Speaking of Special Elections…

This one doesn’t have a clear R/D valence, like the Iowa election Erik posted out, but I wanted to give it a post in part because I want to vent my spleen a bit about how awful the current Seattle City Council is. If you’re a Seattle voter, you’ve probably received your ballot for the February 11 special election. (If you’re a typical Seattle voter, you probably haven’t opened it yet.) There’s not much here-a couple of school levy renewals and Propositions 1A and 1B, which regard a social housing initiative on something approximating the Vienna model. The basic idea, which seems to work reasonably well in Vienna and some other places, is that you have mixed income housing developments with some upfront costs covered by the social housing developer, in which rents would be based on the “no more than 30% of gross income” model and thus middle income renters would pay something closer to market rate, and instead of a portion of their rents making a profit for someone they’d subsidize lower income renters. This vote follows up on a successful 2023 initiative to create (but not fund) a Seattle Social Housing Development Board. The first vote is a yes-or-no “should we find this board some funding”? and the second vote, between 1A and 1B, is between alternative funding models and rules for how that funding should be spent. More on those below
The first bit of Seattle City Council anti-democratic manipulation explains why we’re holding this election now, and not back in November. Petitioners for I-137 (which became option 1A) submitted the necessary signatures in plenty of time to get their initiative on the general election ballot in November. But in order to make it the city council had to vote to certify it by a particular date. The dithered with the intention of postponing it, hoping that a low-turnout February election would produce a result more amenable to their liking. The second is the addition of the 1B option; under the guise of giving voters more choices and options, they’re attempting to muddy the waters and trick pro-social housing voters into effectively voting against it.
So what are 1A and 1B? 1A, proposed by the backers of the social housing scheme, imposes a 5% tax on employers for wages paid to employees making in excess of one million dollars a year (as in, any employer who pays all their employees less than a million dollars per year would owe nothing). In a testament to just how much money is sloshing around Seattle right now, this tax would be projected to raise about 50 million dollars a year. 1B, the “alternative funding model” proposed by the City Council, would simply take 10 million dollars a year of revenue from the Jumpstart tax earmarked for constructing low-income housing, and give it to the SHDB. Furthermore, it would require the “social housing” constructed with this paltry sum go to low income individuals only, essentially upending what was distinctive, and potentially sustainable, about the social housing model.
The electoral play is obvious: the Council wants this “social housing” to go away, but they know it’s likely to pass. The assumption is that no voters will then vote 1B, which I’m sure they overwhelmingly will. If they can keep the social victory to margins similar to 2023 (57-43), they only need to confuse something like 15-20% of pro-social housing voters into voting for 1B. Should yes/IB win, the SHDB will be set up to fail; not enough revenue to do anything meaningful and banned from using the funding model that makes their project distinctive and sustainable. So they “lose” the vote in that the social housing project ostensibly continues, but they win in the long run because it’s set up to fail.
A reminder: I wrote here back in 2020 about that Jumpstart tax passed by a much more progressive council. It imposed taxes on payroll for larger firms for employees earning in excess of (then) 150k, ranging from .8%-2.5% depending on the size of the firm and the amount earned. The highest threshold of 2.5% was constructed such that in primarily, if not exclusively, effected Amazon. This tax was structured as an emergency revenue provider in the short term, covering basic city services 2020-2022, since Seattle’s sales tax heavy general revenue sources were badly harmed by COVID. From 2026 on, Jumpstart revenue was mostly required to go toward affordable/low-income housing construction. From 2023-2025, the revenue was flexible; some of it must be used for affordable housing but some could still be used to cover budget shortfalls. Back in 2020, moderate/conservative forces in Seattle politics including then-Mayor Durkin, Amazon lobbyists, and the Chamber of Commerce, decried it as irresponsible progressive nonsense. Now, those forces fully control Seattle politics, and Jumpstart is saving their ass. Other sources of revenue have not recovered at the rate they’d hoped, while Jumpstart has dramatically exceeded revenue projections. They happily raided the affordable housing funds to cover budget shortfalls, rather than have to find additional revenue sources (which would infuriate their backers) or make catastrophic cuts to the city budget (which would infuriate voters). So in essence they’re proposing using revenue they never wanted the city to have to discredit a voter approved initiative they don’t support.
One thing to keep in mind about Seattle is that, relative to other wealthy, blue cities in California, New York, Massachusetts, etc, the “if you raise taxes on the rich they’ll just leave” argument is a bit weaker because unlike CA/NY/MA/IL, high earners in Washington have a relatively modest tax burden (low and medium earner tax burdens are among the highest, though: Washington has one of the most regressive state and local tax structures in the country). The dire predictions about second-order effects of the Jumpstart tax have obviously proved inaccurate; if high earners and the companies that employ them were fleeing in response it wouldn’t be exceeding revenue expectations dramatically! Similarly dire predictions about 1A are thus not particularly credible. There very likely remains a fair amount of room for Washingtonians and Seattleites to tax the wealthy without significantly risking an unwanted Tiebout-sorting outcome.
Readers will probably not be surprised to learn that I support a “yes/1A” vote an encourage any undecided Seattle voters to cast their vote thusly. Most of the political organizations and commentators I find myself in agreement with (The Urbanist, Publicola, Ron Davis) are strong supporters as well. I confess I’m somewhat less optimistic about this model than they are. For one thing, I’m not convinced the model they’ve developed will overcome the sclerotic inaction, excessive process, and proliferation of veto points that tends to bedevil progressive initiatives in blue cities, for one thing. There’s a bit of “everything bagelism” to the proposal that intensifies that worry; there’s much to admire about the commitment to passivehaus environmental standards discussed in the Urbanist link above, and in the long run it may save money, but it may also slow down getting this off the ground. I also worry, in my more pessimistic moments, that we may not have the degree of social trust necessary to entice the middle income renters, necessary for this project to work as intended, to choose social housing over market rate, in order to avoid proximity from poorer people. This fear is intensified by the some of the problems current affordable housing in Seattle is facing, as it’s in some cases being abandoned by normal working people because these of a disinclination to enforce rules like “pay your rent” and “don’t engage in violent conduct/sell drugs from your apartment.” I’m neither fatalistic these worries will sink the program or confident they won’t, but there are legitimate reasons for pessimism.
Despite that, I’m a strong, unambiguous “Yes/1A” voter despite these worries for a number of reasons. First, as mentioned above, there’s very little downside risks to trying. Second, and importantly, the current Seattle City Council appears to be deeply committed to doing as little as they possibly can to address the current housing crisis. In Seattle, unlike some West Coast expensive cities (like San Francisco), the moderates tend to be distinctly worse on housing supply questions than those on the left. There have been some exceptions, but they don’t appear to exist on this council. The “let’s trick people into not taxing the rich by stealing money from our affordable housing fund” gambit of 1B is evidence of this. Seattle is also in the process of updating its comprehensive plan, which in theory should guide zoning and land use policy for the next couple of decades. Back in 2022-23, there were five general templates for the plan, running from least ambitious to most ambitious, and most of the current council, when they were candidates in 2023, expressed support for the most or second most ambitious option. Once in office, Mayor Harrell presented them with a fairly anemic version of the least ambitious blueprint, and the only major complaint I’ve heard from them has been CM Moore’s NIMBY tantrum about the horrors of allowing apartments on a few blocks at 90th and Roosevelt. If they were enacting some ambitious plan to address the housing shortage that seemed better, I’d at least be open to a no vote (although I’d still vote 1A; if we’re going to do it might as well try to do it right). But right now, we’re stuck for at least 3 more years with a council who are pretty committed to doing nothing. The social housing scheme on the ballot isn’t the best idea out there to address the housing crisis, but it’s pretty far from the worst, too. Given that, for the short term at least, it’s this or “nothing” I’ll take this. I’m also pretty committed to not letting this cynical gaslighting tactic of trying to confuse/trick/suppress the voters rather than simply making the case of their preferred position, work. The city council, mayor, and their Chamber of Commerce backers richly deserve a L here, and we should give them one. I’m cautiously optimistic we will–the valence of low turnout elections is changing and this one in particular seems like it might be more likely to attract enthusiasts than adherents. Vote yes/1A; make sure your ballot is postmarked or in a drop box by next Tuesday.