On the Side | Brad Hicks
Housing is expensive in Seattle. A one-bedroom home typically rents for more than $1,150 a month. A studio apartment rents for more than $900 a month. A 333-square-foot home is currently listed at $299,000.
The median household wage in Seattle is currently about $67,000. Experts say a median wage of $72,000 is required to live in the area. A study showed that if the median cost of living in the U.S. is set at 100, Seattle is now at 176 and growing.
Over the past couple of decades, an influx of technology jobs and new businesses, and now a $15 minimum wage, led to a population boom. In 1990, Seattle proper had a population of 516,259. By 2010, that grew to 608,660. In the next six years, the population grew to 704,352, about a 16 percent increase. Seattle is the seat of King County, which has grown from 1.5 million people in 1990 to 1.931 million in 2010 – and is estimated to have grown by 13.3 percent to 2.186 million in 2016.
This means Seattle’s housing costs compared to its wages is becoming troublesome – troublesome because of the social repercussions.
Recently, in an effort to address a rapidly-growing homeless population, the Seattle City Council decided to implement a “head tax” on the largest corporations there. If your company is a certain size, you are going to pay $275 per employee to the city, with the city promising to spend the money to work on homelessness. Some 600 companies are impacted, including giants Amazon and Starbucks. The leaders of both of those companies have reacted vehemently in opposition to the tax. They question the city’s ability to deliver on the promise. The Associated Press reports the Seattle region had the third-highest number of homeless people in the U.S., despite the city spending $68 million on combating homelessness last year.
City council members slammed Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ reaction, saying they expected more from a company that claims it wants to help in these types of social matters.
Amazon paid almost no federal taxes last year due to special programs, and it is now searching for a place to put its second headquarters – with tax incentives a big part of the equation. It’s also working on using more robots in its operations. One has to wonder what the social conscience is of a company that is working to find ways to avoid helping fix the mess it has helped create, which works to avoid paying taxes, and which wants to employ machines and not people.
The remaining 20 cities being considered will fall all over themselves to land the jobs, but they ought to ask Seattle how that’s working out.
Brad Hicks is the former publisher of The Red Oak Express. Contact him at news@redoakexpress.com.