I find myself heading down to City Hall often these days to throw shade on various proposals about housing hatched by well meaning people at City Hall usually backed with dubious data and economics. Yesterday was no different. The Council passed resolutions putting them on a course to force builders to take more square footage in exchange for restricting rents in that extra square footage. I’ve already said why the math here is worrisome: the additional costs of construction are likely to result in rent increases for other units in the building, something counter to the stated intent of the policy. Seattle needs to stop playing with schemes that try to pay for subsidized housing with new housing construction and just let us build more housing.

Today, we’ll be meeting to discuss the numbers I mention in the KING5 report. As I pointed out, the math doesn’t favor the bargain. When rent revenues drop, costs go up, and there isn’t any other options, projects can become financially infeasible. This infeasibility means projects don’t happen and possibly law suits because of that. We’ll keep update EVERYONE as soon as we have completed a review of the impact of the Grand Bargain’s upzones on actual projects.