Here I go again. Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) is an inflationary intervention in the housing market that simply adds what amounts to a unauthorized tax to new housing and commercial space. The money generated from the tax will end up being poured into a grossly inefficient system of subsidized housing production that will create very, very expensive housing with long waiting lists. Renters and owners in non-subsidized housing units will pay for the new and scarce subsidized housing. But sometimes the social critic or writer or advocate has to be repetitive, especially when the people in charge keep repeating the same mistakes.

One of my heroes is Phillip Glass. Glass is a composer and could easily be called a minimalist. While minimalism is not just repetition, many people would say that Glass’ repertoire is, well, repetitive. My college roommate said one piece sounded like people beating on pots and pans. Here’s John von Rhein from the Chicago Tribune describing Glass.

Glass’ musical style is instantly recognizable, with its trademark churning ostinatos, undulating arpeggios and repeating rhythms that morph over various lengths of time atop broad fields of tonal harmony. That style has taken permanent root in our pop-middlebrow sensibility. Glass’ music is now indelibly a part of our cultural lingua franca, just a click away on YouTube.

Minimalism and Glass’ music is kind of like anchovies, cilantro, and Chinese Opera: you either like it or you don’t. The same is kind of true of MIZ, you either like it or you don’t. But it bears repeating, MIZ doesn’t address the broader problem of rising housing prices; in fact, MIZ makes housing more expensive. That in turn will drive the demand from non-profits for more money for more units of subsidized housing. So here’s a reprise of things I’ve written over the years about why raising prices on housing to fund expensive and scarce subsidized housing makes no sense.

MIZ is an unauthorized and inflationary tax. This post was about the linkage tax, something that was set aside in favor of MIZ. But MIZ is just another way to levy a tax on housing to pay for expensive subsidized units. And speaking of rinse-and-repeat, check out what I call the “San Francisco Death Spiral,” the annoying and dangerous tendency to worry about price, impose inflationary rules, fees, and taxes, watch prices rise, then complain about prices, then adding more rules and fees.

http://www.djc.com/news/ae/12071370.html

So all the cash squeezed out of new development will end up going toward non-profit produced housing funded also by Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC), and subsidies from various other governments and programs. Here’s a post about why it’s so pricey. I’ve pointed out that CHIP’s project, 12^th Avenue Arts project cost $47 million for 88 units and El Centro de la Raza’s project on Beacon Hill came in at $45 million for 112 units and a 5 year waiting list. Each of these are beautifully executed projects and will house real people that need housing, but can’t we be more efficient?

http://www.seattleforgrowth.org/why-is-afforable-housing-so-expensive/

If we were more efficient be cutting the undergrowth and accretion of rules, regulations, fees, reviews, process, and delays for housing we’d get more housing; a significant amount of housing. I estimated, conservatively, that we could create about 100 units of housing a year, that’s like one 12^th Avenue Arts project each year, just by reducing rules and fees. Here’s a series of posts about this potential, including a study from California I used.

http://www.seattleforgrowth.org/cut-rules-half-create-1960-affordable-housing-units/

SPUR Analysis of Costs

http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2014-02-11/real-costs-building-housing

Forbes Post on Costs of Rules

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogervaldez/2014/10/27/want-more-housing-make-fewer-rules/

The California Study

www.hcd.ca.gov/hpd/docs/FinalAffordableHousingCostStudyReport-with-coverv2.pdf

Here’s a post written by our former intern, Tianyi Xiang, that breaks down some of the factors and variables that contribute to the costs of housing projects.

http://www.seattleforgrowth.org/bricks-mortar-costs-affordable-housing/

And here is my plea that non-profit housing developers band together with us, advocates in the market rate sector, to lower costs. Non-profit housing developers are listened to and believed. They have all the political clout in the housing discussion and policy-making arena. If they pushed hard enough, we could all reap the benefits of lower costs that limit supply and boost prices.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rogervaldez/2016/07/12/when-will-affordable-housing-advocates-push-for-more-supply-fewer-rules/#2d7eee3369aa

I first discovered the music of Phillip Glass on Thanksgiving Day, 1983 when I was 13 years old and saw Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi. The film had an enormous impact on me and I went back and saw it several times. Reggio’s purpose was to call out the futility and folly of modern life, that life he argued in images and with Glass’ music, is “life out of balance,” the translation of the Hopi word, koyaanisqatsi.

What Reggio and Glass accomplished, however, was the redemption of that folly by showing how beautiful the folly of life truly is from a distance and perspective. Even in the second film, Powaqquatsi, the opening scene of workers at the Serra Pelada mine in Brazil, the site of environmental degradation and human suffering on a massive scale, ends up being beautiful. Reggio, who trained for years to be a monk, set out to use the rhythm of images and music to distract us from our unhappiness, but ended up, with repetition, also showing us how beautiful we are, even in our suffering. I only wish my blog posts on MIZ could do the same.

The clip I feature is from a segment called Pruitt Igoe. Pruitt Igoe was a large public housing project in Saint Louis that was abandoned and demolished. Pruitt Igoe and other well-known, large, publically owned housing projects were criticized as concentrating poverty. The end of Pruitt Igoe and Cabrini Green marked a shift away from publically owned and operated housing and would be replaced with the Reagan era Low Income Housing Tax Credit program which is a significant source of funding for the non-profit affordable housing industry. I think it’s time to reexamine our abandonment of public housing (I touched a bit on this issue here) in favor of the inefficient system we now have. But that’s a separate post I think.