City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Wilson’s “Path to 500” New Shelter Beds: $17.5 Million, With First Units Opening In April
The Wilson Administration’s ambitious schedule for opening up 500 new shelter beds.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Monday, the Seattle City Council got its first, partial look at Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to build 500 new shelter units by the end of May, and 1,000 before 2027. The mayor’s office is waiting until later this month to announce the sites they’ve identified for the first few new tiny house villages, so the briefing was mostly an opportunity for the council to ask questions about the proposal—including how much new money it will require, how the mayor’s office plans to get buy-in from neighborhood residents, and why the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), which manages the region’s shelter contracts, has been effectively cut out of the proposal.

The biggest news to come out of the briefing was the total estimated price tag for the first 500 units. According to city Budget Director Aly Pennucci, the mayor’s office has identified about $17.5 million to pay for the first 500 units. That number includes$4.8 million Wilson’s team previously identified from an underutilized Community Development Block Grant revolving loan  ($3.3 million) and unused funds from a downtown development fee program dating back to the 1980s ($1.5 million), plus shelter funding from the city’s 2026 budget that hasn’t been spent yet. The average annual operating cost for each new shelter unit, according to Pennucci, will be around $28,000 for each new shelterbed.

That number is be lower than the cost of tiny house villages that feature the range of services, including case management, meals, and 24/7 on-site staff, that Wilson said would be among distinguishing features of the new shelters. For instance, the city allocated $5.9 million to the Low Income Housing Institute to add about 100 new tiny houses last year.

According to the mayor’s office, the $28,000 figure assumes that some shelters will cost less than the ones serving “high-acuity” clients, while some will cost more. In addition, some that are located on publicly owned land may end up paying essentially no rent, if the city can work out a deal with the owners.

At the same time, the legislation would allow the city to lease land at market rate, opening up more potential sites at a higher cost.

“We know that without services, these shelters are not successful, [and] because the people who cause the most disorder and have the highest impact on our community are people who have high needs and high acuity, we know we need 24/7 staffing,” Wilson’s chief of staff Kate Kreuzer said. “We want case management. We want integrated behavioral health support, so that when people come inside, they have the services they need, and then that is getting them on a pathway to housing.”

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In addition to a bill that would allocate the $4.8 million, Wilson’s office sent legislation to the council that would allow the city’s Human Service Department to select shelter providers directly and allow the department of Finance and Administrative Services to lease the property for new shelters itself. If it’s approved, this streamlined procedure would sidestep the KCRHA and bypass the usual 9- to-12-month process for siting shelters, which includes a competitive bidding process and requires providers to negotiate their own leases, permitting, and site preparation.

Nicole Vallestero-Soper, Wilson’s director of policy and innovation, said the first shelters could open as soon as next month. Wilson’s land use bills will likely go through Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee, and the financing will probably go through Dan Strauss’ budget committee.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, seeming to conflate “housing first” with tiny house villages, said he supported the idea of “housing first” if it was a “photo finish with wraparound services” that would not include the kind of “actions that really allow [unsheltered people] to not be ready” to come inside. (Wilson’s plan is more “shelter-first” than “housing first,” in that it consists mostly of new shelter, not rapid rehousing for chronically homeless individuals).

“I really think that the services piece is key, and then setting [people] up for success is the encouragement piece, as opposed to making it easier to stay outside, for example, because there’s a lot of service-resistant folks,” Kettle said. Service providers generally reject the notion that unsheltered people are “service-resistant” or that people live outdoors because it’s “easy,” arguing that there are valid reasons people avoid shelter and services that have failed before, such as shelters that prohibit pets and programs that kick people out for failing to maintain sobriety.

As we reported earlier this month, Wilson’s office did not preview the shelter proposal for the council or secure support in advance, which has been the practice with previous administrations. According to Lin’s office, he has outstanding questions about how the Wilson administration plans to rapidly scale up shelter, how the mayor’s office will measure success, and what role the city will play in engaging with the people living near new shelter sites.

Development, podcasts, Police, Transit

Downtown Seattle Association Leader Discusses Density, Return-to-Office Mandates, and Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when he came on Seattle Nice late last week—most of it surprisingly positive.

Yes, the DSA is still focused on filling up vacant office space with people who may prefer working from home, a goal that seems at odds with the group’s stated commitment to reducing climate change. (The most recent Commute Seattle survey found that drive-alone commutes into downtown grew at twice the rate of trips by transit.) According to the State of Downtown economic report, 32 percent of the office vacancies in the central business district remains vacant six years after the start of the pandemic, suggesting a long-term trend.

And yes, Scholes had plenty to say about how taxes are supposedly driving companies out of Seattle and into Bellevue, where employment has grown 12 percent.

But there were parts of our conversation that may surprise some listeners—starting with Scholes’ apparent optimism that at least some existing office buildings could still be converted into housing . “I think there’s great public good to be gained from more of us living more closely together,” Scholes said.”And if we care about climate change and protecting the environment and driving down carbon emission, we need to live more closely together, and we need to live close to transit, and we need to live where we’re maximizing the investment we’ve already made in utilities and sidewalks and parks.”

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Scholes isn’t wide-eyed about the potential for new housing downtown, however. In fact, I was amused to hear the skepticism in Scholes’ voice when we talked about former county executive Dow Constantine’s big plan to create a whole new office and residential district centered around Sound Transit’s future light rail station two blocks west of the King County Courthouse. (Current County Executive Girmay Zahilay briefly mentioned the plan in his remarks at the DSA’s State of Downtown event last week).

“The reality,” Scholes said, is that despite decades of robust development downtown, “we somehow still have a hole in the ground” across the street from City Hall and the county courthouse. “But I commend the executive for continuing to advance it and to figure out what is possible, what can be phased, what might be more incremental. It’s the right thing to do.”

We were wrapping things up when Scholes told us we were being too polite, and asked if we were going to talk about the city’s police surveillance cameras—an issue Mayor Katie Wilson has hedged on after expressing strong opposition during her campaign. Unless Wilson reverses course, the city will install many more cameras in the downtown stadium district for the World Cup games in June.

Crime, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 14, 2026
Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes at SPD’s Real Time Crime Center last year

A criminal case backlog, the mayor’s big shelter push, the state of downtown Seattle, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 9

Facing Thousands of Backlogged Cases, New City Attorney Says She’ll Reorg Her Office for Faster Results

After taking office, new City Attorney Erika Evans discovered a backlog of thousands of cases left over from her predecessor, Ann Davison. The reasons for the backlog are complex, but Evans says she’s taking one step she believes will help: Reorganizing the city attorney’s office so that each case is handled by a single attorney from the beginning.

Tuesday, March 10

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Go Big on Shelter. Will She Succeed—and If She Does, What Then?

This week’s podcast was all about Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to add 1,000 shelter beds—primarily by building more, and larger, tiny house villages—before the end of 2026. We talked about what it will mean if Wilson is successful, particularly for those living in tiny houses while they wait for actual housing, which is expensive and challenging to site.

Wednesday, March 11

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ

The Seattle Police Department announced a still-unreleased report showing that when its Real Time Crime Center (home to SPD’s controversial surveillance cameras) is involved in a criminal case, SPD is three times as likely to make an arrest. Although SPD framed an increase in arrests as “victims getting justice,” they did not respond to our questions about whether these were justified arrests or if they led to prosecutions or convictions.

Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

Three local right-wing activists (including one, former FOX13 reporter Brandi Kruse, who has posted repeatedly on X, “I am not a journalist”) got big mad when they were denied access to a special press area in the state House chamber. They sued, and are currently losing. The guidelines for press credentials in Olympia are content neutral, but they do require that reporters are primarily engaged in news gathering and not working on behalf of political campaigns or for advocacy groups—a low bar all three activists failed to meet.

Thursday, March 12

KIRO Radio Ran a Segment Attacking My Reporting. They Still Haven’t Responded to My Efforts to Correct the Record.

KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” invited guest Angela Rye on their show to attempt to discredit my reporting about staff complaints against the director and deputy director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. In a 10-minute segment, Rye claimed, inaccurately, that I had written an “unsourced” story with false information as part of a broader effort by Mayor Wilson and her deputy mayor, Brian Surratt, to remove Black leaders and other Bruce Harrell appointees from city departments. (Both Harrell and Wilson, like all mayors, replaced some of their predecessor’s department heads.) This week, KIRO ignored all my efforts to correct the record and explain my reporting process.

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, Mayor Wilson cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event—framing a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority.

 

 

Economy, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event
View from the cheap cheap cheap cheap seats at Wednesday’s State of Downtown Seattle event.

By Erica C. Barnett

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, I got a kick out of Mayor Katie Wilson’s speech, in which she cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event. Wilson spoke after King County Executive Girmay Zahliay, who touted his three-day-a-week return-to-office mandate to surprisingly tepid applause.

It wasn’t that Wilson didn’t kowtow a bit to her corporate audience—saying, for example, that she wants to “keep our parks and public spaces welcoming and accessible to all” by “finally … putting people inside in large numbers.” People experiencing behavioral health crises “can make  the people around them feel less safe,” Wilson said. “We have to acknowledge that, and we have to do more to make all of our streets and public spaces feel more welcoming for people of all incomes and backgrounds, whether they live downtown or tourists visiting our city for the first time.”

But Wilson also used the occasion to frame a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority. “As a progressive and as a socialist— as a progressive and as a socialist—I believe it’s very important for people to have faith in their government, and that means, among other things, being able to trust that it is a good and effective steward of our collective resources. We can’t be afraid to stop funding things that aren’t working well.” (Ahem.)

The keynote speaker, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, was the co-author (along with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein), of Abundance—the book every pro-market urbanist in your life was urging you to read last year. Sounds like this was happening to Wilson, too, and she finally get around to reading it after the election.

It was pretty clear Wilson wasn’t as taken with the book as those who embraced it as a clever takedown of progressive dogma. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because she saw through its paper-thin thesis—that if liberals would only become libertarians, we’d live in an age of abundant housing, transportation, consumer products, and energy.

“Some of you might know that in my prior career, in addition to being a community organizer, I was also a columnist who’s written for some of our local publications, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t been running for office last year, I would have found time to write my critical take on the abundance framework,” Wilson said. “Now I’m in a role where I have to muzzle myself a little bit, so I’m going to resist the temptation, having an audience with Derek, to give my Abundance TED Talk.”

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Instead, she said, she’d focus on some things she liked from the book, like the Urbanism 101 argument that NIMBY land-use restrictions prevent housing from being built.

“I have to say, I also really love the abundance vision of the world, in the not-far-off year of 2050, when we’ve achieved such abundance and productivity that the work week has been shortened to just a few days,” Wilson continued. “I do hope that 10 or so years from now, when AI has thoroughly disrupted the job market, and you start hearing a national rally cry for a 24-hour work week, that many of the far-sighted business leaders here today will hop on board that train.”

I haven’t reviewed Abundance, and I’ll try not to here, but the few minutes I saw of Thompson’s PowerPoint presentation before I had to leave for an event across were pretty misleading examples—tailored for a a roomful of business elites who are inclined to oppose taxes and believe in the awesome power of free markets.

Thompson extolled Lakewood, a suburb of L.A., as an example of the dense housing that can happen in the suburbs when government gets out of the way. (Lakewood, as a contrast to Petaluma in Northern California, is a central example in the book.) But Lakewood sits on an artificial oasis in what would otherwise be harsh, unwelcoming desert, and that oasis was made possible by government intervention in the early 20th century, when Los Angeles diverted water from farmland, destroying farmers’ livelihoods to build a city in an otherwise uninhabitable area. The conflict became known as the Water Wars.

Similarly, Thompson’s praise for Texas and its vast solar farms would be inspiring, except that Texas (where I’m from) has a notoriously unreliable power grid—a fact that the dominant Republicans in the state, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have falsely blamed on renewable energy. They’ve also been working steadily for the past decade to undermine wind and solar while doubling down on fossil-fuel subsidies—but never mind that, look at this slide of a solar farm!

Thompson brushed past another example of what he considers anti-“abundance” waste—the fact that affordable housing for low-income and formerly homeless people costs more to build than market rate apartments—by saying there was no reason for this to be the case. While it’s true that rules for affordable housing can increase costs, a bigger cost driver financing, which typically comes from many public and private sources and can take months or years to secure. Eliminating unnecessary regulation is important, but it’s only part of the story—and  “abundance” advocates often simply ignore the reasons for some regulations, such as building codes and accessibility requirements.

As I said, I ducked out of Thompson’s talk after about two minutes (remember, I did read the book.*) But I hope the mayor will elaborate at some point—maybe on Seattle Nice!—about her reaction to the “libertarian, but make it pro-social” argument at the center of this bestseller.

*  Which, by the way, also lacks any substantive class or racial analysis and conveniently elides the experience of poor people in the US and the rest of the world. Somebody’s gotta mine all those rare-earth metals, pose as AI sexbots, and pilot those “autonomous” delivery robots, after all, and it ain’t gonna be the elites who write bestselling books promising us a frictionless technotopia is right around the corner.

Media

KIRO Radio Ran a Segment Attacking My Reporting. They Still Haven’t Responded to My Efforts to Correct the Record.
By Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this week, KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” show had a guest, Angela Rye, who spent most of a ten-minute segment accusing me of fabricating what she called an “unsourced” story on allegations made by city staff about Derrick Wheeler-Smith, the head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. Rye belittled my work and this site repeatedly, making multiple false claims about my story.

One factual claim—that Mayor Katie Wilson did not put Wheeler-Smith and his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, on administrative leave—merits specific correction. As we reported, Wheeler-Smith has been on family and medical leave to care for his mother; the administrative leave is separate and unrelated.

Additionally, KIRO did not fact check or correct the false claim that Wilson had “been paid, by this gossip blog site, $30,000.” (Rye referred to me as a “gossip blogger” and PubliCola as a “gossip blog” no fewer than nine times—a standard, time-worn term used to dismiss and belittle female journalists and our work.)

As readers know, Wilson was an activist and writer for many years before she decided to run for mayor, and I solicited (and paid for) five pieces from her between 2023 and 2024. The total for those pieces, according to records from my payroll software, Gusto, was $3,900. It appears Rye looked at Wilson’s financial affairs statement and decided to interpret “less than $30,000” (the smallest category) as “$30,000.” The Stranger and the Urbanist also paid Wilson less than $30,000 for period columns in 2024, according to the report.

Here’s an edited version of the two statements I issued after KIRO aired its piece, which it then posted on social media and Youtube with various headlines belittling this website and my work. As of this morning, KIRO as well as the two radio hosts have not responded to any of the posts I have put up on social media, which tagged the hosts as well as the radio station; nor have they responded to comments I have made on the online versions of this segment.

KIRO Radio has still not reached out to me after running a ten-minute segment accusing me of fabricating my heavily reported story about allegations against a city department director by his staff, which their guest called “unsourced.”
They also referred to me as a “gossip blogger” nine times—a misogynistic term used to dismiss female writers since time immemorial. I have been working alongside KIRO Radio’s reporters for 25 years, and their decision to use their massive megaphone to run a 10-minute radio piece trashing me as a person and a journalist is outrageous and unacceptable.
The “Gee and Ursula” show never contacted me about my story before they handed the mic to someone whose apparent goal was to damage my  professional reputation as an independent journalist. They have also ignored my comments about this on social media, on which I tagged them repeatedly and offered to come on their show to explain my reporting process for this story, including the reason whistleblowers who fear retaliation routinely speak to reporters on condition of anonymity.
PubliCola, in publication since 2009, is a fraction of the size of an outlet like KIRO Radio, so my ability to defend myself is dwarfed by KIRO’s ability to defame me as a “gossip blogger” and fabulist. It is appalling that this radio show spent ten minutes of airtime trashing me and my work without bothering to contact me or fact-check any of the false claims made about me by their guest, including the bizarre lie that I paid now-Mayor Katie Wilson $30,000.
Instead, they have shown they are proud of this segment by posting it on YouTube, KIRO’s own site, and elsewhere with splashy headlines like “Angela Rye Calls PubliCola Story a ‘Gossip Blog’ Amid Seattle Civil Rights Drama.” Wilson, who was a writer and activist for many years before she was mayor, wrote for me five times over two years, with the last piece in 2024, long before she ran for mayor. I paid her $3,900 total for those five pieces ($500 for one and between $1,000 and $1,200 for the others.)
I remain eager and willing to come on the “Gee and Ursula” show or any other KIRO show to correct the record about my work and explain my reporting process to their listeners. I realize this is less exciting than a personal and professional attack, but I believe any media outlet should be interested in speaking to the people they are talking about—especially when there is an opportunity to correct false claims they, perhaps unwittingly, led their listeners to believe were accurate.
legislature, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ; Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

1.  The Seattle Police Department announced earlier this month that its Real Time Crime Center, which receives live feeds from dozens of police surveillance cameras trained on neighborhoods across Seattle, “Triples the Odds That a Victim Receives Justice.” That’s a bold claim for an operation that just got access to live surveillance footage late last summer, when the City Council approved the controversial cameras.

SPD, which is pushing Mayor Katie Wilson to expand police cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods, is using stats like this to convince Wilson that the benefits of surveilling Seattle residents outweigh privacy and overpolicing concerns. (And it appears to be working).

But what does a “300 percent increase in victims receiving justice” mean? SPD canceled a scheduled interview with PubliCola seven minutes before it was supposed to happen—according to Mayor Wilson’s office, SPD put out their press release before the mayor’s office had a chance to look at the report—so all we can go on is the scanty data they provided us prior to our scheduled interview.

That data shows that the 300 percent increase represents an uptick in how often a dispatch (such as a 911 call) resulted in an arrest, broken down further into arrests that included violent crimes and those that were primarily property crimes. Overall, 11.7 percent of dispatches that “involved” the RTCC in some way resulted in an arrests, while just 2 percent of dispatches where the center was not involved resulted in an arrest. The data does not show whether arrests resulted in prosecutions, the percentage of arrested people who went to jail, the demographics of arrestees, or how the RTCC was “involved” in the arrests.

Even with the lack of information beyond arrests, it’s important to note that SPD is describing arrests in themselves as a form of justice, when they could just as easily represent the kind of over-policing that often results when police concentrate their energy on specific neighborhoods and communities. As SPD’s blog post noted (in order to make the opposite point), the new cameras are not located randomly; they’re trained on “high-crime” neighborhoods, including Aurora Ave. N and downtown; if the planned expansion moves forward, SPD cameras are also coming to the Central District and Capitol Hill.

SPD’s blog post goes so far as to describe every arrested person as an “offender,” regardless of whether they were ever prosecuted or found guilty of a crime.

Unsurprisingly, the data showed that in general, SPD was more likely to arrest a person for calls that involved a violent rather than a property crime.

2. Yesterday, a US federal district judge ruled that three right-wing activists—Brandi Kruse, Jonathan Choe, and Ari Hoffman—were not entitled to press passes allowing them into the non-public press areas inside the state house and senate. The three had requested day passes from the Washington State Capitol Correspondents’ Association (CC, saying that they were journalists and should be allowed the same access as the rest of the press.

*Except when requesting special access to legislators, apparently

Kruse, a former FOX 13 reporter, has posted over and over (and over) on X, “I am not a journalist.” She frequently speaks at right-wing rallies, including a rally against trans children held at City Hall last year. Choe, a former KOMO reporter, works for Turning Point Media, the campus activism group founded by Charlie Kirk, and the Discovery Institute, the local right-wing think tank that spawned influential MAGA activist Chris Rufo. Hoffman is a onetime City Council candidate who has a talk show on KVI Radio; he also plagiarized PubliCola on at least one occasion, directly stealing quotes and reporting and representing our work as his own.

Both Choe and Kruse recently took part in a cringe-inducing praise circle at the White House, at which Kruse told Trump that supporting him had made her “more attractive.”

The CCA guidelines for press access say, “It is important that a line be established between professional journalism and political or policy work. This is the spirit in which the Legislature has offered access: The press should act as an independent observer and monitor of the proceedings, not an involved party. This means that we cannot endorse offering credentials to one who is part of, or may become involved with, a party, campaign or lobbying organization,” even if that person worked as a journalist in the past.

The judge in the case, David Estudillo, wrote in his ruling that the CCA rules require media to work for an organization “whose principal business is news dissemination” rather than political activities. Although the three activists accused the organization that issues press passes of being biased against them because of their political views, Judge Castillo noted that the legislature has issued badges to media across the political spectrum; the difference in this case, he wrote, was that all three activists’ main job is advocating and speaking on behalf of political campaigns and causes.

As an example, Estudillo noted that Kruse was a listed speaker at a recent rally outside the state Capitol advocating for two anti-trans initiatives targeting children. The first would overturn state legislation designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids from being outed to their parents if they confide in a trusted adult at school; the second would bar trans girls from participating in school sports. Kruse and the other activists were arguing, in essence, that they should be allowed to headline a rally calling for the repeal of state legislation on the Capitol Steps, walk inside, and demand special access to the state legislators they were just rallying against by claiming to be “media.”