Bend has implemented a lot of strategies to encourage affordable housing, but it’s flirting again with a bad idea: lower fees on smaller homes.

Charging lower city fees for smaller homes sounds intuitively right. Look slightly deeper, though, and it doesn’t make sense.

The idea scheduled for discussion this week by the city’s affordable housing committee is to have tiered system development charges.

If anything gets confusing about government, it’s SDCs. They combine jargon, hidden taxes and arcane calculations of future infrastructure needs. But basically SDCs are a way to pay for water, sewer, roads and parks to support growth without increasing property taxes. SDCs are fees put on new development. So build a new house, and SDC fees are charged by the city and the park district. The city sets the fees for water, sewer and roads. The Bend Park & Recreation District makes its own decision about park SDCs.

In Bend the fees come to about $5,000 for water, $4,500 for sewer, $5,000 for roads and $7,000 for parks. Those values are derived from calculations the city and the park district do every few years about needs for future infrastructure to accommodate an additional home. Remember that, because it’s important.

The fees drive up the cost of housing. On smaller, less-expensive homes, they have a larger proportional impact on the cost of the home. “I just don’t see why a 12,000-square-foot house should pay the same as a 4,000-square-foot house,” Kathy Austin, a member of the city’s affordable housing committee, said last year.

Among the many suggestions the city has discussed are charging SDCs based on square footage, lot size or number of bedrooms. Water and sewer could be charged based on the number of faucets or toilets.

Remember, though, SDCs pay for the marginal increase that one additional home puts on the city’s water, sewer, road and park needs. And the simple fact is that a bigger home does not necessarily put more burden on the city’s infrastructure capacity. The city water and sewer pipes are the same size, no matter how big the home. Actual usage costs come in a bill every month. The city also doesn’t need to build bigger, better roads for people who live in big houses.

Bend should stop trying to charge bigger homes fees to account for impacts they don’t produce.