Seattle

"The first 15 apartments will rent to households earning 30% of area median income or less, about $34,500 for a single person."

Good news! Looks like rent-seeking by the public is less harsh ;->

Yep, $61 million dollars for a 150 unit building that's practically waterfront, downtown.

~$400,000 per unit.

So at that rate, you got what, 30, 40% of Seattleites seriously rent overburdened?

Well ok, we can solve that problem for uh... around $162 billion dollars, with this approach.

The tax reveune for this program is, this year, about $150 million. So we'll have this home affordability problem figured out in around a century, sounds great!

Err, wait a minute:

The social housing developer has promised not to displace any current tenants, so change will happen through roughly 10 existing vacancies and then through expected renter turnover in the coming months.

Oh so... ok then. Maybe more like a couple of centuries for this approach to work, for the currently existing Seattle.

... this is a fucking joke.

This is a payoff to existing real estate owners that are in more debt than they want to admit.

The social housing developer declined to disclose the value a seller-commissioned appraisal assigned the building. King County values the property at about $54.5 million. (Valuations for property tax purposes are typically lower than what buildings may sell for on the open market.)

Yes, they indeed typically are for multi unit buildings, because fraud is indeed rampant and normalized and literally institutionalized.

Does uh, do your own home assements and valuations follow that 'rule of thumb' too?

No, probably not, unless your house is in Medina or Laurelhurst or Queen Anne.

Maybe somebody could target that difference with some legal changes and reforms, I dunno.

This is an incredibly unserious attempt to actually address housing affordability problem, that people seem to take seriously, for some reason.

Why not just tax the fuck out of any building that offers any unit for rent above 3x median household income?

You know, have the rich pay?

Instead of the other way around where the city pays them?