Seattle’s Broadmoor Golf Club pays just under $0.08/square foot in property taxes. My 1960s house with overgrown shrubs and a broken concrete driveway pays more than 40X per square foot than a private golf club for the ultra-wealthy.

For those new to Seattle, Broadmoor Golf Club is the exclusive private club in Madison Park behind the guard-gated fence on the drive down to the beach. Broadmoor is not open to the public and is one of the most exclusive clubs in the city. Broadmoor also sits on over 5.3 million square feet of prime land in one of Seattle’s most desirable neighborhoods.

Their 2026 tax bill across 7 parcels? $421,380.34 on a total assessed value of roughly $10.16 million.

That works out to just under $0.08 per square foot of land annually.

My house is in a far less desirable part of the city, on a tiny lot, in a neighborhood with none of the amenities of Madison Park. At that same $0.08/sq ft rate, my property tax bill would be a little over $300 a year. I received my notice last week and my actual bill is… not that.

Now I get that assessed value drives tax calculations, not raw acreage. But that is exactly the point: Over 5.3 million square feet of some of Seattle’s most coveted real estate is being assessed at values that strain credulity. This is land sandwiched between Lake Washington and Washington Park, in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the state, assessed at prices that are in no way reflective of reality.

And who uses this land? A few hundred of Seattle’s wealthiest families. You and I will never set foot on it. There is no public benefit, no affordable housing, no community access. Just manicured fairways for people who summer as a verb.

There are a lot of conversations right now about whether Washington should adopt a state income tax to finally make our tax structure less regressive. And maybe that is the right fight. But let’s not pretend the current system is some neutral baseline that we are departing from. Right now, working-class homeowners are being taxed out of the city while a private club for the elite sits on millions of square feet and pays what amounts to a rounding error.

Washington likes to say that it is a progressive place. But at the end of the day, we are all quietly subsidizing the golf games of people who wouldn’t even give us the gate code. And our politicians are too cowardly to do anything about it. Where you at Katie Wilson???