Screw this tax. The first thing they need to do is start firing people, starting with the staff of the City Council.

"the tax is anticipated to mobilize $1.9 billion on around 5,600 affordable units."

Affordable? if i kept track of the zeros correctly while punching button on my calculator, that is more than $320,000 per unit! About three times the assessed value of my house! Of course I don't live in Seattle (Hi Katie) however, I do work in Seattle at a medium size business so I guess I won't be expecting any raises any time soon. (not that I need one living in a house 1/3 the price of "affordable")

Tax the shit out of everything Bezos owns. Billionaires should not exist.

@11: This is towards the high end of construction costs, not outrageous but high. Well, it's not outrageous if the city can come in on budget. You can build a nice, new apartment in a close in neighborhood for about this amount per unit. You can also buy an existing building in a neighborhood a bit further out for about 1/3rd less.

Since you will be collecting some rent, you should also be financing some of this, using future rents to pay for the financing, meaning quite a bit of the costs should be coming from future rents, even if they're below market rates. If this is factored into the costs already, then the prices truly are outrageous. If not, it shows a complete lack of imagination by the person putting together these estimates about how they could do more with less.

@12- "more with less" is not exactly in the Seattle city councils wheelhouse, unless you're talking about it's attitude towards constituents. "Less with more" would be accurate.

And I'm shocked xina hasn't chimed in a dozen or so times. Taxing Amazon is all she has, she wets her knickers over the thought.

xina's Contributions to Slog have been varied and Valued, whilst Frances wets her panties at the thought of xina's panties. Shocking.

Okay, my working premises are:
A) Seattle IS going to be facing an ongoing financial crisis, caused by both diminished revenue and looming infrastructure costs.
B) It is pointless to re-fight lost battles, e.g. the employer head tax or any form of income tax.

So the challenge is to address the revenue side in the most non-regressive way possible.
Now it occurs to me that there has been a huge run-up in property values over the past decades which has accentuated our current division into haves and have-nots.
So my proposal would be for some form of a million-dollar-property surtax.
It would be targeted, it would be coherent, it would seem fair. I don't know if it would be constitutional, I am not a lawyer.

@18- You raise the philosophical point of whether people should be insulated from rising property taxes.
And I have to answer candidly your question- yes, I believe you should be forced to sell and move if you can't afford the new property taxes.
Your financial situation as a long-term Seattle property owner may be precarious but there are a huge number of property owners who have figured ways to monetize their holdings and can easily afford a surtax.
A revolution by the blue-bloods of Seattle seems a little ... far fetched.

@15- did you just mis-gender me?

Yesterday the mayor responded to david kroman from crosscut, that the Scc needs to be forthcoming that any payroll tax they might pass cannot be used to plug budget shortfalls in 2020 or 2021. She does not see a payroll tax as an immediate solution to the current covid crisis. Translation: she will veto an amazon tax bill if brought under the mayors emergency declaration.

It's a mighty smelly scene when The Stranger's comments section is indistinguishable from those in the Blethen Beacon.