Event: Building the Affordable City

Seattle is at a crossroads: will we grow into an affordable, thriving city for the many? Or an elite playground for the wealthy few?

Please join Sightline on September 20th for a special event: “Building the Affordable City.” Leading voices on urbanism, Kim-Mai Cutler of San Francisco and Daniel Kay Hertz of Chicago, will discuss their respective cities’ struggles and successes with growth and change, and the potential for Seattleites to strike a new kind of balance in how we shape our city’s future. Sightline’s executive director Alan Durning will moderate the discussion and Q&A.

Daniel Kay Hertz is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in Chicago, and has written about urban demographics, neighborhood change, housing policy, and public transit in City Observatory and several other publications including the Washington Post, CityLab, and Next City. Hertz will report from Chicago, the third largest US city and one that is dramatically more affordable than its peer cities on the coasts. He will share research on how Chicago has kept home prices and rents to a fraction of the levels in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other large US cities. Check out his article Finding Nuance in the Housing Supply Arguments and his other publications here.

Kim-Mai Cutler, Partner at Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm, in San Francisco and Contributor at TechCrunch, will report on San Francisco, a fellow West Coast city that has faced similar growing pains to Seattle. As a Bay Area native and in her previous career as a journalist, Cutler wrote several long-form pieces on the housing crisis in 2014 and 2015 that helped form the Bay Area YIMBY movement. Cutler will reprise highlights of her study on the Bay Area’s housing shortage (now a new graphic book), How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists. She has also worked for Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Alan Durning, Sightline Institute Executive Director, will moderate the panel and also spotlight other housing models from around the world—places where building housing has yielded surprisingly low housing costs, including Houston, Montreal, Singapore, Tokyo, and Vienna, plus the nation of Germany.

This event is free and open to the public. Learn more and get your tickets here.

Building the Affordable City

• Panelists: Daniel Kay Hertz, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in Chicago, Kim-Mai Cutler, Partner at Initialized Capital in San Francisco and Contributor at TechCrunch, Alan Durning, Executive Director at Sightline Institute
• Location: Rainier Arts Center, (map) (Located near the Columbia City Light Rail)
• Date: Wednesday, September 20th, 2017, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
• RSVP: The Rainier Arts Center has limited seating capacity, so we are asking all guests to RSVP.

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