Have you seen those weird ads saying, “Enter your name into this site and hold your breath!” Or whatever. The idea is that by searching for your own name on the internet your deepest and most horrible secrets or those of others might come out. Welcome to the public disclosure request. The PDR as it is called isn’t as fast but sometimes it can be as troubling or satisfying depending on your point of view. I queried the Washington State Housing Finance Commission using my name as a search term seeking all public documents. I’m finding lots of good stuff. This is a bit of tease. I’ll post more.

A while back, I wrote about How Trump Might Drain The Low Income Housing Tax Credit Swamp. This post caused a lot of heart burn, which is, to use the vernacular, cute. Cute because there was never any chance anyone was going to listen to me; but boy it rattled people. So I’m going to share some of the behind the scenes chatter among the very wealthy lawyers and non-profits that happened because of that post.

Meanwhile check out this document, an e-mail from Marty Kooistra to Al Levine. Kooistra is the director of the Housing Development Consortium, or HDC, the group that has succeeded in getting the City of Seattle to use its muscle to extort hundreds of millions of dollars for his members. I hope the HDC sues me over that word, extort. I’d love an open debate on that word in relation to the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program. And Al Levine is a former executive at the Seattle Housing Authority. Both men are good people and, I believe, driven by the best intentions. Anyway, here’s their e-mail exchange about me.

Odd. I had lunch with Kooistra, one of his board members and mine years ago in an effort to find common ground on costs to build housing. For many months, one of his board members was invited to our regular meetings with City departments to talk about costs. I also published on my little read blog, a post by Kooistra and Rachel Meyers about how the legislature should put more money into the Housing Trust Fund. Kooistra has been bitter ever since.

And Al Levine. Here’s the e-mail I sent him in advance of sharing these documents widely — I mean in a place where there might be a few more readers.

Hello Al,
I’ve always liked and respected you and still do.

I’m going to start sharing the fruits of a public disclosure request that I made from the WSHFC.

You popped up! See the attached.

Help me understand how you reconcile all this. You know I’m right, don’t you. Marty does too.

Why can’t you folks just work with us to lower costs? Why do you insist on going after me? Why am I the problem and not zoning, and design review and all the other regulatory overreach? Why do you allow for profit groups like Pacifica and Beacon (not to mention contractors etc) to get more and more money and say nothing about that?

I really believe you are a good person and well intended. You’re probably at least 10 times smarter than me. What do I have to do to get your help instead of your opposition?

I need it. We need to turn this thing around. And if you forward this to your buddies with government accounts I may get my hands on it.

How about an honest and not passive aggressive answer?

I hope all is well with you, Al.

Roger–

Why do all this?

Well, as we speak all across this city and region there are people who are looking at their calendars and their bank account. Those people I am thinking of are wondering where the money is going to come from to pay for rent. These people live in public housing, non-profit housing, or for profit housing. What they share is a need for certainty, a certainty that many of us take for granted. For many others it is too late. They live in their car, or with an abusive partner, or outside.

Being liked and adulated has its special pleasures. Being loved and respected and listened to feels good. Making people unhappy and upset has its pleasures as well, especially when it is in the service of trying to motivate them to do the right thing, reduce housing costs across the whole economy and increase overall supply. Will this backfire on me? Will someone come after me one day? Probably. Nobody likes to be criticized, even on a little read blog on a dead end on the internet. But sleeping outside or not knowing when you’ll be outside isn’t fun either. We need to come together, set pride aside, and reduce regulatory overreach. Taxes are not the answer. Rules, regulations and fees won’t work either. We need more housing.

I’ll leave off with the Cesare Beccaria, paraphrased by John Adams at the trial where he defended British soldiers from an American mob:

[I]f, by supporting the rights of mankind and of invincible truth, I shall contribute to save from the agonies of death one unfortunate victim of tyranny, or of ignorance, equally fatal; his blessing and tears of transport, will be a sufficient consolation to me for the contempt of all mankind. Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments 42–43. See note 11 above; 1 JA, Diary and Autobiography 352–353