Yesterday at noon the Seattle Times’ Sanjay Bhatt hosted an online forum on housing. I couldn’t participate but you can see the thread of comments and discussion by visiting the log of the chat at the Seattle Times website.

The fact that the Times would host this kind of forum is great. The region’s largest local daily should take the lead on these kinds of civic discussion. The paper can provide the kind of neutral ground for people to discuss and learn about housing. The problem is that the Times is stubbornly clinging to a narrative that skyrocketing rents created by growth are displacing poor people (just Google the phrase “Bhatt rents rising” and you’ll see what I mean). As we’ve pointed out, very little displacement is actually occurring. For every unit demolished, 8 units have taken its place.

The Times conducted an online survey before the forum that immediately set up a straw man: the free market will fix the problem of rising housing costs. Here’s the write up of the survey results.

As of this morning, more than two-thirds of respondents to a survey say the free market will not fix the problem of housing costs outpacing incomes. The most important solution respondents cited by a long shot is “more housing that’s affordable” (42 percent of respondents), followed by “better mass transit system” (20 percent) and lifting the incomes of poor households (14 percent). Another 22 percent of respondents said “other,” like zoning changes to allow more multi-family housing, rent control and housing assistance for senior citizens.

Nobody, anywhere, that I know of has ever said publicly or privately that the “free market will solve problems associated with affordability.” Never. It has never happened. I’d love to see the citation if there is one. The question sets up an either or choice between increasing supply or proposals like rent control, a false and deceptive dichotomy. The Times may have well asked if manned flight to Mars would “fix” the problem of affordability. Meanwhile, respondents and participants have the idea that the choice is between pro-growth solutions and more taxes and rules.

The truth is that the market is a big part of the solution. In fact, the Mayor called for 30,000 of the 50,000 housing units he called for over the next 10 years to be produced by the market. But everyone, including Smart Growth Seattle and no growth advocate John V. Fox, agree that the biggest part of the affordability problem is among poor families with incomes from 0 to 50 percent of Area Median Income (AMI).

And what is the affordability problem? How do we measure it? Bhatt offers this statistic:

Zillow reports that rent now consumes nearly 31 percent of the average renter’s monthly income in the three-county Seattle metro, which means the market is becoming unaffordable.

But Bhatt was defensive when I asked him to take a closer look at that measure in an e-mail before the forum. I wrote,

First, there are far fewer households in need than originally claimed [in the original HALA Committee staff memo], and second many are paying only marginally more than the normative 30 percent. We need to get this straight because a household in need doesn’t necessary need a unit. And maybe the person paying 31% wants to pay that because it works for that person.

The 30% standard is deeply flawed and if the Times wants to help this discussion you need to explain that and account for it in the discussion. Affordability (or lack of it) is often qualitative and hard to measure; the tools we currently have are inadequate to measure the problem and changes the solutions that would work or not work.

Bhatt said that I was entitled to my opinion. But this isn’t about my opinion, it’s about the fact that as long as we define the problem with a metric that doesn’t correspond to the way real people make housing decision—whether they are buyers or sellers—we’re doomed to come up with the wrong solutions.

I’d like to see the writing that Bhatt does about the rise and fall of rents and how those prices correspond to supply and demand on the front page rather than buried in the real estate section. And the Times could further help the discussion by resisting the well worn journalistic urge to find the “human angle” at the expense of the facts: we are beginning to have a problem and it will get worse if we don’t build more housing of all types, everywhere in the city, for people of all levels of income. Can the Times help bring us together to figure out how to do that? Or will they keep highlighting the angst people about the problem?