homelessness, housing, King County

County Executive Floats Countywide Housing Levy, 500 New Housing Units or Shelter Beds by Mid-2027

By Erica C. Barnett

In an announcement that echoed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to add 500 new shelter units by this summer, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said Tuesday that he’s launching a new plan to add 500 units of “shelter and housing” in the next 500 days, or by mid-August 2027, and will convene a work group to discuss a potential countywide housing levy. Some of the new shelter or housing could be on county-owned land, similar to the strategy Wilson is using to cut down on the cost of new tiny house villages in Seattle.

Other elements of the “Breaking the Cycle” plan include improving performance metrics, reducing regulatory barriers, and better data collection and distribution.

“We want to know where are people falling through the cracks, where are services not connecting, and which programs are actually helping people stabilize,” Zahilay said at a press event Tuesday morning. “And then we’re going to use that information to make better decisions about how we invest public dollars by shifting resources to more programs that are delivering results.”

The overall plan, which Zahilay is calling “Breaking the Cycle,” consists largely of work groups that will report on ways to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of existing county programs. Three months into his term, Zahilay is laying out a process, not presenting a finalized policy agenda or proposing legislation.

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But the two marquee elements of Zahilay’s announcement—the 500-bed commitment and the potential housing levy—do raise questions whose answers will determine the success of his plan. Will housing units (and shelter beds) that are already in the pipeline count toward the 500-unit goal, as the Urbanist suggested? How many will be housing, and how many will be shelter? Both these issues came up when former mayor Bruce Harrell promised to add 2,000 “units” of shelter or housing over four years, declaring victory even when the city ended up with less shelter overall, and claiming credit for projects that were begun under his predecessor’s turn. Zahilay’s proposal is, pointedly, for “net” new neds or units, so presumably he’s eager to avoid a “mission accomplished”-style Pyrrhic victory.

During an onstage conversation with Wilson and Housing Development Consortium director Patience Malaba at the HDC’s annual fundraising luncheon on Tuesday, Zahilay noted that the county has to rely on two main revenue sources: Sales and property taxes. (In 2024, Zahilay—then a King County Councilmember—proposed spending $1 billion of the county’s debt capacity on bonds to pay for workforce housing; that plan has not come to fruition).

“We do have to take a hard look at weighing those tradeoffs” between higher taxes and more housing, Zahilay said. “Of course, we need more revenue to fund critical services, especially to our most vulnerable neighbors—and we need to be careful about what kind of impact that has on cost of living.”

 

Elections, legislature

Hannah Sabio-Howell Says It’s Time to Replace Longtime Legislator Jamie Pedersen

By Erica C. Barnett

Yesterday, we told you about onetime Seattle City Council candidate Ron Davis’ campaign to defeat longtime incumbent state Rep. Gerry Pollet, who’s represented North Seattle’s 46th District since 2011. Davis is hoping voters will reject Pollet, who’s run virtually unopposed for years, in favor of his go-fast urbanist vision.

Today, we’re focusing on a candidate who’s running against an even more entrenched, powerful incumbent: 29-year-old Hannah Sabio-Howell, a first-time candidate who’s running for state senate against 43rd District State Sen. Jamie Pedersen, who was first elected to the state house in 2006 and has run basically unopposed ever since.

Pedersen, who lives on Capitol Hill with his husband and four sons, was Lambda Legal’s lead counsel during the fight over marriage equality in the early 2000s and sponsored the state’s marriage equality bill in 2012. Around the same time, he helped organize and served as a plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit that overturned a Tim Eyman initiative requiring a legislative supermajority for tax increases.

Since those victories more than a decade ago, Pedersen has become known as an effective, moderate Democrat who represents an area whose politics and priorities have shifted leftward. This year, Pedersen shepherded the “millionaire’s tax” through the legislature—a 9.9. percent income tax on earnings above $1 million year. Many progressives were disappointed by the bill, which failed to meaningfully reduce sales taxes that are among the highest in the country.

Sabio-Howell, a First Hill renter and recent communications director for the statewide pro-labor group Working Washington, believes Pedersen’s concessions on the income tax show how he is out of touch with his own constituents. She also accuses Pedersen of capitulating on last year’s rent stabilization law, which capped annual rent increases at an 10 percent—”an amount we know is totally impossible for most people to absorb.”

“After two decades, those of us who live here in this district are looking around like, ‘I still barely can afford my one-bedroom apartment,’ or ‘I would like to have a kid, but that is completely foreclosed to me because I can’t afford $5,000 a month for child care,” Sabio-Howell said. “I think we are pretty tired of being told, ‘I’ve delivered for you,’ and then looking around and saying, ‘Where is it? What has been delivered when I can’t build the life I want to build here?'”

Sabio-Howell said Democratic lawmakers like Pedersen talk frequently about cutting deals and compromising to get things done, “but I think that cutting deals has been at the expense of what we could have won if we started first with our with with what our community has demanded and reaffirmed that we want”—things like funding for public defenders, affordable child care, adequately funded schools, and accessible higher education that won’t leave young people in debt for decades.

As an example, Sabio-Howell pointed to this year’s “Well Washington Fund” proposal from state Rep. Shaun Scott (D-43), which would have imposed a 5 percent payroll tax on large companies that pay workers more than $125,000 a year, similar to Seattle’s JumpStart tax. Although Scott’s bill went nowhere, Sabio-Howell said the proposal helped push moderate legislators like Pedersen out of their comfort zone. Scott was also one of 13 Democrats who pushed back against a proposed $550 million corporate tax break that was ultimately excised from the income tax proposal.

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“There is so much wealth among the ultra wealthy in our state, and I really think that for a state as progressive and pioneering and wealthy as ours, we have an opportunity to really build something that we could be proud of,” she said.

Sabio-Howell also pointed to the $100 million Gov. Bob Ferguson set aside to help cities hire more police as a potential source of funds for progressive priorities, such as fully funding public defense. “That [money] is not being used,” Sabio-Howell said. “It’s inaccessible. The people on the ground who would be in a position to use that money have literally said so. And that’s $100 million a year that we could be funneling into the upstream problems of people not having stable homes and warm, safe places to be.”

First-time candidates often enter campaigns with big ideas but few concrete plans for implementing them, and Sabio-Howell didn’t provide a roadmap to achieving her lofty goals. Universal child care, a top priority for Davis as well, would be costly, complex, and probably infeasible, especially since the majority Democrats have lately been cutting, not funding, child care and education programs. A statewide social housing plan “would be a very pioneering thing that I have not really seen” in other states, Sabio-Howell acknowledged.  And voters may be reluctant to throw out an incumbent who has risen through the ranks and now holds the highest position in the state’s upper chamber.

But Sabio-Howell thinks voters in the 43rd, which includes Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the University District along with parts of downtown, Lower Queen Anne, and Fremont, are ready for a change.

“For a risk-averse voter. I understand. I get it,” Sabio-Howell said. “Our current structure rewards seniority, but we know for sure that visionary policies are possible, when we elect fighters to get in there and go to the mat for them. And that’s what a newer generations of leaders will do.”

 

 

legislature, Urbanism

Ron Davis, Running for the State House on an Urbanist Platform, Says North Seattle Is Ready for a Change

By Erica C. Barnett

At least two Seattle candidates are betting that this is the year voters will decide to replace longstanding Democratic state legislators with progressive newcomers who want to move forward quickly with pro-housing, pro-worker agendas. If either succeeds, it will be a repudiation of the received wisdom that entrenched incumbents have an unshakeable advantage.

The first candidate, Ron Davis, will be familiar to PubliCola readers—he ran for City Council in northeast Seattle’s District 4 in the 2023 election, losing narrowly to Maritza Rivera in a year when moderates swept the council elections. Davis is running against 46th District Rep. Gerry Pollet. Pollet, appointed in 2011, leads an environmental group that advocates for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site; as a legislator, he has worked to defeat or water down bills that would allow more housing in single-family neighborhoods.

In 2022, the state House Democratic Caucus voted to remove housing issues from Pollet’s committee—a decision that was quickly followed by several years of pro-housing legislation that forced cities dominated by suburban-style housing to allow apartments in neighborhoods, not just on busy streets.

Davis is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda—and reject what he calls Pollet’s anti-growth approach.

“He’s been sort of the chief NIMBY in the Democratic caucus,” Davis said. “He does not want anything that involves changing the landscape in any way.” For instance, Davis points out Pollet’s opposite to accessory dwelling units, his support for adding additional environmental review to the long-delayed completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, and opposition to the low-density multifamily buildings known as “missing middle” housing.

“I think there is a set of people whose idea of being an environmentalist, like his, remains sort of stuck in the 1970s Malthusian, Thanos kind of worldview—like, ‘There should be less people in the world,'” Davis said. “I really don’t think that’s going to be most voters.'”

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(After we published this story, Pollet’s team contacted us to say that Pollet co-sponsored HB 1110, which required cities to allow up to six apartments per lot; that he co-sponsored a transit-oriented development bill we covered last year; and that he voted for a middle-housing bill, HB 1782, that included a huge number of loopholes and exemptions.

He also sponsored his own middle-housing bill,  HB 1981, which included poison-pill elements such as concurrency requirements—a common preemptive tactic for preventing new housing—and protections for historic buildings, trees, and “access to sunlight” in residential areas, among other provisions that would restrict new housing. Pollet sponsored amendments to water down both 1110 and 1782), for instance, and attempting to make it harder to build in areas at “high risk of displacement” where urbanists would argue more housing is also necessary.

Pollet has championed the inclusion of more affordable housing in new developments, backed rent stabilization bills, and supported adding back neighborhood centers that former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from Seattle’s comprehensive plan. However, he also argued the city should require private developers to ensure that up to 25 percent of all new units near transit are affordable to people making as little as 0 percent of median income (and up to 80 percent), an idea that seems designed to kill rather than encourage housing even without the bill’s language about protecting trees, historic structures, and access to sunlight.)

On the surface, there seem to be plenty of voters in North Seattle who agree, at least nominally, with Pollet’s slow-growth agenda; in 2024, running essentially unopposed (the other candidate was a Republican), Pollet got more than 83 percent of the vote.

But Davis thinks North Seattle voters will support his ambitious vision, which also includes universal child care; removing police accountability from the list of conditions police unions can negotiate as part of their contracts; replacing endless highway megaprojects with state investments in local transit; and using creative tools like revolving loan funds and state-funded Section 8-style vouchers to expand access to affordable housing and backfill federal funding cuts. All of this would probably require more funding than the state will take in from the “millionaire’s” income tax, which still has to withstand a court challenge after passing this year; Davis says that even with that tax in place, Washington’s tax system will still be more regressive than most other states.

Davis also said he wants to see stronger sanctions against ICE than Democrats in the legislature managed to muster so faåår.” I see our Democrats in Olympia saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s a fascist takeover of the federal government. It’s a threat to our basic freedoms,'” Davis said when we spoke late last month. “And then they’re like, ‘We have a mask ban that says maybe you could sue, but only if they violate your constitutional rights.’ I mean, God, are you fucking kidding?”

Davis said he’d support creating a state-funded “civilian response team” to serve as “the vanguard of resistance” if and when ICE descends on Washington state en masse. He’d also support legislation to “punish Vichy collaborators,” like a proposal last session that would have barred law enforcement agencies from hiring people who worked for ICE during the second Trump Administration.

In fact, Davis says he’d support going even further, by keeping them from taking “any state- or locally funded job, or contracting job, ever again.” Asked whether this kind of mass punishment paints every ICE employee with too broad a brush, Davis said, “I’m talking about who’s participating in this process [of targeting and abducting people perceived as immigrants] now. So you time bound it, and give people notice that they have six weeks or two weeks to quit or whatever.”

When Davis ran for council in 2023, he had a hyperlocal pitch: Elect me, and I’ll work to establish 15-minute neighborhoods and build “intermediate” housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness, including tiny house villages. Three years later, it’s clear that most of Seattle’s new urbanist policies were the result of action by the stateles  legislature, including Sens. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) and Emily Alvarado (D-34, Seattle), which forced cities to allow denser housing near transit stops and in traditional single-family neighborhoods, to widespread NIMBY chagrin.

Davis said his own experience “putting together the coalition that passed the parking reform bill”—a Bateman bill that placed limits on how much parking cities can require in new developments—made him realize “I could get more done in just a few months” in Olympia than the council, with its Seattle Process, often gets done in years. Not only that, he said, the state has the power and funding potential to pull off bigger things—like universal child care, housing, and supplementary funding for local buses.

When I mentioned the conventional wisdom that legislators don’t have much power until they’ve been around a while, Davis pointed to examples like Bateman (elected in 2020) and Alvarado (elected to the House in 2022). “It’s not as if they showed up and the skies parted,” Davis said, “but I do feel like they’ve moved much more quickly, and they haven’t listened the conventional wisdom, which is that you have to put your head down for many, many years” before getting anything done.

Next up: Progressive renter Hannah Sabio-Howell challenges Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a member of the state legislature for 20 years.

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City Council, Density, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 28, 2026

Surveillance cameras, high-tech toilets, an interview with pro-housing councilmember Eddie Lin, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 23

Seattle Nice: Does Mayor Wilson Really Believe Police Surveillance Enhances Safety?

Was Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to audit the safety and security of police surveillance cameras a classic “split-the-baby” compromise, a pro forma move with a foregone conclusion, or a thoughtful approach to ensure public safety for Seattle residents? That was our topic on Monday’s episode of Seattle Nice.

Tuesday, March 24

Councilmembers Say Wilson Must Turn On Stadium Cameras by June

Previewing a demand he would make official via press release later in the week, the City Council’s budget committee chair, Bob Kettle, said a new audit into whether police cameras are protecting people’s privacy better happen fast—an odd statement, don’t you think, from a man who drops “good governance” into every other sentence?

Rob Saka Won’t Use His Committee’s Actual Name

City councilmember Rob Saka won’t call his Transportation, Waterfront, & Seattle Center committee by its name! You can’t make him!

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What Is the NYU Policing Project, and Why Did the Police Chief Resign from their Board?

Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes was on the board of the NYU Policing Project, the group that’s doing the audit of SPD’s cameras, but resigned on Monday—three days after we asked the mayor’s office if his presence on the board represented a conflict of interest. The co-founder of the Policing Project, Barry Friedman, filled us in on the group’s history and what their audit in Seattle will involve.

Wednesday, March 25

Seattle Gives High-Tech Toilets Another Go, Starting in Pioneer Square

Seattle is a really hard place to find a restroom, especially if you don’t look like you’re coming right back to buy a latte. Throne, a D.C.-based toilet company, is coming to the Seattle area soon—including Pioneer Square and the stadium district— with its high-tech toilets, which use AI and user reviews to schedule maintenance and ban people who trash their freestanding restroom from using them again.

Friday, March 27

Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin: “Go As Big As We Can” On Growth in Comp Plan

On our second episode of Seattle Nice this week, we talked to new City Councilmember and Land Use committee chair Eddie Lin, who’s overseeing the ongoing adoption of Seattle’s (ahem, the “One Seattle”) comprehensive plan. We talked with Lin about density, the fees Seattle charges developers to fund affordable housing (which could come down soon, at least temporarily), and his take on surveillance cameras.

Also this week: I appeared on KUOW’s Week In Review, hosted by Bill Radke, along with former KIRO host Dave Ross and KUOW’s Libby Denkman. We talked about surveillance cameras, the potential return of the Sonics, why light rail across Lake Washington took so long, and more.

And if you missed Mayor Wilson’s Town Hall meeting on surveillance cameras Friday night, I live-posted minute-by-minute updates and analysis on Bluesky.

City Council, Density, homelessness, podcasts, Police

Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin: “Go As Big As We Can” On Growth in Comp Plan
Image via Seattle.gov

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who’s serving his first term representing Southeast Seattle’s District 2. He’s the third council member to represent this district since 2025, when Tammy Morales resigned just one year into her second term; she was replaced by Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for SPD who served until Lin was elected in November.

As head of the council’s land use and comprehensive plan committees, Lin will oversee the work of updating the plan that guides the city’s growth and density for the next 10 years, as well as zoning and land use decisions like whether to grant developers a temporary break from the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that allowed taller, denser housing in some areas in exchange for fees that fund affordable housing.

We talked to Lin about those fees and whether they’re working as designed. While MHA has brought in tens of millions a year for affordable housing, developers argue it has increasingly squelched development, by adding significant costs at a time when market-rate housing developments barely pencil out. Lin talked (favorably but cautiously) about a different concept called Planned Inclusionary Zoning, which requires developers to build affordable housing but offers them tax breaks, rather than charging a fee, to make it more feasible for them to build.

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“We absolutely want to go as big as we can” in the remaining parts of the comp plan, Lin said, by expanding the areas where housing is allowed (as The Urbanist pointed out recently, the city’s planning department actually reduced density along several arterials in wealthy neighborhoods). Lin said “we need to be going deeper into the neighborhoods” with density, as well as restoring the neighborhood centers former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from the plan, nodes of density where modest apartment buildings will be allowed.

We also asked Lin about the new dynamics on the council, Mayor Wilson’s new plan to build tiny house villages all over the city, and police surveillance cameras, a program Wilson once opposed and now seems likely to expand.

After pointing out that many people want cameras in their neighborhoods, including people who live in the Chinatown-International District, Lin said he’s still not happy that the cameras were expanded without any analysis of whether the “pilot” program launched last year (and immediately expanded) was effective and protected people’s privacy. His outstanding concerns, Lin added, have to do with the potential for the footage to end up in the hands of the Trump Administration, which could use it for immigration enforcement or to target people seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. That’s the focus of an audit Wilson has commissioned, but hardly the only reason to question mass surveillance by local police.

homelessness

Seattle Gives High-Tech Toilets Another Go, Starting in Pioneer Square

 

One rendering of what the freestanding toilets might look like in Pioneer Square.

By Erica C. Barnett

Anyone who has walked through Seattle’s densest neighborhoods—First Hill, downtown, Capitol Hill—knows that it’s damn near impossible to find a public restroom outside libraries, parks, and tourist-heavy areas like Seattle Center and Pike Place Market. Past efforts to add public restrooms have ended poorly; in 2008, after spending around $5 million on installation, cleaning, and maintenance, the city tore down five freestandimg restrooms installed just four years earlier downtown and on Broadway in Capitol Hill.

During the pandemic, Seattle actually locked existing public restrooms and replaced them with port-a-potties, euphemistically referred to as “comfort stations.” Plans to install something as minimal as freestanding sinks for handwashing got ground up in the gears of concern-trolling masquerading as public process: How will the city maintain them? How can we keep homeless people from ruining them? Won’t people be at risk of tripping if there’s a hose on the sidewalk?

Given that history, it’s tempting to assume that the latest proposal for public restrooms, from a D.C.-based company called Throne Labs, will also run headlong into the Seattle process. But so far, the company’s proposal—a total of 11 freestanding restrooms across the region, each at cost of around $100,000 a year—is moving forward without too much friction. (Really straining—sorry!!—to avoid toilet analogies here). The Pioneer Square Preservation Board recently approved Throne’s proposal to add two of its restrooms in the historic district—a surprising turn from a board whose members recently debated allowing bike parking because it would require ahistorical flex posts and paint on the ground. The vinyl-clad loos have to be wrapped in images of trees, but won’t have to mimic historic bricks, an idea that was proposed and rejected.

The toilets—smaller than a trailer, but bigger than a Port-a-Potty—use a pump system called a vacuum macerator that pulls waste upward and allows water to flow down into toilets and sinks, allowing them to have running water without expensive plumbing. A bigger innovation (or downside, if you prefer your toilets low-tech and accessible right this second) is that the new restrooms only be accessible via an app, a QR code, text message, or an entry card. The first three options allow Throne to keep track of user ratings and to pinpoint which users are causing damage or overstaying the restrooms’ ten-minute limit, while the fourth is intended to make the restrooms accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a working phone.

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The proposed toilets, which will be installed through a contract with the Seattle Department of Transportation, are “not a perfect solution, but right now, if you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the day, there’s nothing for anyone unless you go to spend money in a business,” said Lisa Howard, executive director of the Alliance for Pioneer Square. “The other advantage of the pilot is that they’re looking at things that didn’t work out for X, Y, or Z reasons” in the past, Howard said.

Throne is working on several other contracts with local transportation agencies, including King County Metro, whose spokesman confirmed that it will be replacing two existing portable restrooms at the Burien Transit Center and the Aurora Village Transit Center in Shoreline at an estimated cost of $270,000 a year.

Jessica Heinzelman, who co-founded Throne Labs along with Fletcher Wilson and Ben Clark, said Throne toilets have succeeded in places where other types of mobile restrooms have failed because they “create accountability”—if someone trashes a restroom or smokes in it, for instance, the company can generally pinpoint their identity using sensors in the unit or from negative user reviews immediately after that person left.

“What we learned as we started talking to folks in the public space is, even when there are restrooms, if it’s getting vandalized, or if there’s shit smeared all over the wall, they just shut it down, and they don’t necessarily have the operational capacity to deal with that, and so people kind of stop counting on them,” Heinzelman said. “So [the question was], How do you offer publicly available private space and keep it nice and mitigate against misuse [by] the 1 percent of users that fuck up bathrooms for the other 99 percent?”

SDOT public space manager Joel Miller acknowledged that this kind of “accountability” could deprive some users of restroom access. “If somebody is repeatedly damaging the unit so it is going offline and other people can’t use it, that user would eventually lose access,” Miller said. “It’s not the perfect solution, that we have someone that might need access lose access, but it’s better than everybody losing access because the unit repeatedly goes offline.”

Heinzelman said that even in “high-risk” locations like MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where lots of homeless people hang out and live, fewer than 1 percent of users end up getting banned.

“I think partially it’s because if you give people the dignity and respect of having a nice space where they have enough room to change clothes, they have running water, and they can wash their their face, they want to keep it.” Heinzelman said. She confirmed that Throne hasn’t had any discussions about card distribution with local homeless service providers, but said they plan to do so once they’ve finalized their contracts. (PubliCola contacted several local service providers and only one had heard about the restrooms).

SDOT’s Miller says the city hopes to get the restrooms up and running in Pioneer Square before the World Cup games in June. One of the two restrooms will be located outside the stadiums at First Ave S and S. Charles Street; the other will be at Second Ave. S and S. Washington St.—about a block away from PubliCola’s office.

Both Heinzelman and Miller said the restrooms have to appeal to the general public, not just unsheltered people with fewer options. “We’re talking about it as a homeless issue, and we felt like the homeless absolutely need it, but you have a sustainability problem” if the restrooms are seen as a homeless service, Henzelman said. “When budgets are slashed, what gets cut? It’s the services for the people that don’t vote or can’t advocate for themselves. [We want to] create a service that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to fund because they are personally benefiting from it, but that also enables all members of society to use it.”