By Ron Sims
Former Deputy Secretary Of HUD
Having grown up in Spokane, gone to school at Central Washington University, and finally lived and worked in King County where I served as County Executive, I am proud of how much the political and socio-economic tapestry of Washington has advanced and diversified over time. Our state is home to a number of international leaders in business and commerce, and Washingtonians are on the cutting edge of the innovation industries that are pushing the world towards a brighter and more prosperous future. Unfortunately, the economic engine that drives so much progress doesn’t share the fruits of prosperity equitably amongst the communities that constitute our great state. This is why I’m urging voters to approve Initiative 1000, which will appear under the heading of Referendum 88 on their November ballots this year.
To understand why all our neighbors don’t share equitably in the prosperity of the present requires us only to examine the not-so-distant past. I served as Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama from 2009 – 2011, and we reflected a lot on why certain communities in Washington state, and across the country, haven’t thrived equally.
You see, in the mid-20th century, the Federal government made a conscious choice to segregate communities using a housing policy called “red-lining” to determine which families were successful in home-loan application processes in which neighborhoods based solely on skin color. Simultaneously, black GI’s returning home from fighting in World War II were denied the same federal education and housing finance benefits enjoyed by their white peers.
Today, we can overlay the historical red-line maps across disparate communities and discover correlations to a number of detrimental indicators of worse economic outcomes over time – be it lower educational attainment levels, fewer dollars invested in public school programs, worse public health outcomes, higher utilization rates of Federal subsistence programs for women and children, higher unemployment levels, and so on.
While these policies affected our parents and grandparents directly, the impacts of those decisions still resonate in Washington state today – no matter which side of the Cascade range you live on. It will require decades of work to unwind an inequitable system that’s taken generations to establish. These cycles of poverty may have begun generations ago, but it is incumbent on us to try and heal the divide for the generations to come.
Voting to Approve Initiative I-1000 will give us the tools we need to begin to restore fairness and opportunity for all Washingtonians. It will open more doors into public employment, contracting, and university admissions for communities of color, women, veterans, persons with disabilities, and older workers who have been historically underrepresented in these spaces to-date.
Approving I-1000 will ensure that workers who inhabit our public agencies and school systems are hired from the communities they are working in. It will support and expand opportunities for more small business owners to succeed in bids for public contracts that can grow a company and help them hire more workers. Finally, our public universities and colleges will begin to better reflect the composition of our state as a whole – which improves the quality of learning, discussion, and retention for all students in those classrooms.
From a lifetime of experience living on both sides of the Cascades, serving as the King County Executive, and working in the Obama administration, I know our state can secure a brighter future across communities starting this year. I-1000 is a common-sense policy solution which mirrors efforts already employed by 42 other states in the nation that are taking pro-active steps to level the playing field and promote economic prosperity regardless of race, gender, military record, or other individual status. This country was founded on principles of equality and liberty for all people – let’s put that promise into practice by approving Initiative 1000 in November.
