Seattle Activists Win Excessive Compensation Tax to Fund Social Housing

Feb. 21, 2025

Seattle voters have just beaten the oligarchs, Amazon, Microsoft, the local Chamber of Commerce, the real estate industry, the coup makers and backers, the Muskites, and the Trumpiphiles. How? Through a ballot measure, the people in Seattle have just approved a tax on excessive executive compensation to fund affordable housing.

The vote wasn’t even close. The proposal, Proposition 1A, won by a 26-point margin.

The advocacy group House Our Neighbors led the ballot campaign. Their leaders and leafletters and canvassers prevailed over a conservative and obstructing city council, a mayor focused on toadying to Seattle-based Amazon, a half-million-dollar opposition campaign, and the overlords of the Trump/Musk dictatorship.

In the same February 11 special election, voters in the working class Seattle suburb of Burien approved by a 14-point margin a plan to increase their local minimum wage to $21.10 an hour.

These victories show that we can and will build the resistance to Trump at the state and local level.

How will the new Seattle tax work?

Under the plan, businesses that dole out more than $1 million annually to individual Seattle-based executives or other employees will owe a 5 percent tax on compensation exceeding that $1 million threshold. Companies will owe no additional taxes if they pay all of their employees less than $1 million per year (a sum that exceeds 30 times the earnings of a full-time worker making our state’s minimum wage).

The tax is expected to raise at least $53 million annually, revenue that will enable the Seattle Social Housing Developer to issue bonds and accelerate the purchase, development, and maintenance of social housing, in perpetuity.

What does social housing do? It creates publicly owned housing for residents who earn up to 120 percent of the area median income, currently $145,000. The renters at the top of the income ladder will cross-subsidize the lower-income renters and no rent will exceed 30 percent of household income.

Social housing challenges the monopoly of speculative market rate housing that has been jacking up housing prices. Nationwide, the median sales price is now five times the median household income. Rents in Seattle for a two-bedroom apartment average over $2,700 a month, and go up, on average, $19 a month. Rent for almost half of Seattle renters exceeds 30 percent of their income, and one quarter of Seattle residents pay rent that exceeds 50 percent of their income.

We have succeeded in jumpstarting the campaign to Trump-proof Seattle and our state. We won’t win at the federal level, but we can create our own commonwealth of economic security, universal health care, affordable housing, progressive taxation, tuition-free higher education, respect for all of our neighbors, and love — across the country, one city, one state, one ordinance, one law, one multi-state compact at a time.

We can and should “flood the zone” with all of our hopes and dreams for taking back our country by putting into law at the local and state level the social contracts that bind all of us together in our own democracy.

John Burbank is the founder and retired executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute in Seattle.

[Top photo: Downtown Seattle Housing. Eric Fredericks from Rancho Cordova, CA, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]