XPost: seattle.politics, us.taxes, alt.society.liberalism
XPost: sac.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, talk.politics.misc
From: leroysoetoro@hrc-rejected.com

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-15/behind-seattle-s- amazon-tax-seething-tensions-livid-neighbors-and-rising-rents

It was, as the local public radio station said, the day “Seattle Nice”
died. On May 2, the residents of Seattle were hit with a one-two punch.
For months, the city council had been debating a new tax on large
employers to raise $75 million for new affordable housing and services for
the homeless, whose growing population had burst out of shelters and into
tents around the city.

In the late morning, just before a council hearing, a columnist for the
Seattle Times broke the news that Amazon.com Inc., the city’s largest
employer, was playing hardball. The typically hermetic company said it
paused expansion plans for buildings that would house about 7,000
employees pending the outcome of the upcoming tax vote.

Later that night, hundreds of residents packed a Methodist church in the gentrifying Ballard neighborhood, turning what was supposed to be a civil
town hall discussion into a scrum that exposed deep division in the city.

Homeowners shouted down the council members and each other—decrying how
growth and homeless encampments were encroaching into neighborhoods. Some opposed the tax, shivering at the thought of risking jobs at the city’s
largest employer and furious about giving more money to a municipal
government that already seemed inept at addressing housing issues. “It's refreshing to see ordinary citizens revolting against this lousy city
council,” one man said to cheers.

Others supported the measure, enraged by what they saw as lack of
compassion by their neighbors and struggling to understand why lefty
Seattle should feel subservient to one of the largest corporations in the world. One supporter, taking the floor at the front of the church,
suggested it could take $5 billion to build enough affordable housing to
meet demand. “That's a pretty conservative estimate,” he said. “Five
billion is how much Jeff Bezos made in 10 minutes when Amazon announced
they bought Whole Foods."

The debate raged on for two weeks, culminating on Monday when the city
council levied a scaled-back version of the tax, voting 9-0 to raise about
$50 million. Under the new law, companies bringing in more than $20
million in revenue a year would be required to pay $275 per employee every year. Amazon has more than 40,000 employees at its headquarters in
Seattle, meaning the tax could cost the e-commerce giant more than $10
million annually. The council came out so strongly for the bill that it
was protected against a mayoral veto.

In a statement, Amazon Vice President Drew Herdener said Amazon was "disappointed" in the vote and that the company remains "very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric
toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here."

The showdown demonstrates how politics and economics have shifted in
Seattle, where the pressure to address the city’s growing pains has
surpassed the conventional wisdom that attracting new jobs is the top
civic priority. Council member Mike O’Brien, a co-sponsor of the
legislation, said in an interview last week that he doubts the tax would
slow expansion. But even if it did, he added, that may not be such a bad
thing. “We’re not really supposed to say that," he said, but “I think it's actually a question we probably should be asking: Can cities grow too
fast?”



For years, Seattle has been one of the fastest growing metros in the
country. The city’s unemployment rate is now down to 3.5 percent, and the
boom has put unprecedented stress on the housing market in this city
hemmed in by a bay, lakes, and mountains.

“The dynamics we see in Seattle are an extreme example of dynamics we see
in other very successful labor markets,” said Enrico Moretti, an economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, whose book “The New
Geography of Jobs” explores the divergent paths of manufacturing hubs and technology cities. “These cities have a very good problem in terms of employment, and wages in particular.”

Moretti found that each new tech job creates four to five non-tech jobs
over the next decade. Roughly 40 percent of the non-tech work is for professionals—think lawyers, doctors, architects—and the remaining 60
percent are non-professional, like Uber drivers, store clerks, or
restaurant servers. “The labor market is a tide that lifts most boats,
with one big issue,” Moretti paused, “the cost of living, of course.”

That’s because while there are more jobs across the spectrum, and
generally rising wages, the supply of housing doesn’t keep up. Rather than slowing down Amazon and its ilk with a tax on jobs, Moretti said, cities
should “accommodate as many housing units as possible, especially with transit.” Economically, he said, that makes the most sense. Whether it can
pass political muster is another question.

As bad as the housing crunch is in Seattle—home prices have soared more
than 14 percent in the past year—it is still adding more new units than
other boom towns like San Francisco, said Jed Kolko, chief economist at
Indeed. “More than any of the large metros, Seattle is building upwards
rather than sprawling out,” Kolko said. The city has channeled new density
and construction into to core areas, which are called “urban villages,”
like parts of Ballard, where the town hall was held. But single-family
zones, which account for a large portion of the city—have largely been sacrosanct.

While homelessness is driven by many factors, including the nationwide
opioid epidemic and the state’s meager mental health resources, new
research indicates the city’s rising housing costs corresponds to
increases in the number of people without shelter. A pro bono report that McKinsey & Co. produced for the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce
found a “96 percent statistical correlation between the region’s rent
increases and the increase in homelessness,” according to the Seattle
Times.

And despite the city spending more than $50 million a year in services,
the local homeless population has been growing. "The city does not have a revenue problem–it has a spending efficiency problem," Amazon's Herdener
said. A count last year found King County’s homeless population had
reached more than 11,000 people, and the city’s database tracking
unauthorized encampments now contains more than 400 unique locations, with people living in tents under freeways and in parks, atop graves at a
cemetery and in medians across the street from houses. The McKinsey report estimated the county would have to spend between $360 million and $410
million to build the number of affordable units and services needed.

"It becomes pretty clear to me that there's no way we solve the scale of
the crisis we're in … without additional resources on the housing side,”
said council member O’Brien. “We just have to have more housing.” O’Brien
said he’s particularly hamstrung in finding funding because the state constitution forbids an income tax, making the government dependent on
property and sales taxes. By some measures, the City of Seattle has the
most regressive tax scheme in the most regressive tax state in the county.

In their hunt for tax revenue, politicians saw fertile ground in large companies—Amazon chief among them—that have built Seattle into an
established tech hub. Amazon grew its employee base off the tech community developed by Microsoft Corp., which in turn worked off the engineering community developed by Boeing Co. and the University of Washington. The
effect was to solidify Seattle’s place on the industry’s map. Google and Facebook now also have large outposts in the city. “Here is what is really
cool about what’s going on right now,” said Michael Schutzler, CEO of the Washington Technology Industry Association, which counts Amazon a member. “Amazon completely changed the world of tech roughly 10 years ago when
they made the cloud a reality. More so than another other company in the
world, they have radically changed machine learning, which is now being
called AI.”


That clustering effect has leading other large tech companies to set up
major outposts in Seattle. That core talent for artificial intelligence is
in Seattle, Schultzer said, “nowhere else, not in the Valley, not in
Boston. Now they are recruiting from all over the country to move people
here.” The day after Amazon’s threat over the head tax, Facebook announced
a new AI lab in the city, which will be led by a professor at the
University of Washington.

As the industry booms, will Seattle lawmakers say no to Amazon and other
tech companies, or to homeowners resisting changing the fabric of their
city? “Good question,” O’Brien said. “I would say neither of those are particular easy.” Homeowners have been fighting rezoning for years. “The
Amazon vocal-ness,” he said of the company’s reprisals, “has just come out
in the last week.”

In the end, the council tried to thread the needle, at least a little. In
a concession to the homeowners, the council forced itself to evaluate the success of the spending if it wants to renew the tax after five years, and Amazon, despite its dismay at the outcome, said it’s restarting
construction planning on one of the offices it had paused. But the council
also recommended spending most of the funding to build affordable housing, starting to chip away at the deficit. Ultimately the council stared down opposition from its biggest employers and, unanimously, opted to tax them anyway. Later this year the council will consider rezoning for more
housing density, and the big question will be whether it gives change-
averse homeowners the same treatment.


--
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denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
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Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its supporters can dispute that.

Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum wage, no benefits and the primary revenue stream for ObamaCare. It can't
be funded with money people don't have, yet liberals lie about how great
it is.

Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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