As we head into another legislative session and a new Seattle City Council arrives at work today, I am coming around to the idea that we probably should consider taxing Amazon for housing. Remember, I have always opposed the idea of a tax on jobs; you don’t tax things you want, but things you don’t want. Why stop job creation? I think that the notion, offered in the past, of taxing companies based on the number of employees they have, is a seriously bad idea since it discourages job creation. So the tax on Amazon I’m thinking of would be just that, a tax on the “tech giant” for housing, not based on employees and hopefully limited only to that company. Here’s my thinking. 

First, Amazon knows how to run its business but it apparently knows nothing about electoral politics. They famously threw a bunch of money at last year’s city council election only to face an entirely predictable backlash from late voting younger voters. Keep in mind that many of the people driving a knife into Amazon’s favored candidate, Egan Orion, probably mailed their ballot just before picking up a bunch of junk they ordered on Amazon. There is no doubt that the vote was a repudiation of Amazon’s clumsy effort to shoehorn a lefty, gay, white, man riding a scooter into the office held by an adherent of Leon Trotsky, Kshama Sawant. If Amazon had any sense at all, they would have spent time trying to recruit a candidate that was both charismatic and not the socialist-lite, Orion. And they would have stayed out of the campaign to avoid making the election a referendum on them — and the “head tax.“

Second, since they didn’t bother to pay any attention to who they were supporting (had Orion won, he’d almost certainly have supported a tax on Amazon in the end), and they functionally did make the election about them, we’re stuck with both an emboldened Sawant and new Council President, Lorena Gonzalez. As I’ve said, Sawant is more of a performance artist than an actual policy maker. Gonzalez, however, knows what she’s doing, and she’s not happy. She’s aiming to stunt the ability of businesses of any kind to support candidates in the future and, likely, will reintroduce some kind of “head tax” this year. Add to this all the local bluster about banning evictions in the “winter months” and rent control, and we’ve got a real serious problem, much of it attributable to bumbling by Amazon.  

Third, the monster that has been unleashed and empowered by Amazon, a Seattle City Council full of resentment and a sense of mandate to punish business, has as its target the real estate and housing community. Remember we have a housing “crisis” and an eviction “epidemic!” Of course, we have neither. You can’t measure a “crisis” and the Council hasn’t even bothered to try. High prices for housing are caused by lack of supply in the face of rising demand. The Council could fix that by allowing more housing. Of course they’ve done the opposite. As for evictions, I don’t think 585 removals a year is an epidemic and we have no established endemic rate of eviction; how many should their be? The answer for advocates, of course, is none. “Let’s start with winter,” the Council will say, and “see what happens.”

Fourth, Amazon’s gross incompetence in politics is only matched by its treachery in efforts to preserve itself and its image. During last year’s legislative session, David Zapolsky, Amazon’s lawyer, orchestrated an effort to imply that Seattle’s “tech giants” supported really bad legislation about eviction. While I’m positive that Mr. Zapolsky learned a great many things at Columbia and Berkeley, apartment management and operations was not among them. He know’s nothing about what it takes to build, manage, and operate housing in Seattle or anywhere. If he does, he did a prodigious job hiding that knowledge in the letter he got the Seattle Mariners, Microsoft, and others to sign urging the passage of legislation that has done little to stop eviction but has created more confusion and frustration for tenants and building owners and operators. The 14 day notice requirement to “pay or vacate” that passed, for example, is just that, a required notice. But it’s as if the author of the bill expected that it was an incantation that once written down on paper would just end evictions. It is a requirement, not an effort to intimidate tenants and it is letting them know they have two weeks to pay! 

Here’s what the Zapolsky letter said about housing:

“Our communities are more robust when everybody has a stable home. We want families to be able to live in Washington without fear of losing their homes because of one medical emergency, temporary unemployment, or other hardship. Yet our state’s housing crisis has hit low-income families the hardest, driving out families who have lived in their homes for years.”

So let’s put Amazon’s money where their lawyer’s mouth is. To be clear, Amazon’s lobbyist in Olympia said the company disavowed the letter, saying it was Zapolsky’s own initiative. Amazon should maybe run a bus company; buses are handy to push people in front of.

This is the 999th post on this blog, and perhaps it may be the last given all of Amazon’s power and money. But when I consider all of this, it makes sense to me that the real estate community would pal up with the socialists and lefties and the Mariners and whatever assortment of resentful and craven groups are out there and demand that Amazon pay for the impact they’ve had on housing. What would this accomplish? Well maybe if we all grabbed Amazon by the ankles and shook as hard as we could, enough money would fall out of their pockets so non-profits and others clamoring for rent control, eviction bans, and other bad ideas might just be satiated and go away. Is there a bottom to the quest for cash by the activists and non-profits? Well, we could use Amazon’s money to find out. They can certainly afford it, right? 

Oh, wait, I hear someone wondering, “Won’t it hurt their business?” Hmmm? There is a great line in the 1993 remake of The Fugitive uttered by the US Marshall played by Tommy Lee Jones: “I don’t care!” Amazon’s Zapolsky didn’t really seem to care either about the impact of eviction legislation on the business of managing rental housing or about how messed up things would get when they dropped a cash bomb on the election. Will the real estate community join the effort to push Amazon in front of a big tax for housing? Probably not. But at least maybe we’ll sit back and stream the whole thing on Amazon Prime and eat some popcorn. It should be quite a series.