Vancouver, Seattle mayors talk 'similar challenges and similar opportunities'
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Thu, 03 Oct 2019 02:53:41 +0000
SEATTLE — On what Kennedy Stewart called his “first foreign visit,” the Vancouver mayor didn’t need to travel far, and when he got there, it felt a lot like home.
Soon after arriving in Seattle Wednesday, Stewart met for the first time with his counterpart in the Emerald City, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan. Right off the bat, he said, they felt like “two peas in a pod.”
“I really feel like we have a lot in common,” Stewart said, soon after his meeting with Durkan, “and there’s a lot we can do together.”
The two Pacific Northwest mayors met privately Wednesday evening in Downtown Seattle, shortly before they took turns addressing the crowd of business and government officials gathered for the Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference. The conference aims to boost the economic advantage of the “Cascadia mega-region,” which encompasses the areas around Vancouver, Seattle and Portland.
Durkan echoed Stewart’s sentiments in her comments to the crowd, saying: “We have similar cities facing similar challenges, but also with similar opportunities.”
Durkan is proud that Seattle’s economy is so strong, citing local giants like Amazon, Starbucks and Microsoft. But, she said, there’s another side to that boom.
When new U.S. Census Bureau data last week showed Seattle’s median household income had soared to a record US$93,500, the Seattle Times reported: “Everybody knows that Seattle has become a very affluent city, but even so, this is remarkable news.”
“While Seattle’s overall median income figure is very high, there are striking disparities among the income figures for the city’s racial and ethnic communities,” The Times reported. While the median income for households headed by a white person was about US$105,000, the median for a household headed by a black person was less than half that, at US$42,500.
Jenny Durkan is mayor of Seattle
When Durkan cited those new income figures Wednesday, her tone was more cautionary than boastful. That prosperity, she said, has come with problems, particularly around housing unaffordability.
In a conversation Wednesday evening with Postmedia News, Durkan said Seattle’s boom has brought wealth and vibrancy to the city, “but at the same time, it’s accentuated economic disparities, and communities of colour have been disproportionately impacted.”
In Stewart’s remarks to the crowd, he said he was excited for the two cities to learn from each other. He was particularly keen, he said, “to get a better understanding of how Seattle has built so much rental housing.”
While much of Seattle’s housing remains prohibitively expensive for much of the population, the city has, at least, been able to incentivize the development of enough rental housing that the rental vacancy rate hit roughly 10 per cent this year, and rent in some areas has been dropping.
Meanwhile, before a recent uptick, Vancouver had seen very little rental-housing construction for decades, and the vacancy rate is now below one per cent.
“The rental vacancy has increased some, but it’s still expensive,” said Durkan, who ran for mayor in 2017 with a campaign largely focused on affordable housing, much as Stewart did the following year in Vancouver.
Earlier this year, Seattle’s city council unanimously adopted citywide “mandatory housing affordability” legislation. Durkan described the policy to Postmedia, saying: “We basically up-zoned the whole city, giving developers the ability to build more and make more money, but in return, they had to agree to either build a certain number of affordable units, permanently, on-site, or pay into the kitty, and then we use those funds to build affordable housing.”
Other subjects Durkan and Stewart addressed during their private conversation included opioids, economic development and the prospect of an ultra-high-speed rail link connecting Seattle and Vancouver.
The Cascadia conference continues Thursday, including a “fireside chat” with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and B.C. Premier John Horgan.