Kshama Sawant is at it again. Later today she’ll assemble a mob demanding that the City tax Amazon and “big businesses” for $150 million per year to build affordable housing. This reveals her complete ignorance of what’s going on in housing production and weakens her credentials as a socialist. If she understood the housing market and was really a socialist, she’d demand a tax that would just redistribute corporate wealth into the bank accounts of people who are struggling to pay rent. That’s what I support.

Seattle’s Office of Housing (OH) runs one of the most desultory data operations around. I won’t even bother linking to their data — they probably wouldn’t. It’s enough to say that they’ve Googled some United States Cenus numbers and determined that there’s lots of cost burdened people in Seattle. People or households? Insert big eye roll from OH here. A lot, ok. I mean like 34,000 households or something.  Are those extremely cost burdened, like they pay half their income in rent.  Oh yeah!

Well the sloppily done work from OH leaves us guessing. How much money is that? In other words, are we talking about a person who earns $12,000 a year paying $500 per month in rent or a person at 50 percent of Area Medium Income (AMI) who pays $1,800 for a one bedroom? Are there 34,000 people who are paying $200 a month too much or that many paying $900 a month too much?

Why bother answering that question? That would take work, and we’re in a housing crisis after all. We need to raise more money to build housing!

One thing I know about the people at OH is they know how long it takes and how expensive it is to build housing. One has to assemble land, capital, and grind through a tedious permitting process; yes, even the design review. It might even take a decade and cost $47 million to produce just 88 units like it took Capitol Hill Housing at its flashy 12th Avenue Arts Project.

That brings us back to Councilmember Sawant, another math and fact resistant resident of City Hall. Why would she support a $150 a year tax that would go to the Office of Housing, run by a City that is run by corporatist Democrats. And why would she want all that money going to pay for housing that is subject to a bunch of rules and bureaucracy created by that system?

Why not just pay people’s rent.

Seattle spent $610,000,000 in 8 years building about 300 units of housing a year. That’s about $75 million per year. The Council and Sawant want twice that, or $150 million per year. Why stop there? The Chamber is crying in a corner, nobody listens to developers and people that actually build housing, and there hasn’t been an economist involved in the City’s housing policy ever — unless he or she was being ignored.

Let’s do this. Let’s go just a little higher, say $204 million per year.  Why that much? Because that’s the equivalent of giving all those cost burdened households $500 bucks per month, per year. We already have a website set up here :http://helpmewithrent.com

Anyone could enter their data, validate with a rent receipt and pay stub, and give the City a bank account and routing number and voila! the housing crisis is over. Nobody has to build anything, apply for anything, or do any hard work. And if we’re allowed to buy a couple thousand cases of Champagne we can all celebrate the big transfer of wealth. I’ll be there. How wonderful it would be, and worth it, to stop the bad math, bad policy, bad economics, crap journalism (sorry Mike Rosenberg. I’m sure you’ll find other things skyrocketing, if you know what I mean), and endless griping.

We could go back to worrying about real problems like why do they make a single wait when there’s one spot at the noodle bar? C’mon. Sure I’m 4th in line but it’s a single spot! And sure prices on everything will go up a little bit, but wouldn’t it be worth it? Workers paradise with free shipping!