A new report from the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) paints an ugly picture of what’s happened to downtown Seattle since 2020. Thirty thousand jobs gone. A third of the office space empty. Nearly half the value of the office towers wiped out. And the fingerprints on the policy that helped drive it belong to the woman now running the city.
In 2020, Seattle passed a tax on its biggest, best-paying companies and called it JumpStart. The idea was that the largest employers could afford to fund affordable housing, climate programs, and long-term economic recovery. The woman who dreamed it up was Katie Wilson, then running the Transit Riders Union. She’s the mayor now.
Five years later, the company that pays more into JumpStart than almost anyone else, Amazon, has shifted roughly 14,000 employees to Bellevue, eight miles east, where there’s no comparable tax at all…