Listen to active Tacoma citizens on affordable housing. But don’t ignore these others

The Tacoma City Council is preparing to vote on the Planning Commission’s “Home in Tacoma” proposal. Among other features, it would rezone parts of the city to make the local housing market more affordable.

The civic discussion has been lively, befitting the importance of the topic and the interests at stake or thought to be at stake.

The council’s vote will provide an interesting exercise of a council member’s representative responsibilities. There are four of them. They are all important but vary in how hard they are to fulfill.

The first responsibility is the easiest. It is to represent the expressed views of constituents who vote, speak up, show up, write, call, contribute to re-election campaigns or campaigns of persuasion, or participate in the various online forums.

This measure of civic participation has an understandable and honorable correlation to what people feel to be at stake with their homes and neighborhoods.

Representing these expressed views is relatively easy because they are easiest to recognize, and serving them aligns with any wish for re-election. Yet it is only a council member’s first responsibility.

The second is harder to do. It is to represent the unexpressed views of those who do not vote, do not speak up, do not write or do not contribute to campaigns.

By some lights, they may deserve their self-inflicted disenfranchisement. Yet discounting them weakens any form of government.

They outnumber by a large margin those who do vote or otherwise participate in the civic discussion. They include people who cannot contribute to campaigns or vote, including children, or those too isolated or disaffected to feel welcome in the civic discussion, especially if it is lively or heated.

Yet they do have views. A council member’s challenge is to elicit, know and understand them.

This requires an adequate familiarity with the community they represent. A council member needs this acquaintance across lines of income, race and language. That makes it harder still.

This group is not only large; it includes persons whom the “Home in Tacoma” proposal has in mind because they are unhoused, underhoused, rent burdened or without any plausible prospect that they or their children, even if they can afford rent, will ever be able to buy a home in their hometown.

Learning, understanding and representing their unexpressed views is hard work.

The third representative responsibility is harder still. A council member must represent people who do not have views.

This probably describes most people, especially on complex matters that require study. It also includes those who do not yet know whether or how “Home in Tacoma” affects them.

They may be residents who cannot foresee their own housing struggle when they retire or lose their income. They are not yet focused on whether their children, when grown, will be able to afford Tacoma’s housing market. Or they may be young people who have not yet matured into these worries.

All these people rightly expect, implicitly in the case of children, that their legislators will study the issues. That study takes work.

The final representative duty is the hardest of all. A council member must be willing to judge and represent the community’s best interests and vote accordingly, even contrary to the expressed or unexpressed views of constituents, when he or she believes those views are mistaken.

This is where a council member must also represent Tacoma’s future and consider the interests of people and businesses who do not yet live here because they have not yet been born or have not arrived. This final duty presents occasions for political courage.

It seems to me that each of our Tacoma City Council members takes these duties seriously. The more seriously they take them, the harder their hard job becomes.

Michael Mirra is the departing executive director of Tacoma Housing Authority, where he’s helped provide affordable housing and supportive services to people in need for 17 years. He retires from the position on July 5.

This story was originally published June 26, 2021 at 12:00 PM.