Seattle Council Punts Social Housing Funding Vote to 2025
Seattle voters will not see Initiative 137, which seeks to create a funding source for the city’s newly created social housing developer, on their ballot this November after the Seattle City Council delayed a vote on the issue Tuesday. Despite signature-gatherers clearing the bar and submitting well over the required 26,520 signatures needed to put an initiative on the ballot, the delay means that the measure won’t go before voters until a February special election, bypassing the high-turnout Presidential election. Even a delay of just one day after Tuesday would have meant the city will miss the deadline to get the ballot language to King County Elections in time for November.
Initiative 137 would impose a new high earners tax of 5% on annual individual employee compensation above the $1,000,000 threshold. It’s a follow-up to 2023’s I-135, which created the public developer with the explicit purpose of coordinating to create mixed-income social housing in Seattle, distinctive from the city’s existing affordable housing programs by relying on market-rate units to subsidize some of the costs for lower-income tenants. Under a draft business plan created by House Our Neighbors, the nonprofit group behind both initiatives, after 10 years, the developer would have produced 2,000 housing units, the majority of which would be existing units that get acquired along with just over 600 newly built units.
Business groups, including the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, are asking the Seattle Council to add a countermeasure next to I-137 on the ballot, but Seattle Council staff have not yet had enough time to develop such a proposal. Last week, Councilmember Cathy Moore said she was interested in such a proposal, suggesting that the city should instead increase the size of the existing Seattle Housing Levy, which voters approved just last year. Over the past month, Seattle residents have been getting polled on a housing levy supplement proposal that would increase the cost to property owners by another 10 cents for every $100,000 in assessed value, an increase of just over 20%.
In making the motion to remove the resolution addressing the initiative from the agenda, Councilmember Bob Kettle cited potential legal issues that the Council needed to resolve before it voted. “Legal issues have been raised, but not addressed in our standard council briefing executive session, as is with our protocols,” Kettle said. “Good governance requires us to do our due diligence on these legal questions and is the basis of my motion.”
https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/08/07/seattle-council-punts-social-housing-funding-vote-to-2025/