I was on the Seattle Channel last week with Councilmember Mike O’Brien, Eastlake resident and micrhousing opponent Linda Alexander, and affordable housing developer and Grand Bargain signer Bill Rumpf. If you watch this whole show you’ll notice that the Grand Bargain is a lot more complicated than the group Seattle For Everyone (a group organized by Vulcan and non-profit housing developers to support the Grand Bargain) would have you believe. I keep trying to diagram the various interests in my mind that need to be held together to make the Bargain hold together. As I point out, the Grand Bargain is a political solution to avoid linkage taxes, not a real solution to housing issues. We’re finding the upzones simply don’t create value but actually make projects infeasible.

During the course of the 20 minute panel segment I referred directly to the Grand Bargain framework document (which you can read in full here: Final Framework_MIH and CLF_071315-1) to refute something that  Councilmember O’Brien said about the extra floor that would be mandatory in new construction in low-rise zones. He said that the Council wouldn’t just be waving a wand and adding another floor but that in every neighborhood that value added for builders could be different; maybe some places there would be two floors and some other places no floors.

Aside from sounding like a complete nightmare–imagine trying to decide zoning increases block by block in negotiations with angry neighbors all across the city–the bargain doesn’t say that at all. I pointed out what the language, which I had right in front of me says:

2.b For low-midrise areas, this would add additional floor(s)/[Floor Area Ratio]FAR across most zones at or below 85′ (including LR, NC, C, MR).

And the document, signed by O’Brien, says that changes to capacity and more square footage would be “zone wide.” It’s also ironic that O’Brien indicated that the zoning code doesn’t regulate the number of floors. This is a point we made when we appealed his disastrous changes to the low-rise zones. As have pointed out and did again on the panel, O’Brien listened to Alexander’s group and created a 16 foot set back on the fourth floor of new buildings in the LR3; now the bargain commits him and the signers to ask Alexander’s group less than a year later to accept a 5th floor! Even if the change is an increase in FAR, that is still likely to lead to another floor. Where would the extra units go, underground?

As we organize builders of housing outside downtown and South Lake Union to do the math and raise questions about the Bargain, it’s apparent that, once again, politics not economics was the main focus of the City’s efforts around housing. The problem isn’t just inconsistent application of bad ideas, but the fact that when smart people with good intentions don’t follow principles the outcome of the process is still bad. Good intentions don’t change the basic rules of economics: when housing is scarce it will be expensive, and the cure for scarcity is more production. Adding costs, rules, process, and fees to housing doesn’t and can’t make it cheaper for renters. We may still have to go back to the white board yet again on the Bargain.