A recent story about Seattle’s latest incoherent response to growth and housing policy starts out, “Emotions have been running high in Seattle over the Showbox..” True. Emotions and not much else. The story in Curbed reports on the failure in court by the City of Seattle to defend it’s efforts to zone the location of the Showbox into oblivion, making it part of the Pike Place Market Historic District and thus off limits to serious redevelopment. For what it is worth, here’s what is really happening here and why it shows how Seattle’s government and community are behaving like Mr. Magoo when it comes to growth; the difference is that Mr. Magoo was funny to watch, while Seattle’s bumbling is tragic.

The Showbox is an old brick building. There is simply nothing remarkable about it’s structure or construction. I haven’t read anyone enraptured by the architecture, design, or materials. What we have seen is a lot about the use of the building and what has gone on there over the last 80 years. I’m a person who will travel miles out of my way to drive on a road debated in the 19th century and finally built in the 20th. Yes, a road. So I don’t need to be lectured on the importance of “what happened there” as the basis for preservation.

For me, the question is about the nexus of that particular place and what happened and then, most importantly, can the location be practically maintained for that purpose. In this case, sure, if someone wanted to buy the Showbox as a venue and keep it going, I’d have no problem letting that owner use it for that purpose rather than housing. It would be her private property to use as she wished within the limits of the law.

But here’s another fact left out of the reporting of this story consistently: the old brick building is an unreenforced masonry building, or more technically a URM. That means the building is on a list of buildings that are hazardous in an earthquake, an event that is inevitable according to scientists. So if our nostalgic owner bought the building, determined to carry on the tradition as a music venue, she’d have to fix the building. That would cost a lot of money. How much? Hard to say, but most owners of these buildings tell me that to meet safety requirements does two things, costs a lot of cash and takes the building out of service.

I’m a philosophy major with a graduate degree in religious studies. But what I do know about business is that income for a business must meet or exceed costs. The problem with this business, this use, is that the receipts at the door are not going to match the costs of the upgrade. They never will. Adding more seats or capacity to the venue and even boosting ticket prices won’t work because once capacity is increased the new requirements for seismic safety would kick in. Our new owner, determined to operate the venue as a theater would have a choice: shut the venue down and cut loses or spend millions on the improvements and operate it at a loss. If she’s a billionaire, maybe that makes sense.

The economics and seismology just won’t work here. Ever. Why do you think the Showbox business opened a new venue in the Duwamish. My guess is that anyone with a knowledge of operating a venue like this with a look at the books would conclude that the costs of running the venue — even if it was a perfectly safe building — are higher than the economic potential. That is, the location needs work no matter what. Other theater venues like the 5th Avenue and the Paramount have undergone similar rehabs to keep up with the times, but they did so with significant subsidies and as non-profits in some cases.

So forget about Amazon and growth and the gauzy “vanishing Seattle” sentiment, this venue won’t work, period. If the advocates are successful, it is quite likely the business part of the site will leave. Nobody will take the lease and we’ll have a dead building like the Lusty Lady was for many, many years. Unless someone is willing to operate at the venue with it’s constraints and lose money, or make huge improvements to meet URM requirements (and probably lose money), the building will be, as I’ve pointed out before, a padlocked pile of bricks with a storied past.

The best option for the site is to create a memorial for it, knock it down, and build as much housing there as possible.

But we can’t even quite get that right. One Councilmember came close, Abel Pacheco.

While Pacheco said he “appreciate[s] the nostalgia” surrounding the Showbox, he believes expanding the historic district is the wrong tool for preservation.

Correct about the sentiment and the policy.

But wrong on the reasons why.

He said there are “major tradeoffs” to preserving the Showbox, including losing out on the opportunity to have the 442 apartment units Onni planned for the site, in addition to “up to $5 million in affordable housing payments” through the MHA program, which exchanges additional building size for either on-site affordable housing or payments toward affordable housing. (The historic district is exempted from MHA rezones.)

No, the $5 million in fees from the extortive Mandatory Housing Affordability scheme don’t rationalize the demolition of the Showbox. That’s absurd economics and not worth the “trade off.” Why? Because $5 million dollars will buy, are you sitting down, about 14 housing units maybe 5 years from now. Maybe. That figure is based on an average construction cost of about $350,000 per unit. Will that price go up or down by the time the money is collected, processed by the office of housing, and then inefficiently dispersed to some non-profit? Who knows. I wish people would stop using their purely political embrace of MHA as a rationale. It’s as silly as nostalgia being used to rationalize keeping a pile of bricks. Meanwhile, hundreds of dangerous buildings wait for an earthquake to happen while the City argues with itself over this one building.

On it goes. Yet another episode of Seattle Magoo Takes On Growth and Preservation. Oh well. Sad! While you’re waiting for the next episode of the Showbox drama you can watch an episode of the original here. Enjoy!