After Amazon-Led Tax Rebellion, Seattle's Homeless Aid Stalls | Hacker News Reader

After Amazon-Led Tax Rebellion, Seattle's Homeless Aid Stalls

bloomberg.com

33 pointspseudolus54 comments

This is not to be insensitive to the problem, but I don't grasp why we only talk about dealing with homelessness at the city level? Cities are small and surrounded by other cities, it's a terrible level of government to provide any kind of safety net or benefit. These need to come from states (if not the federal government). E.g. why for example should Seattle bear the responsibility of housing 10,000 homeless while it's rich neighbors on the east side can just wipe there hands of it?

To make it worse: Let's assume Seattle provides a great solution for the issue. Won't that attract homeless from other areas to Seattle, furthering the problem. It really must be solved federally. But we cannot do that because there is no way we can agree on something as complicated and probably nuanced like a solution to homelessness in the US.

If we have an obligation to house them, then let's house them where housing is cheap -- which is not near Seattle. The people in the homeless non-profits don't like this, because they like to live and work in Seattle. So nothing gets done and we have used needles everywhere.

I think you’re making up why homeless advocates don’t want to literally ship the homeless out of the city. There are a lot of reasonable objections to that plan.

Such as?

Cheap places tend to come with lower job prospects and services.

Most of the homeless are already not working anyway. There are exceptions, but that's not the majority.

The homeless can be classified into two groups: temporary and chronic. In any given year, temporary is about 80% of the homeless. We have a okay track record at helping the temporarily homeless, and lower housing costs would make it both less prevalent and cheaper to address.

However, the chronically homeless, at ~20% of the population, take up over 50% of the budget. They aren't able to live independently, regardless of any reasonable cost of living. They're also the most visible group.

We should keep in mind that the solutions for the two are vastly different.

This seems pretty good: http://www.evidenceonhomelessness.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

ya this feels like just another symptom of expensive housing and all the roadblocks to building way more housing. Especially denser housing.

The places with denser housing in Seattle have higher incidence of open drug use, public urination, and other anti-social behaviour. While most NIMBY arguments are garbage, the fact is the city will not enforce acceptable public behaviour, and the only protection you can get is distance. I so wish I could choose to live in a dense, safe area like I could in Amsterdam, Munich, Seoul, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and so many other places.

surely there have got to be some places which have a better ratio of housing price to job prospects than seattle.

Sure, and you send them there, and then that place sends them somewhere else, and so on and so forth.

Either they wind up back where they started because East Nowhere, North Dakota wants them gone too, or you wind up with concentrations of homeless people in an area with minimal tax base and horrific conditions as a result.

It all comes down to matching each homeless person with a city that matches their prospects. If you're disabled or won't ever be able to work, you should be offered the housing and support services in the cheapest place possible since you'll be using the services the longest. If you're lesser skilled but physically/mentally able, you are matched to housing and services in a city that has job prospects that match your capacity. Only those with the most skills and capacity to be successful should get housing and support in cities where the cost of living is very high.

If you've got no prospect of sustaining yourself in a specific city because it requires competence beyond your capacity, you've got no business in that city. We should aim to help put people in circumstances where they can thrive sustainably on their own.

None of this should be compulsory. I'm only suggesting that the support being offered for free should be focused on putting people in circumstances that match each individual and that cost the least amount to those providing the resources.

And the very ugly optics of pushing homeless out of sight and out of mind.

Shouldn't cities be obligated to make sure they're able to have teachers and plumbers and piano tuners?

No.

If rent gets so expensive that plumbers can't afford to live there, then some plumbers will just start coming in from some cheaper area and charge customers probably an increased fee based on the trouble of getting into the city.

Do cities have the power to make sure of such a thing? It's not like the mayor can just go around setting prices and wages to the level she thinks is best.

Why not? Isn't public/social housing basically that?

Public housing generally does not come with a nice enough environment that teachers and plumbers will agree to live there. Maybe there’s some way to build public housing which doesn’t come with drugs and petty crime, but if there is I don’t think American cities know how to do it. The conventional wisdom is that the right way to do affordable housing is distributing it evenly among all the new complexes in the city.

I know it was rhetorical but define "obligation" and "have". Obligation in a moral sense is a matter of opinion. In the practical sense: What happens if the obligation isn't fufilled? Piano tuners are of lesser importance than teachers in terms of consequences for lacking entirely.

There are alternatives for everything with their own price. Even if it is horrific like "die of rabies instead of getting vaccinated after being bit".

If availability of workforce in a broader area is high but in city housing they afford is low either they need to be paid more or traffic and commute time will increase and make the job less desirable which may affect skill level and harm labor availability. Underserving is technically also an option but there will be knock on effects - if the schools are bad then parents will be more likely to relocate.

> if the schools are bad then parents will be more likely to relocate.

Not all parents. Only the intelligent, cultured, and high income ones.

> which is not near Seattle.

The city of Seattle has 0 power to force other municipalities to build housing.

Any attempts by Seattle to build shelters and low income housing projects outside of the city limits would be swiftly shut down, assuming those attempts could even get started.

Unfortunately Seattle has to pay the burden of the entire region. While some cities, such a Bellevue, are helping out, other cities around here have no real desire, or motivation, to start paying money in, and voters in those other cities would likely make that clear the second their elected officials started spending tax dollars.

They don't need to force them. They can just pay to build housing in another city, and by contract give it for free to certain current residents of Seattle who are without homes.

why would the other city ever agree to this?

we have instances of cities facing outcry from residents for simply building homeless shelters within their own limits[0][1]. I imagine the outcry for a city "shipping out" their homeless to a shelter outside their bounds would be even worse.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/28/san-francisc...

[1]: https://www.ocregister.com/2019/04/02/huntington-beach-scrat...

It doesn't need to be a city. I've thought about this idea myself, pick a state with a large amount of empty land and construct housing, addiction and mental health services in a single place. A massive complex for those unable to care for themselves in society.

It would cost billions but it already costs billions nationally to care for the homeless. With lower wages and land values you'd have large cost savings and that's before economies of scale.

Let the addiction specialists and mental health professionals set the rules here. They would be limited by the constitution but would be able to enact laws for this very specific segment of the population. A low trust society encased within a high trust society.

At that point cities would be free to enact laws to the effect of "get help in the complex or go to prison" when they catch the homeless committing crime. Homeless no longer are a blight to the cities and the homeless get the best help we can offer.

What exactly is the difference between what you describe and prison?

And herein lies part of the reason for the mentally ill in homelessness; A portion of homelessness is a result of cut mental facility funding combined with ending forced institutionalization.

Lack of a cell, freedom to leave, no criminal record. Nobody would be forced to go but if you claim you don't need any of these services you will be treated as a regular citizen who just publicly shot up in the street.

Nevada? It worked well for Yucca Mountain...

Don't even need to cross state lines in this case - there's plenty of wilderness and low-density space in Washington (even Western Washington) where development is a fraction of the cost of building and operating a facility in Seattle. Build in a cheap area and shift the surplus into social services and vocational training to help people get off the treadmill.

Relocation should be behavior based (so not "vagrancy", which is a BS charge, but actual public misconduct or documented threat of self-harm). X strikes and you're relocated unless you can fund an appropriate bond.

The rest of the state is probably a healthier place to heal in any event... easier to control access to drugs and alcohol and limit the violence from street predators. The street isn't a very supportive environment....

> The city of Seattle has 0 power to force other municipalities to build housing.

They also have 0 power in forcing people from the region not to come to the city to become homeless. It is a regional problem, Seattle can only do so much by itself, as you say.

There was a Supreme Court Ruling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapiro_v._Thompson) years ago the end result of which is that the largest city in an area ends up paying a disproportionate amount of the social benefits costs.

Arguably the coastal cities pay a disproportionate share of social welfare program costs for the entire nation.

Perverse incentives, small towns can not invest in the future, and just outsource the consequences to larger municipalities.

If folks in Seattle of all places are expressing concern about whether the government is wisely using public money, maybe someone should listen?

I’m pro high (individual) taxes. But it’s a hard position to support whole watching municipalities piss away money. WMATA recently spent $141 million building a new transit center in Silver Spring, a DC suburb. The gleaming new building is now falling apart and covered in graffiti, less than four years later: https://wjla.com/news/local/silver-spring-transit-center-fil....

This is a $141 million bus station. That’s 25% of the cost of the new light rail networ providing transit to a similar outlying urbanized area of Copenhagen. $650 million for a new light rail system with 27 kilometers of track and 27 stations in Denmark. Versus $141 million for a single bus station in Maryland.

Maybe Americans aren’t crazy to believe that our government (versus government in the abstract), can’t solve problems if given more money?

Where did that number for the Copenhagen Metro come from? Wikipedia says the most recent line is expected to cost $3.2 billion for a 15.5km line with 17 stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Circle_Line

That's an extension of the Copenhagen heavy rail line within the city. Obviously that's more expensive than building infrastructure out in the suburbs--Silver Spring, my point of comparison, is a suburb of D.C. I was talking about the Greater Copenhagen Light Rail: https://www.intelligenttransport.com/transport-articles/1426....

Although, I should note that the cost for building 10 miles of new track entirely underground beneath Copenhagen is less than what it cost DC to extend the Silver Line the same distance entirely above-ground through low-density suburbs along a pre-existing right of way.

I see, I think that link is referring to this project? https://www.dinletbane.dk/in-english/stations-and-trains/ In which case, looks like it won't open until 2025 and it's now up to $920 million. But yeah I certainly agree that construction in most of the rich world is dramatically cheaper than most rich US cities.

Looks like it went up a bit, but that figure also includes $150 million in reserves, while I’m not sure the original $650 million was factoring in the reserves.

Maryland is currently building a suburban light rail system that’s almost exactly the same length, with fewer stations. It’s closing in on $6 billion with no reserves.

Yeah the Purple Line is an exceptional boondoggle.

Are there any types of tax that are:

1. Reasonably within the means of cities to levy, and 2. Economcially efficient?

This per employee tax was literally a tax on jobs: it taxes a socially beneficial thing. Of course, many taxes are like this, such as the income tax. But adding a totally new tax is mort distorting than simply raising existing income taxes.

And, at a state /federal level, income taxes for some reason are more politically feasible than taxes on externalities, which are economically efficient

If efficiency is out of reach, are there any taxes cities can levy that at least aren’t lousy in terms of efficiency? It seems to me that municipalities generally aren’t given good taxation powers.

Consumption taxes on luxury goods usually aren’t very distorting at the local level, especially since its pretty easy to define luxury goods that aren’t locally made. The problem is that the max revenue that they can collect is much lower than income or common consumption taxes, which have a wider base with less ability to evade.

Of course with luxury taxes the issue is avoidance more than evasion.

Sales based taxes are either regressive because it cannot be done without and are more or less fixed or avoidable because it can be done without.

Of course if reduced consumption of the given luxury is the goal it is sorta mission accomplished (too high and black markets may arise) but undermines the revenue generation goal.

I figured the goal was revenue, hence my dismissal of it as an effective tax for funding public services.

What’s the difference between avoidance and evasion with regards to taxation?

Evasion is illegal. i.e. not paying your income taxes

Avoidance is legal. i.e. if there was a local luxury goods tax, you could decide to either:

1. Not buy luxury goods, or

2. Buy luxury goods from some other area, without a tax

A local luxury goods tax would be highly likely to destroy the local luxury goods industry without actually lowering luxury good consumption, as such a tax can easily and legally be avoided.

Whereas, local property taxes can only be avoided by moving or selling. They can, however, illegally be evaded through fraud. This is why property taxes are more effective for cities: hard to avoid, hard to evade, and evasion can be punished with fines or jail.

> Are there any types of tax that are: 1. Reasonably within the means of cities to levy, and 2. Economically efficient?

Economic orthodoxy says that taxes in order of efficiency (from most to least) are: Land value taxes > property taxes > consumption taxes > income taxes > capital taxes > wealth taxes.

Cities in general are able to levy land value, property, and sales taxes fairly easily, and these are the most economically efficient taxes.

(And if you want to move from theory to empirical evidence, when relatively rich societies want to raise a lot of money, they almost invariably lean heavily on very large consumption taxes. If you need to raise a lot of money and don't want to burn your economy entirely to the ground, you can do a lot worse than a 20% VAT.)

Why didn't the city increase land, property or sales taxes? Did they just want to pick a big, popular target?

Well yeah. Or probably even more importantly, a tax that most people wouldn't be paying.

Efficient taxes tend to 1) be broad based and 2) be very hard to avoid by changing behaviour. And that means they will impact a lot of voters, and voters don't like paying taxes. :)

Watching the City Council meeting where the repealed the head tax was pretty remarkable. It was like watching a hostage video. Every council member (sans Sawant) stood up and said something to the effect of 1) this tax is absolutely necessary to combat the homeless crisis and 2) it must be repealed immediately.

The pretenses of liberal democracy vanish when the interests of the rich and powerful are threatened.

If FAANG didn't keep adding jobs to overpopulated cities but to rust belt cities, housing pressures wouldn't be bad as it is.

At least OCP invested in the community.

I live in Seattle and think that this tax was a joke. Seattle/King County has spent $700M+ on this issue over the last ten years with 0 results. They have given no reason to pour money into dysfunctional programs.

The "Seattle Is Dying" documentary mentioned in the article: https://komonews.com/news/local/komo-news-special-seattle-is...

I watched this a few weeks ago, and it was extremely eye-opening.

I was just thinking of that documentary. I agree it was very eye opening. Looks like it stands at 3.9M views currently. I read an article about it that the journalist brought a lot of ire his way producing that blunt exposition. If I remember correctly there was a PR campaign to undo his work or something along those lines.

Direct YouTube link: https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw

Komo News is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, a right-wing media organization that regularly forces local affiliates to air propaganda.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/sinclair-requires-...

Here is a a cogent rebuttal to the documentary in question. https://crosscut.com/2019/03/6-reasons-why-komos-take-homele...

Seattle's revenues went from $2.6B in 2007 to $3.8B in 2017, presumably thanks to the tech boom. They can fully fund the extra $200M needed out of that $1.2B windfall. It would be instructive to see what other expenditures were deemed a higher priority.

Are those homeless from Seattle or they travelled to Seattle?

The proposed head tax on Amazon isn't that much to solve the situation, it is probably more due to the fact Amazon is moving out of Seattle.

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