The City of Seattle is on track to fund fewer units of affordable housing this year — but it doesn’t have to be this way
In this year’s short legislative session, Washington state lawmakers are being presented with numerous bills all trying to achieve the same end result: budget more money for affordable housing, homeless services and patches for our social safety net. These proposed revenue streams represent varying degrees of novelty, from the familiar wealth tax, which would assess new taxes against surplus wealth earned by less than 1% of the state’s population, to the Affordable Homes Act, which would change the way the real estate excise tax is calculated.
On the city level, there are also proposals like the “excessive compensation” tax, which would add a small tax onto any Seattle-based employee paid over $1 million per year [see page 3].
All of this is a reflection of Washington’s current reality of having a handful of people who have entirely too much money and entirely too many people who can’t access even the most basic of services.
While there are a lot of factors at work, it’s impossible to ignore the one that disproportionately benefits the extremely wealthy few. Washington state, which has the second most regressive tax structure in the United States and, according to ITEP, has been allowing the ultrawealthy to hoard money for decades, expects regular, average people to pay more.
As a result, the state features unprecedented wealth disparity and all of the things that go along with it. Poverty in Washington has gotten so extreme that it’s impossible to ignore. This is why advocates and allies are coming forward to urge lawmakers to take action. This is why the ideas for drumming up revenue are coming from all different sectors. This is also why it’s so hard to imagine that another legislative session will come and go without any new, progressive changes.
The money to build affordable housing, to care for folks living with mental illness or battling substance use, to help our seniors retire with dignity, to feed our school-aged kids — that money is there.
So instead of banking on the occasional showering of charitable dollars, lawmakers need to build sustainable, reliable revenue to get the job done.
Washington has the money. The real challenge is getting it where it can do the most good.
Hanna Brooks Olsen is a writer living in Portland.
Read more of the Feb. 14–20, 2024 issue.