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By Erica C. Barnett
This week’s Seattle Nice features the debut of a very special guest—PubliCola co-founder and Maybe Metropolis columnist Josh Feit! We brought Josh on this week to discuss our predictions for 2025, but, as tends to happen when we all get in a room together, we quickly entered tangent city. So in addition to our predictions (things that definitely will come true, things that won’t come true but should, and things that shouldn’t happen but will) you’ll get a history lesson about Jimmy Carter’s misremembered “malaise” speech, the time Sandeep and I saw the Monkees together, and our thoughts about the most recent casting for “Cabaret.”
In between all that, we did discuss some of the predictions I published last week, and David added a few of his own.
On the agenda:
• David’s “bold predictions” about local elections this year: There will be ten mayoral candidates or fewer; at least one incumbent up for reelection will lose (perhaps Republican City Attorney Ann Davison?), that the initiative to fund social housing, Prop. 1A, will win in February, and that every candidate will agree to participate in a Seattle Nice debate (let’s manifest this!).
• Josh’s considerably darker prediction about the MAGA years ahead: He thinks we’re going to start seeing the masks drop in Seattle, as emboldened Trumpists in “blue” cities across the country make their presence known through what Josh calls “trickle-down bullying”—from snide comments in coffee shops to hate crimes and outright violence.
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• I talk about why I’m worried that the city of Seattle is horribly ill-prepared for Trump 2.0: Mayor Harrell has made a public statement that he’s open to working with the administration on areas of common interest, but has not announced how he plans to fight immigration raids and crackdowns on LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights, and neither the mayor nor the council has discussed how they will respond if and when the new administration cuts federal funds, which pay for everything from housing to disaster aid, to blue cities.
• Sandeep thinks Seattle will remain stuck in its current period of, yes, malaise, as the era of big, bold ideas (like JumpStart, the tax the business community opposed until they realized it could help the Chamber-friendly council pay for regular city services, avoiding new taxes and budget cuts) continues to recede. Harrell likes to talk a big game about “Space Needle Thinking,” but Sandeep argues that we’ve been playing small ball in Seattle for years (double sports metaphor!)
some lurker: I read the Ellis auto biography. His was a different era. There discomfort in the north end: homelessness, crime, sex work, shootings, etc. The public safety building hole dates to 2005.
Indeed it was. But I don’t think the “discomfort” impacts anyone unless they live along the Aurora corridor. There is plenty of sex work in the downtown hotels, I imagine. Homelessness is everywhere. They are not uncomfortable enough to do anything but vote for more propertarian council members and a law and order city attorney. As someone whose federally-commemorated birthday we observed this week said…
“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
That’s where we are. Property rights outweigh human rights, and we read daily about the rise of computerized “intelligence” threatening people’s livelihoods. Racism is still with us, and the empire we finance is evidence of the militarism he warned us about, as Eisenhower also did more than a decade earlier in his Cross of Iron speech.
Seattle may once have been a city with a definable identity but outside of cap hill, the CD, the ID — all established before cars — it’s just a constellation of suburbs.
Is there an appetite for “big idea” thinking? Likely not. Is there a leader who could build a consensus, many even an enthusiastic one, for some big ideas? It’s not gonna be Mayor “I hate graffiti” Harrell. I wonder if he hates graffiti because it calls out how many disused buildings and abandoned properties there in the midst of the homelessness and housing affordability “crises?” I didn’t live in Seattle during the Jim Ellis era but that’s the kind of energy we could use. I guess we’ll have to wait until things discomfit even the north end suburbanites (anyone living north of Wallingford/the U District).
I’m not sure where the pain points are. They shop on Amazon/online so local shopping, except for boutiques, isn’t an issue. They drive everywhere so people in the street or closed/disused buildings and land are invisible. The mayor and council have been faced with a hole in the ground where the old SPD HQ was; if seeing that on the daily doesn’t register, what will?