Working (Lunch) With Affordable Housing Developers

A couple of weeks ago Smart Growth Seattle board member Erich Armbruster and I met Marty Kooistra Executive Director of the Housing Development Consortium and Doug Ito, a member of the HDC board of directors. We had a great conversation. Marty and I set up the lunch because in spite of our profound and deep disagreement on linkage fees, incentive zoning, inclusionary zoning, we think we have a lot of things we can do, together, to make it easier to build housing in Seattle. This is a post lunch letter that includes ideas to include the Rental Housing Association in collaborative efforts to lower construction costs, support renters and landlords with increased operating costs, and just overall finding ways to work together. Appropriately enough we sat at the Urban Visions table at the Met; Urban Visions is a Smart Growth Seattle sponsor. 

Hello Marty and Doug,

Erich and I appreciate you taking the time to have lunch with us to have an open-ended discussion on ways we might work together. I have widened the circle a bit here by including Bill Hinkle and Sean Martin from the Rental Housing Association and Shannon Affholter who leads MBA. Bill and Shannon I’m sure will have thoughts on how to weave a partnership together.

But here’s what I took from our time together.

First, we face many if not all of the same challenges to get a housing project entitled, permitted, and leased up. In many cases, affordable projects face even more challenges because of an additional layer of requirements and limitations imposed by funders at the federal, state, and local level.

I see this as a great opportunity to work together as we troubleshoot on a regular basis with City departments at our every-other-month managers meeting. Most of what we talk about at these meetings isn’t high flying policy issues, but trying to get to the bottom of glitches in the system that add costs and delays to projects. I believe that having both for and non-profit developers communicating, together, helps make a broader case for regulatory reform that would benefit us all by reducing the cost of bringing more new housing on line.

Second, landlord tenant relations, and in particular the sale of down market or affordable projects at the end of their covenants, hurts poor people but it also poisons the narrative, attributing greed to developers and landlords when the story is much more complicated. 

I’d like to see us work together to push the City to better track and intervene with troubled properties with low rents or controlled rents before they have to be sold to a private buyer. It is simply unconscionable to have buildings like the Theodora simply collapse under the weight of deferred maintenance and then, upon sale, blame the buyer of the building for raising rents.

I also think we could collaborate with each other in better utilizing rent relocation assistance and the Landlord Liaison project. As you know, there are many hardworking people who can pay market rents who have criminal records or bad credit that face a steep climb finding housing. This problem can be fixed. Additionally, many private landlords do end up being case managers for tenants in their buildings; this needs to be acknowledged and somehow better leveraged by the community with training and a better referral network.

Lastly, we are all negatively impacted by efforts of local neighbors to stop or slow the development of new housing in our densest neighborhoods. This is especially the case in our low-rise zones over which the Council is preparing to impose a significant downzone. We are appealing the Determination of Non-Significance in hopes of getting the City to reconsider. Your help in explaining that the lost housing capacity affects your members as well would be of inestimable help in persuading the Council that this is not about profit, but about fewer choices for people looking for housing in Seattle.

I’d suggest that perhaps we get together again in the coming months and plot a course that could, in spite of the things we disagree about, allow us to collaborate effectively on the many more things we have in common as builders and managers of housing in Seattle. I am putting this work in my 2015 work plan.

Thank you again,

Roger
Director
Smart Growth Seattle

Housing Prices: Will Incentives and Inclusion Help? (Part 2)

First of a two part series by Jerrell Whitehead. The posts here on zoning are longer versions of material he completed while at Sightline Institute. His initial interest on this subject came from conversations with A-P Hurd, Vice-President at Touchstone Corporation, who gave a number of reasons why housing construction costs are growing in Seattle. All views expressed here are his own.

Fundamentally, inclusionary or incentive zoning exists in order to make the development of affordable housing a permanent facet of a community’s new development. Although highly controversial, such programs have been legal in US municipalities since 1973. The city of Seattle is not alone in questioning its incentive zoning scheme. In 1999, Oregon banned the zoning program completely, although advocates have tried for years to overturn the ban. Oregon and Texas are the only two states that ban the practice.

Despite operating for a number of years, it is incredible that an issue as divisive as this has hitherto produced mostly theoretical data, with a noticeable absence of empirical studies. Still, although the data sample is small, it is not completely non-existent. In 2008 (updated in 2010) New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy waded into this debate with a policy brief that asks three important empirical questions:

• What kinds of jurisdictions adopt inclusionary zoning?
• How much affordable housing has been produced in different inclusionary zoning programs, and what factors influence production levels?
• What effects has inclusionary zoning had on the price and production of market-rate housing?

To answer these questions, three metropolitan areas were selected: the San Francisco area, suburban Boston, and the Washington D.C. region. As too often happens when researching, data constraints (i.e. the small amount of participating jurisdictions in the D.C. area) prevented full statistical analysis.

	San Francisco Area	Suburban Boston	Washington, DC Area
Prevalence	7/10 counties	99/187 cities & towns	5/23 counties
Year Adopted Median	1973-2004	1974-2004	1973-1996
% of Mandatory Programs	93%	58%	80%
% of Units That Must Be Affordable
Median	15%	10%	8.13%
Range	5-25%	5-60%	6.25-15%

 

Key Findings On Inclusionary Zoning Adoption

Jurisdictions are more likely to adopt an inclusionary zoning program when they:

• Are larger and more affluent
• Have neighboring jurisdictions that have ordinances
• Have adopted other land use regulations (specifically cluster zoning or growth management).

Key Findings On Inclusionary Zoning Production

The longer ordinances have been in place, the more affordable units produced:

• In the Washington D.C. area, programs produced 15,252 affordable units, but roughly 3/4^th of the units are in Montgomery County, the nation’s oldest inclusionary zoning program
• As of 2004 in suburban Boston, 43% of jurisdictions with inclusionary zoning had zero affordable units. Precise counts were unavailable, primarily because many of the ordinances were newly enacted
• In the San Francisco area the median annual production across all programs was nine affordable units per year. For the region as a whole, inclusionary zoning programs produced 9,154 affordable units (1973-2004).

Key Findings On Inclusionary Zoning’s Impact On Housing Market 

• In the San Francisco area, there is no evidence that inclusionary zoning impacts either the prices or production of single-family houses. Researchers found that, when regional housing prices are declining, ordinances are associated with a small decrease in local housing prices, but when regional housing prices are appreciating, inclusionary zoning programs are associated with a small increase in local housing prices. Regardless of whether the market was up or down, inclusionary zoning had no impact on San Francisco area housing prices or overall supply of housing.
• In suburban Boston, during periods of rising housing prices inclusionary zoning modestly constrains housing production and increases housing prices, but had no impact during declining housing markets.

Analyzing the implications of their data, Furman Center researchers concluded that inclusionary zoning isn’t necessarily a panacea for solving housing affordability problems. Indeed, the Bay Area, with over 15,000 affordable units created since the 1970s should stand as a success story, but the area still consistently ranks as one of America’s priciest housing markets. The researchers end with caution, warning that before inclusionary zoning policies are expanded, municipalities must long consider the potential negative impacts on the price and supply of market-rate housing.

The Supporters

Those who agitate for inclusionary zoning are often vocal about its myriad benefits, but most often lofty notions of social equity are praised the loudest. Proponents point to years of exclusionary zoning, racial redlining, and other historical instances of powerless groups thrust far out to the margins of society. In a swift, forceful action, affordable units built onsite effectively integrates communities on key racial and socioeconomic fault lines. Thus, inclusionary zoning serves as a powerful tool that reverses decades of past transgressions by myopic local governments and callous landlords.

Following concerns with social equity, inclusionary zoning supporters will also list access to public services and city amenities for low income groups as another positive bestowed by the ordinances. Furthermore, proponents rationalize why developers need to contribute something the public values in the community where they seek to do business. Here, they state that developers too often try to skirt the idea that they are in fact members of society, and therefore they have a duty to provide affordable housing. On top of that duty, the argument goes, developers have plenty of money and will still be able to turn a profit, so what’s the harm in adding the extra units? In the end, the developers collect their permit to build; the city meets its quota of affordable housing units, and members of the community get to move into new, well-situated lodgings.

For these advocates, their worst nightmare is a city without inclusionary zoning, as they believe a city lacking these ordinances would inevitably be defined by those with capital and power. Whether true or not, a vital question is whether the cost of the policy is one worth bearing.

The Opponents

Detractors of inclusionary zoning bluntly state that such schemes are, by definition, price controls and act as a tax on development. Inclusionary zoning has been deemed by economists as distinct from rent control, but they conclude that any form of price control on a percentage of new housing will have many of the same effects as rent control, namely constrained supply, higher prices, and lower quality housing. Cue the standard economist joke that rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.

Economists will point to the graph below as the visual argument against inclusionary zoning. The demand curve plots the quantity demanded by consumers at different prices, and the supply curve plots the quantity supplied by builders and landowners at different prices. The demand curve slopes downward because as consumers are forced to pay more, they will buy less, and the supply curve slopes upward because as producers receive more, they’ll supply more resources for residential development.

Impact of an inclusionary zoning tax on new market-rate housing Inclusionary Zoning Graph by Benjamin Powell & Edward Stringham

Oftentimes, inclusionary zoning opponents question the economic knowledge of their intellectual adversaries, especially on the question of who actually pays the ordinance fee. Developers must certainly provide the project financing and take the risk of building both market and affordable units, but it is highly unlikely they will pay the entire cost. This burden is shared in some combination by the builders, landowners, and market-rate homebuyers. But recall that in practically every circumstance, taxed goods lead to higher prices for consumers. On the subject of “Who pays?” the economists Powell and Stringham conclude:

If people knew that landowners had to bear the cost of providing affordable housing, the policy might be considered unfair or even a taking because landowners have no more responsibility to pay the full cost of social policies than anyone else. If people knew that market-rate homebuyers had to bear the cost of providing affordable housing, the policy also might be considered counterproductive because rather than creating more affordable housing, the policy would be making the majority of homes more expensive. On the other hand, many people consider it acceptable for builders to bear the cost of inclusionary zoning.

Finally, it was previously written that the supporters of inclusionary zoning often lay claim to the moral high ground in justifying their support for the policy scheme, reasoning that no matter the program’s cost, racially and socially integrating our communities and expanding access to opportunity for all is definitely a worthy cause. Demonstrating the complexity of this debate, opponents to inclusionary zoning also cite social equity as a reason why they do not support the policy.

The underpinning rationale for this position is best encapsulated in Yale Law Professor Robert Ellickson’s useful article, titled, “The Irony of ‘Inclusionary Zoning’,” where he argues that by decreasing housing development, the price on all housing goes up; therefore the ironically named policy is exclusionary. While a tiny slice of society will get access to new housing at a below-market price, the overwhelming majority has to fend for themselves in a market with higher prices and overall lower supply.

Inclusionary Zoning? Or…

Despite the niceness of its name—since anything “inclusionary” trumps that which is exclusionary—the dirty, yet open secret of the policy scheme is this: in every documented instance inclusionary zoning simply creates a paltry sum of affordable units. As shown above, the Bay Area has produced approximately 295 units a year since 1973. In Seattle, 714 affordable units have been created since 2001—a tiny share of new housing in the city, in large part because the weak incentives have discouraged developers from participating. Note that Seattle has added 40,000 new households between 2000 and 2014, an average of 2,850 per year. In sum, if well-meaning stakeholders are interested solely in whether or not affordable units exist, inclusionary zoning is indeed a means of producing them. However, although inefficient as a means of generating affordable housing stock, it is certainly efficient at drawing the ire of developers and those faced with higher housing prices.

Additionally, this survey of inclusionary zoning has not dealt with other key details that surround the policy. The questions are legion: What is the cost of administering the program? Who determines those who live in the units? What happens when a low income family begins to earn more money—are they promptly evicted? Also, one must not forget the philosophical issues at play: Does society agree housing is a right? If we do agree housing is an absolute right, do we also agree that, no matter the cost, it is a right for all to live in the most wealthy and opportune of settings?

And lastly, we must investigate further the notion that racial and economic integration of the housing market is a net positive, starting with questioning the people who themselves have been integrated into higher priced units. Recently, the New York Times completed such a study, discovering a unique tension between poor and rich in Manhattan’s luxurious high-rises. I wonder if such evident discord between classes dampens the enthusiasm of the inclusionary zoning advocate, since along with its attendant economic issues, even the utopian-like idea of stress-free socio-economic integration is problematic.

Exclusionary Zoning?

Inclusionary zoning in part exists to fix the housing problems created by exclusionary zoning. But while debates over the usefulness of inclusionary zoning spark white-hot passions, they typically miss a more fundamental problem: Cities of the Pacific Northwest still struggle mightily with the legacy of exclusionary housing policies.

Distressingly, exclusionary zoning remains the norm in Seattle, and creates huge problems for housing costs. Zoning policies continue to reserve the majority of residential land for single-family housing, which limits the supply (and increases the price) of land for multifamily development. More specifically, Seattle is zoned 65% single family housing, as shown by the light yellow in the map below (with a lot size between 5,000 and 9,600 square feet).

Cities continue to outlaw many of the most inexpensive forms of housing, as well as once-common forms of compact, family friendly housing such as courtyard apartments. New forms of lower-cost housing—small (or micro) apartments, housing without parking—face fierce opposition and political roadblocks.

Curbing exclusionary zoning offers one place where all sides of the inclusionary zoning debate can agree. In the cities of the Pacific Northwest, policies that help to make new lower-cost housing both legal and profitable—and that work to gradually erase the region’s legacy of exclusionary zoning—ought to be a large part of any debate over housing affordability.

Jerrell Whitehead is a former Research Fellow of the Sightline Institute. He is a Bill & Melinda Gates Scholar, and earned his Master’s (MPhil) and PhD in economic and social history from the University of Cambridge. Thanks for research assistance must be extended to A-P Hurd of Touchstone Corporation, Kayla Schott-Bresler of the Housing Development Consortium, and Esther Handy, legislative aide to Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien.

Housing Prices: Will Incentives and Inclusion Help?

First of a two part series by Jerrell Whitehead. The posts here on zoning are longer versions of material he completed while at Sightline Institute. His initial interest on this subject came from conversations with A-P Hurd, Vice-President at Touchstone, who gave a number of reasons why housing construction costs are growing in Seattle. All views expressed here are his own.

On September 5^th, 2014, in the somewhat quiet confines of Seattle’s City Hall, Councilmember Mike O’Brien loudly pronounced words that anyone looking for a place to rent in this city well comprehends: Seattle has a housing crisis. Seattle, now standing tall as the fastest growing major city in America, must confront the fundamental issue of where to house all these eager newcomers. Councilmember O’Brien is the chair of the Planning, Land Use, and Sustainability Committee, which last met Tuesday, September 16^th, to discuss the particular incentives the city uses to encourage the production of affordable housing. On September 23^rd, Mayor Ed Murray announced the creation of the Housing Affordability & Livability Advisory Committee, which is to offer recommendations by May 2015. This news makes it clear that housing affordability will be a significant and highly contentious issue in the next 12 months.

Background

Following the dark days of the recent economic downturn, Seattle now ranks alongside New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. as the nation’s top markets. Seattle is growing rapidly—even faster than the city envisioned in its decade-old Comprehensive Plan, which is the city’s grand strategy on how to accommodate a far larger population. The plan projected 47,000 new households (as well as 84,000 new jobs) between 2004 and 2024. Ten years into that plan, the city is well ahead of that schedule. As of 2012, there were 312,853 housing units in Seattle. Fully demonstrating that growth figures may need to be revised upwards, there were 29,330 net new housing units added from 2005 to 2012, or roughly 62 percent of the 2024 target. A rapid influx of newcomers often signals a strong economy—and Seattle has been adding jobs at a fast pace. Over March 2013-14, King County (which includes Seattle) was ranked as the fifth county nationally with the largest increases in employment level.

Seattle Comprehensive Plan by Seattle Department of Planning & Development

Seattle Comprehensive Plan by Seattle Department of Planning & Development

 

 

Yet amidst a boom in business, acute concerns persist: housing prices and rents are trending upwards in the face of rapid migration. A palpable sense is growing that Seattle is pricing out many of the citizens it once warmly welcomed. Rather than focusing on the entirety of the housing market, both the City Council and Mayor Ed Murray are paying attention to the issue of affordable housing for lower income groups. There is the pervading belief that rents are simply too high and that the best recourse is stronger government intervention. Slowly, and ever louder, the public is starting to clamor for its representatives to do something, anything, which will bring results on this essential issue.

Presently, existing housing incentives for private developers are set to undergo major changes, and a forthcoming series of posts seeks to better inform that debate. Two policy measures are at the heart of Seattle’s development incentive scheme: incentive zoning and the multi-family tax exemption program (MFTE). The latter will be discussed in a future post, but here the focus is on broad analysis of incentive zoning.

Definitions

Incentive zoning is the progeny of inclusionary zoning, and the ultimate purpose of both is to make the creation of affordable housing a key part of a community’s new development. Today, inclusionary or incentive zoning programs come in all shapes and sizes. Some offer developers incentives to build low-rent units. Others require developers to include below-market units in every new housing development. Some give developers a choice between building new units and paying into a municipal housing fund dedicated to building low-rent units. Inclusionary zoning programs differ in the types of development covered, the share of new units required, the required price for new rental units, who can obtain low-cost units, and the length of time that “affordable” units must be offered at below-market rates. Many of these zoning programs mandate that units offered at below-market rates be of similar size and quality as the market-price units, and also spread throughout the project to avoid creating conspicuous public housing or “projects”. However, New York City developers recently have generated national opprobrium by offering affordable units accessible only through “poor doors” separated from main entrances for market-rate units.

Zoning: A VERY Brief History

Zoning of any kind is a relatively new practice in the United States. The nation’s first zoning codes originated in New York City in 1916, spurred by new high-rises opposed by neighbors. The use of zoning quickly spread to other municipalities. In 1926 the United States Supreme Court upheld the practice of zoning, ruling that the zoning laws of Euclid, Ohio passed constitutional muster.

Many (but not all) of these early zoning programs were both racist and classist, as they were principally created to keep “undesirable” people away from higher-income neighborhoods. This was accomplished by restricting both the types of housing that builders could build, and by restricting the kinds of people who could live in them. Over time, municipalities used zoning to reserve large swaths of their total land area for single family houses with ample yards—a particularly expensive form of housing, and one that limited the number of lower-income folks who could afford to live near the well-off.

As a reaction to this sort of “exclusionary” zoning, in the early 1970s US municipalities began to adopt “inclusionary” zoning policies designed to ensure that developers provide low-cost housing to at least some residents. The first inclusionary zoning policy, passed in Fairfax County, Virginia in 1971, mandated that developers of more than 50 units of multi-family housing provide 15 percent of their units at prices that were affordable to residents within 60 to 80 percent of median income. In 1973, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned the ordinance, asserting that it was a “taking” of property rights without fair compensation. (See Fairfax County v. Degroff) Nonetheless, in 1973 nearby Montgomery County, Maryland, passed a “moderately priced dwelling unit” ordinance, which required developers of more than 50 residential units to set aside 12.5 to 15 percent of total units, dispersed throughout the property and available to families with 50 to 80% of the area median income. It is still active as of 2014.

The Montgomery County, Maryland ordinance is the oldest in America. But California, with over one hundred ordinances and 30 years of experience, has the most familiarity with inclusionary zoning. The Bay Area standard bearer is Palo Alto, which first instituted their program in 1973. Today, more than 100 communities in California have similar zoning statutes. Nationally, the ordinances can be found in Colorado, New Jersey, and Oregon, amongst other states.

Controversy

In whatever guise — voluntary or mandatory; with incentives or none at all — the use of inclusionary zoning schemes to procure affordable housing is deeply controversial. Municipal governments love these ordinances because affordable housing units are made, and for-profit developers are forced to pay their fair share. Next, eligible residents lucky enough to live in one of the new units receive a place to call home at a below-market price. Conversely, developers, economists, and pro-growth activists see inclusionary zoning as a straightforward tax on development that adds to construction costs and stunts supply. As total construction falls, the price of market-rate housing increases, and the whole housing market is grossly distorted.

Next in this series, we discuss the argument of each opposing side in this contentious debate.

Jerrell Whitehead is a former Research Fellow of the Sightline Institute. He is a Bill & Melinda Gates Scholar, and earned his Master’s (MPhil) and PhD in economic and social history from the University of Cambridge. Thanks for research assistance must be extended to A-P Hurd of Touchstone Corporation, Kayla Schott-Bresler of the Housing Development Consortium, and Esther Handy, legislative aide to Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien.

More on the Impacts of Proposed Microhousing Legislation

Linkage Fees: Will Seattle Start the San Francisco Death Spiral

The Seattle City Council is at it again. Councilmember Mike O’Brien wants a “linkage fee” on all new development in Seattle to raise money for subsidized housing. This new tax being discussed today in the Planning, Land Use, and Sustainability (PLUS) Committee is supposed to lower rents. When have adding fees and costs to something that is increasingly scarce suddenly caused its price to drop? Linkage fees are part of a chain reaction effect of complaints about high rents, followed by the declaration of an emergency, policies imposed that will act to raise prices, followed by another round of yelling about rising prices, with more policy that higher prices. This is what I call the San Francisco Death Spiral, a city with rampant housing inflation and where the supply of housing is 100,000 units behind demand and even billions of dollars in subsidies won’t help.

What is Mike O’Brien proposing to solve perceived rent increases? He wants to impose a tax of anywhere from $8 to $22 per square foot for any new construction in Seattle. So a 10,000 square foot development in Capitol Hill, for instance, would pay a fee of $120,000 to $150,000. As we pointed out when we were asking to keep microhousing out of the design review process, all the extra fees just end up getting folded into rents. There is no other way to make up the costs. No, taking less “profit” isn’t an option, because lenders and investors set Net Operating Income (NOI). When the ratio of costs to income goes up, banks and investors expect it to be off set with more income: that means higher rents.

When projects don’t pencil out because the rents get too high (yes, that happens) then projects won’t get built. Some projects just won’t be able to charge rents high enough to offset O’Brien’s tax. That means fewer units, less supply, and, yes, higher prices.

But wait, say housing tax advocates, the fee will lower the value of the land. So if that 10,000 square foot parcel was selling for $1,000,000 the price will go down (boom!) to $850,000. The landowner, according to O’Brien and his paid consultant, will just lower her price exactly the same amount as the fee. Problem solved. She loses the money, the builder can build the same project and the lower land price off sets the fee so rents don’t go up.

Anyone who actually works in real estate chuckles and shakes their head at this idea. Most say, “it just doesn’t work like that.” Owners of land will not just lower their asking price by 12 to 15 percent. Prices for land are like all other prices: negotiable. If it’s too high or low the transaction won’t happen.

But let’s take a trip down the Yellow Brick Road with O’Brien. What if his tax lowers land a values?

First of all, many sellers simply won’t sell. If my property with a parking lot on it just lost 15 percent of it’s value, why not just leave it a parking lot. After all, the income from selling parking is good money. If buyers all demand a discount there’s nothing that O’Brien can do to make me sell. So what could have been a bunch of new housing units just disappeared. That means less supply and, drumroll, higher prices. Rimshot.

And get this, because our state applies taxes to the total value of land in a taxing district, O’Brien’s tax doesn’t just raise rents, put a damper on housing production, but it also raises everyone else’s property taxes, including angry, entitled, single-family home owners fighting growth. You’d think a policy that simultaneously lowered people’s property values and increased their property taxes would have everyone up in arms. But this seems lost on everyone, especially the people suggesting the policy.

Here’s how it works in Washington, where we use a “budget based” system for property tax. If the budget of a taxing district is $100,000 and it’s splitting the property tax it assess among $1,000,000 in value, each dollar of value pays $.10 in taxes. A property worth $5,000 would pay $500 in property taxes.

When O’Brien’s scheme lowers property values an average of 15 percent, it would look more like this: $100,000 tax divided among $850,000 in value, or about 11.8 cents on the dollar of each dollar of value. The property tax for the same property would be $501.50 (this is discounting the original value to $4,250 and applying a new rate of .118 cents on the dollar.

Doesn’t sound like much does it? But that small increment when applied to a more real world value, like an $850,000 craftsman in Wallingford adds up (i.e. $2,500 per year). Is that O’Brien’s goal? To raise everyone’s property taxes? He’d say no, but his argument leads there. And guess where rental properties find the money to offset the higher property taxes impact on their operating costs? Yes, you guessed if, higher rents.

So, taken together, O’Brien’s proposal

• boosts costs for new housing;
• raises rents for new housing;
• raises property tax rates for everyone;
• raises rents for all renters as property taxes go up;
• lowers property values which disincentivizes new housing which constrains supply, which means higher rents; and
• increase risks, costs, rents, and time to market for all housing, which isn’t coal trains or cigarettes, but a good thing.

So there you have it, The San Francisco Death Sprial: more rules, fees, punitive measures against new housing with resulting higher prices, rising demand, lower supply, which leads to higher prices, which increases the calls for more rules, fees, and punitive measures, which raises prices, which means more inflationary rules.

Perhaps we Seattlites can warm our homes this rainy winter in the glow of the inflationary furnace created by these policies while we warm our progressive insides with blame for greedy developers and landlords for “sky rocketing rents.” We can invite the City Council to bring the marshmallows and graham crackers.