You heard it here first: The Mayor and City Council’s scheme to shake down builders of market rate housing for fees and rent restricted housing (also known as Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning or MIZ) will collapse in 2017. Simply put, neighborhood opposition combined with growing disinterest from the non-profits who benefit from the cash wrung from builders will mean the Council will likely either back off, or add even more blatantly illegal and punitive measures to MIZ ensuring its demise in the courts.

The non-profit housing advocates at the Housing Development Consortium have been oddly quiet about neighborhood rezones, and the coalition between them and blood thirsty socialists will collapse as the socialists and angry neighbors demand more and more from MIZ in neighborhood rezones (e.g. 25 percent inclusion rates). When the so-called Grand Bargain was rolled out more than a year ago, it was touted as a deal between developers, housing advocates, and neighbors.

The problem of course is that there was only one market rate developer represented at the table, Vulcan. There was no neighborhood person, and certainly no socialists, especially not Councilmember Kshama Sawant. Everyone else at the table had a non-profit housing interest, including the chair of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) Committee.

What the Bargain did is solve a intermediate political problem: how to make developers downtown and South Lake Union pay a cash penalty for building their projects, give the cash to non-profit developers, and call the whole thing a win for density and affordable housing. They should have stopped there, and limited the scheme to downtown and South Lake Union. That would have been hard enough. Last year Councilmember Sally Bagshaw put that deal in peril by pandering to wealthy residents of the Escala building, proposing a new tower spacing scheme downtown.

But City leaders overloaded their buffet plate and expanded the scheme citywide. This overreach is likely what will bring the whole thing down. At the time I wondered, “What makes the Council think that the same angry neighbors they just pandered to with a downzone in the low-rise would suddenly embrace an upzone just a year later?” Like most of the questions I ask of City leaders there was nothing but silence. Some people tried to explain that it was a start, at least we’d get the housing.

I explained back that even if the inclusionary aspect of the MIZ scheme “worked,” it would be because the prices would go up for everything else to pay for the rent restrictions. The smart ones would sort of just stop at that point. Others would argue that, “Well, the price of the land will go down in the exact amount of the costs and fees.” Umm, no it won’t. In fact, as I pointed out earlier, landowners now think they can ask more for the land because of the upzone.

And the press mostly hand waved and eye rolled their way through this whole thing, not out of ignorance or even lack of interest, but because it’s a complicated story. They dutifully reported the hearings and the passage of this piece and that piece and the debate over displacement in the U District, but there has never been a substantive and deep analysis of why and how this whole notion that we’d jack prices up on housing to collect cash to give to non-profits to build really expensive subsidized units was an “affordable housing” strategy. Too complicated.

I told someone yesterday that I feel like Michael Burry from The Big Short. I’m betting on something failing. It’s sad. And it’s been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my career. I told her, whatever I do next, I really want it to be building something good, something that will make life better rather than fighting against something that I know will make things worse. I’ll leave you with the closing from the film. If I’m right, and I know I am, the failure of MIZ won’t be about popping champagne bottles, it’ll be about picking up the pieces. Lots and lots of pieces.