By Erica C. Barnett
For the final Seattle Nice show of 2025, we brought in our returning special guest, PubliCola cofounder Josh Feit, to talk about what we’re hoping (or expecting) will happen in Seattle in 2026.
Josh and my New Year’s wishes included a lot of the items we included in our 14-Point Plan for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson, including Josh’s proposal for Funded Inclusionary Zoning—an idea for boosting housing development that involves giving developers a break on their taxes if they build affordable housing on-site at their new buildings. And to encourage more density in areas that have suburban-style housing—including Seattle’s actual suburbs—Josh wants to see Wilson pass a sprawl tax on people who park in Seattle’s densest neighborhoods.
In tandem with those ideas, I talked up my hope that Wilson and the City Council will get ambitious about the city’s comprehensive plan, which was supposed to be done in 2024 but still isn’t finished, grabbing at the opportunity to upzone more of Seattle, allowing renters to live anywhere in the city, not just on polluted arterial roads.
David predicts that the price of pizza won’t go down, referring to the (at this point, old) viral video in which Wilson explained what the lack of affordable housing in Seattle has to do with the cost of food in Seattle. (Notably, she did not say she would lower the cost of pizza.) And he says he expects Wilson will be far more pragmatic than her biggest detractors have predicted—noting that, despite opponents’ (including, at times, Sandeep) attempts to paint her as a radical leftist, the mayor-elect is surrounding herself with subject-matter experts and people with deep experience at City Hall.
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We also discussed the future of two teams with the word “Care” in them—the 116-person Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and tells their displaced residents about available shelter beds—and the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) Team, a team of social workers that responds to some 911 calls instead of police.
The latest police contract, which raises police recruits’ salaries to $118,000 ($126,000 after six months), allows CARE responders to go to some calls without a police escort, but also dramatically restricts what kind of calls they can respond to—requiring a police response if drug paraphernalia or a weapon is visible, if there is evidence someone violated a law, if a person in crisis is inside a building or car, or if a person in crisis is exhibiting “extreme” behavior, such as nudity.
The two dads on the show, Sandeep and David, bemoaned the current state of Seattle Public Schools. David said maybe it’s finally time for the city to take over the public school system, and Sandeep said Washington should be embarrassed by the fact that Mississippi showed so much improvement on school test scores over the past few years while our state fell behind.
I hadn’t heard of this dramatic turnaround when we recorded (again, not a parent!), so I looked it up. Turns out it’s either mostly or at partly a fiction—while requiring low-performing students to repeat the third grade may (or may not!) have improved their fourth-grade test scores, the performance boost disappears in later years, returning Mississippi to its regular position near the bottom of the barrel.
Hopefully this is the year we kick out the out of town socialists who are trying to ruin Washington State.
Seattle need to stop being nice and start looking to save it’s self.
No home transplants.
Someone doesn’t know much Washington state history or they would know that the Soviet of Washington has a long history of socialist/progressive ideas: they are not new or the result of outsiders moving it. Based on the TX and FL plates I see, it looks like there are more conservatives moving in than anyone else.
The most economical rentals are houses, which can be shared by families or several unrelated people. Per square foot they are a screaming deal, with 3 bedroom rentals of 2,500-3,00 square feet commonly available for the mid $3,000’s, compared to 200 square-foot micro apartments at $1,500 per month. Houses are located primarily in neighborhoods, with yards and trees, far from the “polluting arterials”. In my leafy north end neighborhood I can count 10 rental homes within a block of my house. There were 12 until last year when they were sold to developers.
The Comprehensive Plan is fast eradicating rental homes, by incentivizing the demolition of affordable older structures for new luxury townhouses and mock “ADU’s.” The further upzoning, encouraged by this piece and by the most enthusiastic density advocates on the city council, will make single-family houses even more expensive, erase affordable housing for families and encourage further corporate control of our apartment stock. The corporatization and shrinking of our living spaces has simultaneously removed the places where musicians, artists, inventors, and new businesses and entrepreneurs of all kinds traditionally started.
All in all, it is a model of a soulless city owned primarily by private equity, without history, individuality or sense of place. Ironically, as Seattle’s unique single-family garden neighborhoods are rebranded by urbanists as the dread “suburbs” the One Seattle upzoning has encouraged a viral pandemic of Hardie Plank and cheap vinyl windows — that looks exactly like the suburbs of Redmond, Bellevue, Bothell or any other placeless edge zone in America. These neighborhoods will not age well. Although the majority of new construction homes filling in Seattle’s neighborhoods sell for $750-$2 million, the majority of it is built rapidly with the lowest quality possible materials. The construction will last between 30 and 40 years. To make room for this garbage (much of which is already tarped and in repair three years later) we are tearing down houses that have stood for well over a century. This is an environmental travesty. Be careful what you wish for.