Obligation isn't responsibility.
Probably paying the last mayor's child sex lawyer costs.Can anyone tell me where all the money they've taken for the homeless has even gone? They've got literally nothing to show for it.
And the jobs and tax revenue come and go with them.The state is going to exist with or without them. It's a place and a system.
Companies come and go.
And the jobs and tax revenue come and go with them.
Coddling?
I think that's quite the opposite of what happens to homeless people.
IDK about that. MS is pretty well ingrained/stuck there but Google, Amazon, Nintendo USA all could leave if they wanted and it'd kill the job market in King/Pierce/Snohomish county.I don't think that's a major concern in a place like Seattle.
Someone will always move to fill a market there.
Then what do you call taxing corporations for funds to help the homeless?
That's why states and city's engage in property and tax break wars to get corporations to move to the area. The municipalities that host large corporate and production facilities benefit greatly from their presence, not only in taxing that particular business, but their suppliers, transporters, employees etc. The tax revenue stream is long and deep.I don't think that's a major concern in a place like Seattle.
Someone will always move to fill a market there.
I lived in Lynnwood for 8th-10th grade. The amount of friends I had that had parents working for MS/Boeing/Nintendo was like staggeringIDK about that. MS is pretty well ingrained/stuck there but Google, Amazon, Nintendo USA all could leave if they wanted and it'd kill the job market in King/Pierce/Snohomish county.
Don’t blame me for socialism failing yet again...
From my limited reading, Seattle (like many other cities) has an affordable housing shortage that is basically rooted in the reality that high income earners have purchased the majority of the homes near the city's ideal locations and that competition for those homes has driven up the overall prices within the city. The cities lack the ability, for a variety of different reasons, to construct new housing that low income residents can afford, either for purchase or for rent. Additionally, the public transportation system is not robust enough to efficiently move people in and out of the central city locations to the affordable exurbs and suburbs (which are not the same as the more expensive exurbs or suburbs).
The housing crisis in Seattle is the fault of its government. The city has been on a nonstop rampage to declare itself the most progressive society in the world for the last few years. During its crusade that is killing jobs and making life miserable, city elected officials have enacted rules and regulations that make it almost impossible to build housing there.
John Stossel (formerly of Fox Business) and Maxim Lott recently wrote in Reason Magazine that Seattle’s building code is 745 pages long. The residential building code is another 685 pages.
Jeff Pelletier, of Board and Vellum Architects, points to the permits as one of the main drivers in the rise of housing costs in Seattle stating, “while there is a lot of benefit to a thorough review of your project, we are seeing tremendous cost and schedule increases from local building departments.”
One way to help solve the housing problem would be to build mid- and high-rise condominiums. On a plot of land that usually accommodates three to four single family homes, the city could allow developers to build projects that house more than 100 people, getting much more bang for the buck in land use.
But no, this is Seattle. Strict zoning laws have only given multi-family and commercial and mixed-use areas one-third of the land designated for residential use, driving up the price of single-family homes.
The DEMs better learn from this. They need to get out of bed with the crazy leftists because we are the best country in world history. Period.
Here's the reason why it's next to impossible to build affordable high-rise residential condos in Seattle: 70% of the land mass in the city is zoned for single-family homes.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018...isis-now-its-trying-to-make-it-worse.amp.html
I'm aware of that. But to lay that solely at the feet of the government isn't completely fair either. They have been trying to rezone for a while now. This is an example of those efforts: https://seattle.curbed.com/2017/11/9/16629248/seattle-hala-mha-upzone-plan
But they tried this back in 2015 also and got major pushback so they dropped it. And the pushback came from those residents who live in single family homes who don't want to see their lifestyle changed because of new multifamily additions altering the character of their neighborhoods.
And while I don't have the data here, I'd suspect that pushback came from the high earners in the city, who already have purchased their single family homes, since the majority of Seattle residents apparently want more multifamily zoning. And since most of the cityy makes less than $50k, I'm going to step out on a branch and guess that those earners are not already homeowners.
So, in many ways, the big corporations of Seattle share culpability in the ongoing and exacerbation of this problem. Their employees can afford the higher priced homes and rents. There are more of them than there is supply of housing. So they push up costs. However, because they've paid for their single family homes or are working towards finally acquiring one, they also don't support significant changes in the zoning rules that would tear down single family homes for smaller condo and other multi-family options.
From that perspective, it's perfectly reasonable to shift some of the costs of dealing with the ultimate downstream effects back onto these corporations.
Random aside, I was in a meeting today with some of my city's movers and shakers (I neither move nor shake at that level but it's nice to get invited) and this issue of affordable housing and the effect on homelessness reared it's ugly head. The difference is that my city was originally planned around significant multifamily housing and most of our zoning fights are about converting that to single family residences since it fits the population spread better. But that's a far easier problem to solve than going the other way.
Yeah, that's not happening.
Here's a glimpse on how much Seattle residents trust their City Council to spend their tax money in a recent Town Hall open-mic:
Seattle spent $60 Millions on homelessness last year. This year that number is increasing to $63 Millions. Apparently it does fuck all, especially to the drug issue that no one on the Council want to talk about, so now they want big employers like Amazon to pay more so they can spend more. Where did all those millions go? No one knows, cause the City refuse to provide an itemized chart of how they're spending it.
No wonder the Head Tax idea is failing spectacularly, even after they tried to bulldoze it through.