Courts, Crime

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

By Erica C. Barnett

When former city attorney Ann Davison started her term in 2024, she pledged to swiftly eliminate a “backlog” of some 5,000 cases she said her predecessor, Pete Holmes, had carelessly allowed to pile up during his final term. And while she did clear out much of that backlog, largely by dropping thousands of older cases, her strategy for eliminating future case pileups—a “close-in-time” policy that required attorneys to decide whether to file cases within five days of receiving police reports—was largely unsuccessful.

When she left office at the end of last year, Davison left behind a backlog of thousands of unresolved cases—between about 4,700 and 5,100, depending on which DUI cases are included in the backlog. The larger number, from City Attorney Erika Evans’ office, includes nearly 400 DUI cases that have been reviewed, but not filed, because of testing delays at the state toxicology lab, while Davison’s office did not count that type of case as part of the backlog.

“My predecessor, former city attorney Davison, also inherited a backlog from former city attorney Pete Holmes,” Evans said. “It seems like it’s common to have [a backlog], and it shouldn’t be at all.”

Scott Lindsay, the former deputy city attorney, told PubliCola his own team had identified about 1,000 cases they believe shouldn’t count toward the backlog, including the DUI “tox hold” cases as well as around 200 cases where attorneys made filing decisions before December 31 but the filings didn’t go through until this year.

“We have some real questions about how they’re doing the math,” Lindsay said. But, he added, “It’s absolutely true that there was a backlog at the end of the Davison administration, and it was growing.”

In addition to the DUI cases that are sitting in tox-lab limbo, the backlog includes around 800 criminal traffic cases, 1,700 domestic violence cases, and more than 1,000 other misdemeanor cases, such as shoplifting, trespassing, and public drug use.

The total also include around 1,000 cases that are unclassified—meaning they could be anything. This problem apparently emerged last year during a long-overdue migration from a case management database, called DAMION, to a modern replacement called JusticeNexus. The new system is designed to handle more complex case files than DAMION, but the transfer has been rough. Apparently, whenever a case category didn’t fit the new system’s parameters, JusticeNexus gave it a blank, or unclassified, status; for example, incoming cases that were previously classified under “review”—as in, ready for the filing unit to review—got categorized as blank in the new system, which didn’t have a corresponding “review” category, according to Lindsay.

“I think it’s much better, as you can imagine, to be using a system that’s not from 1999,” criminal division director Jenna Robert said during a joint interview with Evans on Friday, “but there are definitely growing pains that are going to take  while for us to resolve.”

Evans is a former federal prosecutor; Robert worked in the domestic violence division under former city attorney Pete Holmes before joining the state attorney general’s office in 2021. Evans said this experience gives them an important perspective that her predecessors lacked. “I think that perspective matters, when we’re talking about … understanding that not every case that comes in should be filed, and we really need to be looking at cases that affect public safety,” she said.

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Davison, a Republican, supported new laws cracking down on sex work and drug use and believed in treating “prolific offenders” more harshly than other misdemeanor defendants. But Evans acknowledged that despite her “weird fixations” on certain types of crimes, Davison “did have a lot of cases in diversion, including quality of life crimes” like shoplifting and trespassing.

Evans says there are a few key changes that could help her office address the backlog. First, legislation that just passed the state House, after sailing through the Senate, will allow cities to use private labs to analyze blood samples in suspected DUI cases. Evans testified in favor of the legislation in Olympia last month.

Second, she says the city needs to fund more prosecutors to review and handle increasingly complex cases, which often involve hours of video evidence. Evans is well aware that any request for additional funding will probably fall on deaf ears this year, when the city is facing a $148 million budget deficit. Although Davison managed to squeeze around $300,000 out of the city for two additional domestic violence prosecutors in 2022, Mayor Katie Wilson has asked each department to propose cuts between 5 and 10 percent, and Evans acknowledged that this year’s budget fight will be about preserving her office, not expanding it.

Third, Evans and Robert are restructuring the department so that a single attorney will handle each case from filing to resolution, a “vertical” structure Evans said would give prosecutors a greater sense of “ownership and responsibility” over their cases and prevent a situation where the city attorney’s filing unit is simply “filing for numbers.” Evans said that in her experience as a federal prosecutor, “there’s a different mentality when you’re like, ‘Okay, yeah. This is mine all the way through.”

For crime victims, “just getting the quality they need up front is really important, and I think that that naturally happens when you get a case, it’s yours and it’s not going to just be handed off to someone else to go and try,” Evans said.

These proposals don’t address other factors that could be contributing to chronic case backlogs, such as slow filings or the difficulty of hiring highly qualified lawyers to relatively low-paying government positions. By this time next year, we should have some sense of whether the changes Evans is implementing have started to make a dent in the city prosecutor’s workload, or if this recurring problem is due to other, more intractable forces.

City Council, Civil Rights, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 7, 2026

Expanding tiny house villages, inside-out density, city council staff unionization, and more news you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, March 3

As City and County Consider Banning New ICE Facilities, Local Jails Are Exempted from Seattle’s Ban

The city and King County are both passing temporary bans on new ICE detention facilities in areas under their jurisdiction, but only one’s—Seattle’s—does not apply to local jails. As emergency legislation, the Seattle moratorium needs seven of nine votes to pass, and some councilmembers reportedly balked at language temporarily prohibiting new jails, even though no new jail is planned in Seattle.

Wednesday, March 4

An Alternative Approach to Creating Affordable Housing: Inside-Out Urbanism

In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit argues that urbanists should look inward to create new density in neighborhoods, by focusing on changes to buildings themselves (rather than zoning) that could allow more apartments. “Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.”

Wilson Announces First Steps Toward 1,000 Shelter Beds: Simpler Leases, Larger Tiny House Villages, More Money for Shelter

Mayor Katie Wilson announced the first part of her big push to add thousands of new shelter beds in her first term. Under the proposal, the city would lease land for new tiny house villages directly, reducing red tape for nonprofit shelter providers, and the city would allow much bigger villages—up to 250 units. The city council still has to approve (and potentially amend) Wilson’s plan, which she rolled out without securing a council sponsor or feedback from council members.

Thursday, March 5

Civil Rights Office Director Put On Leave Over Employee Complaints, Union Alleges Interference in Investigation

The head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, and his deputy are both on paid leave after the city launched an investigation into allegations of discrimination, harassment, and bias by his staff. PubliCola detailed the employees’ claims in a story last week. The union that represents SOCR employees has filed an EEOC complaint challenging the neutrality of the investigation, after Wheeler-Smith notified a city HR investigator about PubliCola’s forthcoming story in February, saying his employees’ claims were specious and part of an effort by the deputy mayor to oust him by planting false stories in the press.

Friday, March 5

City Council’s Legislative Aides Vote to Unionize

Legislative assistants for City Councilmembers have voted to unionize. While previous unionization efforts went nowhere, this one has strong support, thanks to reportedly poor working conditions in some council offices and growing dissatisfaction with the pay disparity between council aides and people doing similar jobs in other departments.

Police Chief Says “We Don’t Take Sides” in Protests

During a presentation on the Seattle Police Department’s plans for responding if federal troops or ICE descend on Seattle, Police Chief Shon Barnes said SPD is neutral during protests, arguing that social media videos and the press use sound bites or misleading photos to misrepresent SPD’s actions.

City Council, labor, Police

City Council’s Legislative Aides Vote to Unionize, Police Chief Says “We Don’t Take Sides” in Protests
Image via City of Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

1. Legislative assistants for City Councilmembers have voted to unionize, filing a petition for recognition with the state Public Employee Relations Commission last week. The filing means that organizers have collected signatures from more than half the 30-plus employees who would be represented by PROTEC17 if the effort is successful.

Previous efforts to organize legislative assistants, or LAs, have failed, but this effort received well over 50 percent support. This is reportedly for two reasons: Poor working conditions in some council offices that have contributed to extremely high staff turnover, and low pay for legislative assistants compared to people who do similar jobs in other departments, including the mayor’s office.

Historically, Seattle has treated the legislative branch as a lower-value institution than the mayor’s office and the executive-branch departments. City Council members themselves make far less than the mayor and many department directors: a majority of councilmembers earn around $165,000 a year, compared to $272,334 for the mayor, $373,000 for the police chief, and $530,000 for the head of Seattle City Light.

Pay disparities between legislative assistants have also grown significantly since council members instituted more hierarchical office structures starting around 2024. That was the year that five newcomers joined the council (thanks to appointments and elections, several more have joined since then) and Sara Nelson, defeated by Dionne Foster last year, became council president. Suddenly, legislative assistants had fancy internal titles like “Chief of Staff” and “Director of External Relations.” (One result of these new, unofficial titles is that nearly everyone on a typical three-person council staff is a “Director” or “Chief” of something, and almost no one is a mere council staffer.)

The new titles solidified (and may have worsened) the pay structures that already existed between junior and senior staff. The wage gap between the highest- and lowest-paid legislative has grown pretty dramatically over the past several. For instance, the lowest-paid LAs currently make around $38 an hour, while the highest-paid LAs make around $68 an hour—a 79 percent gap. Back in 2019, according to city wage records, the lowest-paid LAs typically made about $28 an hour while the highest-paid made around $44 an hour, a 57 percent gap.

City council members themselves get to divvy up their own staff budget, which may contribute to pay disparities between offices as well as people within each office. Woe betide the staffers going through the revolving door at a council office where the chief of staff is the council member’s best friend!

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2. During a presentation on the Seattle Police Department’s plans for responding if federal troops or ICE descend on Seattle, Councilmember Bob Kettle took a moment to observe—rather preemptively, when it comes to how SPD will respond to a hypothetical ICE incursion—that SPD is sometimes unfairly maligned for appearing to take one side or another during protests, and to assure Police Chief Shon Barnes that the council knows this is frequently a misrepresentation based on a single photo taken out of context.

Kettle said “let’s put Cal Anderson to the side”—a reference to SPD’s over-the-top response to a counterprotest against a far-right rally on Capitol Hill—and focus on “what can we do that shows that you’re looking to support the rights of Seattleites, and it’s not being something that may visually look one way or the other?” (Kettle said the Cal Anderson protest, at which police collaborated with security for an anti-LGBTQ group and referred to protesters as “transtifa,” will be the subject of an upcoming committee meeting.)

Barnes agreed that social media videos and the press misrepresent SPD’s actions at protests. “[P]erception sometimes is people’s reality,” he said. “And you know, one photo of your back turned to the wrong person could give the impression that we are supporting one side or the other. In regards to your question, when it comes to protests, we are neutral in the protests, and we don’t take sides. … I want to make it clear, that we do not, support federal immigration enforcement at any time. We’re there to keep the peace. If we have to talk to people, that doesn’t mean that we are on their side…  and we’ll try to explain that, should that one second clip or photo be given to the community.”

As for the recommendations from the city’s Office of Inspector General, which included many proposals SPD has promised, then failed, to implement in the past, in the past, Barnes said they’re on it. “We have a captain that will be implementing those things,” he said.

Civil Rights, Mayor Wilson

Civil Rights Office Director Put On Leave Over Employee Complaints, Union Alleges Interference in Investigation

 

By Erica C. Barnett

Derrick Wheeler-Smith, director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, has been put on administrative leave along with his deputy director, Fahima Mohamed, while an outside investigator looks into allegations by SOCR staff that include discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Erika Pablo, a former Race and Social Justice Initiative manager at SOCR who now heads up the Human Services Department’s Safe and Thriving Communities division, will replace Wheeler-Smith on an interim basis.

PubliCola reported last week about the allegations after speaking with about a quarter of SOCR’s current staff.

Among other allegations, employees said Wheeler-Smith had ignored or rejected efforts to focus SOCR’s work on emerging issues facing Asian American, Latino, and LGBTQ+ people and imposed his personal religious views on department activities. Staffers also alleged retaliation, discrimination against women and LGBTQ+ and disabled staffers, and inappropriate conduct such as sending misogynistic “jokes” about women to male staff, including a meme suggesting Kamala Harris rose to her position by giving oral sex.

Although the investigation will be conducted by an external investigator, it falls under the purview of the city’s internal Human Resources Investigation Unit (HRIU), leading some staffers to raise concerns about about the independence of the investigation.

Shortly after my story came out, Wheeler-Smith sent an email to city officials and local news outlets claiming that Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt was the secret puppet master behind my story, “direct[ing]… a few disgruntled staff” my way and steering my reporting. (Surratt was not a source.) In the email, Wheeler-Smith revealed that he reached out to HRIU Director Ray Sugarman in February to report Surratt’s “threatening actions” and “inquire about an alleged HR complaint based upon false allegations.” One day after Wheeler-Smith contacted Sugarman, according to PROTEC17, the investigations unit reached out to the union seeking the names of employees who complained so they could conduct intake interviews.

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In response to Wheeler’s allegation and HRIU’s request for employee names, PROTEC17 filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The complaint argues that it’s inappropriate for the city’s internal HR investigations office to oversee complaints against department heads because HRIU is lower on the city’s chain of command, and says the independence of the investigation is “fatally compromised” because it was triggered when the subject of the complaint, Wheeler-Smith, alerted the investigations unit that there might be a “false” HR complaint against him.

The EEOC complaint accuses Wheeler-Smith of retaliating against employees he believed were responsible for the complaints against him, creating a “chilling effect” that has caused at least one SOCR staffer to pull out of an intake interview after Wheeler-Smith learned that they planned to participate in the investigation.

According to the complaint, “The employee subsequently received threats from community members associated with the Director.” Additionally, “Wheeler-Smith’s public letter will predictably deter OCR employees from participating in any investigation. Employees who have not yet been identified now face the prospect that the Director will publicly attack them if they come forward,” the EEOC complaint says.

Mayor Katie Wilson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for more information on Thursday morning.

 

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Wilson Announces First Steps Toward 1,000 Shelter Beds: Simpler Leases, Larger Tiny House Villages, More Money for Shelter

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson introduced three pieces of legislation on Wednesday that she says will reduce barriers to tiny house villages—groups of small, freestanding shelters—by reducing bureaucratic obstacles, freeing up money, and removing a cap on the size of tiny house villages that Wilson called out of step with nationwide best practices.

Framed by tiny houses-in-progress at Sound Foundations’ 15,000-square-foot tiny house production facility in SoDo, Wilson said the legislation is just the beginning of a plan to dramatically reduce visible homelessness and get people into shelter as a step toward permanent housing.

“We have twice as many homeless people in Seattle as we have shelter beds, leaving thousands of people with nowhere to go,” Wilson said.  “We also have a responsibility to make sure that everyone can access and enjoy our parks, trails, sidewalks and other public spaces. But we can’t just keep moving people from place to place, and calling that progress. The single most important thing we can do to address our city’s homelessness crisis is to rapidly expand emergency housing.”

Wilson’s first bill would allow the city, through its Department of Finance and Administrative Services, to directly lease and prepare land for tiny house villages and other types of noncongregate shelter. Wilson said the 56-word amendment may seem like “a small and technical change,” but will relieve shelter providers of the obligation to negotiate their own land deals with property owners, prepare sites for opening, and connect new tiny house villages to electricity, water, and other utilities, a process that can push opening dates back months.

The second piece of legislation would significantly increase the cap on the size of individual villages. New villages, currently capped at 100 residents, could have as many as 250, with a limit of one such large shelter per council district (or nine citywide). Additional villages could have no more than 150 residents.

Wilson also announced that her office has identified $4.8 million in unspent city funding to help stand up new shelters, which the third piece of legislation would appropriate. The mayor has pledged to open up 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of her first year, 500 of those before the FIFA World Cup comes to Seattle in June.

Speaking to PubliCola late Wednesday afternoon, Wilson said she’s focusing on shelter because it’s a high-impact strategy that can be implemented quickly—unlike housing, which costs more and takes longer to build.

“Right now, the big thing is just that we need to make an impact fast. We’ve seen the number of unsheltered homeless folks going up and up and up, year after year, and it takes time to build housing,” Wilson said. “To me, the most important number is how many people are sleeping unsheltered in Seattle, and I think we’re going to be adjusting [strategies over time] to make more of an impact.”

Several supporters of Wilson’s plan who spoke on Wednesday sounded notably cool on aspects of “housing first,” the idea that people can’t recover from addiction and other behavioral health challenges until they’re in stable, permanent housing. Conservative politicians and talking heads have made “housing first” a bogeyman for all kinds of supposed giveaways to unworthy lowlifes, but the concept is also a matter of debate among homeless advocate themselves, and the pendulum in Seattle appears to be swinging toward a new kind of shelter-first approach—one where shelter (and mandatory case management) is a prerequisite for housing, at least for people with complex needs.

“Strong shelter programs with robust support services can be a game changer in achieving stable, permanent housing placements,” Fé LopezGaetke, co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (PDA), said. “In fact, taking three to six months to stabilize a person significantly improves outcomes for those who go on to permanent housing. Housing providers benefit when tenants come in with a lot more support and when a lot of obstacles to recovery and stabilization have already been tackled.”

This is a dramatic turnabout from the rhetoric of, say, 2020, when anti-shelter sentiment was thick in the air. The thinking at that time was that there is no such thing as a person who isn’t “housing-ready,” and that housing, not shelter, is the best way to stabilize a person with addiction or behavioral health issues that are exacerbated by living on the street. In a city without adequate permanent supportive housing (housing designed specifically for people with disabling conditions), people were getting stuck in the shelter system, and a renewed focus on housing was seen as a more effective way of addressing homelessness.

This focus on housing, rather than shelter, led to approaches like the Partnership for Zero, a pandemic-era public-private partnership that was supposed to rapidly “end” visible homelessness downtown. That program shut down in 2023 after housing 230 people.

At the exact same time, the PDA was launching its JustCARE and CoLEAD programs, which included hotel-based emergency shelter combined with  intensive case management, health care, and housing navigation. This model of shelter, proponents now argue, is more effective at getting people into permanent housing than either those that move people from tents into apartments or older, non-“enhanced” shelter models.

Chief Seattle Club director Derrick Belgarde, who spoke at Wilson’s event, told PubliCola Wednesday afternoon that the people who are most successful in CSC’s permanent supportive housing are the ones who’ve gone through mandatory case management at one of their shelters, which include two tiny house villages, first. “If ‘housing first’ is getting people off the streets, getting people in a safe room with a door, then it’s good, but when we’re talking about permanent housing, we haven’t been fans,” Belgarde said.

People can be kicked out of a CSC shelter for behavior that wouldn’t get them evicted from permanent housing, and as a result, they’re far less likely to start fights, blast music, or engage in other un-neighborly behavior once they move into a housing unit, Belgarde said. “In our shelters, it’s not even about shelter—it’s about a program to build community and get life skills and keep them safe, with a roof over their head.”

Wilson’s office suggested that the city will be ready to sign leases on several properties shortly after her legislation passes, assuming the city council approves it (more on that in a moment.) But they wouldn’t say yet where the properties were, or if they’ll include the very large villages Wilson’s proposal would authorize.

“Obviously, we don’t want to just put 250 people in a huge tent and be like, “OK, here you go!'” Wilson told PubliCola. “It’s going to be based on a case-by-case analysis.”

Belgarde said his organization is unlikely to apply to build much larger tiny house villages than the ones they currently operate. “I’m not opposed to other people trying it. I’m not an expert on anybody else’s community,” Belgarde said. “I know about our own unique trauma, and I know where the a chronically homeless person sits, as far as their acuity level and their needs. A 100-person shelter would be downright dangerous for us. We’re not going to entertain the idea of opening a shelter that large.”

Low Income Housing Instititute director Sharon Lee, who also spoke at Wednesday’s event, said if LIHI was to build a very large tiny house village, they would divide it into separate “neighborhoods” to prevent it from feeling dangerously large. Currently, LIHI’s biggest tiny house village has 73 units.

One group the discussion about enhanced shelter leaves out is people who don’t need intensive case management—those who are homeless due to economic circumstances like job loss and evictions for unpaid rent. During the campaign, Wilson proposed providing rent subsidies to some of these “low-acuity” homeless folks to move into tax-credit-subsidized housing units that are currently sitting vacant because there’s a glut of subsidized studio and one-bedroom units that cost about as much as market-rate apartments.

“You won’t be surprised to hear that we are going to be looking at ways to move low-acuity folks into some of the vacant units in our affordable housing sector with some kind of rent subsidy,” Wilson told PubliCola. “That will be a strategy that will take people who are hanging out in the shelter system, putting them into a housing situation, and hopefully freeing up some space in shelter that is set up to deal with higher-acuity folks.”

“Among the homeless population, there are a number of people who just can’t pay the rent—the working homeless person, the person who finally got into recovery and now is employed,” Lee said. “They can live in regular workforce housing. I think it’s a valid model, and it’s a lot cheaper to do it that way than to subsidize vacant units.”

Belgarde, echoing comments LopezGaetke made during the announcement at Sound Foundations, said his main concern about the new push for shelters is that shelter becomes a path to housing, rather than a final stop. “If there’s any worry, it’s a worry that it’s not the solution,” he said. We don’t want people to see there’s not any more tents on the sidewalk and think we’ve solved it, because you haven’t solved it if people are just sitting in a tiny house village.”

Wilson still has to get her legislation through the council. In a break from longstanding practice at City Hall, Wilson did not secure a City Council sponsor for her proposals, discuss the wording or sequencing of her legislation, or ensure that the legislation would get a committee hearing before announcing her legislation publicly. (She also left her own press conference shortly after she spoke without answering questions, prompting audible grumbling from reporters.)

This approach has raised some eyebrows in council offices. Ordinarily, the mayor and allies on the council work behind the scenes to draft legislation and secure support from council members before doing a public rollout; instead, the council has been left wondering who, exactly, is supposed to back Wilson’s bill and even which committee it’s supposed to go through.

“Now that the three bills have been transmitted to council, we need to determine which Councilmembers will sponsor each bill, whether they should move together or through separate committees, and which committee or committees are the right fit,” Council President Joy Hollingsworth told PubliCola Thursday. “We also need time for central staff analysis regarding the legislation and for the executive to answer initial questions as well. We will also invite and offer the executive an opportunity to come to a council briefing to discuss their legislation. Our goal as a body is to run a transparent and open legislative process.”

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

An Alternative Approach to Creating Affordable Housing: Inside-Out Urbanism
Image of a four-unit apartment building
Sneaky urbanism adds housing inside the existing buildable footprint—and can be a way to expand the footprint in advance of major zoning changes.

By Josh Feit

The city of Seattle was supposed to be done with its 10-year comprehensive plan update more than a year ago, in December 2024. The comp plan is the document that governs local land use and zoning, which means it’s also about where the city will (and won’t) allow more density. As you know, it’s now 2026.

This should give you an idea of how many deadlines we’ve missed. Here we are, 14 months on, and pro-housing advocates are still waiting as the city braces for yet more debates over the specifics of the Neighborhood Center and Urban Center strategy that, sigh, continues to cordon density into tightly constricted areas.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting for the city to take action. It’s time to take matters into our own hands—at least as we wait for the new pro-density council members like Eddie Lin and Dionne Foster to join forces with Alexis Mercedes Rinck and new self-avowed urbanist Mayor Katie Wilson to get the zoning right. In the meantime, I’m hopeful about an emerging method to usher in the dense housing we need citywide to address the affordability and climate crises: Instead of fixating on wholesale land use changes, focus on discrete housing regulations with piecemeal reforms. Devious density.

I’m not advocating for timid tinkering around the edges. I’m thinking of ingenious hacks that are possible within the restrictive height limits, contorted floor area ratio guidelines, and setback requirements that currently define and limit the number of units you can fit into an apartment building. Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.

Pro-density progressives in Washington state have already had success with this sneaky inside-out approach. In 2025, they won parking reform, which maximizes the square footage available for housing by lowering building costs and forgoing the need for carports and underground garages. Similarly, in 2023, advocates succeeded in passing the nation’s first-ever single-staircase bill, a reform that frees up space for more units in the same building footprint by getting rid of unnecessary two-staircase mandates.

Another recent bit of tactical urbanism, passed last year, made an exception to mandatory setbacks (the distance a building must be from the street and other lot boundaries) for smart construction methods like mass timber, passive house, and modular construction, as well as for affordable housing units.

In the current legislative session, pro-housing advocates are now on their way to passing elevator reform, which will lower costs for developers, hopefully hastening construction of more units.

As I reported last week: While the elevator industry stripped out a push for universal reform, urbanists are still set to pass a deceptively specific change at the ground level. The legislation will change elevator size guidelines for apartment buildings up to six stories tall, lowering costs and allowing more units. This detail-oriented code change will open the doors to multifamily housing in neighborhoods where the the overall zoning remains antagonistic to this type of renter-friendly development.

Consider this “within-the-envelope”-approach a pro-housing hack against the classic anti-density refrain about “neighborhood character.” (The housing “envelope” is the planning term for the ultimate size allowed for a development after all the setback, density, height, and other parameter guidelines are taken into account.) By adding the potential for more units within buildings that are visually in sync with the surrounding area, pro-housing advocates may reveal what intransigent NIMBYs actually mean when they say “character.”