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The International Franchise Association and its members are shocked, shocked to find that lawyering is going on in here:

The City of Seattle’s decision to hire expensive outside legal counsel to try to defend its discriminatory actions against small businesses in the recently adopted minimum wage ordinance should outrage every taxpaying resident and business, according to Jan Simon, President and CEO of the Washington Lodging Association (WLA).

Last week the City announced it had hired Susman Godfrey, a Texas law firm with offices in Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City and Seattle, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, to assist in its defense of the ordinance.

“As a Seattle taxpayer I am flabbergasted and disappointed that the Mayor and City Council believe it is appropriate to hire an outside law firm charging a reported $1,100 an hour to defend the blatantly discriminatory sections of the ill-conceived ordinance,” said Simon.

Even worse, adds Simon in the press release, is that some of the money used to pay the city’s legal expenses will come from taxes on the very businesses who have filed this lawsuit! Which is, of course, hilarious.

Well it is true that the IFA lawsuit is laughably frivolous, that still wouldn’t excuse lazy lawyering on the part of the City Attorney’s office. Government agencies hire outside attorneys all the time, particularly to deal with highly specialized areas of the law. So it’s good to know that City Attorney Pete Holmes isn’t too stoned to know that he better seek outside expertise on this one, especially since he’s facing off against evil genius former US Solicitor General Paul Clement.

As for the IFA’s mock outrage, what’s next? Suing the Pike Place Market for refusing to rent to franchises? They can decry Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance as “discriminatory” all they want—and maybe it is—but this sort of discrimination is neither illegal nor immoral. The only thing more laughable than its frivolous lawsuit is the IFA’s efforts to spin this into some sort of a civil rights issue.

Boston-based Boloco is one of a handful of fast food chains that makes a point of paying its workers above the minimum wage. How and why does it do it?

“We were talking about building a culture in which we want our team members to take care of our customers,” Mr. Pepper said. “But we asked, ‘What’s in it for them?’ Honestly, very little.”

So in 2002, when the minimum wage was $5.15 an hour, Boloco raised its minimum pay to $8. It also began subsidizing commuting costs, providing English classes to immigrant employees and contributing up to 4 percent of an employee’s pay toward a 401(k).

“If we really wanted our people to care about our culture and care about our customers, we had to show that we cared about them,” Mr. Pepper said. “If we’re talking about building a business that’s successful, but our employees can’t go home and pay their bills, to me that success is a farce.”

When the company raised its minimum pay to $8, “that was an immediate hit to the P.& L.,” Mr. Pepper acknowledged, referring to the company’s profit and loss statement.

He said his privately held company, unlike some fast-food chains, did not sense an urgency to achieve a 20 percent profit margin per restaurant.

Zeynep Ton, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, said many companies did not pay their employees well because they had a short-term focus on maximizing profits.

During much of the minimum wage debate, proponents (including myself) have emphasized that a higher wage can actually be good for business—increasing productivity and reducing costly turnover, while stimulating the broader consumer economy. And all that is true. But if $15 ultimately decreases profit margins for the businesses required to pay it, so what?

It is important to remember that our current obsession with maximizing shareholder wealth is a late 20th century invention, first popularized by economist Milton Friedman in a 1970 article in the New York Times. It was never a part of classical economics. You won’t explicitly find it in Adam Smith. Through the early part of the 19th century, corporations were chartered to provide a public good. The modern joint stock corporation was never intended as a departure from this tradition, but merely as a means of more efficiently pooling capital, while limiting the liability of shareholders to the sum of their investment. Indeed, read the 1881 mission statement on the founding of the Wharton School, and it sounds downright utopian:

1. Object.  To provide for young men special means of training and of correct instruction in the knowledge and in the arts of modern Finance and Economy, both public and private, in order that, being well informed and free from delusions upon these important subjects, they may either serve the community skillfully as well as faithfully in offices of trust, or, remaining in private life, may prudently manage their own affairs and aid in maintaining sound financial morality: in short, to establish means for imparting a liberal education in all matters concerning Finance and Economy.

That executives might choose to run their corporations with a primary goal of maximizing shareholder wealth is up to them. But contrary to Friedman’s assertion, they are under no legal or moral obligation to do so.

I was sorting through some of the crap in my archives over the weekend, when I stumbled on this:

“If you have the 1 percent saying, ‘Tax the 99 percent,’ and the 99 percent saying, ‘Tax the 1 percent,’ you have a standstill.”
— former WA State Senator Joseph Zarelli (R-Ridgefield), 12/2/2011

That’s right: 99 to 1, and we’re at “a standstill.” Utterly fucking ridiculous.

I’ve often remarked on the irony that the best daily newspaper journalist in Seattle doesn’t write for a Seattle newspaper. And that still might be true. But the NY Times’ Timothy Egan is beginning to lose my attention:

The election this fall will most certainly return to power the most despised Congress in the modern era, if not ever. The House, already a graveyard for common sense, will fall further under the control of politicians whose idea of legislating is to stage a hearing for Fox News. The Senate, padlocked by filibusters over everyday business, will be more of the same, with one party in nominal control.

Republicans suck, amirite? And yet congressional gerrymandering and an antiquated Constitution that gives tiny rural states like Wyoming the same representation in the Senate as giant California virtually guarantees another Benghazi-obsessed do-nothing Congress. Hopefully, Egan has some ideas on how to fix this tyranny of the minority.

The fastest-growing, most open-minded and least-partisan group of voters will have no say. That’s right: The independents, on this Independence Day, have never been more numerous. But they’ve never been more shut out of power.

Oh. Independents. That old trope. Sigh.

Earlier this year, Gallup found that 42 percent of Americans identified as independents, the highest it has measured since modern polling techniques started 25 years ago. That survey found that Republicans — destined to keep control of the House and possibly take the Senate — comprise only one in four Americans, their lowest share over that same quarter-century span. Democrats were at 31 percent.

Honestly, I’ve never understood the argument that we should hand political control to the people who can’t make up their minds. No doubt there are some Americans who self-identify as independent because they’re too good to sully themselves with party politics, or something, but adopting a political label that stands for nothing is not inherently a sign of intellectual conviction or rigor.

The breakdown is even more unrepresentative when you look at the millennial generation, which, by most definitions, is the largest ever, with about 80 million people. These are the baby boomers’ kids, who bring their life-as-a-buffet view to voting as well. They like choice — in music, food, lifestyle, religion and politics.

Half of all Americans under the age of 34 describe themselves as politically independent, according to a Pew Research Center survey earlier this year, a high-water mark. This generation is also near the highest levels — 29 percent — to say they are not affiliated with any religion.

I suppose one could view this as a sign of a long term trend, or as an indication that it takes longer for young people to make up their fucking minds. It’s a holiday, so I’m not willing to put in the work to research the data, but I’d guess that young people often tend to skew more independent than older voters.

And if you consider California, our most populous state and long a trendsetter for values and politics, the same picture emerges. There, the latest tally of registered voters shows that the fastest-growing segment is the category of “no party.” While the number of these independent voters in California grew by 50,000 people this year, the Republicans lost almost 37,000. Democrats were basically flat, with a loss of 3,000.

Okay. But if you consider California as a trendsetter for values and politics, one might also want to consider that after years of political gridlock and decline, California voters have turned things around by handing Democrats supermajority control of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. California is virtually a one-party state! And it’s working! Voters may be self-identifying as “independent” in greater numbers, but they are voting for Democrats.

The pattern, nearly everywhere but in the states of the old Confederacy, is the same: People are leaving the Republican Party, and to a lesser extent the Democrats, to jump in the nonpartisan lane. The independents are more likely to want something done about climate change, and immigration reform. They’re not afraid of gay marriage or contraception or sensible gun laws. They think government can be a force for good.

Um, then doesn’t this pattern say more about the declining brand of the Republican Party than it does about some ideological swing to “independence?” I mean, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance in switching parties. The act of doing so acknowledges that one was wrong. It also reeks of disloyalty. Far easier to just proclaim oneself an independent, and then vote for the Democrat, than it is to officially switch parties entirely.

And none of those sentiments are represented by the current majority in the people’s House. The Senate, at least, has two independents, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. In the House? Zero. Remember that the next time Speaker John Boehner says that his members are doing the work of the American people. They’re doing Fox’s work, which is why they’ve had endless hearings on Benghazi, and voted more than 50 times to take away people’s health care, but won’t allow a vote on the minimum wage or immigration reform.

What is it that Egan doesn’t get about our two-party system?

If you thought that the last election — in which 1.2 million more votes were cast for a Democratic member of the House, but the Republicans kept control by a healthy margin — was unrepresentative, the coming contest will set a new standard for mismatch between the voters’ will and the people who represent them.

And how is this in any way a result of a lack of deference to independents? This is a result gerrymandering, pure and simple, that ghettoizes the Democratic vote into urban districts.

Only 12 percent of the general public is defined as “steadfast conservative,” in the latest breakdown of seven political niches done by Pew. But that rises to 19 percent for the “politically engaged.” Thus the Tea Party, though disliked by most Americans, can win elections in red states, and send people to Washington who will govern only for the narrow, passionate base that elected them.

Um, “politically engaged” means actively engaged in party politics. The teabaggers have won influence by seizing control of the Republican Party. Independents lack influence because they refuse to engage in party politics at all.

When you examine the beliefs of independents, particularly among millennials, they lean Democratic. That is, most policy issues pushed by the Democrats get majority support from the nonpartisans. Combining all the categories, Pew put the pro-Democratic cohort at 55 percent, the pro-Republican at 36 percent. But the two party brands are so soiled now by the current do-nothing Congress and their screaming advocates that voters prefer not to have anything to do with either of them.

So that means, what, only 9 percent of independents are truly “independent”—less than the 12 percent defined as “steadfast conservative.” Independents these days are disproportionately Democrats who refuse to self-indentify as such. So why should I care what they call themselves as long as they’re voting for my candidates?

The indies still vote. They went for Barack Obama, twice, but hate partisanship. They’ve soured on Obama for not fulfilling his great promise of forging a coalition that is neither red nor blue.

Way to feed into the Fox meme that this lack of a coalition is somehow Obama’s failure. He tried. Way too often and way too long. And at every turn the Republicans fucked him. Obama would have been a much more effective president had he been more partisan from the start instead being so goo-goo-eyed over that “team of rivals” fantasy.

What to do?

Good, Egan is going to propose some pragmatic solutions.

First, recognize the imbalance. Any democracy is broken when a plurality is not represented in the halls of power. The November contest for control of Congress can’t possibly be a “wave election,” as many politicos will claim, because a near-majority has no slate of candidates.

Okay. Whatever.

Second, get a slate of candidates. Some states now allow “no party” politicians a prominent place on the ballot, so long as they finish in the top ranks. In the age of crowdsourcing, raising the kind of money to fight, say, a Koch brothers-backed Republican is not all that difficult.

You’re fucking kidding me, right? Does Egan understand absolutely nothing about how American electoral politics works? I mean, forget the fact that American history is littered with dismal third party failures. The very nature of independents is that they are not members of a political party! So how the fuck are they going to put together a representative slate of candidates?

Third, don’t check out.

Too late.

The emerging majority is the most racially diverse, politically open-minded, social-media-engaged generation in history. They’re repulsed by the partisan hacks, and the lobbyist-industrial complex that controls them. You see their influence in everything but the governing institutions in Washington. It’s about time that voice is heard.

Whatever, Tim. Too bad you didn’t actually propose any actual reforms that would allow that voice to be heard. So let me help you out.

First of all, we need proportional representation. Imagine how different Congress might look if instead of electing representatives from highly gerrymandered districts, we instead elected them statewide, through a ranked choice voting system? For example, here in Washington, we’d rank our top ten choices, and the top ten vote getters would go to Congress. Betcha that would elect a House more representative of the people as a whole.

Second, we need to eliminate the Electoral College, and elect our president directly through the popular vote. Not only would that avoid another bullshit coup like the one that gave us President Bush, but it would also dramatically transform the nature of our presidential elections, forcing candidates to campaign in all fifty states, instead of just the swing ones.

Third, we need standard election laws and procedures nationwide, so as to prevent the fascistic Republican strategy of voter suppression.

And finally, we need real campaign finance and disclosure reform. If that means a constitutional amendment, so be it. (While we’re at it, we can address that whole corporate personhood bullshit.) If that means packing the bench, I’m up for that too.

Is the American political system broken? No shit, Sherlock! Anybody can see that. But where Egan goes wrong is that he sees the rise of “independents” as some sort of a solution, when in fact what it really is, is a symptom.

Independents are by definition less engaged in electoral politics. They’ve opted out. They don’t caucus. They don’t doorbell. They don’t participate in the hard grassroots work that characterizes the very best of American politics. So of course their voices aren’t heard. Have you ever been to an LD meeting, Tim? Have you ever sat through one of those godawful party platform debates? It’s boring, tedious, frustrating hard work. But imagine if the 36 percent of independents who lean Republican got themselves engaged in party politics, how quickly they’d overwhelm their Tea Party counterparts, restoring some sanity to the GOP?

So instead of just fantastically declaring that we need to elect more “independents”—a label that stands for absolutely nothing—it would have been much more useful had Egan any suggestions for how to get disaffected voters more engaged.

– Happy 4th tomorrow. I won’t be posting anything. Maybe Goldy or someone else will.

– That is to say, in Alito’s apparent way of thinking, the religious scruples against blood transfusions do not involve a legitimate religion. Concern about abortion, however — even when that concern has no factual basis — is a legitimate religious scruple because, well, it’s Catholic. Just like Sam Alito. And just like John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas — the only justices who agreed with Alito’s inexplicable assertion that this alleged concern about alleged “abortifacients” is self-evidently different from other such claims.

– There will always be a few House seats available for unreconstructed bigots. The presidency not so much.

– The creative commute contest seems like a hoot.

– More maps should be adjusted for sobriety.

They’re fucking insane, that’s what:

Two years ago Kansas embarked on a remarkable fiscal experiment: It sharply slashed income taxes without any clear idea of what would replace the lost revenue. Sam Brownback, the governor, proposed the legislation — in percentage terms, the largest tax cut in one year any state has ever enacted — in close consultation with the economist Arthur Laffer. And Mr. Brownback predicted that the cuts would jump-start an economic boom — “Look out, Texas,” he proclaimed.

But Kansas isn’t booming — in fact, its economy is lagging both neighboring states and America as a whole. Meanwhile, the state’s budget has plunged deep into deficit, provoking a Moody’s downgrade of its debt.

There’s an important lesson here — but it’s not what you think. Yes, the Kansas debacle shows that tax cuts don’t have magical powers, but we already knew that. The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people.

As Albert Einstein is often credited with saying: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” This bit of supply-side orthodoxy has already been tried again and again, and with disastrous fiscal results (for example, the massive deficits that resulted from the Bush tax cuts). Meanwhile the opposite strategy—the Clinton tax hikes—were followed by the longest economic expansion in US history, along with several years of budget surpluses.

Some might argue that Seattle is embarking on a remarkable experiment too, but that’s not entirely true. Washington State has long had one of the highest minimum wages in the nation, yet our economy has outperformed both neighboring states and the nation as a whole. In fact, last year Seattle was the fastest-growing big city in America. As Nick Hanauer recently wrote in Politico: “Fifteen dollars isn’t a risky untried policy for us. It’s doubling down on the strategy that’s already allowing our city to kick your city’s ass.”

Unfortunately, Seattle’s demand-side strategy just isn’t perceived to serve the direct interests of “the right people” (you know, the rich and powerful). So whatever the results here, it’s hard to see the people of Kansas following our lead.

In an effort to repeal Seattle’s historic $15 minimum wage, business-backed Forward Seattle has been gathering signatures for a referendum to put the ordinance on the November ballot. And how are they persuading Seattleites to sign their petition? By lying:

In the audio above, recorded June 27 outside the Target in Northgate, the signature gatherer can clearly be heard telling potential signers that Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage “hasn’t been legalized yet,” that the city council “didn’t officially vote on it,” and that the petition “raises it to $15 an hour.”

These are lies. In fact, the petition is for a referendum that would entirely repeal Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage, and replace it with nothing. That is what the businesses behind Forward Seattle have resorted to: paying signature gatherers to lie to voters about their referendum.

And it’s not just one rogue signature gatherer. Over the weekend I was forwarded this audio from an unrelated source, a compilation of various signature gatherers telling various lies about their petition. Potential signers are told that “they’re going to get to $15, just not so fast,” that “this is not to eliminate it,” and that the petition will “incrementally raise it to $15, not all at once.”

If I lied about Forward Seattle and the shameless lying liars who back it, they could sue me for defamation. But it is perfectly legal for them to hire people to lie about their referendum. Still, if these businesses are so willing to lie to me about their referendum, why should I trust them to tell me the truth about their goods and services? Politics aside, I won’t willingly do business with people I don’t trust, and so I will never spend my money at these businesses again.

While the Twitterverse remains obsessed with the US Supreme Court’s awful ruling in the Hobby Lobby case—that closely held corporations can exempt themselves from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception requirements on religious grounds—a potentially more impactful decision isn’t getting nearly as much attention.

Again, by 5-4 vote split purely on ideological grounds, the court has ruled that home health care workers in Illinois have a First Amendment right to refuse to pay “agency fees” (you know, dues) to the union that represents them. There is little analysis so far online, and I haven’t had time to more than skim the decision, let alone wrap my mind around it, but the conclusion of Justice Elana Kagan’s dissenting opinion (pdf) is probably instructive:

For many decades, Americans have debated the pros and cons of right-to-work laws and fair-share requirements. All across the country and continuing to the present day, citizens have engaged in passionate argument about the issue and have made disparate policy choices. The petitioners in this case asked this Court to end that discussion for the entire public sector, by overruling Abood and thus imposing a right-to-work regime for all government employees. The good news out of this case is clear: The majority declined that radical request. The Court did not, as the petitioners wanted, deprive every state and local government, in the management of their employees and programs, of the tool that many have thought neces- sary and appropriate to make collective bargaining work.

The bad news is just as simple: The majority robbed Illinois of that choice in administering its in-home care program.

Just like in Hobby Lobby, newspaper ledes will likely describe Harris v. Quinn as a “narrow” opinion. It did not overturn Abood, and thus apparently did not drive the final nail into the coffin of organized labor by extending “right to work” rules to all public employee unions. But it also did not extend Abood’s protections to home health care workers in Illinois. And that could potentially have an enormous political impact here in Washington State.

By far the most influential and successful union in Washington in recent years has been SEIU Healthcare 775NW, which organized and represents the state’s 40,000 in-home health care workers. It was SEIU 775 that largely funded the organizing efforts behind Seattle’s fast food strikes and SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage initiative. It was SEIU 775 president David Rolf who co-chaired the mayor’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee, and played a major role in pushing through our new minimum wage law. Other locals may grumble at the assertion, but it is fair to say that SEIU 775 has been the most powerful and effective union in the state.

But if the court’s ruling in Harris v. Quinn extends to Washington State, then SEIU 775 may have just been largely defunded, and the state’s in-home health care workers left without effective representation.

Because that’s how “right to work” works. If workers are given the right to opt out of paying union dues, narrow self-interest dictates that many of them will become freeloaders, benefitting from union contracts without bearing any of the cost of negotiating them. I mean, if you’re struggling to make ends meet on $12 an hour, what are you going to pay first—your electric bill or your union dues? And without the majority of the workers paying their dues, unions wither away into political insignificance, lacking the funds to effectively organize, advertise, or make political contributions. As the union grows politically weaker, its ability to collectively bargain on behalf of its members weakens too. And as the union becomes a less effective negotiator, fewer and fewer members choose to pay their dues.

It is that sort of death spiral that has made it nearly impossible to unionize in “right to work” states.

I’ve asked SEIU 775 for comment and was told that they are still “analyzing the decision.”

Maybe organized labor largely dodged a bullet in Harris v. Quinn. This time. Maybe. But clearly some of our nation’s lowest paid and most vulnerable workers did not. And if this ruling applies to in-home health care workers in Washington the same way it applies to in-home health care workers in Illinois, then it may end up having an enormous impact on local politics, largely defunding what has been the most powerful and effective union in the state.

UPDATE: SEIU 775 spokesperson Jackson Holtz offers the following defiant response: “Home health care workers in Washington will continue to stand with low wage workers throughout the state and around the country in our fight to lift workers out of poverty. Today’s Supreme Court decision will in no way change that.”

Holtz emphasizes that this is “a long and complicated opinion,” and that Washington’s in-home health care system is very, very different from the program and Illinois. “We have a far more robust collective bargaining model through which workers have won benefits,” says Holtz, like health insurance, mandatory training, and certification, as opposed to just wages. “The distinctions between the two programs are too innumerable to go through.”

In other words, their lawyers are still trying to figure out what this all means.

One thing that seems certain is that today’s ruling will surely spark similar lawsuits here in Washington State, attempting to widen the crack provided by Justice Alito’s opinion in an effort to further erode the few legal protections still afforded organized labor.

– This has been going around, but here’s the list of places opposing the minimum wage increase.

– It would be very nice indeed to have an Eyman initiative free year at the polls.

– Happy first day of the South Park Bridge reopening.

– Putin’s quite the grand master chess player. It takes a rare talent to push potential allies away, while tarnishing your country’s reputation on the global stage and pushing your economy into a recession.

– It was a bit of a surprise how quick Podlodowski’s tenure was.

– Every time gas prices go up, Republicans pass imaginary legislation.

– Surgically precise

Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.

Stephen gets batshit serious about migrant kids.

Sam Seder: Rick Perry visions of being Jewish.

Ed: Gov. Bobby Jindal calls for a rebellion with a hostile takeover of Washington.

Young Turks: Here’s the Republican scandal machine in 10 easy steps.

Liberal Viewer: FAUX News, “Girls more likely to have hateful little minds” ???

ONN: The Onion Week in Review.

The Return of the Neocon and Wingnut War Criminals:

• Mark Fiore: The Neocon reunion tour!.
• #Dicklovers speak out:

• Pap and Cliff Schecter: War chickenhawks coming home to roost
• Maddow: John McCain, ‘Blah blah blah arm the rebels’.
• Jon: Republican warfare queens
• Thom: The return of the neocons.
• Jimmy Dore: Digging a deeper hole.
• Pap and Sam Seder: The King of Iraqi blood and oil, Part I.
• Pap and Sam Seder: The King of Iraqi blood and oil, Part II.

Dark Snow 2014: Why we are here.

Young Turks: FAUX News’s Soccerghazi!!!!!!11!1!!

David Pakman: Looney Toon Rick Santorum says Christians should fight war against gay marriage.

Thom: GOP is the pro-death party.

Daily Show: College sexual assault.

Some historical iced tea for the 4th.

Young Turks: Michele Bachmann’s latest insanity turns Neil Cavuto reasonable?!?

Sam Seder: Election fraud is real, and rich white Republicans are doing it.

Thom and Pap: Gov. Walker’s (R-WI) “Criminal Scheme”.

Sam Seder: Christie builds another bridge to jail.

White House: West Wing Week.

Young Turks: California’s historic vote to get money out of politics.

WaPo: 44 years of Charles Rangel, in one minute.

David Pakman: Benghazi has become an epic Republican embarrassment.

Boehner’s Silly Lawsuit:

• Obama: Boehner wants to sue me for doing my job
• Sharpton: The GOP’s absurd lawsuit
• Pap and Sam Seder: Boehner’s asinine lawsuit stunt.
• David Pakman: Republicons sue Obama over fewer executive orders than Shrub.
• Alex Wagner: Obama disses Republicans.

Liberal Viewer: Is ISIS the #1 threat to the U.S.?

Factivists: The GOP’s Immigration Inaction.

Ed: Herman Cain thinks Obama voters are “stupid”.

Bill Mahar’s guest draws comparison between Teabaggers and Nazis.

Supremes Greenlight Harassment at Abortion Clinics:

• Sam Seder: Supreme court greenlights harassing women at abortion clinics.
• Maddow: Hypocritical SCOTUS has buffer zone, but doesn’t think abortion clinics need buffer zone.

Young Turks: Syria hands over their chemical weapons…THANKS OBAMA!

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

We all know Seattle area rents are going through the roof. There’s no surprise there. But what really jumped out at me from the latest statistics was this:

Apartments in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood saw the biggest increase in rents. The average asking rent was 12.3 percent higher over the quarter, rising to $1,628.

But Ballard also had a vacancy rate of 8.6 percent, the highest in Seattle. And when new apartments that just opened are included, the vacancy rate shoots up to 18 percent.

The apartment boom in Ballard has led to a doubling of the inventory over the past six years, said Tom Cain, head of Apartment Insights Washington. When the units now being built are complete, Ballard’s inventory will have quadrupled.

New units rent for a premium, and they’re part of what’s driving up market rents, Cain said.

Listen to the free market folks and you’d think the solution to Seattle’s worsening affordable housing crisis is simple: get out of the way of developers and let them build more units faster! And that somewhat makes sense. Supply and demand and all that. And yet the neighborhood with highest vacancy rate and one of the biggest booms in new construction, is also the neighborhood with the fastest rising rents. How does that work?

The problem is that the market incentivizes developers to focus on meeting the demand of high-end renters to the detriment of middle and low income households. The cost of borrowing and the cost of land remains the same no matter what you choose to build. Given these and other fixed costs, there’s just more profit to squeeze out of any given lot by catering to the highest end of the market the neighborhood will support. And so that’s what developers tend to do.

Thus if we rely on the market to address affordability in Seattle, it will necessarily constrain the growth in luxury housing prices first, before saturation at the high end of the market ultimately forces developers to target their product further down the income scale.

Yes, rents of older housing stock rise more slowly than rents of new, and all this expensive new housing will eventually be old. But as these units age, unless their rents increase more slowly than growth in median income, these apartments will never become more affordable.

Affordability is not just a product of how much we build, but of what we build. And private developers simply aren’t focused on meeting the demand for low and middle income housing.

Yes, the city should always strive to make the permitting process faster, cheaper, and more efficient. And we certainly need to let go of our nimbyist fetish with building heights. Seattle must become a taller, denser city. But simply getting out of the way of developers won’t solve our problem. If we can’t find a way to effectively incentivize developers to meet the demand for low and middle income housing, then the city is going to have to find a way to tap into its own access to capital markets to build more low and middle income housing itself.

Swim at your own risk?

The family of a man who drowned a year ago in the swimming pool at the Quality Inn & Suites Seattle Center has filed a wrongful-death suit against the owners of the hotel, claiming poor maintenance made the water unusually murky and contributed to a botched rescue operation by firefighters.

[…] The hotel operators, Seattle Hospitality Inc., last Friday filed a third-party complaint seeking to draw the city of Seattle into the suit as a second defendant, claiming the Seattle Fire Department failed to conduct an adequate water rescue and didn’t find Deboch in the pool after firefighters were summoned to the hotel.

Except it’s hard to perform an adequate water rescue when the water is so filthy that you can’t see the victim.

[…] Seattle firefighters arrived within 2½ minutes of the call, according to Fire Department records. They searched the pool using a rescue hook and thermal-imaging camera but found no sign of Deboch.

A Fire Department report states that firefighters “believed they were visually able to confirm that no victim was in the pool” and thought they could see the pool’s bottom.

A civilian also got in the pool to search for Deboch, but no firefighters entered the water, according to the report.

I worked three summers as a lifeguard (i.e. pool boy) at swimming pools at four different residential apartment buildings in Philadelphia, and I can tell you that we would’ve been fired had we allowed the water to get anywhere near that sort of condition. We checked chlorine and pH levels throughout the day, and would clear swimmers out of the pool if the chemicals ever got out of whack. Murkiness wasn’t even an option.

“There were more than a dozen people allowed back in the pool to swim,” Micah LeBank, the attorney representing Deboch’s family, said in an interview this week. “The hotel let people get back into that murky water and swim around, unable to see the body.”

That’s disgusting.

When Deboch still wasn’t found, his friends searched the pool again.

Tom Fleming, a 51-year-old off-duty firefighter vacationing at the hotel, joined in the search and cleared the pool of swimmers, according to the Fire Department report.

The Seattle Times reported last year that after about a 10-minute search Fleming felt something in the center of the deep end of the pool. He asked the hotel to turn off the pump and was able to pull up Deboch’s body.

“You could not see him until you got him 18 inches to the surface,” Fleming told The Times last year. “I was fishing around and even though he was at the very bottom, he was not always in the same spot. Finding a victim in a pool in that condition is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Granted, water clarity at indoor pools is more difficult to maintain due to the lack of natural oxidation from sunlight, but that’s no excuse. The hotel was clearly negligent.* And their effort to make taxpayers liable by pulling the fire department into the lawsuit is offensive.

Given the time that had already elapsed, firefighters might have been able to pull the victim from the pool without permanent neurological damage, had they been able to immediately locate the body. But the cloudy water made a timely rescue—about a 10 minute window—all but impossible. From the facts presented in the press, there is no question that improper pool maintenance impeded firefighters’ ability to do their job.

Swimming pools are potential public health hazards, both due to the drowning risk and the spread of disease causing organisms like Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and E. coli. That’s why they’re so heavily regulated. So if a hotel is going to seek a competitive edge by offering guests the amenity of an indoor pool, then the hotel has both a moral and legal obligation to properly secure and maintain it.

The hotel should settle with the victim’s family and leave Seattle taxpayers out of it.

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* My former editors at The Stranger never would have allowed me to use such direct language, for fear that the use of such a legalistic term like “negligence” might leave the paper vulnerable to a defamation suit. But my own personal experience as a former pool maintenance professional leaves zero question in my mind that it is negligent to allow guests into water so cloudy that they could swim for three hours without noticing the dead body at the bottom of the pool. And as a blogger, I feel that it would be negligent of me to shy away from bluntly speaking the truth.

After 37 years, longtime Ballard staple Louie’s Cuisine of China is closing, and I blame Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage! Although probably, its closure had something more to do with this:

The property was sold last month for $2.49 million, property records show.

In fact, restaurants and other businesses close all the time, and for all kinds of reasons:

Louie’s expected closure comes three months after the landmark Frontier Room, around since 1954, closed in Belltown. Last year the legendary Alki Tavern closed, and Funhouse music club was closed in 2012 to make way for a seven-story building near Seattle Center. Claire’s Pantry, a Lake City staple since 1974, closed in February 2013, and Piecora’s Pizza on Capitol Hill closed in April after 33 years.

In March 2010, the first restaurant in the Red Robin chain closed in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood.

Brace yourselves. In the coming years we’re going to hear all kinds of stories about businesses closing because they can’t afford to pay Seattle’s minimum wage. If $15 was already in effect, we’d be hearing it about some of the businesses above. But correlation is not causation, so you can cast all these anecdotes aside.

It will take a decade or more to truly suss out the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage by comparing local economic trends to both historical data, and to economic trends in other locations. But that won’t stop the scare stories from coming.

– Designing Streets for Safety [h/t]

– I’m not sure if Sawant would have voted against Kathleen O’Toole if she was the deciding vote (maybe, but it wasn’t the vote she needed to take). But it’s nice to know there will still be some pull to the left on police issues.

– The problem Burk faces however is that the Genesis texts don’t mention genitals or chromosomes as markers of gender, nor do the Genesis texts have a notion of what is essentially mid-nineteenth century biological essentialism. Burk has taken an ancient Israelite mythopoem and has attempted to force onto it a rather vague construct of “biology,” thus obfuscating what would otherwise be a theologically rich text. Like creationists, Burk has attempted to treat the biblical narratives as a science textbook, having assumed that the biblical authors are able to speak biological truths across different times and different cultures. I would recommend Burk actually research gender, biology, and sociology, and how various societies construct their notions of gender, before he writes definitively about it.

– Why does anyone still listen to Donald Trump?

– World Bicycle Relief Red-Bell 100

– If a puppet government falls in the desert and the whole world is around to witness it, does it make a sound?

– I think the HA comment threads are worth at least two or three leaf boats.

I suppose I’ve had a hard time articulating exactly why I’m so irritated at the way Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar have been allowed to bully their way into the Seattle market. But fortunately, economist Dean Baker does a much better job:

If Uber and Lyft force a re-examination and modernization of taxi regulation in San Francisco and elsewhere, they will have provided a valuable public service. However it can’t possibly make sense to have a stringent set of regulations for traditional cabs, while allowing Uber and Lyft to ignore them just because customers order these services on the Internet.

If we go the route of ending the requirement that taxies need medallions, there is also the question of what we do about the sunk costs for people like my cab driver, who is currently out $250,000 from buying a medallion. On the current path, these medallion owners will just be out of luck. Their life savings will be made worthless by young kids who are better at evading regulations than immigrant cab drivers; so much for the American Dream.

It is worth considering this issue in light of the larger issue of the growing inequality we have seen over the last three decades. Uber, like Amazon, has allowed a small number of people to become extremely rich by evading regulations and/or taxes that apply to their middle class competitors. Amazon and other Internet-based retailers have used their tax advantage to put tens of thousands brick and mortar stores out of business.

This is a pretty simple story. In a country where rules are enforced or not enforced to benefit the rich and screw the middle class, you will have increasing inequality and a middle class that is seeing few of the benefits of economic growth.

What we are witnessing is a giant transfer of wealth from tens of thousands of mostly middle class medallion owners nationwide into the pockets of a handful of clever, law-evading entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists. Uber’s gambit that local governments would not crack down on its illegal operations has paid off handsomely—it now enjoys an implicit market capitalization of $17 billion.

“This is not supposed to happen in a market economy,” says Baker:

To encourage efficiency, we would want a proper set of regulations and taxes and have them apply equally to everyone. The point is to encourage people to make profits by providing better products or lower cost services, not to get rich by finding clever ways to evade regulations.

There’s much more to Baker’s piece, and you really should read the whole thing.