Awful to move it around from the Future Slum Housing budget...they should have ordered up even more of our money instead.

“His budget proposal uses JumpStart to pay for a staffer to process applications for tenant relocation assistance, the start-up costs for the social housing developer that voters approved in February,”

If revenues from the JumpStart tax are dedicated “to support affordable housing,” then how can anyone object to spending some of it on tenant relocation assistance and voter-approved social housing? Do those activities somehow not “support affordable housing”? If they don’t “support affordable housing,” then what does?

"The reason why housing is so expensive is because there are very few areas left in Seattle that are relatively safe, clean, have good school districts, and with short commute times."

Well, I'll give you points for not mentioning needles or poo, sofi dear. But the rest of that statement is worthy of the Seattle Times comment section. Most of Seattle is overwhelmingly safe, and the areas that are experiencing crime are having that crime exaggerated to meet ideological needs.

The reason why housing is so expensive is because people want to live here, and the state of WA has no income tax, hence the wealthy are essentially wards of the state.

And, as we all know, the city is facing a budget crisis. Expect a lot more "plundering" of non-essential programs to meet essential needs.

@5 is correct. The average billionaire here pays 3% total taxes, and millionaires pay around 8%. You're being taken to the cleaners.

Everyone is fed up with these simpering idiots who think you can tax your way to Utopia to pay for specious programs like housing the homeless, which is like herding cats because many of these people do not want to live in regulated housing, with hours of operation, discipline, a drug-free living environment, and all the encumbrances that make street life so alluring.

Remember when Boeing pulled their pants up and moved to Chicago?

If Seattle keeps increasing taxes on businesses the city will start to look like Tacoma back in the eighties when the Tacoma Mall went in and shoppers abandoned the downtown core, which became the province of druggies and ho-mammies.

Particularly in these heady days of internet commerce, municipalities must be temperate in their taxation policies, or companies like Amazon will move corporate operations to business-friendly environs such as Kansas or Wyoming.

Remember when Boeing moved manufacturing operations to Frederickson, and everyone said “Frederickson? Where’s that?”

That’s where Boeing is saving money on taxation and overhead expenses, although the hairy philosophy major and public sector advocates who drove Boeing away were perplexed.

Seattle city leadership must focus on concrete issues like mass transit, police protection and potholes.

Stop worrying about enabling public drug use or warehousing dysfunctional people who choose to not participate in the great American experiment.

And please stay away from firebrand issues like slave reparations or Amazon deforestation.

This is not your province, and will foment an exodus such as we saw in San Francisco, when city leadership over-stepped their governmental boundaries and wished to impose nosebleed taxation on citizens to compensate people of color from legacy enslavement, which has no relevance today, even more so on the west coast, and has no bearing on municipal operations.

Such is the dysfunctionality of upper middle-class white guilt for past societal misdeeds.

The Euro Americans who imposed slavery on a repressed African American population were a minority of the citizenry to begin with, and are long gone from the political scene, although some repressive remnants remain in Virginia, which was a hotbed of black oppression in the mid-nineteenth century, and of course the deep south.

As economics genius Professor Thomas Sowell intoned:
“...And you are never going to convince the descendants of the majority of white Southerners, whose ancestors were too poor to buy slaves if they wanted to, to say that they owe anybody anything...”

Thank you to fellow commenter Holmes for the brilliant suggestion to look up the work of Dr. Thomas Sowell, a welcome conservative intellectual antidote to the leftist horse manure we see bandied about these days, even more so on the kooky pages of The Stranger.

To encapsulate, please Mayor Harrell continue to fulfill your Executive Administrative duties with an eye on making Seattle livable by shipping the loafers out to Ephrata or Kennewick, and rebuilding the downtown core so people come to visit in the evenings like they did in the old days, before the progressives grabbed Seattle by the ears and pounded her in the rear, from a governmental policy standpoint.