Affordability, Development, housing, Maybe Metropolis

Seattle’s MHA Program Should Come with a Tax Break, Not a Fee
We’ll never have Portland-style density if we don’t have Portland-style incentives. Photo by M.O. Stevens, CC-by-SA 3.0 license

by Josh Feit

I have repeatedly argued in this column—and long before— that liberalizing our land use code is the best way to address Seattle’s housing affordability crisis. Summary: We need to allow apartments in the vast majority of the city where they’re currently banned. Thankfully, there’s a recent glimmer of hope. The state passed a new law last year, HB 1110, that will upzone Seattle’s neighborhoods. Thank you state Rep. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia); her legislation requires cities with populations of 75,000 or more to allow four-unit buildings wherever single-family homes are allowed, and up to six units if two of the units are affordable.

This encouraging uzpone goes into effect statewide after the cities update their local comprehensive plans, as Washington cities are required to do every 10 years; Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan update is on the docket for 2024.

I have to admit, though: The fact that the bill is tied to Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan update makes me nervous. Readers may recall that we started the year with some 2024 PubliCola predictions, including my pessimistic prognostication about how Seattle will sabotage Rep. Bateman’s upzone requirement through our comp plan update.

Here’s what I wrote on January 1 (italics added this time around): Undermining the new state mandate for increasing density in traditionally single family zones, Seattle “will come up with lot coverage minimums, setback requirements, and height limits along with hefty affordable housing fees that will keep housing developers from building any apartments in Seattle’s touchy neighborhood residential zones.”

As our comp plan update gets underway behind the scenes, I’m hearing affordable housing fees are already in play at City Hall. It’s hardly surprising. One thing that unites all political stripes in Seattle—lefties and NIMBYs alike—is a call to tax developers, everyone’s favorite scapegoat. Why has pickleball colonized traditional tennis courts? Evil developers!!

Call it Funded Inclusionary Zoning, or FIZ. How would we pay for it? Portland has a smart model. Under their IZ program  they give developers a property tax break.

Seattle’s gut instinct to tax housing production to pay for housing production is a political pathology. And it stalls development, leading, ironically, to less affordable housing. It’d be like targeting Swedish, Virginia Mason, UW Medical Center, and Seattle Children’s with a special tax to pay for local health clinics even though these institutions help reduce greater health care costs down the line.

Let me be clear, I’m all for government intervention to create affordable housing. It’s precisely what governments are supposed to do: Regulate essential marketplaces. Like all good governance, ensuring universal access to life’s fundamentals—such as housing and health care—not only promotes equity, it also benefits society as whole by preventing things such as spiking health care costs en masse through widespread upstream care. Or, per UW real estate prof Greg Colburn’s 2022 book Homelessness is a Housing Problem, here’s a more germane example: Building more affordable housing helps address homelessness.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the swath of land that HB 1110 opens up to new housing development, Seattle is likely to tax it. Watch for the comp plan update to expand Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, a quasi-inclusionary zoning program the city created in 2019. Inclusionary zoning, or IZ, is housing policy that requires developers to include affordable units in their projects. MHA isn’t classic IZ because there’s also an option to pay into an affordable housing fund rather than building on-site. But either way, MHA puts the cost of building affordable housing on developers.

Certainly, requiring developers to contribute to affordable housing stock in the city is an important step, but mandates aren’t going to create affordable housing on their own. Progressive governments also need to help pay for that housing. Otherwise, as projects become financially untenable, developers are going to build less. The best affordable housing policy would require developers to include affordable housing in projects (or an in lieu program) while also providing government subsidies to help the program pencil. Additionally, as I already mentioned, we need to upzone to allow dense housing citywide,  ending our restrictive zoning policies that perpetuate classist and racist policies of the past.

MHA, which also came with an upzone, including peripherally around the edges of single-family zones, was an earnest attempt to address the ugly legacy of Seattle’s restrictive zoning, and it got off to a good start, raising tens of millions for affordable housing (about $68 million in 2020). However, we may have already hit peak MHA; while MHA payments raised more than $70 million annually in both 2021 and 2022, the 2022 number represented a slight drop—a 1.5 percent decline in cash along with a drop in the number of affordable units developers committed to include in new buildings, from 107 to 66.

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Showing the same downward trend, and perhaps even more worrisome, as Erica reported, production of in-fill housing like townhomes has dropped in the MHA era with permits shrinking from more than 1,800 permits filed in 2018 to just 165 in the first nine months of 2023. And the Seattle Times reported that overall apartment and townhouse construction permits dropped 42 percent  and 27 percent, respectively, between 2021 and 2022.

We need more evidence to see if MHA requirements are squelching development, but these are not good signs. The drag on development (and the related drop in affordable housing dollars) makes sense in an Econ 101 way—and highlights the irony I called out above: We’re taxing, thus discouraging, something we want.

Rather than discouraging affordable housing production, let’s make it easier for developers to meet the inclusionary zoning mandate by funding it. Call it Funded IZ, or FIZ. How would we pay for it? Portland has a smart model. Under their IZ program, which requires developers to include affordable housing in projects that include 20 or more units (or pay a steeper version of an MHA-style fee), they give developers a property tax break on all the units in a building. The program was initially limited to Portland’s downtown core, but the data showed it was working so well at creating affordable housing that their city council voted unanimously to expand it citywide last month.

Coupling IZ with property tax breaks is a logical next step here. Seattle  already has an optional incentive zoning program, known as the Multi-Family Tax Exemption credit, that rewards property owners with a 12-year tax break if they choose to make units affordable. There are currently 6,300 affordable MFTE subsidized units citywide, according to the most recent data.

Now that we’ve decided, as demonstrated by our MHA inclusionary zoning program, that affordable housing production is no longer optional, let’s also make sure that funding isn’t optional.

However, now that the city has decided, with MHA, that creating affordable housing should no longer be optional, let’s also make sure funding is no longer optional. A property tax exemption—for all buildings whose developers participate in the expanded program, including those where developers opt to pay a fee—would do just that by making affordable housing pencil out for developers.

There’s one asterisk. Government intervention requires more than just funding. Witness our famed Housing Levy, a property tax that’s been dedicated to affordable housing production for more than 40 years; the latest seven-year iteration will raise $970 million. Clearly, given that the root of our current housing crisis is a scarcity of affordable units, the levy is not delivering enough.

While we’re paying to build where we can, there’s not enough opportunity to build in general. Bateman’s zoning reform legislation could change that, adding substantially to the housing pipeline by allowing apartments in historically off-limits single-family zones. IZ would also help. If it’s funded!

Zoning changes in isolation won’t solve the housing problem; mandating affordable housing production in isolation won’t solve the housing problem; and funding affordable housing in isolation won’t solve the housing problem. Rather than defaulting to MHA’s unfunded mandate in our comp plan update, let’s seize the opportunity to combine all three approaches—housing production mandates, funding, and allowing citywide development—to properly address our affordable housing crisis.

josh@publicola.com

Courts, Crime, Mayor Harrell, Police

Despite Public Opinion, Seattle Cops and Prosecutors Still Prioritize Cracking Down on Sex Work

 

Last year, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office pursued charges against 30 men accused of “sexual exploitation,” or patronizing a sex worker. Most people charged with this misdemeanor are men of color, and many are immigrants; of the 30 prosecuted la required a court interpreter.

By Erica C. Barnett

Shortly before dark one evening last April, a young woman stood outside the Lowe’s hardware store at the corner of 125th and Aurora, looking for customers. Clutching a silver fanny pack, she stood alone near the entrance to the parking lot, dressed in eye-catching moon boots, a reddish cropped tank top, and a black skirt she later described as “a very, very short skirt that barely covered my rear.”

According to her later account, a young man driving a decades-old sedan honked his horn, made a U-turn, and pulled into the driveway of the parking lot, blocking traffic in his haste. After a quick negotiation, the woman later testified, the man said he would give her $80 for “quick sex,” prompting the woman—Seattle police officer Kortney North—to give a signal.

Within moments, the parking lot became a blur of activity, as teams of uniformed officers swooped in. Simultaneously, a detective driving a vehicle filled with other “decoys”—more female officers, also dressed up as sex workers—arrived to whisk North away. Four surveillance officers remained just out of sight, as did a second surveillance vehicle nearby. Once police had the man—we’ll call him James— in handcuffs, an officer drove him a nearby precinct, where still more officers awaited to process and release him.

A few weeks later, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office charged him with one misdemeanor count for soliciting a sex worker—a crime that carries a maximum of 90 days in jail, plus fines that can add up to several thousand dollars..

Most men charged with sexual exploitation—the city’s official term for soliciting a sex worker—end up agreeing to a deal with prosecutors. Last year, according to the Seattle Municipal Court, the city attorney’s office brought sexual exploitation charges against 30 individuals. Only one, James, insisted on his innocence.

And so, late last month, North found herself testifying before a jury as a witness for the prosecution in a courtroom on the 11th floor of the Seattle Municipal Court building in downtown Seattle.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this.”—Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham

Because undercover officers don’t wear video cameras or carry recording devices—and don’t collect money from the men they target—the outcome of prostitution cases depends almost entirely on whose story the jury believes. Without tangible evidence proving that James was guilty, the prosecutors tried to tell a story about a hypothetical woman forced into sex work by circumstances beyond her control.

“Eighty dollars. That’s how much [he] thought sex with Officer North was worth that day,” assistant city prosecutor Alisa Smith said in her closing argument. “There is no question about what [was] going on. [He] was out to buy sex with … someone whose life circumstances had brought her to a place where she needed some quick cash.”

The jury took four hours to find James not guilty.

Criminalizing sex work is broadly unpopular; during jury selection, echoing national sentiment, 23 of 25 potential jurors said they didn’t think sex work should be illegal. But the city remains deeply invested in penalizing the practice—and pouring resources into prosecuting men who patronize sex workers.

Like James, most of the people prosecuted for patronizing prostitutes are men of color, and defense attorneys say many are immigrants—mostly Latino—who don’t speak English fluently or at all.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this,” Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham, the supervising attorney on James’ case, said. “Often, with clients who are charged with [sexual exploitation], English is not their first language and they often have immigration issues, so this charge is not a good one for a client of be convicted of.”

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Publicly available police reports don’t usually indicate defendants’ race or immigration status, but it’s suggestive that a large majority of the men prosecuted for sexual exploitation last year had Hispanic, African, or Asian surnames, and that half requested an interpreter from the court. Because solicitation stings are based entirely on an officer’s claim that she made a verbal agreement to exchange sex for money, a defendant’s ability to understand what an officer is saying could be a strong argument against a guilty verdict—if any of those cases ever went to trial.

To understand why the city puts so much energy, effort, and money into chasing down men for a low-level misdemeanor that most people think should be legal, it’s helpful to know that under city law and SPD policy, sex work is virtually synonymous with human trafficking—one police source described women being sent around the country on a circuit, which—police argue—prevents women from developing ties or getting help.

This view is reflected in the language of the law itself; in 2015, then-city council member Bruce Harrell sponsored a bill, which passed unanimously, changing the crime of “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation.”

The idea, backed strongly by then-city attorney Pete Holmes (who later vacated all outstanding charges against sex workers) was to focus on the demand side of the equation by focusing on the men buying sex rather than the people, mostly women, selling it. As Harrell  summarized in 2015, “we will now refer to [solicitation] as a crime relative to sexual exploitation [because] that’s what actually occurs when people are being forced to use their bodies in the commerce of prostitution.”

In about eight years of representing defendants in such cases,” Branham countered, “I’ve never seen a case where there has been any link to sex trafficking.”

A spokesman for the city attorney’s office said there has not been any “greater emphasis on sex work” since Davison took office in 2022. “However, the City Attorney is very aware of the continuing problem and the tragic impact on women and girls who are preyed upon by criminals engaged in human trafficking,” he said.

Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.

Pursuing men who buy sex is time-consuming and expensive, although it’s surprisingly difficult to determine just how time-consuming and how expensive. SPD did not respond to questions about what its sting operations cost and how they operate, and a spokesman for Davison’s office said “there is not a cost tracking system in place for criminal trials.”

But with the median SPD employee making well over $150,000 —and with a three-day trial that required, at minimum, dozens of hours of preparation for both prosecutors and defense attorneys—it’s easy to see how the costs can add up. According to data from the city, in 2022, SPD arrested 28 people for “purchasing prostitution” on Aurora over the course of five operations. In 2023, that number was 41, in six operations. Those numbers were down significantly from 2019, when police arrested 87 people, and up dramatically compared to earlier in the decade, when SPD stings were aimed at sex workers, not their customers.

Testimony at the trial provided a closer look at the scale of these stings, which can involve as many as 20 officers. In addition, before going undercover, officers have to go through “decoy school”—a two-day training where they learn the “language” of sex work, act out various scenarios they might encounter, and practice hand signals to let observing officers know if they’re in distress and when it’s time to make an arrest.

“There was probably 10 pages of acronyms that we went over, just so that we would be familiar with those kinds of terms and not be thrown off if somebody approached us,” North said.

“The trial really highlighted the immense expense involved in these stings and the resources that are thrown at them, and I just can’t see what value they are getting,” said Branham, who, along with lead attorney Claire Beckett, worked on James’ defense over several months and appeared in court during all three days of his trial..

Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.

Last week, for example, the domestic violence arraignment calendar included six assault cases—cases in which women described being punched, beaten, and strangled by intimate partners—that sat around for 60 days or longer before Davison’s office filed charges. According to a 2017 report by the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the longer it takes to file charges in a domestic violence case, the less likely a victim is to cooperate with prosecutors, and the harder it becomes to track down witnesses; delay also “diminishes the quality of DV cases as its sends a message to victims and courts that the case is not a priority.”

DUI cases are also stacking up. Out of 14 cases on the docket for the first week of February, 11 involved cases from early 2022 for which the two-year statute of limitations was about to run out. Delays at the state toxicology lab, which examines blood samples in DUI cases, are only responsible for about half of this two-year delay, which has been consistent for much of the last year. With two years’ lag time, successful prosecutions are rare; in 10 of the 11 cases on last week’s docket, court records indicate the defendant could no longer be found.

Should the city be spending time, money, and court resources prosecuting men who pay for sex? The question is especially relevant at a time when both the police department and the city attorney’s office say they’re short-staffed and stretched thin.

At a time when SPD claims it doesn’t have enough officers to respond to 911 calls promptly, it’s worth looking at the sheer quantity of resources they pour into apprehending sex buyers on Aurora. At a time when the city attorney’s office says it’s having trouble staffing its criminal division with qualified attorneys, it’s worth questioning why they have chosen to use those scarce attorneys prosecuting men for buying sex, rather than the “serious” misdemeanors, like DUIs and domestic violence, that Davison has said are among her top priorities.

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Affordability, housing, Mayor Harrell

Seattle Affordable Housing Awards Plummet Amid Economic Challenges
Office of Housing director Maiko Winkler-Chin

By Erica C. Barnett

The city will award far less money to affordable housing projects this year than it has in previous years—just $53 million, compared to $147 million last year. Those funds will pay for just four projects, including two in north Seattle, one in the Central District, and one in Beacon Hill. In comparison, last year’s awards—known colloquially as the “NOFA,” for the Notice of Funding Availability that starts the funding process each year—funded 12 projects across the city.

Another 18 projects that applied for funding this year will not receive it.

City officials, including Mayor Bruce Harrell and Office of Housing director Maiko Winkler-Chin, announced the awards yesterday at El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill; the event also included announcements about homeownership programs that are not part of the affordable-housing NOFA.

PubliCola reported on the reduction in funding on Tuesday; the Seattle Times had its own story on the awards yesterday.

A primary reason for the reduction, Winkler-Chin told PubliCola Wednesday, is the need to “backfill” projects that are unable to pay their construction loans due to issues like the increased cost of labor and construction materials (which went up 15 percent last year), the concrete strike, interest rate hikes, and “operational issues,” like tenants failing to pay their rent.

Typically, an affordable housing project gets a certain amount of funding from OH—say, $10 million— based on a set of assumptions about what the project will cost to build and how much revenue the project will take in from rents once it’s up and running. Those assumptions then inform the size of the loan the developer will be able to get from a bank after construction is complete and the building is leased up.

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If those assumptions are wrong—if, say, construction costs spike, there’s a concrete strike, and 20 percent of the tenants aren’t paying rent—the bank will reduce the size of the project’s “permanent” loan based on the new numbers, leaving a gap. If an expected $10 million loan gets reduced to $8 million, the Office of Housing will step in to fill that gap. And when that happens, say, 50 times, the gap works out to around $100 million—about the size of the reduction between 2023’s awards and this year’s.

Ben Maritz, an affordable-housing developer whose proposal the Office of Housing did not fund this year, said unpaid rents have become “the biggest problem” for providers who need those revenues to pay their construction loans.

Rents in subsidized housing, which are set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development based on local median, have climbed much faster than wages for low-income people, making it harder and harder for tenants to keep up, Winkler-Chin said. “A lot of people are unable to really recover and pay their rent, and that does have an impact on how much of a loan a developer can get as they’re building up their housing.”

Another reason for the lower award amounts, Winkler-Chin said, was that the city had already “forward-committed” funding from the JumpStart high-earners payroll tax and the housing levy in previous years—guaranteeing funds for projects that were in the works but wouldn’t begin construction until later. About 43 projects funded in previous rounds of funding are currently in the works, the Office of Housing confirmed.

The JumpStart fund, most of which is supposed to go toward low-income housing, has reportedly been frozen as part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s effort to address an estimated budget shortfall of more than $220 million.

But there may be other factors contributing to this year’s relatively paltry awards.

The JumpStart fund, most of which is supposed to go toward low-income housing, has reportedly been frozen as part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s effort to address an estimated budget shortfall of more than $220 million. Projects already funded through JumpStart will continue moving forward, but  revenues from the payroll tax are reportedly not being dedicated to new projects, reducing the overall pool of funds for affordable housing significantly. Last year’s city budget, for example, included $138 million for affordable housing from the payroll tax.

Asked about the reported freeze on the use of JumpStart funds for new projects, Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said the City Budget Office’s “direction to the Office of Housing (OH) is to use JumpStart [Payroll Expense Tax] funds on housing. Payroll tax is one of several large revenue streams in the OH budget, and the annual NOFA opportunities are just one of the ways OH makes investments in the community. Other investments include supporting operations, maintenance, and services (OMS) for affordable housing providers—including wage increases for staff who work in affordable housing buildings—and providing support for increased costs on previously awarded projects.”

Every year since its inception, Seattle mayors have used JumpStart funds to fill budget gaps and fund priorities that aren’t in the JumpStart spending plan; last year, about $89 million in repurposed payroll tax revenues allowed the city to pile the budget with new programs (like the police surveillance system Shotspotter as well as generous police recruitment bonuses). This year, given the size of the deficit, it’s probably that the new council and Harrell will again view JumpStart as a solution to help close the revenue gap without cutting pet programs or laying off large numbers of city workers.

If the the payroll tax is converted, at some point in the future, into an all-purpose funding source for city needs, that would represent an abandonment of its official, legally codified purpose: Building new housing, funding small businesses, and supporting climate-friendly economic development.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Considered Hiring Ceis to Embed in Homelessness Authority, Council Starts Government 101 Briefings

Editor’s note: Due to a glitch, this article went out to newsletter subscribers earlier today but was not published on the site. We apologize for any confusion.

Mayor Bruce Harrell reportedly planned to hire controversial consultant Tim Ceis to serve as a city representative inside the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, where Ceis would work to reorganize and “fix” the organization, according to several sources. The plan to embed Ceis inside KCRHA hasn’t happened—PubliCola hears the mayor’s office decided it would be “too controversial”—but Harrell did manage to more or less singlehandedly appoint his longtime ally (and Garfield football teammate) L. Darrell Powell as the agency’s latest interim director.

It’s unclear whether the mayor plans to send someone other than Ceis over to the homelessness authority, which he recently criticized (along with Seattle-King County Public Health) to the Seattle Times, characterizing both the KCRHA and Public Health – Seattle & King County as “county” functions that should be doing a better job addressing homelessness and fentanyl, respectively, than they are. The city is actually a joint partner in both efforts, and provides a majority of KCRHA’s funding.

Ceis, a former deputy mayor whom Harrell hired to advocate for changes to Sound Transit’s station locations last year (Ceis received $310,000 to push for a plan that will eliminate stations near First Hill and in the Chinatown/International District), was recently criticized for his efforts to elevate business-backed candidate Tanya Woo, the business-backed candidate who lost last November to District 2 council incumbent Tammy Morales, to the city council. The eight elected councilmembers appointed Woo to replace former citywide councilmember Teresa Mosqueda late last month.

Neither Ceis nor Mayor Harrell’s office responded to requests for comment.

Now that Woo’s appointment is complete, the council has said it plans to get to work implementing the policy changes they promised during their campaigns, like hiring more police officers, getting “back to basics” like reducing visible drug use and filling potholes, and finding waste and inefficiencies in every city department.

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(Why they couldn’t start holding committees during the first month of their terms is unclear. The new council decided not to hold a single committee meeting until filling the vacant position. In contrast, the council filled the most recent several vacancies while holding committees and conducting a typical full roster of council business.)

But first, the new council members’ committee agendas consist of a series of Government 101-style briefings from city departments and council staff about what the departments do, how the division of powers works when it comes to the budget and executive departments, and how the city functions as a whole. On Monday, council central staff director Ben Noble held a briefing to explain how the city budget works. Throughout, new councilmembers offered suggestions about how the budget could change this year—including adopting a whole “new model” for budgeting, “benchmarking” Seattle’s spending on certain areas (say: homelessness or transportation) in comparison to what other cities, such as Houston, do; and “driving efficiencies” by “consolidating functions” that are being done by multiple departments.

“Taxpayers need to see some good return on investments, and members of the public, they’re just not seeing that today. And I think the number one area where the members of the public are seeing lack of ROI is in our homelessness spending.”—Councilmember Rob Saka

Councilmember Rob Saka, in particular, said he would like to see the overall city budget (written by the mayor’s budget office, but amended and approved by the council), change to reflect the values of the “two-thirds net new council,” which is politically to the right of the previous council. “We need to align our budget priorities with the priorities of everyone here that sits at the dais,” Saka said, “not that of previous councils.” Specifically, he added, the city’s “taxpayers… need to see some good return on investments, and members of the public, they’re just not seeing that today. And … I think the number one area where the members of the public are seeing lack of ROI is in our homelessness spending.”

Saka, along with new councilmember Maritza Rivera, promised to “audit the budget” during his campaign. On Monday, both said that they do not think a full “budget audit” is affordable or feasible. (The exact definition of a “full budget audit” has always been vague, and the city already conducts routine audits of its departments).

“It would be great to audit the full budget, but that’s not practical,” Rivera said. This is something their opponents noted repeatedly on the campaign trail, but both stuck with their “audit the budget” promise until the end of the campaign, abandoning it only once they were securely on the council.

Affordability, Elections, housing

Social Housing Backers Propose New Tax on Pay Above $1 Million
House Our Neighbors director Tiffany McCoy and social housing supporters at City Hall on Tuesday.

By Erica C. Barnett

House Our Neighbors, the group that in 2023 passed an initiative setting up a new development authority to create permanently affordable, mixed-income housing, filed a Seattle initiative on Tuesday—I-136—that would impose an “excess compensation” tax on employers with workers who make more than $1 million a year. HON’s goal is to put the measure on the ballot in November 2024.

HON will need to collect more than 26,000 valid signatures from Seattle residents to get the initiative on the ballot.

The proposal, if adopted by voters, would impose a 5 percent tax on individual compensation above $1 million, including stock options, bonuses, and deferred compensation; the tax would be paid by businesses, not employees. The proposal is modeled on the city’s JumpStart payroll tax, with at least two significant differences: It would only kick in after the first $1 million in compensation (JumpStart currently applies to companies whose workers make over $182,000), and it would apply to grocery stores and health care companies, both currently exempt from the JumpStart tax.

Also, unlike JumpStart, the social housing tax could not be raided by the mayor and city council to fill budget holes unrelated to its purpose.

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HON estimates that the tax could bring in about $50 million a year and create around 2,000 new units of housing over 10 years, through acquisition of existing buildings and the construction of apartments, including two- and three-bedroom “family-size” units.

At a press briefing outside City Hall on Tuesday, HON director Tiffani McCoy noted that an earlier version of the proposal would have involved building or buying 2,500 units, but those would be all studios and one-bedroom apartments—not the two-and three-bedroom units for which there is much greater untapped demand.

Tomorrow, the city’s Office of Housing will announce which Seattle projects will get funding through the latest annual Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) process; this most recent round of awards, which amount to just over $50 million, represent a fraction of the $147 million the city handed out last year.

McCoy called social housing a way to provide permanently affordable housing outside the existing affordable housing market, which relies on complex funding streams and can be sold off if a nonprofit housing provider is short on funding. While “we have tremendous affordable housing partners” in the city, McCoy said, “there is no level of government that has a plan to address our housing crisis at scale. There isn’t a plan from the private sector. And the affordable housing sector is constrained by what the Housing and Urban Development Department decides year to year.”

Unlike traditional affordable housing, social housing would be funded, in part, by rents from tenants at higher income levels; the buildings would be open to people making up to 120 percent of the Seattle area median income, who would pay rents closer to market rates than lower-income tenants.

Additionally, “social housing will not be vying for the limited funds of the housing levy or JumpStart,” said Ben Maritz, the affordable-housing developer who drafted HON’s high-level business plan. Tomorrow, the city’s Office of Housing will announce which Seattle projects will get funding through the latest annual Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) process; this most recent round of awards, which amount to just over $50 million, represent a fraction of the $147 million the city handed out last year.

Guest Contributor, immigration, King County

Beyond the Border: Addressing the Asylum Seeker Surge in Our Own Backyard

By Palmira Figueroa and Ben Maritz

It was one of Pedro’s sons who gave him the idea. A friend of his made the trip earlier that year and experienced no issues getting across the border, posting about the entire journey on TikTok. Pedro, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, had been living in Colombia with his family of six for the past three years, doing odd jobs when he could find them, and decided to set out for a better life in the north.

Salvador, an Angolan from the embattled exclave of Kabinda, had been bouncing around various African countries, unable to return home. He learned from a friend that it was possible to buy a cheap ticket to Brazil, a country which doesn’t require a visa for entry. Once in São Paulo, he joined the stream of migrants from every part of the world heading to the United States for safety and economic opportunity.

A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

Pedro and Salvador both recently passed through an informal asylum-seeker encampment at the Riverton Park Church in Tukwila, a community-run facility that is now overwhelmed. Every week, 30 to 50 new asylum-seekers arrive, most with young children. The federal government has policies in place that allow people to cross our border, but has provided no resources to help provide them resettle. The church is woefully overcrowded and the vulnerable people staying there are getting desperate.

How we got here

Today, most people who reach the border seeking asylum—about 2.3 million a year—are processed and released, especially those who are traveling with children. They are assigned the next available court date, which the most recent arrivals have told us is currently sometime in 2029. Federal law makes asylum-seekers eligible to work six to eight months after they apply for asylum; in the meantime, they receive no assistance or accommodation.

Three-quarters of the migrants are from places further afield than Mexico, including South America and Africa. Some people cross 20 countries before they arrive in the United States. Because the migrant facilities at the southern border are completely overwhelmed, authorities are encouraging migrants to travel to other places within the United States, ideally where people have access to family or other resources. A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

The local crisis

Both Salvador and Pedro passed through shelters near the border that had no capacity to accommodate them, and so paid for them to travel to Seattle—Salvador by plane, and Pedro and his family by bus. They arrived at the church just like the dozens that are still arriving each week – disoriented, penniless, and full of hope.

The Riverton Church, under the leadership of Pastor Jan Bolerjack, has long played a leading role in caring for our most disadvantaged neighbors. It was the site of a sanctioned homeless encampment until early 2023, when the Low Income Housing Institute built a tiny house village on the site. Seattle police officers and other law enforcement agents had been referring people to the Riverton Shelter ever since the first migrants started showing up in Seattle about a year ago. The officers knew Pastor Jan would welcome them.

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Today the church is a buzz of languages and chaos, with hundreds of people from around the world overflowing its fellowship hall, sanctuary, parking lot, and green spaces. It’s wet, muddy, and cold, but smiles abound and a spirit of optimism is palpable. Children play, families cook and sing, teens gossip. After a harrowing journey across South and Central America, the American dream is palpably just around the corner.

The people at the church, like those at similar overflowing facilities around the country, are here to seek safety and happiness. They are ready to learn, work and to fully take part in our society. But they still face tremendous short-term obstacles and have essentially no resources available to help them. Most are from countries without families or established communities in the region and so don’t have a natural network to turn to. Unlike refugees, a different category of migrants, they are not eligible for federal assistance.

The asylum-seekers in Tukwila and elsewhere need help filing their immigration cases. They need English language training. They need jobs. But most of all, in the immediate term, they need housing and basic sanitation so they can restart their lives.

What’s Needed

In December, King County allocated $3 million to rent 100 rooms in a hotel in SeaTac through June for some of the most vulnerable asylum-seekers. This is a costly, partial, and temporary solution. During our most recent cold weather emergency, many families living outside the church were moved to hotels by volunteers who used their own funds, but only for a few days.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

This group of people is very different from other homeless community members who are living unsheltered. While they certainly carry their share of trauma, they do not generally suffer from the issues that our urban unsheltered community goes through. They are ready, able, and eager to work and grow in their new community. A small amount of targeted assistance will get most asylum seekers into a place where they have work permits, a job, and stable housing.

We are calling on our local, county, and state government to step in and do what the federal government has failed to do: Care for the asylum-seekers and help them become a part of our community while they wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated. Concerned citizens should write to their elected officials (a list of state local officials can be found on the new VoteWA Voter Portal) and let them know that helping this worthy group of new Americans should be a priority.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

Today, Salvador is living in the county-funded hotel and working as a translator and community organizer among the asylum seekers; he’s also enrolled at Seattle Central College, working toward his GED. Pedro and his sons are working in construction and building toward a life of independence in their new country.

Meanwhile, in December 2023, the most recent month for which data is available, 302,034 people were processed at the southern border, an annualized rate of 3.6 million and an increase of roughly 50 percent increase over the record-breaking rate of the most recent fiscal year.

Washington has long taken pride at being a Sanctuary State and rejecting xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment. Now is the time to invest in welcoming and embracing our new neighbors and letting them join our community with dignity.

Palmira Figueroa is an immigrant, a community organizer and long-time immigrant rights advocate. Ben Maritz is an affordable housing developer based in Seattle.