Above photo: Jean-Pierre Chamberland / CC.
Is Your City Next?
Seattle’s budget threats to equitable development should set off alarm bells for the future of municipal racial equity funds.
When it launched a first-in-the-nation anti-displacement fund in 2016, Seattle established itself as a leader in racial equity. But a new attack on the City’s Equitable Development Initiative (EDI), part of a national backlash against government efforts to address systemic racism and inequality, threatens that progress.
The EDI finances the construction of community cultural and commercial space developed by community-of-color organizations in Seattle, often co-located with affordable housing. As of March of this year, the fund had provided over $100 million in grants for 56 different community-led projects that are helping create an inclusive, multiracial city.
Then, in May, City Councilmember Maritza Rivera suddenly dropped a drastic proposal to cut off tens of millions of dollars already allocated to the EDI fund. Community members have pushed back hard: More than 100 people came to testify against Rivera’s proposal, while thousands emailed statements of opposition. Rivera has retracted her proposed cuts for now, but council members continue to pursue budget cuts with EDI still in their crosshairs.
The attack on EDI harms a fragile growing trust between the City of Seattle and its communities of color. And it also threatens to jeopardize dozens of equitable development projects that have been years in the making.
Projects that would have otherwise faced formidable barriers to land acquisition and financing are now making a tremendous impact across Seattle, including cultural centers built by the Africatown Community Land Trust, the Duwamish Tribe and Ethiopian Community in Seattle. They’re providing support for small culturally relevant businesses, cultural heritage programming, commercial kitchens and large community gathering spaces.
The Attack On Municipal Racial Equity Funds
Other racial equity funds in other cities that use progressive tax revenue to address systemic racism and inequality have faced similar attacks.
In Los Angeles County, the sheriff’s union led a lawsuit against the Care First Community Investment Fund, which shifts money from policing and incarceration to community care. The union ultimately lost in court, and community groups are still organizing to push the county to fully finance the fund.
In Portland, billion-dollar businesses that are taxed to fund the city’s Clean Energy Fund, which invests in just climate transition projects, have lobbied the city council and mayor to cut their taxes and shrink the fund. A councilmember tried to do just that by proposing to put the Fund, which was created by voters through a ballot measure in 2018, back on the ballot again this November. Fortunately, community groups successfully organized to defend the fund from these attacks.
Seattle’s EDI is unique in that it was founded with an explicit racial equity focus and a city mandate to implement the equitable growth strategy of Seattle’s 20-year Comprehensive Plan. A coalition of formerly redlined communities worked with allies in government to win the EDI funding. This relationship continues through EDI’s community advisory board, which helps shape EDI’s governing plan, keeps the initiative accountable to communities experiencing displacement pressures.
“EDI is an important city initiative because it says our community is heard, acknowledged and supported,” said Miguel Maestas, from the community organization El Centro de la Raza, at a recent city council meeting. “To freeze EDI funding is to send a message that we will no longer be heard, acknowledged and supported.”
What is happening in Seattle is a wake-up call to all cities using a racial equity lens to plan for and fund equitable growth and public goods. Other cities and communities across the country must organize and prepare for similar backlash.
EDI In The Crosshairs
Since a new council majority was elected last November, city leaders have launched a steady attack on racial and economic equity efforts that community organizations, the previous city council and city agencies have spent years building.
They also came into office facing a $240-million budget gap driven primarily by inflation. But instead of progressively raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy (Seattle is home to Amazon and Starbucks, among other major companies), they pledged to freeze taxes and make up the entire budget gap by cutting public spending, disproportionately impacting communities of color.
And the hits keep coming.
In April, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office ordered the Office of Planning and Community Development (which manages EDI) to remove all new anti-displacement proposals from the city’s update to its 20-year comprehensive plan.
Later that month, the council voted 7-2 against a proposed ordinance from Councilmember Tammy Morales that would have created a pilot program in which affordable housing developments would have been giving an exception to build at higher densities than the city’s zoning code would otherwise allow, which would make the per-unit cost of housing much cheaper.
In May, the council reportedly considered revoking the $27 million funds that residents had delegated through a participatory budgeting process to six projects, including a Native community center, mental health and housing support services, and food equity. The attempted cuts to EDI are already disrupting the development cycle of many projects in the pipeline.
In introducing her proposal to sever EDI funding, Rivera framed her concerns not as opposition to equity, affordable housing or community control, but as a concern about fiscal responsibility and efficiency. Yet as people testified before the city council, Rivera and her colleagues have targeted their “fiscal” concerns solely at equity initiatives.
“Of the 76 projects that are proposed to be cut, 27 are African American,” Daryl Powell of the local NAACP noted. “At best this is tone deaf, at worst it’s something more insidious.”
And the critique that EDI is not spending all of its allocated funding fast enough is a red herring. “We don’t ask the Office of Housing [or Seattle Department of Transportation] to put their money back in the general fund or back in the pot because their capital projects are taking a long time,” Morales pointed out to the rest of the council.
“It is interesting to me that the programs that are meant to assist with reversing harm done to communities of color are more closely scrutinized than other programs in the city and are consistently at risk of being defunded more than other programs in the city.”
Twenty years ago Seattle established the nation’s first government initiative to advance racial equity, the Race and Social Justice Initiative, and inspired the national Government Alliance on Race and Equity, which now has over 450 jurisdictions committed to advancing racial equity.
Much of that progress is at risk. Communities of color and their allies in government and other spaces must be proactive and collaborate to build bulwarks against these backlashes and set themselves up for long-term success advancing racial justice. Now is not the time to backtrack on our commitments to racial equity.