There is a pretty damning report by Daniel Person at the Seattle Weekly that found the City, and in particular the Mayor, cooked the books on the impacts of the $15 minimum wage

To review, the timeline seems to have gone like this: The UW shares with City Hall an early draft of its study showing the minimum wage law is hurting the workers it was meant to help; the mayor’s office shares the study with researchers known to be sympathetic toward minimum wage laws, asking for feedback; those researchers release a report that’s high on Seattle’s minimum wage law just a week before the negative report comes out.

I wish I could be shocked, but it isn’t surprising. Remember when Tom Rasmussen and Sally Bagshaw wrote to the Mayor saying that we needed to build 6,000 units of subsidized housing for a decade to solve the “housing crisis.” They said,

To reach 60,000 – 85,000 units, we must increase our supply by over 6,000-8,500 units of affordable housing annually for the next ten years if we are to make room for the people who want to live and work in our community. If we want to extend that period to twenty years, we need 3,000-4000+ units annually to reach our goal. This will require new approaches.

If it wasn’t for some quick analysis of the City’s shoddy work, those crazy numbers (the entire housing economy produced around 4,000 units; that’s the entire production!) might have stuck. The City tipped the scale by not counting existing subsidized units and voucher programs.

The City has betrayed common sense and is now just manufacturing data to prop up bad policy. It’s a pretty disgusting mess at City Hall. I’m not sure how these people sleep at night.

You can read Person’s whole story for more, but the truth isn’t the only victim. The City’s bad policies and bad data are propping up the runaway train of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) and the real victims are people who will see their housing costs going up and up while the City makes things up to explain why builders are to blame. Just another day at the office for bureaucrats at the City.