On ballots that went out last week, voters have two choices to make to determine the future of Seattle’s newest plan for housing.
The first is whether the developer should be funded at all. The next choice — regardless of the previous answer — is how.
Option 1A is with a new employer tax on all salaries over $1 million a year. Backers hope the 5% tax would raise as much as $50 million a year to be spent on buying and, eventually, developing housing that would be cost-controlled and owned by taxpayers.
Option 1B is to fund the developer with $10 million a year in existing city funding — specifically the city’s JumpStart tax on large corporations in Seattle.
… $50 million dollars a year?
Construction costs for a single unit of an apartment in Seattle average $300k, on the low end.
Thats about 160 to 170 units for $50 million dollars, if they’re all studios, less if there’s a mix with one bedrooms and two bedrooms.
So, if they’re buying existing apartment complexes or townhouses or something, maybe they can get that up to 200 units?
Meanwhile there are at least 16,000 homeless people in Seattle, and half of all housed Seattleites (380k ish) pay more than 30% of their income toward rent.
You’d need something like 100x or 1,000x or 10,000x this level of spending to make a meaningful impact, otherwise you’re just making the equivalent of a couple more Section 8 buildings with 8 year waiting lists.
Or, even better, additionally, massively tax landlords that don’t basically follow a rent control schedule, and emminent domain any buildings with landlords that won’t comply with a lower profit margin, and massively finance new construction of public housing construction, thus actually turning housing into a public good, instead of continuously using the language that implies that that is what your goal is while not doing anything even remotely approaching that.
Seattle has at least 70k households making below 80% AMI, about 45k households below 30% AMI.
AMI is about $120k.
For the 45k households making below 30% AMI, that means you need 45k units with rent at or below about $900 a month for them to not be rent overburdened (>30% rent to income ratio).
For the 25k between 30% and 80% AMI, that means you need 25k units with rent between $900 and $2,400.
Adding a max of 200 units at probably about $2.2k - $2.4k monthly rent does nothing.
I mean it is at least a start. Would you rather they just do nothing at all?
I’ve been getting that response for a decade every time I point out the true scale of problem of affordable housing, but sure, yeah, 1% of the solution is better than 0%.
I’m sure we will have properly means tested a solution for an entire 1% of the problem in 10 years, by the time that problem has grown worse and worse and worse, and then in another 10 years some other smug asshole will say 'Well we solved 1% of the problem!" and then I’ll spend 20 minutes looking up basic stats around the issue and found that some other place did something resembling my plan 10 years ago and it more or less solved 90% of the problem, but yep I guess 1% is better than 0%, so yep you are right, I’m an idiot.
I mean, who doesn’t love to waste political capital on ineffective solutions?
What really matters is being able to act morally superior and virtue signal that your ineffective policy is in some sense technically better than nothing by co opting the language of a real solution and closing the overton window enough that a real solution is linguistically unthinkable!
Let’s go, Seattle. Put our money where our mouths are. Tax the rich to help the poor, invest in infrastructure, be a sanctuary to the needy, all the good shit.
As a lower-upper-lower-middle-class DINK, I am more than willing to give up some more tax money to help. People making more than 10x what I do should feel the fucking same.
Harrell and the current Council aren’t going to do anything like that.
1A all the way.
@pelespirit I wish the people who keep saying “run the government like a business” meant “I want an accountable landlord”. Definitely a yes vote from me
