Affordable housing developer in Seattle, Tacoma and Portland. Dad, volunteer board member, aspiring pillar of the community
Seattle, WA
Joined December 2008
- Tweets10.6K
- Following671
- Followers2.7K
- Likes10.5K
I’m calling the bottom right now.
The CEO says the firm will focus on acquisitions and asset management for its $5.9 billion portfolio. bizjournals.com/seattle/news…
This affects every homeowner and renter, as it will cause their property taxes to go up significantly.
Office makes up a big chunk of real estate value. If it falls by 2/3 then the amount of the tax lost will be spread out across all other property.
That’s how it works.
Downtown Seattle's decline is impossible to ignore...
The city's PLUMMETING commercial real estate valuations tell the story
Just look at these recent deals:
Roosevelt Commons: Bought for $157M in 2019, sold for $27M - an ~83% discount
901 Fifth Avenue: $304M in 2019, sold for $48M - an ~84% discount
Plaza 600: Valued at $97M in a 2019, sold for $12.5M - a MASSIVE ~87% decline
And it's not just office buildings. Retail centers and hotels have been DECIMATED over the last several years
Seattle was truly one of the great American cities but has been destroyed in recent years due to obvious reasons
How does downtown Seattle recover from this?
Stay tuned and follow for more commercial real estate deals trading at massive discounts
Working on choosing models for the accounting factory and running a bake off but it’s hard because opus keeps exposing mistakes in my answer key on the harder problems
benmaritz retweeted
Coincidence or connected? You tell me.
After 40 of my campaign signs were vandalized with "slumlord" stickers, a post circulated online claiming my management company was tied to over 300 code violations.
Here are the facts straight from the city’s records:
The public records request was submitted by an official tied directly to my opponent’s campaign.
Out of over 300 violations, only 18 occurred while my company was involved with the properties—with some citations on the list dating all the way back to when I was in 8th grade.
Those 18 were typical resident infractions like parking violations and improper dumping (like discarded mattresses), not building or property negligence.
Is this really a coincidence, or a coordinated effort to smear my campaign, business, and reputation?
Let's stick to the facts.
This isn't just a problem for evil developers -- if you can't sell an existing building in Tacoma, nobody will build a new one. No sales/B&O tax on new construction for the city. No new homes to compete with old ones and drive down rents.
These charts are such incredible nonsense. It’s really no different than trying to make a ranking of “best humans ever”
Tho @viviansong would do quite well on that.
Open weights models fall further behind in v5. The leader, Kimi K3.1 Pro (weights not yet released), scores 46, 12 points behind the leader, compared with a 3-point gap in v4.3. Of models with released weights, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (max) and GLM-5.3 (max) score highest at 32, and Claude Haiku 5.5 (max) outscores all of them.
The gap is widest on HLE-Diamond and Terminal-Bench-Science, where Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 37% and 34%, compared with 68% for Claude Opus 5.5 (max) and 63% for GPT-6 Astra (max).
The implications of this are
1) serving inference (renting out GPU) is a very good business today, better than, say, VM hosting (renting out CPU)
2) long term these two are likely to converge, meaning a crash in AI pricing
Very big ruling today from the appeals court on Seattle’s tenant protections. For the first time a court has basically said there is a limit to how far govt can go before it’s a “taking”
courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/8…
1/
