Ape-Shit in the Emerald City

Over the last week or two I've noticed that the usual homeless encampments I come across on my morning walk to work have been swept up. I got to see a sweep take place today. A guy was sleeping peacefully wrapped in one of those blankets made out of recycled material when two strapping young white officers of the Seattle Police Department pulled up in their trendy hatchback cruiser and rousted him.

Rather than address the problem -- which Charles Mudede correctly identifies in a post yesterday "Why Seattle's Proposed Head Tax Is Making So Many People Go Ape-Shit" -- of skyrocketing housing costs brought on by Amazon's commercial construction orgy, the idea is just to scatter it to the winds so it's not as visible, not such an eyesore.

This change, I surmise, is pegged to the high-stakes city politics underway. There is a committee vote tomorrow morning on a "head tax" to fund low-income housing and homeless services in Seattle. From this morning' s Slog:

Under the current proposal, the city would impose a tax of about $500 per employee on for-profit businesses grossing more than $20 million annually. In 2021, the city would switch to a .7 percent tax on payroll for the same businesses. City staff estimate both taxes will generate about $75 million of revenue for housing and homelessness services.

The mayor has come out in opposition. She will likely veto the legislation, and the council majority does not have the votes to override her veto.

Mayor Durkan was elected for this very reason. The wealthy have been troubled by the progressive drift of the city since Occupy Wall Street and the ascension of Kshama Sawant and the $15 minimum wage. The message is clear. The market rules even in a progressive metropolitan gem like the Emerald City.

With the head tax stymied, the present boom will maintain its course. More homeless sweeps, more sterile gentrification of an already gentrified city. Eventually -- I thought of this last week -- a prison ship will be anchored in Elliott Bay to keep the homeless and their refuse off the streets.

Mudede sums it all up:

All of this hysteria, however, obscures one obvious fact about Seattle's boom: It's not benefiting the poor. They can't afford to live in the city because rising rents, which are tied to rising house prices, are claiming more and more of their hard-earned, but still low, wages. Indeed, a recent article by Puget Sound Business Journal's Marc Stiles reports that though there is more supply in the local housing market, prices are still going up and up. He also reports that, according to Northwest Multiple Listing Service, the "median sales price of houses in King County hit $725,000, up 16 percent over a year ago."

This is all that the boom has meant for most people in Seattle who, even if they find employment, are unlikely to earn enough to meet the ever-rising costs of living in this city. For them, the boom has been a crisis that's only getting worse. Officially, we haven't been in a recession for most of this decade, and in an economic boom for half a decade, and yet, IRS data from 2015 (a full two years into the boom) shows half of the people who live in Seattle earn less than $50,000. The five-year boom has, for many in this city, done more harm than good; this we do actually know. But what the anti-tax op-eds and stories in this city's leading papers are saying is that the head tax will be even worse than the continuation of a boom whose benefits have yet to be shared in any meaningful way. So, even if you do not agree with raising taxes, you have to admit that what all of the anti-tax people are offering as a solution to a brutal housing crisis is more of what has, for the most part, caused the crisis.

And it is exactly here that the noise about the taxes is revealed to be atavistic rather than edifying. Those who authorized the current hysteria are from a class that, since the birth of the market-centered society, has hated taxes (the rich). And with good reason. Taxes hit them the hardest. And with good reason—they have most of the money. So, it's not a matter of the head tax being right or wrong, good or bad, fact or fiction, science or religion. What the chimps must do is bang and jump when any talk about raising taxes emerges from the foliage.