UPDATE: Will Carless of VOSD says through email that Kelly Davis got her rebuttal story wrong. So please hold off any judgments until I post a followup. If he’s right, then I screwed up.
— Bradley
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Journalists aren’t known for their facility with numbers. After all, we’re just English majors who couldn’t find anything else to do with our lives. But Kelly Davis at San Diego CityBeat demonstrates fierce number-crunching mojo. A recent article of hers on affordable housing deserves to be read to experience this skill in action.
Davis’ article meticulously dissected a Voice of San Diego investigation by Will Carless into affordable housing. That article said affordable housing is wildly overpriced compared to market rates. I’m economically sympathetic to that argument, but Davis convinced me that the matter isn’t as black and white as the VOSD article made it appear. She precisely detailed questionable assumptions and faulty figures.
The VOSD piece begins by profiling the Estrella del Mercado, which Carless calculates to cost $542 per square foot. He compares that with the $225 per square foot cost an unnamed developer is supposedly paying to build “top-shelf apartments.” And another anonymous developer is building “upscale” apartments for $275 a square foot.
VOSD’s use of anonymously-sourced numbers is a red flag to me — I think using anonymous sources is poor journalism. Readers can’t judge the credibility of anonymous sources, or even know if they exist.
While Davis didn’t raise that issue, she pointed out that Carless didn’t factor in common spaces such as a 5,140 square-foot playground, in computing the per-square-foot cost of the Estrella del Mercado apartments. With that square footage included, the cost drops to $509 per square foot. Carless said he thought common areas should be included in the square footage, and as Davis notes, a playground is a common area.
Davis relentlessly continues on putting the VOSD article under a microscope, not just for its numbers, but for its assumptions about affordable housing. Davis says affordable housing has other goals built into it than just providing housing, and that needs to be taken into consideration. And the VOSD article contains more of what I regard as inexplicable apples-to-oranges math, as Davis demonstrates:
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The least expensive project on the list is Phase II of a transitional-housing project at Veterans Village of San Diego (VVSD) for vets who’ve graduated from VVSD’s treatment program. Carless took the total cost of the project, $9.1 million, and divided it by the total number of beds, 112, to get $81,290 a bed.
But he treated Phase III of the same project—96 short-term-stay beds, split up among 16 units with three bedrooms and three bathrooms each—differently, dividing the total cost by 16 units. This put the project, near the top of the list at $436,038 per unit. (The total cost of Phase III includes 125 parking spaces that will serve the whole VVSD facility.) A redevelopment agency staffer fact-checked Carless’ numbers before the story ran and pointed out that if he was measuring one part of the project by number of beds, he should use the same measure for the other, but Carless stuck with 16.
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As for what I think about affordable housing in general, let me be clear: I still think the cheapest and easiest way to lower the price of housing is to allow more of it to be built, letting market forces take over. But advocating general principles is one thing, and doing good journalism another. Davis makes a convincing, data-driven argument that the VOSD article overstated the case against affordable housing in San Diego.
While Davis didn’t refute all the VOSD article, she proved enough of it wrong that I find it unreliable. As a news organization whose only asset is credibility, VOSD needs to correct that article’s inaccuracies.
What’s most impressive to me is the disparity in time and resources between SD CityBeat and VOSD. The latter says its July 22 story was the result of a three-month investigation. Davis’ rebuttal appeared scarcely a month later, on Aug. 24. And from the look of it, Davis did more work than VOSD.
So I salute Davis and SD CityBeat for a fine piece of quality journalism.
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(DISCLAIMER: This article represents my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times).