Forget It, Dawdy, It's Chinatown

Saturday we ran into Philip Dawdy sitting in front of Liberty. We were all blah blah affordable housing, blah blah CHHIP, but Dawdy was unimpressed. "What is that, 40 units?" he asked. "Why aren't you talking about what's happening with the Alaska Building?"

Alaska Building? We looked up Dawdy's 2005 Seattle Weekly story:

The mayor pointed due west of his City Hall office to the city-owned Alaska and Loman buildings. The Alaska Building currently houses some city offices. He explained that the city planned to sell the properties for "workforce housing." Together, the two buildings along First and Second avenues would house a few hundred people, tops.

Now the P-I reports (radio silence from the Seattle Times) that while the city took a $500,000 to $1,000,000 bath on the sale to Kauri Investments Ltd. and Ariel Development, what it's actually getting in return is a 160-room Marriott, not affordable housing. Per the P-I, "The developers realized about a year ago that the building was ideally structured for a hotel, said Kent Angier, president and CEO of Kauri Investments."

What went wrong? "We're giving up some money in return for what we expect will happen," said City Councilman Richard Conlin when the deal was going through. A city facilities representative argued that mandating housing would make the property even harder to sell. And besides: the developers had "put a significant amount of money into the housing option already. And for them to turn around at this point would be losing quite a bit of money."

Angier was surprised to hear that City Council members approved the deal knowing it would be worth less in order to encourage housing.

"The city never asked us for a commitment to put housing there, and we never made a commitment to put housing there," he said. "And it's not unusual to change course once you're under way with a building."

Repeat after us: the City Council's relevance is not in question. Okay, but what about negligence? It looks like Nickels and the City Council just lost up to $1 million of public money in a questionable real estate deal. Might that count as negligence?