Some things still surprise me. I guess I should be happy. Here’s the email I sent to members of the State House of Representative’s House Community Development, Housing & Tribal Affairs Committee. I testified in opposition to giving the Washington State Housing Finance Commission an increase on their debt limit without requiring more accountability. There is a link to the video of the  hearing below. 

Hello members of the Committee,

I think I look pretty good for my age and I have to say, it doesn’t feel like 25 years that I’ve been doing this kind of thing. But it’s been about that long.

In all that time, I don’t think I have heard a more, well, strange and obfuscating response than the one that Mr. Herman gave yesterday after I rattled off the costs of the projects I mentioned, about $165 million for roughly 350 housing units in Seattle.

I took the time to transcribe what he said from the TVW video which is now available.

The problem with the per unit cost limit division, it’s very easy to take the cost of a project and just simply divide it by the number of units; what it doesn’t do, is it doesn’t look at what kind of community rooms there are in the building, what kind of certain types of supportive housing. There may be rooms for nurses to come in twice a week to look at people and provide those kind of services. There may be meeting rooms with counselors. All of those are usually not housing but when you do the division of housing units into the total cost you come up with a much higher cost than if you had taken out those service or other types of facilities that are inside a housing project and then made the division.

The emphasis is mine of course.

As I mentioned in a previous note, how much do rooms for nurses cost?

Let’s take 12th Avenue Arts, a project in Speaker Chopp’s district, that cost $47 million for 88 units, or about $534,090.91 per unit.

Let’s reduce or “take out” some of that cost for the theater and non-profit office space, and since Mr. Herman did not offer a discount factor I’ll just suggest $10,000,000, or about 20 percent. So let’s do the math again, $37,000,000 divided by 88 is $420,454.55 per unit.

As I’ve pointed out, based on data from Zillow, “the median price of homes currently listed in Seattle is $688,000 while the median price of homes that sold is $647,200.”

I am a philosophy major, so I might be missing something. But that is the average house price in Seattle. Which means there are houses priced between $400,000 and $500,000; so even with a discount for a room for a nurse and counselor, these projects are so expensive we’d be better off buying houses for the 88 people living in that project for the same price. That’s outrageous!