Joshua McNichols at KUOW has done us all a great favor, creating a high quality interactive map of subsidized affordable housing in Seattle. Two things matter here. First, you can see that the housing units are all over the city. As I pointed out before, this flies in the face of the argument that somehow subsidized affordable housing is not where people work or close to transit. And the idea that there is segregation with the subsidized units only in a small part of the city is simply false. The second point is why: the Seattle Housing Levy and the Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) Program. These two programs do everything that inflationary inclusion, incentive, and linkage schemes claim to do, but really actually create lots of subsidized units without penalty to new housing.

This map should change the whole discourse on housing, shifting it away from efforts to penalize new housing to build subsidized affordable housing. Through a fair and widely shared property tax, the Levy creates thousands of units for people earning between 0 and 60 percent of Area Median Income (AMI), and the MFTE creates thousands of units for people earning between 60 to 80. Why not just improve these highly productive programs to meet Seattle’s housing need? Someone has to pay a penalty for making housing. It’s a terrible way of doing things, but that’s exactly what the Grand Bargain is, a scheme that essentially taxes and fees new housing to create subsidized units. We don’t need to punish people building new housing, we just need new housing and the Levy and the MFTE do that, all over the city, without adding any cost to new housing.