Seattle Voters Support Taxing High-Paying Firms for Housing

Voters in Seattle appear to have opted to pay for workforce public housing by taxing companies with employees earning more than $1 million a year.

Two years after the city set up a development authority to build publicly owned social housing, voters headed to the ballot box on Tuesday, where measures were leading to both fund the developer and force high-paying companies to foot the bill, the Seattle Times reported.

Final results of the election could be determined by next week.

But a win would be a slap in the face to City Hall and the local Chamber of Commerce, which urged voters to reject the new tax in favor of using preexisting city dollars for new housing.

On Tuesday, voters were asked to decide whether the city’s Social Housing Developer led by Roberto Jimenez should be funded.

They were also asked to choose how the developer would get paid: either from a new tax on companies with employees earning more than $1 million a year; or from money raked in by an existing tax on Seattle-based corporations.

By a ballot count late Tuesday, 68 percent of Seattle voters marked yes to funding the developer.

For the second question, 58 percent of voters marked yes to Proposition 1A, the new tax; 42 percent opted for Proposition 1B, to use preexisting funding.

Early election results appear to favor the new tax, with proponents calling it a “resounding victory.”

“Voters are tired of incrementalism, they’re tired of waiting for the housing crisis to be addressed,” Tiffani McCoy, co-executive director for the House Our Neighbors campaign backed by the Inatai Foundation, told the Times “They want it to be addressed fully, they want it to be addressed now.”

The election on whether to tax high-paying firms or use funds from existing taxes on large corporations had drawn battle lines across Seattle.

Backers of Prop. 1A expect the 5 percent tax on high-paying companies to raise $52 million a year to build 2,000 cost-controlled homes over 10 years, owned by taxpayers.

Backers of Prop. 1B, supported by Mayor Bruce Harrell and businesses like Microsoft, Vulcan Real Estate and T-Mobile, said it was better to fund the Social Housing Developer with $10 million a year in city funding, through its JumpStart tax on big businesses.

The social housing properties paid for by either option would be permanently owned by the public, with rents capped at 30 percent of income for working families of teachers, restaurant workers and others who struggle to live where they work.

House Our Neighbors said people with higher incomes should subsidize those with lower incomes. But the mayor and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce said it was risky to give a new, untested public development authority $52 million a year — forever.

— Dana Bartholomew