relax.
it's just
Capitalism cum
Housing as Commodity

gotta expect a little
fallout collateral Damage
mass die-offs etc in return for
Making America Safe Again for
our Profiteers. sans them, Where'd
We even BE? underfoot in tents most likely

the Lucky ones, anyways.
mind your Steps.

gated communities:
good or bad?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSZf0yIx1ec&ab_channel=Rush-Topic

Oh Dear, we have resorted to compassion babble to sell this poorly thought out I-135.

Wasn't Obama care going to solve all these problems with our medical system and insurance... low cost, better care and conditions for this industry. What happened? Oh ... that's right it didn't happen ... in fact its far, far worse.

They do an interview with a person doing their medical residency, get their opinion on paying rent, spin it up to a broad based support and slap a picture of the nurses protesting for higher wages.

I wonder if these medical students in residency will weep when they are pulling down $250,000 in salary.... will they still decry the housing issue behind their gated communities.

Next UP in the compassion babble series -- Won't somebody think of the children?

This highlights the problem with I-135. A medical resident at the R9 level is making 93% of the current median household income for Seattle. It's crazy to subsidize housing for persons this well off while we still have thousands of people living in tents.

I'm a little confused by the article/some of the comments. My understanding was that the mixed-income model was in part to allow the units to gain surplus revenue from some units which helps subsidize others. This was given as one of the reasons to support the initiative in the Inside/Out debate, in rebuttal to the accusation that this would drain funds from other projects. It would make sense to me if the threshold for subsidized housing in this program is not in the exact same place as in currently existing grants, but at some point the numbers need to flip.

Ok, I looked at the text. I looked at it a few weeks ago but nothing jumped out at me as notably objectionable so I didn't remember much of the details. There's not any sort of complicated structure for how subsidies work, it just says that rent can be no more than 30% of income. So if the market rate falls within that 30% figure, the PDA can charge full price. The fact that units up to 120% of median income are available doesn't mean that all units are subsidized. According to the census, median income is 105k. 30% of this is 31.5k, which means 2,600 a month. Also according to the census, median gross rent is 1,800. This fits well within the allocated budget without subsidy.

@7: “…accusation that this would drain funds from other projects.”

That accusation remains valid. I-135 would create and sustain a new housing bureaucracy, nothing more. It contains no funding mechanism for actually building any housing. The only way for this new bureaucracy to get money would be to have elected officials re-allocate funds from other projects. This is why CM Morales says she’ll “…work standing up the social housing developer if voters pass the initiative…”; she’d have to redirect funds which has been appropriated for other purposes. (https://www.thestranger.com/news/2023/02/01/78842231/seattle-city-council-member-tammy-morales-announces-reelection-campaign)

Government funding is required to bootstrap the process, but cross-subsidization can make it sustainable independently in the ideal case, or sustainable with less public funding in the less ideal case, making it a more efficient (in terms of government spending) way to build & maintain social housing. The Family Housing Fund, which has been developing in Minneapolis & St Paul for more than 40 years, notes that cross-subsidization works best "in strong markets with high market rents and/or home prices." (https://www.fhfund.org/report/use-cross-subsidies-to-support-mixed-income-communities/#) That sounds a lot like Seattle to me.