Category: legislature

City Council, Elections, homelessness, housing, legislature

This Week On PubliCola: April 26, 2025

Homelessness programs threatened, sex work crackdown fizzles, and Metro considers converting parking lots into housing.

Monday, April 21

PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 2 Candidate Adonis Ducksworth

We sat down with Adonis Ducksworth—a longtime skateboarder and Seattle Department of Transportation staffer who’s running to represent Southeast Seattle—to talk about density, social housing, and how to address and prevent gun violence in the district.

Meeting to Consider County Executive Appointment Canceled, Leaving Shannon Braddock In Limbo at Least Two More Weeks

Acting county executive Shannon Braddock, appointed on a temporary basis several weeks ago, remains essentially an at-will employee until (and unless) the county council appoints her as interim executive through November. They were supposed to make a decision this week (after declining to appoint her at an earlier meeting) but now won’t do so until at least early May.

Tuesday, April 22

Seattle Nice: City Council Shakeup in Southeast Seattle

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed the District 2 city council election, hacked crossing signals in Amazon’s neighborhood, and the potential closure of the Virginia Inn, an institution in Pike Place Market. Also, on this week’s episode of Are You Mad At Me?, the podcast Josh and I are doing about the movie Shattered Glass, we explain why everyone should watch this excellent movie.

Seattle Leaders Said “Stay Out” Orders Would Reduce Gun Violence and Sex Trafficking. So Far, They’ve Issued Five.

When City Attorney Ann Davison and City Councilmember Cathy Moore pushed to urgently pass a new law allowing judges to ban sex buyers from Aurora Ave. N, they claimed the orders would help end gun violence and trafficking in the area. In the seven months since, there have only been five such orders, all issued after costly stings involving police pretending to be sex workers.

Wednesday, April 23

As Cuts to Critical Programs Loom, Latest Count Shows Sharp Increase in Homelessness

The homelessness authority released some new details about its latest statistical estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in King County. Unsurprisingly, homelessness has gotten worse, just as the state and federal governments prepare to make cuts to programs that bring people indoors.

State Budget Cuts Could Halt Successful Encampment Resolution Program

One of the programs on the state’s chopping block is an encampment resolution program begun during the pandemic. Unlike the city of Seattle’s policy, which mostly consists of designating people as obstructions and sweeping them from place to place, the state program involves weeks of outreach and provides both case management and temporary lodging as part of a path to housing. The state budget would eliminate funding to address encampments in the future.

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Thursday, April 24

New Federal Homelessness Contracts Appear Designed to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants

New contracts from HUD’s Continuum of Care program, which provides about 11 percent of the region’s homelessness budget through grants to nonprofit providers, would require providers to check the immigration status of people seeking shelter and other services, and deny service to anyone who can’t prove they’re in the country legally. The regional homelessness authority hasn’t decided yet how to respond to the contracts, which also include anti-”gender ideology” language.

Friday, April 25

Turning Park-and-Rides Into Housing

In his “Maybe Metropolis” column, Josh Feit touts legislation that would allow King County Metro to redevelop up to three underutilized park-and-ride lots as affordable housing—the ultimate transit-oriented development.

 

housing, land use, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Urbanism

Turning Park-and-Rides Into Housing
Aerial view of Shoreline Park-and-Ride via Google Maps.

By Josh Feit

We (Ed: Actually, Erica) gladly paid $7 an hour on a recent Friday afternoon for a  street parking spot behind Capitol Hill’s Stoup Brewing. The reasonable fee is part of SDOT’s data-driven demand management program, which puts an appropriate price on parking, recognizing—sort of like NYC’s congestion pricing program—that popular destinations should be subsidized by the car-centric culture their urban density offsets. After all, density makes Capitol Hill’s go-to clubs, bars, restaurants, and shops possible in the first place.

Applauding the high cost of parking was on point because the event we were attending was a happy hour thrown by Sightline Institute, where more than 50 people crowded in to celebrate, I kid you not, a parking reform bill.  Sightline, which has become an incubator of green metropolis legislation in Olympia, helped draft the bill, which had just passed the state legislature the day before.

Demand management is well and good. But the Sightline bill takes the next step: It prevents cities from requiring too much parking in the first place. The bill, which was sponsored by urbanist rock star Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), caps parking mandates statewide. For example, the bill says cities can’t require more than one parking space for every two units in new multifamily housing. Developers could still build more parking, but they’ll no longer have to.

There were free stickers on the tables proclaiming, in the style of parking signs: “End Parking Mandates.” And when Sightline’s parking reform guru Catie Gould jumped up on a table with a handful of drink tickets to thank everyone for coming—identifying herself as “the one who wrote” SB 5184—the crowd feted her like she was Bernie or AOC behind the mic on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

Certainly, three cheers for the parking caps; I grabbed one of the free stickers. But it’s another bill that sets my war-on-cars heart aflutter. Where the Bateman/Sightline bill limits new parking, the one I’m giddy about actually nukes existing parking infrastructure—parking infrastructure that (unsurprisingly to those who have been predicting a transit future for years) is sitting largely empty.

According to King County Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer, only about 30 percent of the parking spaces in park-and-rides across the system are full on a typical day—and the most heavily used lots, at Northgate and on the Eastside, are only 60 to 70 percent full.

King County lobbied for a change in state law to allow for a different use at these properties: Affordable housing. Appropriately enough, the reform—which authorizes  Metro to overhaul three pilot sites for now—came as an amendment to state Sen. Julia Reed’s (D-36, Seattle) transit-oriented development bill, broader legislation that’s about incentivizing affordable housing near transit hubs. (I wrote about Reed’s bill and its innovative funded inclusionary zoning progam earlier this session.)

 

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The un-pave paradise amendment, a friendly add from state Sen. Yasmin Trudeau (D-27, Tacoma), says WSDOT can select up to three park-and-ride facilities in King County so Metro can conduct a pilot affordable housing program that “releases [Metro from] any covenant imposed for highway purposes and replace it with a covenant requiring affordable housing.” “Gaining this flexibility,” Metro spokesman Switzer said, “would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service.”

You don’t have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist’s version of turning swords into ploughshares.

Switzer declined to specify which park-and-rides are being liberated, but the legislation specifies three large surface parking lots—each with between 300 and 1,000 parking spaces—in Kirkland, Shoreline, and South King County.

Go figure. Parking lots with 300 to 1,000 stalls are going underutilized. Props to King County Metro for turning those empty stalls into an opportunity for fulfilling the potential of transit infrastructure as a prompt to build affordable housing. Transit policy is land use policy. And King County needs more land use policy like this that authorizes affordable housing.

Josh@PubliCola.com

homelessness, King County, legislature

State Budget Cuts Could Halt Successful Encampment Resolution Program
Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck

By Erica C. Barnett

A program started under former governor Jay Inslee to resolve encampments on state-owned rights of way could shut down this year, advocates and King County elected officials warned on Tuesday, unless state Democrats restore funding to continue the program in this year’s budget. The program, unlike the daily sweeps that have become part of the urban landscape in Seattle, involves extensive outreach and, for most participants, ends in housing.

Currently, both the House and Senate versions of the budget reduce funding for the right-of-way program, as it’s known, from $75 million a year to $45 million a year. That funding, advocates said Tuesday, would only be enough money for the program to continue housing people from past encampments, not to provide ongoing outreach and shelter for new encampments in the future. To keep the program at current levels—accounting for inflation, capital costs, and payments to WSDOT for costs associated with physical cleanups—the state would need to restore $40 million to the budget.

Speaking at the Arrowhead Gardens senior housing complex in Highland Park, near the former site of an infamous encampment that was resolved through the program, King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said, “We do not see results in getting people inside by sweeping people out of sight and from one location to another. We do not create trust with our housing service providers by making it harder for them to find people when there’s actually a unit available.”

In King County, the right-of-way program is run by Purpose Dignity Action, which created a program called CoLEAD to provide temporary lodging during the pandemic. Unlike previous efforts to shut down encampments through brute-force sweeps, the PDA’s program resolves encampments by providing sustained outreach, intensive case management, and hotel-based shelter to former encampment residents.

The strategy is more expensive than the sweep-and-repeat approach, but unlike sweeps, it has a strong track record of keeping people housed. According to the PDA, the program has resolved 23 encampments and moved 479 people into housing in King County since 2022, with more than two-thirds of those individuals still housed.

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“Without restored funding for those programs, the front door will close. In other words, we will not have an encampment resolution program that cannot resolve new encampments,” Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said on Tuesday. “No new encampments will be resolved if this goes forward. But we know there’s a way that we can fix this, and leaders from the local and state level have a moral imperative to ensure that there is a path forward for this work to continue.”

Diane Radischat, president of the resident community at Arrowhead Gardens, worried out loud about what would happen if money for the right-of-way program dried up. Already, she said, people are beginning to set up tents and RVs in the area.

The people who have set up encampments on Myers Way are “not the cooperative ones,” Radischat said, “but they still need help. They still need services, and we cannot give up on them ever. So we can’t afford for the state to take any money away from this program in any fashion at all. If the money disappears, what you think will happen? People will just suddenly be all fine, and we don’t have to worry about them anymore?”

After the meeting, Mosqueda told PubliCola that along with restoring the cuts to the right-of-way program, state legislators also need to pass (and Governor Bob Ferguson needs to sign) the $12 billion progressive revenue package that state Democrats have proposed this session. “It’s not a zero- sum game,” Mosqueda said. “We cannot take funding from another bucket to invest in this evidence based program—it needs to be additive so that we are also investing in upstream safety net programs with new revenue from the state.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Mosqueda said the King County Regional Homelessness Authority needed the ability to raise revenues on its own, rather than serving exclusively as a pass-through agency for funding from outside sources.

Last year, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci proposed spending $1.8 million of the county’s budget to supplement the right-of-way program, calling it a “bright spot” at KCRHA, but the council voted it down 7-2, with only Balducci and Jorge Barón voting yes. Then-budget chair Girmay Zahilay urged a “no” vote at the time, citing the need for fiscal discipline amid a growing county budget deficit. Both councilmembers spoke Tuesday in favor of the state budget request.

City Council, Courts, homelessness, housing, Jails, legislature

This Week on PubliCola: February 22, 2025
SCORE jail in Des Moines.

Unsheltered people challenge Burien’s sleeping ban, a new state proposal would fund mandatory affordable housing in new developments, and an in-depth look at the deadly SCORE jail in South King County.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, February 18

Unsheltered People Suing to Overturn Burien’s Sleeping Ban Get Their Day In Court

A judge held the first hearing in a lawsuit against Burien’s total ban on sleeping or “residing” outdoors in the city, challenging the city to explain how the ban would be applied and how it differs from banishment.

Wednesday, February 19

The City’s Maritime Industrial Area is No Place for Housing

In a guest editorial, representatives from industry argue that a proposal to allow housing on land just south of the two Seattle stadiums would be devastating to the local economy and dangerous for future residents.

Thursday, February 20

Seattle Should Follow State’s Lead on Inclusionary Zoning—By Funding It

Maybe Metropolis columnist Josh Feit takes a look at a state proposal that would require developers to include some affordable housing in projects they build around transit stations. Unlike previous proposals, this bipartisan bill includes a Republican amendment that would actually fund affordable housing, making it viable.

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Seattle City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth came on the podcast this week for a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from her recent vote against the recent “less lethal” weapons legislation to her position on density in the comprehensive plan. We also talked about efforts to shut down a longstanding nude beach in her council district.

Friday, February 21

Eleven People Have Died at this South King County Jail in the Last Two Years. Their Families Are Demanding Answers.

Reporter Andrew Engelson took an in-depth look at conditions inside SCORE jail in South King County, where at least 11 people have died in the last two years alone. Families of people who have died in SCORE custody, former medical staff, and people incarcerated at SCORE told PubliCola the jail is plagued by inadequate care, filthy conditions, and hostile staff.

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

Seattle Should Follow State’s Lead on Inclusionary Zoning—By Funding It
Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle)

By Josh Feit

With little fanfare, state house legislators passed a game-changing housing affordability bill out of committee last week. The bill, HB 1491, would require more housing density around rail and bus rapid transit stops and mandate on-site affordable housing as part of new developments in those areas. The bill tanked during the last two legislative sessions. But this session, it includes a change that represents a tectonic shift in how affordable housing advocates are thinking about the issue of inclusionary zoning, a policy that requires developers to include affordable housing in new projects.

I’ll get to that big shift momentarily, but first, a little history. Known as transit-oriented development, or TOD, housing around transit stops is a longtime priority for pro-density urbanists. In Washington State, I trace its origin back to the 2009 (!) legislative session, when the housing advocates at Futurewise first took up the cause.

At that time, their nascent pro-housing movement unwittingly stirred up a hornets’ nest of anti-development opposition from both the homeowner right (who are touchy about “neighborhood character”) and the social justice left (who often equate new housing with developer “giveaways” and displacement).

Thankfully, a lot has changed since then. First of all, gentrification has escalated exponentially under Seattle’s low-density status quo, a trend that calls b.s. on the NIMBY thesis that denser zoning is the cause of gentrification. If anything, the last 10 years under single-family protectionist policies show that it’s the opposite: Sequestering multifamily housing into a minuscule slice of the city’s residential areas causes gentrification.

And, more importantly: The pro-density “Yes In My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement of the past decade has re-framed the density debate in a way that has attracted social-justice lefties. YIMBYs now talk about municipal land use regulations in the context of  historic redlining and current exclusionary zoning laws that wall off huge portions of cities like Seattle from lower-income families and renters. As a result, lefties no longer stand in lockstep with wealthier “neighborhood character” obstructionists like they used to.

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Certainly, knee-jerk opposition to developers (along with real issues like displacement) persist, but 1491’s sponsor, Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) let go of the orthodox left’s antipathy toward for-profit developers by accepting a Republican amendment from Rep. April Connors (R-8, Kennewick) that includes a new tax exemption to make the housing mandate pencil out. Thanks to Connors’ amendment, Reed’s inclusionary zoning bill, which passed the housing committee 9-5 with two GOP votes, is now a funded inclusionary zoning bill, or FIZ.

“The goal of this bill,” Reed said before last week’s vote, “is to try to address the urgent housing needs in our state, to ensure some public value capture for opening up new areas to development, but also to ensure that builders are incentivized to build, and that cities have the flexibility they need to manage this development effectively.”

Funded inclusionary zoning is exactly what it sounds like. Rather than simply making developers include affordable housing in a portion of their new developments, FIZ also helps pay for the affordable housing. In this instance, the amendment authorizes a 20-year property tax exemption on the development, and provides two options for affordability; a developer who builds in a FIZ zone can either make 10 percent of the project affordable to people making 60 percent or less of area media income (AMI), or 20 percent for people making 80 percent of AMI.

This is a classic compromise: Developers don’t like inclusionary zoning, but were willing to go along with it if it was subsidized; and lefties don’t like giving tax breaks to developers, but they like affordable housing. “This is a supply bill that ensures affordability while offsetting the costs for new development,” said Futurewise executive director Alex Brennan, who is encouraged by the sudden momentum for his group’s longstanding TOD bill.

The funded inclusionary zoning compromise, something I advocated for in this column a year ago, combines two well-intentioned, but limited, affordable housing policy tools: First, traditional inclusionary zoning, which requires developers to add affordable housing if they want to build a project, and second, the state’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption (MFTE) program, which gives developers a tax break if they choose to include affordable housing in a project. By combining the two tools, 1491 makes the prospect of actually adding affordable housing to the state’s housing stock more likely.

Seattle has had its own (unfunded) inclusionary zoning program, Mandatory Housing Affordability, since 2019. MHA requires developers to either include some affordable housing in new developments or pay into an affordable housing fund. Reed’s bill exempts cities that have their own inclusionary zoning programs from following the new TOD affordable housing mandate. However, let’s hope Reed’s smart bill, which is likely to encourage more housing starts thanks to the tax exemption, prompts Seattle to consider a FIZ program of its own.

Similarly, the increased zoning 1491 contemplates wouldn’t have a big effect around Seattle’s light rail stations, because Seattle has already upzoned those station areas to the same or greater density as what the bill would allow. But the legislation could increase density around many Seattle bus lines where its upzones are greater than Seattle’s current requirements. Seattle’s Office of Planning and Community Development hasn’t done a full analysis, but a spokesperson said, “There is a larger difference between existing zoning around BRT stations in the city and the potential new requirements than there is for zoning in the light rail station areas.”

And the legislation could add more density to Seattle in another way. The bill defines transit areas as locations within a half-mile of rail stops or quarter mile of bus rapid transit. This geographical definition of TOD would overrule the current minimalist “Neighborhood Centers” proposal in Seattle’s pending comprehensive plan, which would limit new density to developments that are just 800 feet from major bus stops. Seattle’s slow-growth council is actually trying to scale back that already-timid TOD plan. Thankfully, if HB 1491 becomes law, Seattle will get more housing and more affordable housing despite intransigence from City Hall.

The funded inclusionary zoning TOD bill is currently in the house appropriations committee.

Josh@publicola.com

City Council, Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Mayor Harrell

Council’s Fight to Scale Back List of Neighborhood Centers is a NIMBY Canard

By Josh Feit

Calling Mayor Bateman, calling Mayor Bateman! We need your help. Again!

Bateman, of course, is pro-housing Olympia-area state senator Jessica Bateman, whose 2023 HB 1110 forced the slow growth Harrell administration and even slower-growth city council to actually allow some multifamily housing in this year’s comprehensive plan.

First off, thank you for forcing us to allow four-unit multifamily housing in all residential zones; although Mayor Bruce Harrell scaled back his own planning department’s original proposal to fully embrace your model for growth, it’s a start.

We need another favor, though. There’s a transit-oriented housing bill at play in the state legislature right now that, if you passed it, would stop the Seattle City Council’s latest NIMBY crusade against another minor upzone that’s in the city’s comp plan proposal.

The comp plan would create new “Neighborhood Centers,” allowing 3- to 6-story apartment and condo buildings within a 3-minute walk (about 800 feet) of 30 commercial centers and bus stops with frequent service. The state TOD bill, HB 1491— sponsored by your colleague from Seattle, state Rep. Julia Reed—would actually do better than that by allowing multifamily housing within a half mile of light rail and within a quarter mile of bus rapid transit. That would mean upzones for apartments all along the new G Line through Madison Valley, for example!

In its quest to stop the “floodgates of unlimited development,” as North Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore put it at a recent briefing on the plan, the council is cuing up its push to remove several of these neighborhood centers from the plan, reducing them even further from a list the Harrell administration already pared down from almost 50 in the original plan.

What I love about the council’s high-pitched opposition to adding a small amount of tightly controlled density is that it exposes the mendacious reasoning behind a core NIMBY argument: “Concurrency.” Concurrency is the obstructionist idea that you can’t add density to neighborhood until you first add bus routes and other infrastructure. It’s actually the reverse—and I’ll get to that in a second—but for starters: It’s disingenuous to claim, as the anti-housing (homeowning) contingent did at a January 29 public hearing, that you oppose density in your neighborhood because your neighborhood lacks transit—and then come out against a plan to target density along transit lines.

If the argument against adding density is that we don’t have the transit to support it, then why are council members like Moore intent on taking Maple Leaf off the list of new neighborhood centers?  The area of concern for Moore that’s slated for the upzone, between NE 85th and NE 91st, sits on a frequent bus line (the 67) between two light rail stops, Roosevelt and Northgate. (Moore called this workhorse route the “one little bus” that serves the neighborhood.)

To be clear, the “concurrency” argument is illogical in the first place.  Consider: At another hearing on the comp plan earlier this month, Councilmember Moore reasoned: “People seem to believe that if you build all this multifamily housing, transit will come. Let me tell you, it will not come. That’s not how it works.” (As Erica pointed in her reporting on that hearing, that’s exactly how it works.)

Dressing up obstructionism as logic, Moore seems to be saying that an upzone will bring thousands of new people overnight. But in reality, population growth happens over time. Asking Metro to run empty buses through currently sparse street as a prerequisite for future density is a comically inefficient use of Metro dollars. The smarter way to do things is precisely the way Metro does it today: When a neighborhood reaches the point at which buses make sense, they meet the need concurrent with new growth—not before the growth arrives.

With a single-family zone protectionist mayor who shredded his own Office of Planning and Development’s original pro-growth proposal, and with a half-baked council now parroting anti-housing tropes, I’m sending a pro-housing SOS from Seattle: Don’t let Seattle strike down this opportunity to build more units. These minimal, cordoned-off neighborhood center transit-oriented development zones won’t exactly qualify us for a Jane Jacobs city-building award, but you’ve helped us get started before. Please help us again.

Josh@PubliCola.com