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After a weekend of high-stakes negotiations between Seattle City Council members and Mayor Jenny Durkan, the council voted unanimously Monday to tax the city’s largest employers to help address homelessness. Starting next year, the tax will be $275 per employee, per year on for-profit companies that gross at least $20 million per year in the city — down from a $500-per-head proposal that Durkan threatened to veto. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Having paused construction planning on an office tower over the larger proposal, Amazon now will move ahead with it, a spokesman said after the vote. But the company’s plans to occupy a...

Hours after the Seattle City Council passed a head tax on the city’s largest businesses Monday, Amazon issued a statement in response. The online shopping giant is grateful that the city amended its head tax proposal to a lesser amount, but notes that it is wary of city leaders’ attitudes toward business. Amazon’s statement is attributed to Vice President Drew Herdener: "We are disappointed by today’s city council decision to introduce a tax on jobs. While we have resumed construction planning for Block 18, we remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward...

The council approved a tax of $275 per employee, per year on for-profit companies that gross at least $20 million per year in the city — down from a $500-per-head tax Mayor Jenny Durkan had threatened to veto. The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Monday to adopt a new tax on the city’s largest employers to help address homelessness. The ordinance will impose a tax of $275 per employee, per year on for-profit companies that gross at least $20 million per year in the city — down from a $500-per-head tax that Mayor Jenny Durkan threatened to veto. -snip- The...

The Seattle City Council has approved a tax on large businesses such as Amazon and Starbucks to fight homelessness. The council on Monday unanimously backed a compromise tax plan that will charge large businesses about $275 per full-time worker a year. It’s lower than the $500-per-worker tax initially proposed. The tax would begin in 2019 and raise about $48 million a year to pay for affordable housing and homeless services. Some council members acknowledged it wasn’t enough to address urgent housing needs but conceded they couldn’t get the six votes needed to override a potential veto by the mayor. Other...

Kshama Sawant’s rally “March on Amazon! Tax Big Biz to Build Affordable Housing!” was planned well before a committee passed a head tax on big businesses, including Amazon. The full Seattle City Council is expected to vote on the proposal on Monday. ”Our message today for the council is to stay strong,” Kshama Sawant – one of the most vocal proponents of the tax – told KTTH’s Jason Rantz at the rally. The rally on Saturday began at Seattle Central College Plaza and preceded a march to Amazon’s headquarters in South Lake Union. This is extortion,” the events Facebook page...

Seattle is worried about the well-being of the poor and mentally ill people living there, so it's going to drive businesses out of town. OK, that's not how the politicians describe their plan, but that's probably how it will work out. Members of Seattle's city council want all big Seattle businesses to pay a tax of $500 per employee. In response, Amazon stopped building a new complex. Construction workers joined Amazon in protesting the new tax. On the other side are city council members like Kshama Sawant. She and members of her political party, Socialist Alternative, demonstrated in support of...

MIFFLINBURG, Pa. -- Employees at Ritz-Craft Custom Homes in Mifflinburg finished up a modular home on Eighth Street. When it comes to buying a house, many people are turning to modular homes. So many, the Ritz-Craft is hiring 150 new employees to help produce them. "Framing, carpentry, electrical, plumbing, drywall, we'll also need leadership positions," Myles Biggs said. Biggs is general manager of Ritz-Craft Custom Homes in Mifflinburg. Biggs tells Newswatch 16 the housing market is coming back and his company has seen a large influx of orders. Ritz-Craft Custom Homes is reopening a section of one of its plants...

The great things about liberals is that even though most have never run a business, they all know exactly how businesses should be run.  It's as if all those courses they took at Amherst or Yale on women's studies, art history, and neo-colonialism gave them an intuitive sense for market forces, and exactly how much businesses should pay employees, exactly how much in taxes businesses should pay, and how to run every aspect of their companies. It's hardly surprising, then, to find an exposé in the Washington Post focusing on Fox News commentator Sean Hannity.  Hannity spent millions of dollars to...

If you build it, they will come. And if you 3D-print it, they will come faster, cheaper and more sustainably. We live in an era of overpopulation and mass housing shortages. Yet we also live in a time of phenomenal digital innovation. On the one hand we have major crises affecting the health, liberty and happiness of billions of people. But look at the other hand, where we have potential for life-changing technological breakthroughs at a rate never before seen on this planet. Our challenges are vast, but our capabilities to produce solutions are even greater. In the future, we...

Fair-housing advocates planned to file a lawsuit early Tuesday against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and HUD Secretary Ben Carson for suspending an Obama-era rule requiring communities to examine and address barriers to racial integration. The 2015 rule required more than 1,200 communities receiving billions of federal housing dollars to draft plans to desegregate their communities — or risk losing federal funds. The 2015 rule, developed over a six-year period, required every community receiving HUD funding to assess local segregation patterns, diagnose the barriers to fair housing and develop a plan to correct them. Most communities were...

The state's Energy Commission is expected to approve new energy standards that would require solar panels on the roofs of nearly all new homes, condos and apartment buildings from 2020 onward. There will be exemptions for homes that either can't fit solar panels or would be blocked by taller buildings or trees, but you'll otherwise have to go green if your property is brand new.

This Is How Much it Costs to Rent a One-Bedroom Apartment in 50 Major U.S. Cities It won't come as a shock that the cost of rent can be steep in cities such as New York and San Francisco. After all, a monthly bill in the $2,000–$4,000 range isn't unusual in those locations. But have you ever considered how much it would cost to live in a one-bedroom apartment in Anchorage, Alaska? Earlier this week, personal finance site GOBankingRates.com released a study on the median costs of rent for one-bedroom apartments in 50 major U.S. cities. It also includes data...

New HomeOne mortgage has no geographic or income restrictions. It’s been more than three years since Freddie Mac rolled out a conventional mortgage that only required a 3% down payment for certain borrowers. The program, which is designed for qualified low-and moderate-income borrowers, saw reasonable progress over the last few years, with Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt telling Congress last year that Freddie’s 3% down program (along with a similar one from Fannie Mae) was continuing to grow. But now, Freddie Mac is about to supercharge its 3% down program and launch a widespread expansion of the offering....

California's Democrats are trying to take us once again The definition of insanity is to repeat the same mistake over and over again, while hoping for a different, better outcome. Such is the latest case of the predictable Left, turning once again to another failed sociological experiment—capping or regulating rents artificially, more commonly known as “Rent Control.” Democrats in California are once again imposing rent control initiatives through state and local ballot measures, including the Sacramento Renter Protection And Community Stabilization Charter Amendment. The effects of rent control only become worse the longer the rent control continues. Rent control is...

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has proposed legislation that could triple rents on the poorest tenants in federally subsidized housing as part of a push to redefine housing assistance as a temporary benefit instead of the permanent source of shelter it has become for millions of poor people. The legislation, spurred by Mr. Trump’s conservative budget director, Mick Mulvaney, and drafted by aides to Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, would also allow local governments to impose work requirements on tenants in public housing deemed fit for work. The plan would also increase rents for elderly and...

The trailing twelve month average of median new home sale prices in the United States reached a new high in March 2018, where preliminary data puts that figure at $326,217. At the same time, the value of the typical new home sale price in the U.S. is 5.57 times as much as the typical household income, which also represents a new record. One way to think of that latter figure is that new homes in the U.S. have never been less affordable for the typical American family at any time during the 21st Century than they are right now....

California’s housing market faces challenges that have been building for decades. The median home price in the state has increased at several times the rate of median home prices across the country, leading to lower-income Californians fleeing the state in droves. One analysis estimated that housing problems cost California $140 billion annually in lost economic output. Faced with a means of addressing this issue, these activists pressured California legislators into killing reform legislation in its first committee hearing. California suffers from a severe housing shortage, as the state ranks 49th in housing density. Local governments have failed to allow sufficient...

A Sacramento, Calif., area home is up for sale, but it comes with a catch. The homeowner has a political preference in mind for the next owner of her house, which has been in her family for decades. "She entertained people from all walks of life," said the homeowner who asked we not use her name for fear of retaliation. "I told her [the realtor] that I didn't want her to sell it to a Trump supporter," said the woman. She wants a sale contingent upon how someone votes, but is that legal?

The omnibus bill Congress passed and President Trump signed last week is a disaster. However, one positive thing to come out of it, in addition of course to the increase in military spending, was the defunding of President Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation (AFFH). This is a move we’ve been advocating for some time. Finally, the Republican Congress pulled the trigger. AFFH enables the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to order more than 1,200 cities and counties that accepted any part of annual community development block grants to rezone neighborhoods along income and racial criteria. I have...

The Progressive left loves to assign "rights" to poor people who have no constitutional basis (the "right" to medical care, for instance) but is strangely reticent when it comes to your Second Amendment rights. Apparently, if you live in a housing project in East St. Louis, you had best surrender your guns at the door. From the Belleville News Democrat: The woman, who was identified in the lawsuit only as N. Doe, out of fear that her abusive ex-husband could find her if she was identified, has a valid Illinois FOID license and has been trained in firearm safety, according...