, saw SHA Director Harry Thomas, and yelled out: "Hey, Harry, what do you think of this thing--up or down?" Harry gave it a thumbs down, but then did add that he had no strong objections to it. (Since it was non-binding, why complain?) Compton only then supported Licata's resolution.

Richard Conlin also seems to have aligned himself closely with the SHA party line. More than anyone on the council, Conlin typifies the dominant corporate liberal approach to addressing our housing crisis. When a vote was taken to acknowledge receipt of the City's annual allotment of Stewart-McKinney Homeless Funds--dollars that support Seattle's network of homeless services--Conlin took time to condemn the Feds for cutting Seattle's allocation this year by about two million dollars. He even said he had strong words about this with HUD Secretary Cuomo on his recent visit to D.C. But when it comes to taking on local elites (and that includes SHA) that are destroying our low-income housing stock, gentrifying our communities, and actually causing homelessness--matters here at home for which he has direct responsibility--Conlin only offers us high-minded euphemisms to justify these elite actions.

As for giving away limited housing subsidies to King County when they are so desperately needed right here in Seattle, Conlin states: "Additional dispersion of low-income housing is generally a positive step." Conlin and McIver (an African American and the only person of color now holding an elected office at City Hall) aren't the only ones warping the concept of regional cooperation.

In Seattle, an increasing number of city and county officials are saying that the movement of poor people from the inner city to the suburbs is inevitable and even healthy--a natural process of "de-concentration" or dispersion of the poor out to the suburbs--and that it is the proper role of government to accommodate it. This is the worst kind of social engineering.

Under the guise of promoting "regionalism"--a word being used in this case to justify SHA's decision to give away these city subsidies to the County--it allows governments to actively promote the displacement of poor people and people of color from inner city neighborhoods. For more of this hogwash, take a look at the incredible arrogance of public officials now trying to ram high-density (i.e., expensive) development down the Martin Luther King Corridor. Low-income neighborhoods, including Rainier Vista and Holly Park, and hundreds of Asian, African American, and Hispanic residents and small businesses will be uprooted--all in the name of accommodating light rail.

And, as housing analysts all across the country are observing, instead of de-concentrating poverty, it only means that poor people are re-concentrating out to the inner ring suburbs, into housing of lesser quality and where there is little or no access to services, transportation, and jobs tailored to their needs. Masking the process of displacement behind high-minded planning jargon or other euphemisms is objectionable in the extreme and it portends how self-serving elites and other vested interests will increasingly frame their arguments to justify the wholesale removal of poor people from our communities.