What are my aspirations?
Making homeownership more affordable and accessible.
Right now, people making 70% to 150% of the Average Median Income (AMI) are completely left out of the conversation. At that level, buying a home is a moving goal that moves faster than anyone can save. We keep hearing “I couldn’t afford my home today”. It sucks more when you don’t have one and want one. From competing with institutional investors to watching home and interest prices rise while wages stagnate - many middle-income earners leave to buy somewhere else, or are trapped in a cycle of renting.
How do we get more people owning homes?
Vacancy taxes: A tax on home left empty for more than 6 months. Do we want a ghost town with empty homes and vacant storefronts? No. Homes should be for living in.
Walk through downtown Bellevue at night, you’ll see dark windows in half the luxury high-rises. See an LLC nab up that house you were looking at and check back in months later to see it still empty? These aren’t homes; they’re parking spots for foreign wealth and tax loopholes for speculators. Meanwhile, our workers and retirees scramble to find an apartment they can afford. We need to get those Empty Units onto the market: Speculators will either rent, sell or pay the tax, adding supply and lowering prices.
Every dollar from this tax goes into a fund to build affordable housing and helping people with the cost of living. Vancouver was able to increase the supply of housing, brought in money to support affordable housing projects, and funded popular programs like a first-time homebuyer assistance program without raising taxes on residents and workers.
Let’s bring to Bellevue, proven and successful policies that help people.
Creating opportunity for people to make living wages
You can work full-time at a downtown high-rise, cleaning offices, serving coffee, or guarding the lobby, and still not afford rent within 20 miles of your job. We do not have a labor shortage. We have a wage shortage.
Tech billionaires get tax breaks. Corporations get subsidies. But the people who cook our meals, stock our groceries, and teach our kids? They’re told to "budget better" or move to Auburn.
We need a minimum living wage that matches inflation.
We need to strictly enforce penalties for wage-theft.
We need to stop funding poverty jobs, where city contracts are going to employers who cheat their employees to make the lowest bid.
I want to see Bellevue sponsor a vocational school to train people in high-demand fields. Construction. Electrical. Plumbing. HVAC. I want to see us run apprenticeship programs that pipelines into union jobs that can’t be outsourced.
I want us to bring back jobs that have been outsourced. These are our neighbors. Why are we ok with them not having healthcare or sick days? People should have the option to have a career, not just needing to jump from gig to gig.
Becoming a resilient city of our own
Why are we completely reliant on a foreign owned private equity company for electricity? Why is there only a single internet provider, one that doesn’t even offer modern speeds and connectivity in half our city? Why does Tacoma have the lowest utility rate in the region with better service?
We need to publicly explore options that don’t have us reliant on others for our public services. We wouldn’t let a private equity firm own our fire hydrants or outsource our police. So why do we let corporations and billionaires control our power grid and digital future?
I want us becoming energy and internet independent by breaking the monopolies. Publicly exploring municipal energy and municipal broadband. To get these profiteers to actually compete or get out of the way so we can modernize.
Why did so many homes go without power for so long while Seattle and Tacoma fixed their outages so much faster? Because we’re wholly reliant on PSE - a shell owned by foreign private equity. One that fired all of its linemen and needs to hire emergency contractors everytime something happens.
We need to audit PSE’s infrastructure failures and demand accountability for outages and price hikes and start a conversation about a public power utility. If Tacoma and Seattle can do it, why can’t we?