I’m taking a break. And so the blog here is in reruns. Back when there was television, Johnny Carson would sometimes turn over his desk to a guest host. Other times they would run reruns as, “The Best of Carson.” So this is The Best of Seattle For Growth.” I decided this week to go with three posts about Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA), perhaps the single worst housing policy ever conceived by human beings, best summed up as, “housing is expensive, let’s tax it, raise its price, and then build a few lower rent units, somewhere, a long time from now.” This post, about the final passage of MHA, posted earlier this year. 

I suppose I should have been emotionally prepared for the final passage of the City’s version of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning, something they call Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA). It is sad. But it’s passage seems like nothing more than reading the final punctuation on a municipal suicide note after the deed has been done; there is not much left to do but prepare for the aftermath. Monday afternoon, unanimously, and with much self-congratulation, the Seattle City Council decided to tax all new housing development in the city for the purpose of generating money for non-profit housing developers. As a bit of therapy I’ve been reviewing one of my favorite and most relevant passages of the Aeneid: the taking in of the wooden horse into the walls of the city of Troy. In the story of the wooden horse is the lesson we must take from the whole MHA debacle.

If you’re not into extended allusions to old western classics now is the time to stop reading. And I’ve written on this theme before.

The story of the Trojan horse is one most people know. After a long and protracted but indecisive war between Greeks and Trojans, the Greeks hatch a plan to hide inside a big wooden horse, get taken into the heart of the city, and then ambush the Trojans. I see it as a classic urban tale. The Greek telling of the story in the Odyssey is much less elaborate than in its telling in Latin by Virgil. And there are differences worth noting in the Greek and Latin versions of the story about one of my absolute favorite parts of exactly how the Trojans get the horse filled with Greeks bent on the destruction of Troy into their city, the wheels put under the horses legs.

In the Greek take, Epeius a great architect includes the wheels as part of the construction of the horse.

In the Taking of Ilios by Tryphiodorus, the author includes a fabulous and detailed description of the horse and drama of the Greeks climbing inside with “Epeius of glorious craft” being the last one to board the machine and Odysseus closing the hatch. And the final detail added to the horse by Epeius was the wheels.

And when he had wrought all the warlike horse, he set a well-spoked wheel under each of its feet that when dragged over the plain it might be obedient to the rein, and not travel a difficult path under stress of hands.

Quintus Smyrnaeus in Book XII of his The Fall of Troy details the inspiration of the seer Chalchus to build a wooden horse and the divine inspiration of Epeius (say, eee pie us) in a dream in which Athena promises she “would labour in his labour, and herself stand by his side,” as he designed and built it. When the time came, and the horse was left at the gates of Troy,

Then gathered all,
And o’er that huge Horse hastily cast a rope,
And made it fast above; for under its feet
Smooth wooden rollers had Epeius laid,
That, dragged by Trojan hands, it might glide on
Into their fortress

Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t get into the design in such detail nor does it mention the wheels, but it has a different take on where the council sat down and debated what to do with the horse.

For the Trojans themselves had drawn the horse into their fortress, and it stood there while they sat in council round it, and were in three minds as to what they should do. Some were for breaking it up then and there; others would have it dragged to the top of the rock on which the fortress stood, and then thrown down the precipice; while yet others were for letting it remain as an offering and propitiation for the gods. And this was how they settled it in the end, for the city was doomed when it took in that horse, within which were all the bravest of the Argives waiting to bring death and destruction on the Trojans.

Homer has the Trojans discovering the horse and dragging it in and then having a big debate about what to do with it, a much different take from his colleagues and certainly from the Roman take. For Homer, the death of Hector was the decisive moment of the Trojan War in any event; the wooden horse was sort of the final doom.

Virgil, writing for the Roman Emperor Augustus, was spinning an origin story. The main character of the Aeneid, Aeneas, is one of the last survivors of Troy and he sets out with the household gods gathered from the city’s temples to found a new Troy, what eventually becomes Rome. Augustus is referenced a few times in prophecies but doesn’t feature as much as a Roman emperor might like. Along the way, Aeneas tells the sad story of the horse, and a key difference is what matters most to me,

A spacious breach is made; the town lies bare;
Some hoisting-levers, some the wheels prepare
And fasten to the horse’s feet; the rest
With cables haul along th’ unwieldly beast.
Each on his fellow for assistance calls;
At length the fatal fabric mounts the walls,
Big with destruction.

Virgil, Aeneid, John Dryden translation, 1697

The pain and agony of the telling of the story when its told by Aeneas is the many warnings they received (at least 3) to not take the horse inside the gates and the struggle they had getting it in. This is not trivial. Imagine being in a car wreck you could have easily avoided by staying home, but forgetting the keys, going back inside, getting them, then forgetting your phone and going back again. You can see the point; it didn’t have to happen.

What’s worse, and to me the symbol of the folly of Troy, is the absence in the Aeneid of Epeius’ wheels. There’s the horse just kind of sunk into the sand. It’s big and its heavy and its full of Greeks. The most sensible and easiest thing to do would be to leave the damn horse there. And once Laocoon hurls his spear into its side, proves that it is hollow and everyone hears the noise from the Greeks from within, you’d think that would have been the prevailing wisdom.

No. Let’s all get together, make a big hole in the city’s walls and build some wheels for this baby.

In his, Virgil’s Aeneid: Decorum, Allusion, and Ideology, Wendell V. Clausen digs into the Latin to draw out both the tragedy and horror of the wheeled horse. In a later translation (Williams, 1910) Aeneas recalls that,

Yet frantic pressed we on, our hearts all blind,
And in the consecrated citadel
Set up the hateful thing.

“Hateful thing” is elsewhere translated as “ill-omened thing” from the Latin, “monstrum infelix.” Claussen writes about that word, “monstrum” in the context of the phrase, “pedibusque rotarum subiciunt lapsus,” which from reading about this and my own weak Latin is essentially, “Smooth-gliding wheels were put under its feet.” But the notion of a horse with wheels instead of feet made it like seem like something closer to our own word “monster,” something violating the rules of nature. Clausen’s take invites us to think of the horse in the way we’d understand how Godzilla functions in our own time, the product of ill advised nuclear testing, horrible, unnatural, destructive and representing the dark side of scientific innovation – and our own doing.

Like the leaders of Troy, the Seattle City Council has been warned again and again that adding costs to the production of housing will not spur its production. Instead, adding additional costs in the form of fees will mean a slow down in production with many projects going on hold. And how will production ramp up again? When prices and rents go up enough to pay for fees we’ll see production levels rise and projects that were shelved go into production. Angry neighbors opposed the Council because they were upset about the modest (the Council’s term) increases in density. And they’ve been warned of the legal jeopardy created by the programs violation of the plain language in RCW 82.02.020 that doesn’t allow oxymoronic mandatory incentive programs.

And the whole proposal is built on a problem defined 5 years ago and with a solution, a few units of expensive subsidized housing, 5 years from now. As I said when I was on the radio not long ago, the actual costs of the 6000 units promised by the program is more like $1.95 billion, not the $472 million in fees the Council claims are forthcoming from the program. And, based on their own numbers, the fees will add as much as $15,000 per unit to the production of market rate housing. I’m not even going to bother to link to the data behind this because what difference does it make now, something to think about when considering that the Seattle Times only covered the issue of what fee money will buy just a week ago.

So its almost like I am there, in Asia Minor on a beach, feeling the sun burning my forehead. I can feel the sand between my toes. I can see a huge horse there sinking into the sand. There’s Sinon, the young Greek spy being quizzed by the Seattle City Council. There’s the spear hurled by Laocoon. I can hear Cassandra’s screaming, as she is lead away. And like a dream, I run toward the growing crown under the shadow of the horse, but I can’t move. I see the crowd approaching with flowers and a strong cable, and, yes, a beautiful set of wheels.

Aeneas had the advantage of watching the city he loved burn to the ground. When he arrived in Carthage and Dido fell in love with him for his suffering the whole world knew of the folly of the wooden horse, the fall of Troy, and even the Gods were watching how the story would play out. Seattle won’t burn to the ground with the passage of MHA. We won’t see building permit applications dwindle to nothing.

We’ll see prices rise to absorb fees and to offset the growing burden of regulatory overreach. When prices go up, we’ll here the Council debate what to do, and then we’ll hear them say, “The only answer is to raise the fees to build a few hundred more units of subsidized units years from now!” And they will. And they’ll claim that they’ve solved the problem at least until prices go up again, and the inflation will punish poor people the hardest at least until an economic downturn causes production and demand to slowdown; hardly the fall of Troy.

Nevertheless, the scene, a council of city leaders engaged in a deliberate and strenuous endeavor that most certainly not solve the problem of higher housing prices but ensure that they will always rise when demand goes up, surely is tragic.