By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who’s serving his first term representing Southeast Seattle’s District 2. He’s the third council member to represent this district since 2025, when Tammy Morales resigned just one year into her second term; she was replaced by Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for SPD who served until Lin was elected in November.

As head of the council’s land use and comprehensive plan committees, Lin will oversee the work of updating the plan that guides the city’s growth and density for the next 10 years, as well as zoning and land use decisions like whether to grant developers a temporary break from the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that allowed taller, denser housing in some areas in exchange for fees that fund affordable housing.

We talked to Lin about those fees and whether they’re working as designed. While MHA has brought in tens of millions a year for affordable housing, developers argue it has increasingly squelched development, by adding significant costs at a time when market-rate housing developments barely pencil out. Lin talked (favorably but cautiously) about a different concept called Planned Inclusionary Zoning, which requires developers to build affordable housing but offers them tax breaks, rather than charging a fee, to make it more feasible for them to build.

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“We absolutely want to go as big as we can” in the remaining parts of the comp plan, Lin said, by expanding the areas where housing is allowed (as The Urbanist pointed out recently, the city’s planning department actually reduced density along several arterials in wealthy neighborhoods). Lin said “we need to be going deeper into the neighborhoods” with density, as well as restoring the neighborhood centers former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from the plan, nodes of density where modest apartment buildings will be allowed.

We also asked Lin about the new dynamics on the council, Mayor Wilson’s new plan to build tiny house villages all over the city, and police surveillance cameras, a program Wilson once opposed and now seems likely to expand.

After pointing out that many people want cameras in their neighborhoods, including people who live in the Chinatown-International District, Lin said he’s still not happy that the cameras were expanded without any analysis of whether the “pilot” program launched last year (and immediately expanded) was effective and protected people’s privacy. His outstanding concerns, Lin added, have to do with the potential for the footage to end up in the hands of the Trump Administration, which could use it for immigration enforcement or to target people seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. That’s the focus of an audit Wilson has commissioned, but hardly the only reason to question mass surveillance by local police.