By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson has frequently been compared to fellow Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City. But as one supporter observed at City Hall on Friday, her inauguration ceremony was almost intimate in comparison to Mamdani’s star-studded event. Surrounded by supporters in yellow Transit Riders Union shirts, Wilson sat, beaming, while listening to speakers who included an organizer for the Nickelsville homeless encampment and a Somali American health services researcher who helped organize for free youth transit passes as a student attending Rainier Beach High School.

The Nickelsville organizer, Jarvis Capucion, noted that he hadn’t been inside the mayor’s office since 2015, when then-mayor Ed Murray declared a state of emergency on homelessness.

The audience was packed with people who aren’t regular fixtures at city hall (yet!); I’ve never seen so many young people in the building for anything other than a protest or public comment opposing some conservative action or budget cut proposed by the City Council. A number of city department heads and their deputies sat, mostly stone-faced, on the indoor steps leading up to council chambers, but the audience on the lobby floor consisted largely of young Wilson supporters, longtime activists, and Black and brown Seattle leaders who stuck their necks out to support Wilson even when ex-mayor Bruce Harrell laid on intense pressure to back him or else.

When Cynthia Green, an 80-year Seattle resident who spoke shortly before Wilson took the stage, said “Seattle can hope again,” it wasn’t just about the fact that Seattle voters elected Wilson, a grassroots organizer accustomed to being underestimated, as mayor of Seattle. Green’s speech was also about what Seattle voters rejected—a mayor who closed out a debate in October by telling the people of Seattle, “This is not the time for hope. Passion and great ideas and inexperience is just not going to get us there.”

Harrell’s message was that voters should accept what they already had—a middling mayor who failed to deliver on his promises while insisting that critics and the press had no right to “question the compassion of this administration”—instead of hoping for equitable prosperity and lasting solutions to challenges like homelessness, addiction, and the rising cost of housing.

“Today we swear in a mayor who did not come from the loudest rooms or the richest donors, but from the long work of organizing, listening and standing with people who are usually told to wait their turn,” Green said. When her family decided to endorse Wilson over Harrell, “We were cautioned to be sensible, urged to temper our hopes and accept what was deemed realistic. But history has taught us this: Realism, accepting a situation as it is—this is often the language of those who have grown comfortable living with inequity and who would prefer others to do the same.

Wilson, Green continued, has “assembled a team that reflects the true Seattle—multiracial, multi-generational, rooted in community, rich in lived wisdom. People who understand that loudness is not clarity, that ego is not leadership, that passion is not weakness.” When she said “ego is not leadership,” Green had to pause for applause.

Wilson’s own speech, which she described as “my last unvetted speech” before she takes office in earnest, focused on a goal I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a Seattle mayor articulate—the role of government in making it possible for people to live full lives, not just solve “the math problem of how a household can make its revenue exceed its expenses.” (Talk about hope!)

“I want to live in a city that honors the things you do when you’re not making money… the time that you spend with your kid at the playground, caring for a sick friend or an elderly relative,” Wilson said. “A city that values the pursuits that create beauty and community, whether or not they ever turn into careers. A city that thinks you should have time to read a book and lay on the grass staring up at the clouds.”

“Because we need bread, but we need roses too. We deserve roses.”

A number of people I spoke to afterward admitted getting misty at this line, and I did too. (What a change from Mayor Football References with his sports name-dropping!) I’m not being excessively idealistic here. Being mayor is (or should be) hard, grinding work, and success requires keeping a daily focus on long-term policy goals amid economic and political pressure. Every mayor has failures and the job requires compromises that inevitably disappoint the most dedicated supporters, particularly if your supporters are progressive and your compromises are with the centrist majority that has always called the shots in Seattle. And every mayor deserves, and should expect, media scrutiny, including (perhaps especially) from those of us who share their aspirations for the city. (Please keep ignoring the dipshits, though!)

But one thing our last two mayors lost sight of, if they ever considered it, is that real success requires a commitment to core principles. Progress doesn’t happen by papering over problems and fudging statistics to paint a picture of success. (Ed Murray’s name is often invoked because of the city’s failure to treat homelessness as a true emergency, but it was his two successors, Durkan and Harrell, who spent their terms twisting the numbers to claim constant progress on homelessness, even amid an obviously growing crisis.) Wilson’s loftiest goal may be turning Seattle into a place where ordinary people can survive on one job and thrive by reading books in the park or writing poetry just because they want to. That’s a refreshingly hopeful aspiration, one Wilson should keep front of mind as she navigates the challenges of being Seattle’s 58th mayor.