Dump the "but for"

 The City of Topeka says we have a housing crisis. Their own updated housing study (released September 2026) says the city needs 4,220 additional housing units over the next 20 years — roughly 210 units a year. Median home values jumped 63% between 2019 and 2025. Rents are up. Inventory is tight. As of the June 2026 Point-in-Time count, 460 people in Topeka/Shawnee County were still experiencing homelessness.

So how is the city responding?

By writing checks to Columbia Capital Management totaling approximately $1.85 million in municipal advisory and consulting fees across 95 invoices dating back more than a decade. Of that, $136,500 was specifically for RHID consulting — nine separate invoices, eight of them at $16,000 and one at $8,500, for projects including Riverstone (Meier’s Place), Sherwood Village Park, Union at Tower District, Project View, 3D Homes, Johnson-Betts Meadows, and Windward Estates.

These aren’t small administrative fees. They’re the price of admission to the incentive machine. The city’s RHID policy (Resolution 9695 and earlier versions) requires a “but-for” analysis showing that, without the tax increment subsidy, the project could not proceed or could not meet the city’s housing goals. Private developers must pay for this analysis. The consultant who typically runs it is Columbia Capital. The same firm that has billed the city itself nearly two million dollars over the years.

Here’s the problem: the Kansas Legislative Post Audit has described the core “but-for” question as inherently unknowable. You cannot reliably prove a counterfactual — what a developer would or would not have done in the absence of a subsidy. The city wrote the rule, requires private applicants to jump through it (and pay a consultant to produce the paperwork), and then exempts its own projects and certain preferred partners when convenient.

Meanwhile, actual housing production remains well below the levels the city’s own study says are needed. Shawnee County’s new housing permits have lagged peer counties for years. The city is now floating a sales-tax increase for an affordable housing trust fund and homeless services while continuing to route substantial public money through the same consultant-driven incentive process.

$136,500 in RHID consulting fees. Nine invoices. That is enough to cover the hard costs of multiple modest single-family homes or a meaningful number of units of genuinely affordable housing. Instead, it bought more analysis of whether developers needed more analysis of whether they needed subsidies.

If the housing crisis is real — and the city’s own numbers say it is — then the priority should be removing barriers to building, not adding layers of paid ritual that primarily benefit the consultants who administer them. The “but-for” test does not create housing. It creates billable hours. And right now, Topeka appears more committed to the latter than the former.