As the Antiplanner noted last week, Seattle is the only major city whose transit ridership grew in 2017 because the city has concentrated nearly 300,000 jobs in its downtown area. Yet, as noted earlier this week, Seattle transit ridership is starting to decline. That decline may may rapidly accelerate if the city council approves a proposed so-called “head tax” on all businesses that earn more than $20 million a year, which basically means Amazon and a few other companies.
The proposed tax would charge employers 26 cents per hour that each employee works in the city, or about $500 per full-time employee per year. For Amazon, which has something like 40,000 jobs in Seattle, the tax would amount to around $20 million a year — more than a quarter of total head-tax revenues — for the first couple of years, then go up to $30 million a year. The revenues from the tax would be used to provide affordable housing for homeless people.
Amazon was so perturbed by this that it halted construction on a new office tower it was building in downtown Seattle and threatened to pull all of its employees out of another existing building. When Seattle city councillor Kshama Sawant held an outdoor press conference, laid-off construction workers disrupted the meeting with shouts of “no head tax.” Despite this, members of the city council insist they will approve the tax. Continue reading
