Here we go again. Yet another proposal to flush more cash into “affordable housing.” Notice that the press and the proponents never ask and never offer what the money will buy. Performance artist and sometimes City Councilmember Kshama Sawant now wants to make big budget cuts, including to the police force, to give $48 million of this year’s City budget to “affordable housing.” What does that mean? Nobody asked her.

Here’s the Seattle Times:

Seattle could raise $48 million with actions such as slowing police-officer hiring, shedding executives, capping executive salaries at $150,000, eliminating other vacant government jobs, not putting new computers in police cars and ending “sweeps” of homeless encampments, Sawant said.

Daniel Beekman fails to ask the question to Sawant or of anyone at the City, “What would the $48 million buy.

Same thing at Publicola, quoting Tim Harris, Director of Real Change:

“There’s this thing I keep hearing, which is that in a city this wealthy, nobody should have to live in a tent,” Harris said at the press conference Wednesday. “But it’s not enough to just say that. We have to take action, we have to do something about it.”

I have a lot of respect for Tim Harris. But I would have asked him, “So, Tim, how is this money going to get people out of tents? Will it? Is the money for units? Services? Staff?

And I’ll be nice and figure an average cost per unit of non-profit subsidized housing at about $350,000 per unit. I think that price is getting higher all the time. At that cost, the $48 million would buy about 137 units; and remember there are supposed to be 26,000 cost burdened households and 5,000 homeless people in Seattle. When would these 137 units come off the assembly line? Who knows? Entitlement and construction is taking as long as 3 years. This is what the City said when it wanted $75 million for “affordable housing” during the head tax debate.

I’m hearing from some developers that it is taking 5 years because of the City’s horribly unpredictable and opaque permitting process, not to mention design review and redundant utility requirements. None of those things is getting better.

But still, local media and everyone else just accepts “more money for housing” as almost like saying “more Unicorns.” It must be good right? If Sound Transit, or the Seattle Department of Transportation said we want $48 million for “more transportation” Daniel Beekman would be perplexed. “What do you mean by that?” I’m sure he’d ask. “More trains, more roads, more sidewalks?”

But no, when it comes to “housing” nobody except me in Seattle asks that question. Forget about what a bad idea it would be to stop hiring police without any explanation of the impact that would have. What in the world would the City get for the $48 million in cuts to the police budget? That’s the question we need for this or any other proposal made by politicians or groups that want more money for “affordable housing.”