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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.
Agreed, and the appointment of Mark Solomon kind of solidifies that. I'm hoping that we pass 1A, and by the time we actually get to work on it we'll have voted in a council that actually does the shit we want.
I'm mystified by all these 'centrist' officials in our fine liberal city. Is it because the only newspaper is acres to the right of its readers, along with KOMO and KIRO and who knows about the rest...
That's a big chunk of it, yes. KOMO is owned by Sinclair media, KIRO isn't much better. Fox13 is fucking fox, so I won't even bother. The Times is Hearst Corporation. So the vast majority of media sources here are directly owned by institutions that have a vested interest in maintaining status quo.
The Stranger is still independent, but the quality has suffered greatly over the last 10+ years.
Also, this is partly a natural pendulum swing back to the right. A lot of people were upset after the Sawant experiment (debacle?), but instead of finding better leftist politicians, we just fled back to the centrist, corporate bullshit that led us down the Sawant path in the first place.
Not to quibble, I hate quibblers, but the old P-I was Hearst. The Times is 'independent', but owned by a big-money local family .
Count me among the folks who seriously liked Sawant. Abrasive, sure she was. But she made things happen, sometimes good things.
... $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!
I agree with you that more needs to be done, but small progress is better than none or regression. No where did I insult you or call you an idtiot, not sure why you are so aggressive. If you're so upset about all this you should go out and start the change you want to see. What doesn't help is dooming on the internet, but I'm sure you already know that too.
Have they fixed the law that requires new construction to build affordable housing and taken out the buyout options?
... what?
In new construction, they're required to provide a certain amount of new construction. Except that the developers can buy their way out of providing them. Have they fixed that condition? I haven't kept up with it.
Ah, your sentence makes a lot more sense now that you've added a subject.
Unfortunately your subject is 'they'.
Presumably you mean lawmakers.
Presumably you're talking about MHA / MFTE apartments.
No, they have not closed the 'loophole', it isn't a loophole, its very clearly designed as a program with 2 options, its not some kind of accidental flaw in the law that allows exploitation via clever manipulation.
Option 1: Pay the city some amount in taxes, which the city then uses to pay for low income housing.
Option 2: Offer a certain amount of your rental units at MFTE price levels (ie, a volunatry for the landlord, rent control scheme), and then you functionally get a tax break by not having to pay the extra sum to the city from Option 1.
The problem with this whole approach is that it isn't working to actually alleviate rental costs, rental prices are still out of control.
Breakdown of MFTE data
There are a grand total of 9,325 MFTE units in all of Seattle.
About 40% are studios, set to 60% AMI rent guidelines, or about $2000 mnth rent.
About 50% are one bedrooms, set to 70% AMI rent guidelines, or about $2333 mnth rent.
About 10% are two bedrooms, set to 85% AMI rent guidelines, or about $2833 mnth rent.
So, maxxed out in terms of legal occupancy, that's about 20,515 people.
... renting for a weighted, household average of $2250 a month.
20k people max at $2250 rent.
This is considered 'affordable' pricing.
Reminder that there are 380k ish people in need of actually affordable pricing, 380k ish people are currently paying over 30% of their income toward rent.
20% of households, or about 80k people, live off of about $55k or less a year.
Thats an actual affordable rent that tops out at about $1530 mnth rent.
Basically, the MFTE program is very, very far from a solution as is.
The 'affordable' prices it generates are completely unaffordable to something around the bottom 30% of the population, and there are at max only enough 'affordable' units to even house about 9% of that bottom 30%, who can't even afford them anyway.
...
Maybe this framework could work, but you'd have to enforce both a much more severe optional rent control schema, and have the other option be a much larger tax on landlords... and make the whole thing apply to far more than the measely 9k ish apartment units it currently applies to.
Option 1: Pay the city some amount in taxes, which the city then uses to pay for low income housing.
Is that happening? Are you adding those into your previous thoughts on housing?
Yes it is happening.
Yes, the fact that this is happening is considered in my comments thus far.
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/Housing/Reports/2023_MHA-IZAnnualReport-a_157808.pdf
Rough numbers:
2023, MHA payments from the payment option totalled $63 million.
$8 million of which went toward helping to build 230 new units, which is roughly 1/10th the total cost of actually building 230 new units.
The rest went toward maintenance of existing low income units/properties.
So... yeah, woo, $50 million from this new tax basically doubles that.
We need 100x, 1000x, not 2x.
Rent control? You mean one of the only things that economists almost universally agree does not work?What follows is a survey of the top economists working at the time this poll was done. Note Emanuelle Saez’s opposition here as he was the guy Bernie Sanders based his plans around.
Yes.
I do mean that.
The main reason most economists offer to justify being against rent control is that it will drive supply down, ie, disincentivize new construction.
Well guess what?
We currently, and have for the last decade, exist in a world where the capitalist 'free market' has ... not built anywhere near enough new homes, muchless affordable ones.
That is typically a situation that is referred to in other markets, other realms of the economy, as a market failure, which can only be remedied by significant government intervention.
... We are already in the situation that most economists fear would arise from rent control.
The reality is that the overall economy will just keep draining more and more money via literal rent seeking to the wealthy landlords, until more and more people become homeless or impoverished.
The government absolutely can use emminent domain if it wants to. This only harms extremely wealthy people, and the benefits to the masses, and the actual real economy, massively outweigh the harm.
Give poor people more money via lower rents, they spend it, velocity of money increases, virtuous cycle, economy grows.
Don't do this, and you get greedier and fatter dragons hoarding more and more money, velocity of money tanks, mass suffering intensifies.
Even Adam Smith, the ultimate grandfather of all modern, western economic theory, really did not like landlords.
As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.
Mao's solution was murder all the landlords.
Smith's was tax the shit out of the wealthly, unproductive landlords.
I strongly suggest that if you don't do the latter, more and more people will begin to advocate the former.
... Also this survey is from 12 years ago, run something similar nowadays, in our current completely broken housing market, and I'd bet a significantly greater proportion of economists would be friendlier toward rent control.
Ok so you knowingly want to follow a program you know will not work?
Mao was an idiot economically speaking.
The science behind that survey hasn’t changed. At no point has rent control increase housing in the long term.
We can do what this article suggests and construct social housing as that doesn’t have an absolute shitload of evidence that suggests it is a bad idea like we have for rent control.
The MHA / MFTE program that Seattle has had in place for almost 30 years is, imo, the right framework, but needs to be dramatically upscaled.
It basically is a two option system:
Option 1: Landlords pay a tax upfront that goes toward the funding of your favored social, low income housing.
Option 2: Landlords avoid this tax but willingly agree to a percentage of their units being rent controlled.
This is a good framework, the problem is the numbers aren't there.
You need a larger percentage of a building's units to be rent controlled, you need those rent controls to further and lower rents more, you need the other option's upfront tax to be much higher so as to throw 10x, 100x, 1000x of this pithy $50 million at building low income housing, and probably you also need to expand the MHA / MFTE guidelines to apply to more residential properties than it currently does.
If landlords don't accept this, fuck em, option 3 is the city emminent domain buys your building for pennies on the dollar and turns it into low income housing, like what happened when I5 came through or any other number of public works bought up land.
Hey, while we're at it, pass another law that says if you have a home on the market, or unrented apartment, you legally have to lower the price some amount for every month its just vacant, or work in a tax on the home seller/apartment owner that increases logarithmically for every day on the market, something like that.
Huge problem in the housing market right now is everything just sits there, being theoretically worth the asking price (which in reality is being price fixed by computer systems landlords use to keep prices climbing, don't see you complaining about that) until finally a rich buyer shows up.
Fuck that. If you can't get a tenant in a rental unit or a buyer into a house, tax the listing seller, the apartment opening, for every day beyond 30 for an apartment or 60 for a house.
That'll incentivize people to price things more reasonably.
Do something similar with vacant office space, jam up the cost of that untill they start getting converted into apartments (and subsidize/incentivize that!), or lower their prices such that a commercial tennant moves in.
You keep asserting rent control will being rent down that has never been the case. Rent control only makes rent more expensive. That’s why you see such consensus.
Rent control actually always brings down rent prices in the affected units, this is widely agreed on.
It makes non affected units marginally more expensive, and the other widely agreed on malefects are that people in rent controlled units don't leave as often, and that landlords skimp on maintenance, evict people more frivolously/baselessly, and disincentivizes new construction.
So throw on better tenants rights / eviction protection, crack down on maitenance skimping landlords by making a city hotline / web portal for residents to make complaints to directly, have an actually funded and staffed enforcement agency for that (take away some police funding and move it to that)... and then have a reasonable way to avoid incentivize and fund the new housing construction that the free market won't want to do.
A reasonable implementation of rent control, as I literally just described, is what Seattle has been doing for 30 years, giving certain new or remodelled buildings the option to either pay a tax that goes toward city built/funded social, low income housing, or forgoe the tax but endure a rent control scheme for some of its units.
This approach just needs to be expanded, augmented, increased in scope, increased in magnitude of the low income housing tax and the required number of rent controlled units, and make those rent controlled units even less costly to renters.
Did you read anything I wrote in my last reply to you?
I did and I don’t believe you are correct as average rent in Seattle hasn’t declined as a result of these policies.
Oh cool, thats wonderful, the only thing impacting the housing market that's changed in 30 years is the MHA MFTE program, the entire rest of the economy just stayed perfectly static.
Population hasn't grown, wealth disparity hasn't grown, construction costs are the same, the unemployment rate never changed, zoning laws are the same, the tech sector is still as small.as it was in 96, no neighborhoods have gentrified, covid never happened, nope, everything affecting housing is all down to a single experimental variable and everything else is a control variable.
Did not realize I was actually talking to a clown.
Honk honk!
In a clown because I don't believe ypu have proven that rent control has worked? If it had rent should have stabilized lower income housing which it did not. There should be more available affordable housing and there isn't.
You haven't proved anything. You have made ton of unsupported claims entirely constructed on "trust me bro". Do you have any idea how any of this works?
1A all the way.
I'm sure this will work out well.
@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