We say things. Today we say what a columnist said builders said, and then we count.

The column ran on Sunday, September 6, three days before the primary, under a headline in two sentences. The challenger says rent caps won't kill development. Builders disagree. We read it to find the builders.

There are three.

The first builds. David Baskin, fifty-five, came here at nine from the Soviet Union, grew up in South Providence, went to Classical, and has made a career of new builds and remodels in the city. He said a cap would likely make him shift potential Providence projects elsewhere, and that it pains him. He did not name a project. His better point was not about the cap: it was that banks cut what they will lend when the upside is capped. We will come back to that.

The second sells. Shannon Weinstein is a real estate agent and the director of the Rhode Island Coalition of Housing Providers, which is the landlords' association, which lobbied against the ordinance. She and her husband own two small properties and are delaying plans to add a few apartments to them. She also corrected the challenger on a point of fact — owners of one or two properties are exempt only if they live in one — and she was right.

The third owns. Joe Paolino is deferring a seventy-million-dollar conversion of the Amica building into apartments and hotel suites. His stated reason, in the column, is that occupancy at 100 Westminster is down because of remote work, so he would move his corporate tenants there and convert the emptied tower. Rent control is the shadow the columnist places over that decision; the decision as described is about offices. Asked whether he would cancel it if the challenger won, he said he would welcome a conversation. "The real estate community is the ally of the city," he told the columnist, "not the enemy."

On the other side of the ledger the challenger offered builders, unnamed, who met him at a café in Wayland Square about three multifamily homes they wanted to build, ran the numbers, and are proceeding. We cannot count those either.

So the census of builders who disagree is one, with unnamed projects. The largest deferral in the piece has a stated cause that is not the cap, and whether a conversion counts as new construction under the ten- and twenty-year exemptions is a question nobody in the column asked.

Which leaves Baskin's point, the only one that survives the exemptions. A twenty-year exemption on a thirty-year note leaves ten years under the cap, and a lender prices those ten years now. If that is true, it is true at the bank. Nobody called the bank.

We say things. We have said them.

— S. T.