Harger: Katie Wilson built Seattle’s biggest business tax. Amazon drove to Bellevue. Downtown lost 30,000 jobs
Jun 17, 2026, 6:24 AM | Updated: 1:34 pm
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.
Bellevue took the same pandemic. The same remote-work shock. The same tech downturn. Its downtown office values rose 7%.
Ten companies.
That’s where roughly 70% of JumpStart money comes from, according to the city’s own budget office. We’re talking Amazon, Meta, and Google, among others. Ten employers, most of them tech, carry a giant slice of the city’s budget. Ten employers with the means to sign a lease anywhere they please.
How Seattle’s JumpStart payroll tax works, and why it reaches past the corner offices
JumpStart applies to any company with more than $9 million in total Seattle payroll and at least one employee earning $194,452 or more. In Seattle’s tech economy, $194,000 is a senior engineer, a product manager, a mid-career professional. The tax reaches well past the corner offices.
For employees in the $194,000 to $518,000 range, the cost to the employer runs $1,450 to $3,021 per job, depending on industry. Above $518,000, it climbs as high as $9,390. For salaries above a million, there’s an additional 5% excess compensation tax, which means at least $50,000 per head. Bellevue charges nothing close to any of it.
Mayor Katie Wilson designed JumpStart, promised it would fund affordable housing. The city raided it for the general fund
Her own allies describe it that way. She served on the city’s revenue task force, co-authored the blueprint, and built the coalition that pushed the payroll tax through in 2020. The Urbanist called it her idea. Seattle Magazine called her instrumental in designing it. Her own campaign site lists it as a top accomplishment.
So when the question becomes whether JumpStart helped or hurt, there’s no treating it as an abstract policy fight. It’s the signature achievement of the woman now running the city.
And here’s where it gets complicated for her. JumpStart was sold as dedicated money for affordable housing and climate, with 62% earmarked for affordable housing. The city has since pulled around $201 million of it into the general fund to patch ordinary budget holes, and dissolved the oversight committee that was supposed to watch the spending.
Wilson confirmed the math herself, on camera. The city’s deficit is only $150 to $200 million, down from $400 million, because of the JumpStart transfers, she said. The tax she built to construct affordable housing is now keeping the lights on at City Hall. Her answer to the deficit it papers over is a new round of taxes on top of it.
A city can be progressive and solvent at the same time. It can fund affordable housing and still want the employers who pay for that housing to stick around. A leader who actually believes both of those things could turn this around. That leader is not currently running the city.
The Downtown Seattle Association has an agenda. The JumpStart numbers still hold up
The Downtown Seattle Association wants lower business taxes. That’s their job, and you should read their report knowing it.
An agenda doesn’t make the math wrong. Most of these numbers come straight from the King County Assessor, from CoStar’s office data, and from Seattle’s own Economic and Revenue Forecast. Stack them together, and they say Seattle built the most expensive door in the region to walk through, then acted surprised when the line formed next door.
And man, looking at these numbers, these taxes seem like a bad idea. Not because a business group says so. Because the businesses that pay them are voting with their leases, and the bill for the empty towers they left behind is landing somewhere most people aren’t looking.
King County homeowners in Seattle, Federal Way, and Shoreline are quietly covering the tax revenue those empty towers used to pay
Somebody’s covering the difference, and it isn’t the empty towers.
Washington runs a budget-based property tax. Each taxing district sets its total bill first, within the legal caps, and then the assessor splits that bill across every property in the district based on relative value. When office towers lose half the value, they no longer carry their old share. That share doesn’t vanish. It slides onto whatever held its value, which is houses.
And here’s what the county doesn’t do. It doesn’t cut spending to match the lost revenue. The bill stays the same size. The towers just stopped picking up their end of it.
In King County, the residential share of the tax base went from around 65% to 83%.
And before anyone assumes Bellevue’s gains balance out Seattle’s losses, they don’t come close. Downtown Seattle lost more than $10 billion in office value. Downtown Bellevue’s entire office market is a fraction of that. Bellevue went up 7%. Seattle went down 48%. That math doesn’t net out. Seattle’s collapse is its own dead weight on every homeowner’s county tax bill.
Inside Seattle, it hits hardest because the city’s own levies get re-split onto city houses. But the countywide and state portions of the bill, the parts every King County homeowner pays, tilt toward residential too. A homeowner in Kent or Renton or Burien picks up a sliver of a downtown they may never set foot in.
Nobody on any council voted for that. There’s no line item to vote on. It’s automatic, which is exactly why it’s easy to miss.
RELATED STORIES
Seattle tried the head tax in 2018. Amazon froze a tower. The council repealed it in a month. JumpStart was the second swing
I covered the 2018 head tax fight. The city passed a tax on big employers. Amazon paused construction on a downtown tower. The council repealed the whole thing inside of a month.
JumpStart was the second swing, and it connected. Now the businesses are answering with leases instead of press releases, and the city keeps reaching for the same tool.
Push that cycle far enough and you get an open street fight between business and City Hall, each side daring the other to blink. Nobody wins that one. Either the tax base walks, or the services do.
We’re not there yet. But the current plan for closing the gap is another round of taxes, which is roughly the strategy that got us here.
The tax is called JumpStart. But what does that actually mean?
Anybody who’s owned an old truck knows how to jump start. You clamp the cables on a dead battery, turn the engine over, then drive around long enough to charge it back up. You don’t leave the cables clamped on for five years and wonder why the thing still won’t start on its own.
Five years in, downtown is the engine that won’t turn over. Meanwhile, Bellevue just turned the key and drove off.
At some point, you stop blaming the battery and start looking at the mechanic.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
