Letter of the Week
This week’s feature letter is short and sweet. Thanks for the editorial haiku, Mickey.
Supporting the cost of development fees for builders sounds like a swell idea. Not unlike subsidizing gas prices so people can drive farther and faster as the cup overflows ever more abundantly for Arabian princes and oil speculators. We need more vacant housing at least as much as we need more air pollution.
Mickey O., Redmond
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2008.
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Right On, Mickey O.! Let the bastards learn the ol’ Buddhist maxim: You get what you create…or…Be Here Now… What is Now, daddy? A vacant house in the middle of nowhere…
I get a bit misty eyed when I think of how developers are getting poorer by the day and how they want to now pass that buck onto the tax payers as if we are supposed to feel sorry for them. Total BS. We owe them nothing and we should raise the fees to twice this amount to fend off more houses being built. Any developer who believes in the “field of dreams” concept is a moron. Build the fields and they will come is a joke. We are already sitting on a ton of inventory as it is that is unsold and people are losing their homes by the hundreds due to no jobs, our economy was rigged by Bush and his friends at Fannie Mae who spent 650 million dollars on lobbying to prevent government from regulating their activities and now we are paying for it to bail them out.
I share the point of view of the letter writer and the two commenters. When this issue was before council and prior to their vote, I wrote to some councilors to share my point of view with them. I hope more will write to councilors as issues arise because that’s where we need to have the message heard. I heard back from Mr. Gramlich, who in my view is doing a very good job on council and does a great job of explaining his positions and how he came to them. My interaction with him made me better understand how the councilors “got there” and that the financial risk is more limited than I thought it to be. That said, we agree to disagree because I think council was wrong to allow developers to delay payments of SDC fees.