Jonathan Bingle occasionally finds himself (and his council colleague, Michael Cathcart, the other reliably conservative member) on the losing side of 5-2 votes. But he says he has had success working with progressive members. Bingle talks with SPR's Doug Nadvornick how he approaches his job as a member of the minority faction.
Jonathan Bingle: There's certain issues that myself and the majority are probably just never going to agree on, right? And so there's not a lot of workshopping on those issues. But on the issues that, again, public safety or housing or things like that, you know, I've partnered with, you know, former Councilwoman Stratton on a Parks After Dark ordinance that helped us reduce shootings in our parks after dark. Councilmembers Zappone and I have partnered on a number of development issues to make development in Spokane a little bit easier. I've worked with Councilwoman Navarrete on some ARPA spending and how do we get the money out there.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
DN: Where are the areas where you feel pretty proud of what you've done in four years and where are the areas that you think you didn't do as well as you'd hoped?
JB: I think with housing, this particular council and the council before, we're pretty unified on we need to get housing built in the city of Spokane. And again, the why might be different and even the how in certain ways, but we all want a more affordable Spokane when it comes to – particularly to housing. And so that's an area that's been really good.
The general facilities charges [development fees], that was a year of my life where we needed to find a way to correct a number that hadn't been updated in 20 years and find a way to where the burden wasn't borne by the rate payer. And I think we found a really good middle ground policy there where, you know, you would have folks like, you know, SLIHC [Spokane Low Income Housing Consortium] on board and you would also have the big developers on board because, again, developers don't mind paying the fees. You know, they just want – you know, they want certainty in – as they're creating their investments and drawing up their sheets, they want certainty. And so we helped create that.
DN: In terms of expectations, the mayor just talked about what we need to do to create 22,000 new homes over 20 years. What are your expectations in terms of housing at each level?
JB: This is where I think we need some state reforms in a lot of ways. I am proud of the work we've done on council. The 22,000 in 20 years is, you know, 1,100 units a year. We're already exceeding that number. We're at 1,300, 1,400 units a year, which are record-setting numbers for us. And again, that's a credit to the council that we have, that we were united on the issue of housing and finding ways to make it work.
But there are other things that are particularly difficult to do, modular homes, smaller housing communities that used to be more prevalent. I represent the Northeast. I have a number of trailer parks in my district. I don't know why we don't seem to appreciate the value that that brings to the community for folks who maybe don't need a bunch of housing, maybe aren't looking for something super nice and are looking for more affordable. Those are really affordable units and they're not apartments, right? There are things that you own or can rent out. You have your own space. You're not connected to other things.
There's a long way to go yet when it comes to housing. And while we have a lot of units getting built, and that's great, we have a lot of rentals being built. My focus for the next four years is really going to be on how do we incentivize homeownership opportunities for individuals? Because that's really how you start to build generational wealth, right? And you look at the racial disparities between homeownership rates, you know, they're pretty stark. And it's not that people can't afford them. It's that, you know, there's stepping out of renting into affordable or attainable homeownership opportunities. There's not a ton of those. So how do we incentivize that through, again, zoning or the lot sizes or frontage or addressing?
DN: Developers have talked about we need to expand the urban growth boundary in certain places. And, you know, not willy-nilly, but just a little bit. You agree with that then?
JB: I do agree. I voted against our land capacity analysis, particularly because it took into account all the things that were theoretical but not necessarily practical. And I don't want to say it was only that because we have a fantastic staff and our staff worked really hard on that. I disagreed with some of their conclusions. And so while there might be the theoretical capacity, again, you're not going to tear down a $300,000 home to build four units there. It just doesn't pencil. And so we do need more land in the city limits to be able to develop housing. And so for that reason, I voted against it. It is one of the things that if you limit the amount of supply for land, it drives up the cost of land, which drives up the cost of housing. And if we're truly trying to do everything we can to reduce the cost of housing, then you have to look at every way possible to reduce cost.
DN: So let's go from housing to homelessness. Help me to understand where your differences are with the majority of the council in terms of how homelessness is handled.
JB: Absolutely. Homelessness is a really difficult discussion. And the reason why it's difficult is because HUD has literally 10 different definitions for homelessness. And so while somebody might be talking about specifically folks who have severe substance use disorder or mental illness, somebody else could be saying, well, it's just a bunch of people who had a bad medical bill or living in their cars or something. And you're both right. And so that's the difficult discussion.
I think what the community is more interested in on this discussion are the folks who seem erratic, make them feel unsafe, people leaving their trash all over the place. Those are the problems here. It's not the fact that somebody is homeless. It's the effects on the community. And so my focus for the next four years will be how do we help folks who have serious substance use disorder and serious mental illness. And the reality of the situation is that we do not have the infrastructure in place to be able to adequately address those issues.
And so my focus in the next four years is when people are talking about homelessness, it's not the single mom who had a bad bill and is struggling to pay her rent. There's not a single person here who's going to say don't help her or the single dad or the senior whose Social Security hasn't kept up with the rise in rent. Nobody's going to say no to helping those folks.
What we need to focus on is, again, helping folks who have a real brokenness of the human spirit. And it's either serious mental illness or it is serious substance use disorder problems. And how do we get long-term stay facilities where we can offer somebody pathways and penalties? So listen, now we have a spot for you to go. So we see that you're doing drugs here. You obviously can't be doing drugs here. You can choose to go to this long-term stay treatment facility that we have for you or you can go to jail. The choice is yours. But an unacceptable behavior is doing drugs on the street. And I think that is really going to be the pathway out for us in Spokane.
