By Erica C. Barnett

Voters across the city received multiple mailers opposing Initiative 1A—the social housing initiative—and encouraging them to support an alternative, Initiative 1B, that would take funding out of existing JumpStart payroll tax revenues to fund traditional affordable housing.

The election is on February 11, and ballots started hitting Seattle mailboxes last week.

Initiative 1A would impose a tax on employers—5 percent on employee compensation above $1 million a year—to fund the construction and purchase of buildings for permanently affordable mixed-income housing. Renters making more money—up to 12o percent of Seattle’s median income—would pay higher rents, directly subsidizing lower rents for people who make less. The campaign estimates the tax would raise about $50 million a year.

Initiative 1B, the business-backed alternative, would take $10 million a year out of the city’s existing JumpStart payroll tax fund to pay for traditional, subsidized affordable housing for people making up to 80 percent of the Seattle median. The city has already used JumpStart’s unexpectedly high revenues, which were supposed to be dedicated to affordable housing, small business support, and other progressive priorities, to pay for general city functions, so this would be another instance of moving funds around without providing any additional resources for housing.

The mailers, which feature Mayor Bruce Harrell on the flip side, contain some extremely misleading numbers, buried inside a confusing math problem. (If 12 percent is reserved for people making up to $144,000 and 3 percent is reserved for people making up to “low-income,” how much is reserved for people between very low-income and $144,000?)

First, it’s important to note that the social housing campaign doesn’t have a detailed spending plan for future dollars, because that’s one of the things the social housing developer—created through a separate initiative passed last year—is seeking funds to develop. What they do have is a  “hypothetical business plan” created by Ben Maritz, a local housing developer, that assumes half the apartments provided at social housing buildings would be two- and three-bedroom “family-size” units, which private developers rarely build because it’s more profitable to build studios and one-bedroom units.

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In the scenario Maritz laid out, 3 percent of units would be studios serving people at the very lowest income level—between 0 and 30 percent of the Seattle median, or about $30,000 a year. That isn’t many, but it’s also worth noting that social housing backers never presented themselves as providers of housing for formerly homeless people. And overall, the hypothetical plan sets aside half of the units for people who currently qualify for low-income rent assistance because they make less than 60 or 80 percent of Seattle’s median income. That’s a total of 53 percent—not 3 percent.

As for the 12 percent of units that, according to the “no” camapign, “will be set aside for people making up to $144,000 a year”? That number appears to refer to the 12 percent of apartments that, in the hypothetical business plan, will be available to households making between 100 and 120 percent of median income. The $144,000 figure, however, doesn’t represent just one person’s income. It’s actually 120 percent of the median income for a family of two, which, for a two-income household, averages out to $72,000 a year.

Under the proposal, higher-income renters won’t be receiving subsidies; they’ll be paying around 30 percent of their income on rent, which works out to roughly $4,000 a month for a $144,000 household. (Since that’s higher than market-rate in Seattle, the actual rent would probably be less). That rent, in turn, will subsidize rents for people in the same building who earn less—a feature of social housing Prop. 1B, which uses existing city money to build traditional low-income housing, does not include.

Whether all this will work out in practice remains to be seen—these are, as the campaign acknowledges, plausible but still hypothetical numbers on a ledger. The claims opponents are making, though, assume voters won’t dig into the numbers or source materials; they’ll just see that big “3%” (and Harrell’s smiling face) and vote for the measure that would do very little and cost nothing.

According to campaign finance records, the group that sent out the misleading mailers, People for Responsible Social Housing, has spent more than half a million dollars on the anti-social housing campaign so far, and raised just over $430,000. The majority of that has come from just three entities—Microsoft ($100,000), Amazon ($100,000), and the Greater Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce ($35,000).