I said earlier this year that 2015 will be the Year of the City Builder. With that intention, we will start a regular feature here on Smart Growth Seattle that will  showcase the human beings that do the work of building our city. You’ll notice the image I chose. Whenever I am talking with people who are wary of new growth or who have genuine concerns about development, I will often point out that, “there is no Monopoly Man with a top hat and cane running away with bags of gold!” It always brings a smile or a laugh. The truth is that many, many good and smart people in Seattle think there really is a Rich Uncle Pennybags behind new growth.

We all know that this isn’t true. If anything, even investors and banks who finance local building are simply representing their investors, hard working people with deposits or pension funds. Builders and developers typically finance their projects, borrowing money and paying it back over time, with interest on top, using funds generated from operations. Those operating funds are called, usually, rent. Sometimes in the single-family market that payback comes after the sale of a house, usually from the bank or lender who is financing a new home for a buyer household. The whole system of housing is really an interdependent web of real people building and borrowing and lending and buying housing. George Bailey explains it best in the classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

There is no Rich Uncle Pennybags! It’s harder to hold a grudge against the people at a work site or the people working the loan desk at a bank or even the developer assistant putting numbers together in a pro forma than a fantastical mustachioed villain. The more we can get the message out that we’re all in this together, the more we can solve the challenges of how we grow sustainably in a collaborative and innovative way rather than through punitive measures like linkage taxes and impact fees. These kinds of fees hurt real people, not profits. When costs and the difficulty of building go up, so do rents and the cost of housing over all.

We’ve already highlighted the God Pods, a microhousing project that was donated to the Union Gospel Mission. We’re looking forward to sharing more stories about the people building our city.

I am grateful for the help of Marisa Rodriguez who’s by line you’ll be seeing on many of these stories. Marisa is an active MBA member with a strategic marketing and writing business who helps companies increase sales through marketing communications. She’ll be finding stories and writing about a variety of people building the city. If you have any ideas please let us know. You can e-mail me at Roger@seattleforgrowth.org.