Hello friends,

You may have heard of the "poor door." Since being written about in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, the story made it to multiple media including the Colbert Report. It's about a high rise developer in Manhattan meeting inclusionary zoning requirements by putting 55 affordable apartments in a building with 219 luxury condos. So far so good. The problem is that there are two doors for residents - one for the wealthy condo owner and one for the family of four working hard to make ends meet. Some of those hard-working folks might be just as happy to maintain a distance from their well-heeled neighbors, but the issue of the poor door is emblematic of the larger problem of inequality facing our country. 

I won't elaborate on economic inequality here - plenty has been written about it recently. But we are about to create our own poor door right here in Seattle. It's not a single door in a particular building but a policy allowing the developer to meet his affordable housing requirement by shunting the affordable units to lower income neighborhoods, instead of building them in the affluent neighborhoods where they're putting up their ritzy new apartments. It's segregation. It's the poor door on the meta scale. The result will be neighborhoods that are increasingly divided by income levels. Congregating people of lesser means into poorer neighborhoods leads to more poverty, more crime, less access to education and healthy environments. And it certainly isn't equitable.

Want to ensure that Seattle neighborhoods continue to be homes for people of all income levels? Get involved with the Housing Development Consortium's effort to strengthen incentive zoning.