I love math; I can watch people doing it for hours. I’m not particularly all that smart but I do have access to a calculator and a spreadsheet and the internet. So here’s one dumb guy’s, philosopher math on the Sawant-Durkan tax on jobs that will likely pass in the weeks ahead.

According to the City’s really, old and getting older, sloppy data analysis here’s where we are as a city:

I say sloppy because anyone who as looked at US Census data will tell you it doesn’t have a narrative. It doesn’t fit any kind of story. For example, the Census will tell us about households that pay 30 percent or more of their monthly income on housing, but it doesn’t tell us how much, in dollars, those households spend each month. We don’t know that. There’s all kinds of ways to slice Census data to make a point. I do it myself. But it’s hazardous. I doubt the number here, of 26, 250 households. There really isn’t a count of exactly how many people how much rent and it’s always changing.

But let’s take it as a fact, even though it is old data. This data is still driving the relentless pursuit of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ) which the City calls Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA). Here’s my stupid guy philosopher math on the City’s take on cost burden.

A household earning 30 percent of Area Median Income (AMI), which is about $74,000 a year, is making about $22,337 per year, or about $10.73 an hour, way below the current minimum wage. But let’s go with the sloppy City data anyway. That’s about $1,861 per month. A person making that amount of money should be paying about $558 per month. If that household is paying half their income in rent they’d be paying about $930 per month in rent or about $373 more than they should pay. I won’t even challenge this goofy way of measuring what’s affordable. Let’s go with it.

So there are 26,250 people and families out there wondering how will they pay April rent. According to the City, many of them are looking at a rent bill about about $1000 due on Thursday. For those families this is a real problem. These families do math too. I imagine a mom trying to get kids to sleep, then sitting at a table wondering, with a calculator, “How am I going to find $1000 by Friday?”

That’s reality. But let’s go back to City Hall again. So the supporters of a $150 million tax on jobs say they’ll build 750 housing units a year with the money they extort from local business. The people who do the math for the City already said, that there are 26,250 households that are paying half their pay check for rent. Assuming that about a week after all the money is collected from Sawant’s tax, and those units are somehow built, that would mean (and I’m just making this up like the City does) that the cost burdened households would drop from 26,250 to 25,500.  Good for those 750 households that get into that housing.

I’ll intervene with a little reality here. Nobody can build 750 units of housing in 12 months in Seattle. It’s impossible. Not Vulcan. Not Holland. Not Greg Smith. Not Jesus. Really. That many units can’t be built by fiat, even if there were a billion dollars available. It would be miraculous. You can look at the forty plus reasons why on the list we’ve built of cost drivers. Land is scarce. Labor is expensive. And leverage? More sources of capital means more transaction costs and time.

Let’s go back to that mom at her table. She’s adding numbers too. She has medical costs, not big, but she gets the bills. She has tips from one of her jobs. She keeps those. Often, on a good night, she’ll put some of them aside. She is taking care of her child but also her sisters. Sometimes her sister helps, sometimes not. Maybe she’ll talk to the landlord. Maybe she’ll call the hospital where she took her daughter to the emergency room when she had an ear infection and ask for a little more time. She has a calculator too. Who should she pay? The rent is due soon, it’s $930.

What if we went with Mayor Durkan and Councilmember Sawant’s tax starting now? What if business paid for their sins of making profits and creating jobs. What if we had $150 million dollars?

Let’s imagine that woman opening up an envelope from the City of Seattle and it offers help. All she has to do is send in her pay stubs from her job and the bill for rent. Download an app, the letter says, and give the City a bank account and a routing number and the City will pay your rent. She’s rubbing her eyes. Is this for real?

It must be a scam. She makes some calls. Others got the letter. Some people even got the money. How, she wonders. This doesn’t make sense. But she does it. She takes a picture of her pay check, a rent bill, and a check from her account. It’s late. She goes to sleep. It is a fitful sleep. She hasn’t slept well in a long time. She wakes up as light is streaking the skies. The kids are ok. She can’t help but look at her phone. She logs into her bank account.

There is a credit of $373.30 from the City of Seattle.

I must be dreaming, she thinks.

No, it’s real.

Let’s go back to the math.

Let’s say we paid each of the cost burdened households $373 a month. That would be a cost to the City and payers of the tax of $9,791,250. For 12 months, that would be $117,495,000, about $33 million less than Sawant has asked for.

Think about it. All across the city, families would get a reprieve. They’d get real help. They’d suddenly have a few dollars extra to save, to pay student debt, to finish paying off that loan.

It’s pretty clear, help thousands of families now, or pour cash into a system that, at best, promises a unit about 5 years from now.

So do the math. Check your conscience. The answer is easy.