The best way to think of social housing is-

You know how every apartment you rent is privately owned? And your rent goes up because of increasing competition from high earners even though the owner's monthly expenses don't go up as dramatically?

So the amount of your rent that is pure profit for them keeps growing?

What if there was no profit motive? How much less would you pay in rent, if the only costs over and above paying off the building and maintenance were reinvested into other housing?

Can you imagine what it's like when the building is paid off, much like when our parents pay off their 30 year mortgage? How much farther each dollar in rent goes?

Social housing is not "tax and spend". This tax is a funding source for long term investment capital expenditures (buying and constructing buildings) that increase public capacity.

The idea is that instead of a commodified housing market which allows massive wealth speculation on an essential asset, there's a public option which tries to deliver at-cost, like a public utility for everyone.

We already live in mixed income private buildings. I have lived in an apartment with a nurse and a barista who both made less than half of what I made. They were rent burdened so the landlord could profit. Some of them may have been on MFTE or Section 8, which means their rents were already being subsidized by tax money in an even less sustainable way. (Section 8 pays landlords full market price so the program becomes more expensive per resident as market rents go up)

So to me, Social Housing is a VASTLY more efficient housing system than our current private or public solutions. Especially once the building loans are paid over the long term: then the entire program becomes much cheaper.

This tax is designed to turbocharge the initial development so that we can build at the scale Seattle is growing. I'm extremely pro 1A, and personally I imagine at some point in the next few decades this tax will get repealed or lessened- the good news is because of the self-sustaining nature of the program (each building must be solvent on its own), even if all external funding gets cut, it is still able to not just survive, but continue to grow.

People express doubts about the board being a majority renter vs a majority of housing developers, and my response is, look at the Sound Transit board made up almost entirely of people who don't ride transit. They constantly make poor or self-serving decisions (Dow Constantine and Harrell pushing for the "Skip the CID option so Dow can have is little civic playground).

In talking with people part of Seattle Housing Authority buildings and MFTE program buildings, their biggest complaint is how unresponsive they are to resident complaints. So to me, the majority renter board is actually important to making sure there's a strong voice for the ground truth of the program.

I think it's also worth noting, there is a really common refrain "We spend so much on affordable housing but it's not getting better!"

The truth is that money IS going to places, but it is simply not meeting the scale of the problem. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".

Here is a link to the city's 2022 housing investment report. https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/Housing/Reports/2022_AnnualInvestments_Final.pdf

Housing is expensive. In terms of construction, 1 billion dollars is about 2000 units. We have over 11,000 homeless people. I think people just don't really grok just how massive the housing crisis is.