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Zillow Research has determined that home values in our city are currently "appreciating more than 3.5 times faster per working hour than [what] minimum wage workers earn." What this means in hard money: A homeowner who earns, say, the average (mean) hourly wage for the Seattle area (around $30) is making much less, in terms of equity, than their house ($54). A houses' use-value is diminishing every day as its exchange-value rises. And because the city has no real plan (or desire) to correct or check this form of inflation in the near or distant future, we can reasonably expect that hourly rate to become totally detached from the local economy. In San Jose, the city of million-dollar homes, the hourly rate for home equity is $99.81.

If one deciphers this economic arrangement, which has an autarkic appearance—a self-fulling process without a subject—he/she will fully understand why a progressive city like Seattle continues to vote for nominal liberals like Jenny Durkan. Because the resistance against wage inflation is powerful, ubiquitous, and almost always successful, those who had the luck or resources to purchase a home when values corresponded with the city's economic realities can be expected to become more and more reliant on rising home values to finance services that, under normal circumstances, would be provided by the public and funded by progressive taxes: education, health care, retirement.

The unrestrained inflation of home values has the further political advantage for the right of locking a class of wage-earning property owners with the interests of those who are not dependent on wages or earn far more than the equity of their homes. This process only worsens the housing crisis—and forces the poor (many of whom are people of color) to the edges of the city—by depriving a huge part of the city's mostly white middle-class population of the political freedom they would have gained if wages were linked to productivity. With so many chained to their homes, a conservatism hardens at the core of the "progressive" city. A drop in value would mean financial ruin for many heavily indebted homeowners, many of whom earn $50,000 a year.

A cosmologist once described gravity as the celestial sculptor. It shaped galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and super-clusters into the image of the universe. Property value inflation is also sculpting our city. It's actively shaping it into the political image of the super-rich.