Chris Persons at Capitol Hill housing (who I have sparred with before) has a peculiar post called, “Doing the Math on Homelessness and Housing,” which needs a rewrite I think. I only point it out because the headline claims to “do the math,” and Persons math appears to be wrong and misleading. Let’s take it apart real quick.

Persons writes this:

Let’s take a look at the math. The cost of building a single unit of apartment housing in Seattle depends on a lot of factors, but $200,000 is a reasonable estimate.  At that price, housing the estimated 10,000 homeless people in Seattle would cost $2 billion, well beyond what Bill [Hobson] predicted in 2014. The sad truth is that homelessness has only grown since 2014 and the cost of building has skyrocketed. That’s the price of our inaction.

Persons estimate of $200,000 doesn’t pass the red face test, especially for “affordable” housing built using subsidies and low income housing tax credits. Try more like $300,000. Taking the proposal for Capitol Hill Station as an example, where the approved proposal has 418 units at a cost of $124 million. That’s roughly $296,650 per unit. And we can argue about that all day. But the bottom line is that almost all estimates for projects in Seattle have a much higher per unit cost that cited by Persons. I’d love to know how much Capitol Hill Housing paid per unit for it’s projects, though. In my own short stint as a affordable housing developer I discovered that 43 units in Des Moines, with much lower land costs, our units were still more like $275,000 per unit.

So that isn’t a reasonable estimate.

Along with Persons faulty numbers is faulty reasoning. Think about it. Do we need to build brick and mortar housing for every single person who is homeless right now? How long would that take? How much money would it cost to operate those buildings? Who’d get that money? The answer to that last question is obvious: organization like Persons’. And what about the high transaction and labor costs embodied in the cost associated with building units? Can Persons and his colleagues address those?

The biggest issue I’ve heard from homeless advocates is not that everyone needs a one bedroom apartment, but that they need shelter options tonight. They also need to be protected from a Mayor who has essentially declared being homeless illegal and is now engaging in a process of “sweeping” away the problem. I think it’s unconscionable at this time to be banging the drum for funds for units when someone who is sleeping in a car or tent is facing being dislocated by police action. See Tim Harris’ column about this.

Then Persons says that there are 10,000 homeless people in Seattle. Um, no there isn’t. Try more like 2,942.

And the price of our inaction? Persons and his colleagues at the Housing Development Consortium have been very active. They managed to get the Mayor to agree to a Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) proposal with no private developers at the table from outside of downtown. Oddly, however, the Mayor’s big pitch about inclusion (“developers will have to pay a penalty if they don’t build affordable units) is really a shell game. It’s all about generating fees. The Seattle Times caught this not too long ago when it reported that only about 150 inclusionary units would be created by MIZ, with none downtown or South Lake Union.

The truth is that the non-profit housing lobby is incredibly powerful. They don’t want you to know that. Instead, they want to use bad math, homelessness, and the perception that they have few resources to funnel more cash into their coffers. I’m the only person in town who will go on the record saying this and, believe me, it gets me into a lot of trouble. But I also think when “facts” are put into the public realm that aren’t facts someone needs to challenge them. I guess I’m that someone. I would suggest that Persons correct his post and at least get number right even if he insists on suggesting that we build thousands of units of housing with money squeezed out of private development when what many people need is a solution today.