City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media

Mayor Katie Wilson at Six Months In: “Incredibly Proud of What We’re Accomplishing”

The mayor talks about her shelter plan, encampment sweeps, why news vouchers aren’t happening this year, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

PubliCola sat down this week with Mayor Katie Wilson to talk about how her agenda is going at six months in, what she’s learned from the setbacks and conflicts she’s encountered (like early, still-reverberating missteps with the city council), and how she plans to deal with this year’s $175 million budget deficit. Will the city’s shelter expansion continue? Will Wilson propose cutting the police budget? Can the schism between the mayor and the city council be repaired? We discussed all of that and much more on Tuesday morning in Wilson’s office at City Hall.

This is Part 1 of our interview; look for Part 2 later today.

PubliCola (ECB): I want to start with a big-picture question: You’re a little over six months in. What’s the most surprising challenge that you’ve encountered so far?

Mayor Katie Wilson (KW): I hate questions like this!

ECB: I’m not giving you a ‘Rate yourself from A to F’ question! It’s your first time in elected office—I just want to know what has surprised you so far.

KW: I’m not sure how surprising this is, but one thing that I’ve been reflecting on is just the tension—and I think that this is a tension which is maybe unique to people coming in with an ambitious progressive left agenda— the tension between wanting to get things done fast, wanting to get results, wanting to cut through the Seattle process, and people and organizations and communities that are like, ‘wait, wait, ask me.’ It’s not surprising in retrospect, but I just didn’t have a lot of time to think about it coming in. It was more like, ‘Okay, we’re here, what can we do?’

ECB: There was some tension with the city council, obviously, early on, like after things kind of hit a wall on your shelter legislation. Have you recalibrated at all?

KW: Well, I wouldn’t say we hit a wall on the shelter stuff at all.

ECB: I’m talking specifically about the conflict with the council—

KW: I mean, we’ve moved on since then, and we got our three pieces of legislation through, right?

ECB: I’m curious if there’s anything that you learned from that experience.

KW: Well, I certainly think that coming in, setting up a new mayoral administration, you’re bringing in 40-some people, assembling a new office, figuring out how to organize yourselves, and so we definitely were slow to staff and figure out our council relations. And so that that was a learning process. We definitely made some missteps, and in retrospect, should have put a lot more focus on that at the outset—[figuring out] what we needed to do in order to build a really good relationship with each council office.

Some of the shelter thing, I think, was that tension between ‘we need this stuff to happen, so let’s just send it down,’ the urgency of trying to start standing up shelter, and not having an entirely thorough understanding—or more, just not having had time to establish our council relations strategy in a really good way. So I think, in retrospect, we did that poorly, and certainly we’re learning from that and trying to try and do better.

“It’s a tension within myself, as someone who’s coming in from an organizing background, wanting to shake things up and get things done. But also, in order to do that in a way that works and that’s sustainable, you actually need to know how the city works. You need to not burn things down in a bad way.”

ECB: Without getting too philosophical, do you think that some of the growing pains—I can feel you getting ready to disagree with the term ‘growing pains,’ but I think there have been growing pains—

KW: I’m not gonna argue that term. I mean, look, I’ve never been the mayor before, and I think anyone coming into this job, even having been an elected official, even having had previous experience as the executive director of an organization, there’s gonna be a steep learning curve. There’s nothing like being the mayor of a major city—just the pace and the number of things coming at you.

ECB: There seems to be a tension between people in your administration who are government veterans, who are like, ‘This is how the process works, and this is what you do, and this is how you compromise in advance so you can get things through’—and then people who worked on your campaign, who are saying ‘We were elected to do these things, we need to do them fast. How is that tension playing out, and is it causing problems?

KW: There is a tension, and I think it’s a productive tension and an inevitable tension. And it’s a tension within myself, as someone who’s coming in from an organizing background, wanting to shake things up and get things done. But also, in order to do that in a way that works and that’s sustainable, you actually need to know how the city works. You need to not burn things down in a bad way. And so, yeah, that tension exists within my office, and I think that’s healthy, and that’s I think why ultimately we’re going to be successful.

And I’m really proud of the things that we’ve accomplished in these first six months. We’ve had a lot of headwinds. We came in with ICE scares, and we had to stand up our federal response work really fast. We moved $4 million out to the community. We had to immediately figure out the library levy and transmit that to council. Our [Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise levy] implementation got free school meals, which was not easy. (After our interview on Tuesday, City Council President Joy Hollingsworth introduced an amendment to the that would delay universal free meals and use the funding instead on vouchers for kids from low-income families to get meals on weekends and holidays during the school year).

We got the Graham Street Station to affordability on Sound Transit. We’ve transmitted a Seattle Transit Measure package that will expand transit at a time when many jurisdictions in the country are pulling back on public transit, when gas is many dollars a gallon. We’re painting bus lanes on Denny. We got our rapid shelter expansion work off the ground. We’ve opened with one big new shelter, which has been key to the success of the Pioneer Square efforts that [Purpose Dignity Action] and others have led [during the World Cup]. And we have a number of additional shelters that are going to be opening up in over the course of the rest of this year.  Obviously, we’ve had to deal with the KCRHA and everything going on there. We launched Taller, Denser, Faster. We transmitted [rental] junk fee legislation, and you know what, we’re the most successful World Cup host city in America.

We are learning a lot, and obviously, there are things that, in hindsight, we could have done better, and are going to do better moving forward, but I’m incredibly proud of what we’re accomplishing.

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ECB: News vouchers [a funding mechanism for local news] are being pushed to next year. Can you tell me why?

KW: I am very, very excited to advance these vouchers, or News Notes. [But] we are looking ahead to a very challenging budget cycle. And we needed more time and attention to work on the policy than we thought we were going to be able to carve out in the next few months, because a lot of energy right now is going into figuring out the budget.

We need to figure out how to fund it, and there’s obviously a few different ways we can do that. We could send a small levy to the ballot, or we could try to find funding within the existing city budget. We couldn’t have gotten the policy ready in time to put a measure on the ballot this November, even if we wanted to, and it also seems like a hard narrative when you’re in the middle of cutting lots of things. So we’ll get there, but it just wasn’t in the cards [this year].

“Politically, to be like ‘We are stopping all sweeps until we have the shelter—the backlash that that would cause both among constituents and among most of my council colleagues would be such that I think we would lose the ability to actually do our shelter work.”

 ECB: You’ve taken some heat in the press for not hitting your goal of 500 new shelter beds by the World Cup. What have some of the unanticipated roadblocks been? I know that you said that goal is aspirational, but we’re at 165 or so in July.

KW: I don’t want to project exactly where we’re going to be by the end of this year, but we’re chugging away. I think there’s a question of, does it make sense to have a big number goal that then you don’t meet, and then people are like, ‘Oh, you failed.’ But we’ve already opened many times the net shelter that the last administration opened in four years.

Putting that goal out there did really give us something to focus toward, and I can see the immense amount of work that has gone on with our interdepartmental team, and all the city departments—they got together and they just hashed it out, like, ‘how do we make this happen faster, how do we make this happen more efficiently?’ And then we were able to rally not just our service provider partners, but philanthropic contributions, and so that part of it has been such a success.

We know what works. People who are really hard to serve, we can get them inside with support, and that new shelter that we opened was instrumental to the success of [the PDA’s Pioneer Square] project, and so now we’re thinking about, how do we replicate this.

ECB: The Unified Care Team, by all accounts, is doing at least as many encampment sweeps with no notice as they ever have—maybe more. I don’t think you came in wanting to be the sweeps mayor, but in some ways you are. What would you say to supporters who are disappointed that you’re still sweeping people without offering shelter and services?

KW:  I think we’re trying to strike a balance here, where the situation you’re trying to get to is one where we have shelter, we have housing, where we’re able to resolve encampments by getting people into that shelter and housing, and that is what opening up these new shelters is going to allow us to do at a much larger scale. And it is important—and I said this during the campaign—that we are maintaining high-priority public spaces for their intended uses, whether that’s a park or a sidewalk.

So there’s that answer, and then there’s also a political answer of doing this in a way that builds political will to do more. Leaving aside the question of the impacts of an encampment removal or sweep versus leaving an encampment there, leaving aside the question of how that affects people’s lives—politically, to be like ‘We are stopping all sweeps until we have the shelter, the backlash that that would cause both among constituents and among most of my council colleagues would be such that I think we would lose the ability to actually do our shelter work.

We are actively working on improving the operations of the UCT in order to get better outcomes for people living in encampments. Months ago, I asked the UCT to come up with recommendations from their experience of how they could operate differently to get better outcomes, and we’re working through those recommendations now. So we are planning to make some changes to how the UCT operates, especially as we start opening up new shelter, to try to shift that model.

ECB: I know a lot of decisions about KCRHA are in the future, so here’s a short term question about something you do have control over over. Should Kelly Kennison continue to be the leader of KCRHA??

KW: I think stability is really important. We’ve taken the steps outlined in the press conference to embed outside financial consultants, and we’re really looking at what do we need to do to make the strongest possible application for [federal Continuum of Care funds, and I think continuity of leadership is really important.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police, Privacy

Wilson Turns Off Stadium Surveillance Cameras, Homeless Authority Director Tells Staff Not to Trust the Media

1. As PubliCola first reported on Bluesky yesterday, Mayor Katie Wilson is turning off the police surveillance cameras around the downtown stadiums now that the final World Cup match in Seattle is over. In an official announcement this morning, Wilson said the decision “follows through on the commitment I made last month that these particular cameras would only be turned on for the duration of the FIFA World Cup in Seattle, because of its high global profile and the unique circumstances surrounding the event.”

In March, Wilson approved the installation of the cameras but said she would not have them turned on, and connected to the Seattle Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center, unless there was a “credible threat.” After months of pressure to tur.n the cameras on before the World Cup, Wilson announced that there had been a credible threat and she was ordering SPD to turn the cameras on.

Anti-surveillance activists, who had planned a rally and press conference today demanding Wilson to turn the cameras off today, praised the decision. But they said they were still skeptical that the cameras are fully off, posting video showing a camera unit near the stadium still plugged in. Asked to clarify what Wilson meant by “off,” a spokesperson for her office said, “The cameras were turned off via a PoE (Power over Ethernet) switch. As the cameras are not receiving power, they are not operational, and not capable of recording.”

For some anti-surveillance activists, that isn’t enough; they want visual evidence that the cables have been disconnected, which would require workers to go up to each camera unit and physically disconnect the lines. Noah Williams, a Transit Riders Union member who works in cybersecurity, said one of the challenges with camera systems like SPD’s is that technical specs vary from system to system, and SPD has not shared how its cameras, which are provided by Axon, work. (The TRU, which Wilson co-founded, is part of a coalition called Community Not Cameras, which planned today’s press conference and rally).

“It is really hard to verify that the mayor’s intent is being carried out because of the nature of the way these systems are designed and installed,” Williams said.

Wilson’s spokesperson said there are “other electronics in the camera cabinets (router/modem, Linux box, a cooling fan, etc.)” and that shutting these electronics down would require the city to send out bucket trucks, costing time and money. “Regardless of the power status of any of those devices, the cameras themselves are not operational,” the spokesperson said.

Wilson said she still plans to wait until the NYU Policing Project completes its data and security audit of the surveillance camera system later this year before deciding whether to turn on the stadium cameras and put other neighborhphoods, including parts of Capitol Hill and the Central District, under camera surveillance. Cameras have remained on in other areas, including Aurora Ave. North and downtown.

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2. Late last month, Mayor Wilson and King County Executive Girmay Zahilay announced that the city and county will be taking over almost all of the region’s homeless shelter and service contracts, a change that will result in an initial 20 to 25 layoffs, according to city and county officials who briefed reporters on the “right-sizing” effort late last month.

In an all-staff email about the announcement on Friday, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison didn’t focus on her employees’ understandable concerns about their jobs. Instead, she suggested that the press were wrong about the number of potential layoffs, noting that she was the only person who had control over how many people would lose their jobs.

“A lot of information is floating around in the media and among various levels of our partner organizations,” Kinnison wrote “In particular, there is much speculation about the number and timing of a KCRHA reduction in force.”

But Kinnison assured staff: They shouldn’t trust the media. “Please remember that the media frequently get facts slightly or very wrong,” she wrote. “Especially outlets with low journalistic standards with a history of one-sided, agenda-driven, or incorrect reporting.” As the outlet that has covered the KCRHA longest and most doggedly (going back to the “One Table” meetings that eventually led to the KCRHA’s formation), PubliCola stands by our years of reporting on the agency.

“As I said yesterday,” Kinnison continued, “my actions to reduce our workforce will come from discussions with Department Chiefs, HR. Protec17, and our partners and funders. I have full authority to manage our workforce to align with our budget and labor agreements short of a new resolution passed by our entire Governing Board that curbs that authority.”

A reduction of 20 to 25 staffers would represent about one third of the agency’s current 73 staff, leaving around 50 people on the agency payroll.

It seems unlikely that the layoffs will stop with the initial round. After the local contracts that made up the vast majority of its work go back to the city and county, KCRHA will be left with just a handful of official duties: Serving as the organization that applies for federal contracts, overseeing the emergency “activation” of overnight winter shelters, and conducting the Point in Time Count of the region’s homeless population next year. All Home, the organization that previously did all this work except the winter shelters, had between 7 and 10 people on staff.

Opinion, Transit

Sound Transit’s Bespoke Wayfinding System Is Unnecessarily Baffling

 

International visitors have likely never seen anything quite like it.

By Erica C. Barnett

For Sound Transit, the World Cup games could serve as a test of the changes the light-rail agency has made to its wayfinding signage over the past few years. Sound Transit has said the changes put the region’s transit agency in line with “international standards” and make the signs easier for international travelers, non-English speakers, and people with certain disabilities to understand.

But some of the new features, such as the addition of station numbers to route maps and the removal of location information from station exits, are more confusing than clarifying.

Under the new wayfinding system, each station has a three-digit numeric code that’s displayed prominently on signs at stations, transit maps, and on trains themselves. Westlake, for instance, is now rendered as “150,” indicating that riders are at station 50 on the 1 line.

State law requires some kind of station identifier that people with limited English proficiency can easily remember. Previously, Sound Transit used a series of baffling pictograms; these included two types of bird, two types of boat, and both a moose and a deer. Unfortunately, the three-digit system seems like a marginal improvement, at best, over the twee old silhouette-style images.

Sound Transit spokeswoman Amy Enbysk said numeric station codes “are commonly used in many international transit systems to support riders with limited English proficiency, as well as visitors who may not be familiar with the region,” pointing to cities like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai that use station numbers. However, most major cities on every non-Asian continent— London to São Paolo to Thessaloniki—use names, not numbers, to identify stations, and they indicate station locations with simple dots. The more visual clutter a sign has, the more confusing it becomes.

But maybe I’m an outlier? According to Enbysk, the new three-digit identifiers tested well in focus groups and “customer feedback on the station codes has generally been positive, including requests to expand them to digital signage and onboard displays, which we have done.” It’s notable, though, that each station now includes a key—in English—explaining how to decode the new numeric system.

Sound Transit also has duplicate station numbers on each of its two lines, so someone who is navigating entirely by station numbers will also have to remember if they’re looking for, say, stop 56 is on the green line (where it’s 156) or the blue line (where it’s 256).

The potential for rider confusion is only compounded by the fact that Sound Transit now uses the terminal station for each line to identify which direction a train is going, rather than simple directions (north/south, east/west) or common destinations (“downtown Seattle”/”Airport”). Thus, a rider going downtown from Beacon Hill has to decide whether to stand on the side of the station that’s bound for “Lynnwood City Center” or “Downtown Federal Way,” with no obvious indication where these two non-destination cities are located geographically.

According to Enbysk, Sound Transit doesn’t use cardinal directions because most people tend to think in terms of “landmarks and destination,” not which way they’re headed. And they don’t use terms like “uptown/downtown” or “Seattle/Eastside” because light rail isn’t a “hub and spoke” system where the lines radiate from a central location, but a system that “services multiple major cities in the region.”

This rationale strikes me as typical Seattle exceptionalism, not an actual reason to omit basic, useful information from wayfinding signs. The New York City subway system, which serves a population 10 times the size of Seattle, has trains going in all different directions and isn’t really a hub-and-spoke system either, yet stations have simple, basic information about where to board with signs that indicate whether a train is generally going toward Brooklyn or Manhattan, for example. There’s no reason Sound Transit couldn’t do the same thing. Instead, our bespoke signage requires people to memorize the names of far-flung stations just to know what side of the platform to stand on.


Once a rider gets off the train, there may be one last hurdle before they reach their destination: Underground station exits that have been stripped of information about where each exit emerges at the surface Instead of “northwest corner of Fourth and Pine,” for instance, riders emerging at Westlake station face options like “A1,”  “A2,” “B,” and “C.”

According to Enbysk, “Exit lettering (Exit A, B, C, etc.) is another common approach used by many rail and transit systems, such as Paris, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, and Hong Kong, as it allows signs to remain concise in constrained spaces. We are then able to provide more detailed street and landmark information on maps and exit directories.” The difference between Seattle and all the systems Enbysk mentioned is that those systems do include information about exit locations alongside their station letters (here’s Rio, for example). Seattle’s system is the only one I’ve personally encountered that eliminates all potentially helpful information from its platform-level exit signs.

(Ironically, Seattle’s exit signs are only in English. It’s not that “Exit” is hard to decipher, but exits are one area where there is an internationally adopted image that indicates “exit” no matter what language you speak, and Sound Transit doesn’t use it.)

Sound Transit’s wayfinding system seems—perhaps not without reason—like a series of well-intentioned choices made by people who don’t actually use transit regularly. As a transit rider navigating a new city for the first time, I’m generally looking for the familiar visual language shared by most transit systems in the US and worldwide—a language that prioritizes information over the visual clutter of numbers, letters, and codes.

I kind of wish Sound Transit had surveyed World Cup visitors to ask them which is easier—memorizing information like “green/1 Line toward Lynnwood City Center, get off at Station 60, Exit A1,” or “ride the 1 line toward downtown and get off at Westlake on 5th Ave”? Based on the way most of the world does wayfinding, I can guess which one they’d pick.

City Council, Density, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Media

This Week on PubliCola: July 4, 2026
KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison

KCRHA contracts yanked, opponents rail against plan to eliminate one avenue for challenging density, news vouchers pushed back a year, and much more.

Monday, June 29

KCRHA Spins the News that Homelessness Is Growing

At a meeting of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing board, KCRHA leaders put a positive spin on the news that more people are homeless in the region than ever, noting that the overall rate of increase has slowed. As we discussed on the Seattle Nice podcast, however, unsheltered homelessness grew substantially, making Seattle an outlier among US cities.

Tuesday, June 30

News Vouchers Delayed Until 2027

Mayor Katie Wilson’s office confirmed this week that a planned ballot measure to fund local, independent journalism has been delayed a year; initially, the mayor’s office had planned to introduce a proposal this summer.

Stranger’s Editor Out

The Stranger’s editor, Hannah Murphy Winter, was fired this week after two years on the job. The timing—one day before the paper released its primary election endorsements—sparked speculation, but the decision seemed to be unrelated to the endorsements.

Ex-Cop Fired for Punching Handcuffed Woman Involved in Fracas at Pride

Adley Shepherd, a former SPD officer who was fired after punching a woman who was handcuffed in the back of his police car, was apparently providing security for a street preacher at a Pride event when a melee erupted, ending when someone restrained Shepherd to break up the brawl. Shepherd appears to have been standing on someone’s wheelchair, ignoring people who asked him to let the person move.

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Wednesday, July 1

Regional Homelessness Agency “Right-Sizing” Will Largely Restore Pre-KCRHA Status Quo

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced they’ll transfer the region’s homelessness contracts back to the city and county, effectively ending the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as it has existed for the past five years. Although both demurred when asked if the authority was a failure, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison told reporters, “As it was launched, [KCRHA] is a failed experiment.”

Thursday, July 2

“Ballard is an Environmental Disaster”: Opponents Rail Against Plan to Eliminate One Avenue for Land Use Appeals

A public hearing on a proposal to eliminate one of several avenues for appealing city land use decisions drew the usual crowd of opponents, who argued that allowing more housing for renters in Seattle would kill orcas, “clear-cut” the city, and lead to dangerous urban heat islands. They also testified against planting new trees, arguing that saplings do nothing compared to existing trees.

Friday, July 4

Proposal to Temporarily Cut Fees on New Housing Is Dead (For Now)

In an 11th-hour decision, Mayor Katie Wilson decided not to propose legislation that would temporarily reduce fees on new market-rate housing that help fund affordable housing projects, saying the proposal needed more process. Housing development has fallen off a cliff in the last year, and developers asked for a two-year, 80 percent discount on the fees so that projects that are currently in limbo could move forward.

Council Amendments Would Slash Transit Funding Plan, Subject Measure to Annual Council Vote

The city council has its hands on Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to increase the sales tax that funds additional King County Metro bus service in Seattle, and some councilmembers are asking for major changes. Bob Kettle wants to cut the tax to a level that will require cuts to service, and Rob Saka wants to divert funding for service hours to transit police and security officers on buses.

Also this week: On the latest episode of Seattle Nice, posted today, we discussed the big KCRHA news and what it means for the future of the region’s homelessness system, and the arguments for and against giving developers a break on affordable housing fees.

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Transit

Council Amendments Would Slash Transit Funding Plan, Subject Measure to Annual Council Vote
Image by Atomic Taco, via Creative Commons

Other amendments would allow the city to divert funding from additional King County Metro bus service to transit security and introduce new levels of micromanagement to the transit funding measure.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmembers Rob Saka and Bob Kettle want to heavily amend Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed renewal of the Seattle Transit Measure—a sales tax that funds extra Metro transit service in Seattle—by cutting it to a level that would require cuts to existing service and lowering the term of the tax from 10 years to a baffling 6.75.

Kettle’s proposal would be the most dramatic change: He wants to reduce the proposed sales tax from 0.3 percent to 0.2 percent—an amount that would result in cuts to service compared to the levels the tax previously funded. Currently, the tax is 0.15 percent, which was enough to preserve existing bus service back in 2020. Because the cost to provide service has increased over the last six years, a 0.2 percent tax would require cuts to service, while a 0.3 percent tax would increase bus service by about 140,000 hours a year.

Or, rather, it could increase service by that much. Because in addition to Kettle’s proposal to cut the tax, Saka and other council members are offering amendments that would carve out part of the money for pet priorities, including many that are not the city’s responsibility or part of the original intent of the service enhancement levy.

Saka came into the amendment process having already won a bizarrely picayune battle that threatened to upend the legislation before it was introduced. During discussions with the mayor’s office, Saka, who heads up the Seattle Transportation Benefit District committee, told the mayor’s office he wouldn’t take up the legislation in his committee unless he got a $5 million annual earmark (up from the $3.5 million in the mayor’s original plan) for capital improvements that enhance bus service, like curb cuts.

Saka later boasted from the council dais that Wilson had agreed to this concession. But that didn’t stop him from proposing five new amendments, including one that could divert transit funding into more King County sheriff’s deputies and private security officers on Metro’s buses, which centrist Seattle leaders continue to insist are unsafe. His amendment would add transit security to the list of items the transit measure can fund, without any specific limits on how much could be diverted from service hours to security.

Many other proposed council amendments are attempts to micromanage Metro—which is, again, run by a completely separate and independent government—by dictating specific details of its service or requesting reports on council members’ pet priorities.

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For example, one Saka amendment would require King County to report on fare compliance, fare recovery ratios, the extent to which service was delivered “consistently and predictably,” and “On-time performance across service hours and routes served.”

The city does not have the authority to require King County Metro to produce reports—because, again, the county is completely separate from the city. But Saka’s amendment would attempt to force Metro’s hand by making the transit measure subject to annual approval, based on these reports, by the city council—a novel overreach designed to hold funding for the county’s bus system hostage to the Seattle City Council’s will.

Saka is also behind the amendment that would change the length of the tax measure from 10 years to 6 years and 9 months, with an expiration date of December 31, 2033. No other current city tax has a term that includes a partial year.

Other amendments—from Kettle and Maritza Rivera—would request reports from the Seattle Department of Transportation, “in partnership with King County Metro,” on “opportunities to expand” the use of shuttle buses rather than real buses during off-peak hours (Kettle); the feasibility of increasing the space between bus stops (Kettle again), the “performance outcomes” and feasibility of expanding service on two northeast Seattle bus routes, the 62 and 65 (Rivera), and more.

While Metro already compiles lots of information on ridership, reliability, and bus stop efficiency already, this level of micro-reporting has never been part of the Seattle transit measure.

The transit benefit district committee will meet to discuss the proposed amendments on Monday, July 6 at 11am.

Affordability, housing, Mayor Wilson

Proposal to Temporarily Cut Fees on New Housing Is Dead (For Now), Negotiators Say

By Erica C. Barnett

A proposal that would have given developers an 80 percent break on Mandatory Housing Affordability fees for two years is dead, according to an email to members of the Housing Development Consortium sent by HDC director Patience Malaba yesterday afternoon.

In her message to HDC members,, Malaba wrote, “After careful consideration, I informed the Mayor’s Office that HDC was withdrawing its support for advancing the proposal at this time. Following that decision, the Mayor’s Office chose not to move the legislation forward on a summer, pre-budget timeline and instead will convene a stakeholder workgroup to continue refining the proposal and related policy considerations.”

Wilson’s office confirmed that the proposal isn’t moving forward. “this month,”

Instead, Wilson said in a statement to PubliCola, “we will be setting a table with labor, affordable housing providers, community-driven organizations, and market rate developers to identify shared, collaborative solutions and make sure that our city and region takes every action possible to 1) expedite and encourage housing production 2) support community-driven development, 3) build the critical affordable housing  our city and region needs and 4) prevent displacement of low-income households and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.”

Developers who have been waiting for the legislation say its failure will jeopardize about 30 projects immediately, and make new housing projects far less likely, at a time when market-rate housing development has slowed to a trickle.

The HDC, which represents affordable housing developers, had been negotiating with the mayor’s office for months over the proposal to temporarily reduce MHA fees, which private-market developers must pay as part of the 2016 “grand bargain” that allowed taller buildings in exchange for payments into an affordable housing fund.

Behind the scenes, a number of HDC members and advocacy groups raised concerns over the last several weeks that the MHA “holiday” would lead to the end of the program itself, which is based on the principle that “housing should pay for housing.” New housing, according to this logic, causes displacement and other harms, and MHA fees offset those harms.

Downtown Emergency Service Center Daniel Malone sent an email to Wilson last month expressing “deep concern” about the proposal, which he said would reduce local funding for the kind of housing-first projects DESC builds at a time when federal funding may dry up.

“As we explore solutions and mitigation strategies in preparation for unprecedented federal disinvestment in our existing programs, we will need to rely more on local resources than ever before,” Malone wrote. “Allowing housing developers to receive the benefits of upzoning to only create luxury apartments for the few who can afford them isn’t a solution; it adds to our problems by decreasing the production of affordable housing units.”

Opponents of the temporary fee reduction reportedly sought concessions like a cap on the number of new apartment buildings that could take advantage of the break on MHA fees, along with “backfill” of MHA revenue that would be “lost” due to the fee reduction by other city funding sources.

However, since many of these hypothetical new building projects wouldn’t happen, at least according to the developers who would build them, without the fee reduction, it’s misleading to describe these as “lost” revenues.

Scott Berkley, an organizer with Tech 4 Housing, said the group was “disappointed to see this worthwhile proposal fed to the insatiable maw of the Seattle Process. We encourage the mayor and city council to move beyond a revenue source that demands middle and working class renters fund affordability, while expecting nothing of our city’s wealthiest homeowners and corporations.”

Nicole Macri, a state legislator and deputy director of strategy for the Downtown Emergency Services Center, said there are better ways to reduce costs for developers than slashing MHA fees, even temporarily. The city could, for example, “refund permit fees, or a portion of permit fees, if you deliver the project in X amount of months, or give a partial sales tax exemption for projects” that are finished on time, Macri said. “There are many things the city can control, including the permitting fee,” without giving developers a temporary break on MHA fees, she said.

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The city’s budget process starts in August and ends in November, meaning that any “stakeholder workgroup” process would be delayed until next year, past the point when many developers have said they will have to cancel projects that won’t pencil out with MHA fees attached. The fees range from $6.75 per square foot in the small “urban industrial” zone to $50.46 per square foot in places like north Beacon Hill, with most fees ranging between $10 and $20 a square foot.

In a statement, the leadership of the pro-housing group Seattle YIMBY urged Wilson “to show true leadership on housing by making hard choices to prioritize the homes that can be built right now. Our housing crisis was not caused by having too little process. Seattle has a critical window to show the region we are ready to act, ready to deliver thousands of new homes, millions in new tax revenue, and millions more for affordable housing as we start building again.”

MHA originated at a time before large majorities of Seattle residents agreed that building more housing, not just purpose-built low-income housing, is an urgent need. It also began at a time when development was booming, and for years, it produced tens of millions of dollars of funding for affordable housing projects. But fees have plummeted in recent years, going from a high of $74 million in 2021 to just $22 million last year, because of a precipitous drop in the number of housing projects in the pipeline.

Emily Thompson, a partner at GMD Development, said a lot of developers are currently in their fifth or six round of “corrections,” which occur just before a permit is issued. “I think that shows the applicant is slow playing it because as soon as you get our permits you have to start” the development process. As for the argument that giving developers a break will reduce MHA proceeds, Thompson says, “Any amount of zero dollars is zero dollars”—that is, if developers don’t build because of MHA fees, there won’t be any MHA proceeds anyway.

Development has slowed precipitously since its peak in 2020 and early 2021. So far this year, developers have only filed permits for 1,134 units of housing. By this time in 2020, in comparison, there were more than 8,600 units in the pipeline, which increased to more than 20,000 units by the end of that year.

Meanwhile, according to data provided by the Housing Roundtable, a group of developers who had been pushing for the MHA “holiday,” more than 50,000 units that were going through the city’s development pipeline between 2023 and 2025 have since been canceled.

PubliCola has reached out to Malaba and Mayor Wilson’s office and will update this post when we hear back.