Seattle woman can’t build housing without paying city $77k. Now she’s suing

The sad reality is that a lot of the people who shout the loudest about the problems of wealth and systemic inequality with their words, do very little or even the opposite with their actions.

There's probably similar psychology at play as to why it's common advice to not tell people about your personal goals. The act of proclaiming what you want to do gives you that little kick of dopamine that saps your motivation for actually doing it, making it less likely that you'll actually follow through. Waiting until after your accomplishment to share your success is much more effective.

In the case of moral virtue signalling, it seems like the act of proclaiming your virtue is much more likely to give you a feeling of moral license that makes you feel ok about acting immorally to serve your self interest.

In short, be suspicious of people who virtue signal too much, and judge them by their actions and results, not by their words or intent.

It seems like a complete waste of time to try to declare a political victory here.

They already need a highway expansion in Austin because of it

But in this case the city assessing a luxury tax for such a setup seems pretty reasonable.

Doesn’t want to pay anything—submit for an exception, or pay the Hollywood price to do what she wants.

I don’t see what’s unfair. It would be unfair if she could only build the larger building, and was required to have affordable units—or do nothing.

What _sucks_ is that while her and her family were dealing with these restrictions, there has been a world pandemic, and the economy took a swing towards inflation and higher interest rates.

The family is in a worse spot than if they had paid the 77k upfront.

I’m wondering why their story is getting amplified. I guess this is a turn against cities trying to create regulations promoting affordable housing.

The point of a Land Value Tax is that everyone gets taxed purely on the value of the land and none of the improvements. So adding more units would only decrease the per-unit tax you pay.

Seattle here is attempting the same thing in broad strokes by literally taxing underdevelopment - but it's clearly not as elegant of a solution

This is literally what the state is doing. They're loosening restrictions if you build affordable housing. They're not loosening restrictions across the board as the default would be to just build housing without any regard to affordability.