We’re in the early stages of putting together a legal challenge of the City’s version of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) called Mandatory Housing Affordability. The case may well rest on the most obvious of economic and legal questions, “How does new housing create an impact to the City by causing housing prices to go up,” and “How is the City’s fee schedule proportionate to this claimed impact?” It is going to be hard for the City to prove that more housing makes it more expensive and maybe even more difficult to show how charging a project in Greenwood $20 a square foot is a rational fee and not just a tax for subsidized housing. As part of this I asked the City to please share with me what projects have paid fees under the program and how much additional development capacity those projects received in exchange. Here’s the first response:

I wrote about this response already. The implication here is that there is no value exchange for the fee, a bit of a slip that City staffers realize that practically speaking MHA is just a tax on development. Oh, I mean  “contribution” for non-profit housing developers extorted by the City through the land use code.

What about the fees?

At the roughly $375,000 per unit it now costs to build non-profit housing, that’s about 4 units. The projects range from, top to bottom, a 100 plus apartment building at 23rd and Union, an upzone from 40 feet to 65 feet in Fremont for apartments, and a church project in West Seattle that was a rezone and paid a lot more fees that it should have, a upzone for an 85 unit apartment building.

As for the church project, the West Seattle Blog story I link to says it all:

The church says it would be charged $200,000 in MHA – to fund “affordable housing” somewhere else. That’s more than a quarter of the revenue it estimated the project would bring. A list of its concerns distributed at the October MoCA meeting includes: “These fees come straight out of the bottom line of the project. Every penny that we pay the city for MHA is one we don’t have to restore the church and build the playground.”

In this case the City’s muscle shook down a church for $200,000. Good work.

How about the difference between what’s going on at 23rd and Union and 1600 Dexter. The folks at Dexter should be scratching their heads and dialing their lawyers. Why is their project paying $1.3 million while a larger project in one of Councilmember Lisa Herbolds “low opportunity” neighbors is paying $60,000? When I first saw that figure, I had to clean my glasses. No, I wasn’t missing any zeros: $60,000. I’ve sent in yet another Public Disclosure Request (PDR) for the “development agreement” that prevails at that address. We’ll see.

As for the apartment project in Fremont, it looks like the typical project that will often be exposed to MHA exaction. Again, we haven’t had the time to dig into this and since the City won’t respond to anything but PDRs, we’ll just have to keep asking questions and waiting for responses. I’ll also reach out to the developers. But not much housing is going to be built by non-profits with fees amounting to $37,000. I’m not asking for higher fees, but part of the economic and legal case the City will have to make is how and why such a hap hazard fee schedule has any sort of relationship to the stated impact and the solution.

One thing is clear, however, and that is that in the era of Mayor Durkan the only answers that can be found from the City are through a formal disclosure process. E-mails and requests for discussions on costs and other recommendations from the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee go unanswered. I find is somewhat vindicating, but not consoling, that people who bet on Durkan are now telling me that she “doesn’t like developers.” That’s funny.

My criticism of the then new Mayor was why some people turned on me so hard after the election. “Give her a chance!” But she’s had more than six months on the job and has shown she’s pretty much a ribbon cutter, showing up to events, making speeches and pronouncements, and then moving on. She hasn’t figured out the job. Part of that job is learning what you don’t know, being humble and listening to people who do. It’s Ed Murray’s second term with all the stubbornness and lack of sensitivity to what’s happening day to day in the city. Will that change? Can it change? Maybe that’s my next Public Disclosure Request.