Category: Guest Contributor

Affordability, Density, Guest Contributor, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Throws in the Towel on Housing with a 20-Year Plan to Increase Housing Prices and Worsen Homelessness

By Ron Davis

Mayor Bruce Harrell just released a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis. With its proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan, the administration plans a big slowdown in housing production, and over the course of 20 years, actually aims to make the housing deficit deeper.

This is a stunning surrender from someone who promised he would not play “small ball” and said he wants to embrace “Space Needle Thinking.” Unfortunately, the way state law and the process works, we will be stuck with this feeble framework for quite some time.

Right now, we are tens of thousands of housing units behind, and this plan will take twenty years to make it at least 12,000 units worse, and possibly much more so. It doesn’t improve the housing deficit, and it doesn’t even tread water.

It is literally a plan to fail.

What Is A Comprehensive Plan and Why Do We Have One?

State law requires cities and counties to release a 20-year “comprehensive plan” for how they are going to handle their growth. This includes how much growth, and where it goes. After this plan gets an extensive environmental review, it is much harder to challenge. This makes it expensive, time consuming, and sometimes legally risky to try to change course after the plan is approved. In other words, these plans are hard to unstick.

So the plan to fail will be with us for a while.

The Impact

Failing at housing means prices will climb higher and faster. So unless you have a few million to loan your kids before you die, or a very roomy basement, there is little chance they will be able to afford to live in Seattle. And unless you made around $400,000 a year in your twenties and thirties, people like you will not be able to start a career or raise a family in Seattle.

According to experts, higher housing prices also increase homelessness. This is because when people experience an economic or behavioral crisis in a city with affordable rent, they usually manage to stay housed. But expensive markets like Seattle’s are far less forgiving, so when someone gets into a bad situation, they are far more likely to end up without a roof over their head.

If this all sounds a bit like a certain city by the bay, that’s because it is. San Francisco’s refusal to keep up with housing demand has resulted in $3,200 median rents and people pooping on the sidewalk.

I don’t know about you, but I aspire for more in 2044.

The Numbers, if That’s Your Thing

For those who want to understand the numbers: The slowdown in housing growth relative to population growth over the last few decades created a massive housing debt. Most of the best figures are regional, and address the overall gaps in housing production, production relative to growth (page 20), gaps in affordable housing, even a growing mismatch in the number of jobs homes by one online commentator However you slice the data, the Seattle deficit is tens of thousands of homes, and the regional gap is much larger.

Harrell’s Bizarre Plan To Slow Down Construction

Because of high land prices, stringent zoning and other rules, our ability to add housing is dropping fast. We have built nearly 10,000 units per year in the last five years, but permitting is cratering. If we do nothing, housing production is going to fall off a cliff, to 4,000 units a year for the next 20 years. So the Harrell administration spent a year of staff time and millions of dollars and ignored the overwhelming documented supermajority of feedback they received, and only planned for a little life support to bring it just up to 5,000 units per year. That’s right—we’re going to reach for a sky that is half as high as where we are now.

This plan is likely to yield about 100,000 homes over 20 years, even though King County says Seattle needs 112,000 units just to keep up. The 112,000 unit number comes from the fact that an average rental household in Seattle has 1.85 people, including single family home rentals. Since most of this growth will be apartments, the number of people per unit will be just a bit lower (1.78), which leads to the need for 112,000 homes

In other words, we are planning to fall behind by at least 12,000 homes.

Lest you think no one has thought about sending folks to nearby cities–that’s already baked in. The plan suggests Seattle will add 159,000 jobs, which will support far more than 200,000 people. In other words, the 200,000 person growth target already assumes tens of thousands more commuters from out of town, choking our roads with traffic and paying property taxes somewhere else.

The city says that in the next 20 years, the Seattle population will grow by at least 200,000 people. But if we simply match the growth rates of 2000-2020, we’d grow by 240,000. If we grow at the rate of the 2010s, it will be 363,000 new people. So when they say, “at least” they really mean at least. Those higher rates would increase the housing hole by up an additional 22,000 to 91,000 units!

The plan manages to do all this in especially damaging and clumsy ways.

Racial Inequality

The plan shoehorns a lot of the growth into small areas of the city, an approach Seattle has long called the “urban village” strategy.

And yet the very office responsible for this document called the basic structure of their longstanding urban village strategy racist just a couple years ago. This plan pulls heavily from the same pernicious playbook.

Notably, the plan concentrates poverty, and pushes multifamily housing near large, dangerous, polluted roads. All the while, it shields Bruce Harrell’s neighborhood and other rich neighborhoods with water views, like Laurelhurst and Magnolia, from any real change. And the restricted growth everywhere means higher prices everywhere, which means more displacement for lower-income populations and people of color.

In other words, the city is planning to perpetuate much of the pattern of our openly racist housing history.

Sending Families Somewhere Else

The Harrell administration’s plan is hostile to families.

One of the reasons that family housing is so expensive is our housing deficit, but another is our infinitesimal growth in larger units. Harrell doubles down on this foolish approach, making it much less likely that family housing will be built. For some reason, Seattle seems determined to prevent people from raising kids here.

The state’s “missing middle housing” bill requires cities like Seattle to allow four to six units on normal residential lots. But the plan makes this functionally impossible, especially for family-sized units. If we followed the state’s model code, we could build four 2,000-square-foot homes or six 1,333 square foot homes on a standard lot.

But Seattle cut the square footage allowed by almost 40 percent. Forget decent-sized homes. And in fact, Seattle’s plan also ensures that many more projects won’t pencil out.

In other words, the design is deliberately set up so that that missing middle housing won’t get built at scale, and where it does, the units will be too small for families but still spread around the lot enough to require cutting down lots of trees.

If you think the schools can’t get enough enrollment to stay funded and open now, imagine a future where even fewer families can live here.

Transit, Affordable Housing

The Harrell plan treats taxpayer money with very little respect—notably generating a mere 2,700 units near two new light rail stations, frittering away a billion dollars in taxpayer investment in our regional transit system. It also ignores the overwhelming feedback favoring social housing, as well as the significant margin the social housing initiative passed with. Overall, it fails to tackle the even larger housing gap when it comes to affordable housing of all types.

It plans for less growth than much-smaller Bellevue, much weaker middle housing than Spokane and, and is so bad that state legislators are calling out the BS.

The legislator who led the effort to pass the missing middle housing bill noted that “it barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell Gives Up

This is an absurd failure of leadership. Up until now, I’ve wanted to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. He’s well meaning, and although we disagree about a great deal, he’s not a true conservative like Sara Nelson. He’s just afraid of big business.

But Bruce has lost his touch. Centrist leaders get this. President Joe Biden gets it. Governor Jay Inslee gets it. King County Executive Dow Constantine gets it. Thousands of Seattle residents get it.

Harrell does not.

This article is also available on Rondezvous, Ron Davis’s excellent free Substack newsletter, where you’ll also find details about how to weigh in on the proposed comp plan update.

Ron Davis is is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, and past candidate for Seattle City Council District 4. He lives in Northeast Seattle.

Guest Contributor, immigration, King County

Beyond the Border: Addressing the Asylum Seeker Surge in Our Own Backyard

By Palmira Figueroa and Ben Maritz

It was one of Pedro’s sons who gave him the idea. A friend of his made the trip earlier that year and experienced no issues getting across the border, posting about the entire journey on TikTok. Pedro, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, had been living in Colombia with his family of six for the past three years, doing odd jobs when he could find them, and decided to set out for a better life in the north.

Salvador, an Angolan from the embattled exclave of Kabinda, had been bouncing around various African countries, unable to return home. He learned from a friend that it was possible to buy a cheap ticket to Brazil, a country which doesn’t require a visa for entry. Once in São Paulo, he joined the stream of migrants from every part of the world heading to the United States for safety and economic opportunity.

A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

Pedro and Salvador both recently passed through an informal asylum-seeker encampment at the Riverton Park Church in Tukwila, a community-run facility that is now overwhelmed. Every week, 30 to 50 new asylum-seekers arrive, most with young children. The federal government has policies in place that allow people to cross our border, but has provided no resources to help provide them resettle. The church is woefully overcrowded and the vulnerable people staying there are getting desperate.

How we got here

Today, most people who reach the border seeking asylum—about 2.3 million a year—are processed and released, especially those who are traveling with children. They are assigned the next available court date, which the most recent arrivals have told us is currently sometime in 2029. Federal law makes asylum-seekers eligible to work six to eight months after they apply for asylum; in the meantime, they receive no assistance or accommodation.

Three-quarters of the migrants are from places further afield than Mexico, including South America and Africa. Some people cross 20 countries before they arrive in the United States. Because the migrant facilities at the southern border are completely overwhelmed, authorities are encouraging migrants to travel to other places within the United States, ideally where people have access to family or other resources. A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

The local crisis

Both Salvador and Pedro passed through shelters near the border that had no capacity to accommodate them, and so paid for them to travel to Seattle—Salvador by plane, and Pedro and his family by bus. They arrived at the church just like the dozens that are still arriving each week – disoriented, penniless, and full of hope.

The Riverton Church, under the leadership of Pastor Jan Bolerjack, has long played a leading role in caring for our most disadvantaged neighbors. It was the site of a sanctioned homeless encampment until early 2023, when the Low Income Housing Institute built a tiny house village on the site. Seattle police officers and other law enforcement agents had been referring people to the Riverton Shelter ever since the first migrants started showing up in Seattle about a year ago. The officers knew Pastor Jan would welcome them.

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Today the church is a buzz of languages and chaos, with hundreds of people from around the world overflowing its fellowship hall, sanctuary, parking lot, and green spaces. It’s wet, muddy, and cold, but smiles abound and a spirit of optimism is palpable. Children play, families cook and sing, teens gossip. After a harrowing journey across South and Central America, the American dream is palpably just around the corner.

The people at the church, like those at similar overflowing facilities around the country, are here to seek safety and happiness. They are ready to learn, work and to fully take part in our society. But they still face tremendous short-term obstacles and have essentially no resources available to help them. Most are from countries without families or established communities in the region and so don’t have a natural network to turn to. Unlike refugees, a different category of migrants, they are not eligible for federal assistance.

The asylum-seekers in Tukwila and elsewhere need help filing their immigration cases. They need English language training. They need jobs. But most of all, in the immediate term, they need housing and basic sanitation so they can restart their lives.

What’s Needed

In December, King County allocated $3 million to rent 100 rooms in a hotel in SeaTac through June for some of the most vulnerable asylum-seekers. This is a costly, partial, and temporary solution. During our most recent cold weather emergency, many families living outside the church were moved to hotels by volunteers who used their own funds, but only for a few days.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

This group of people is very different from other homeless community members who are living unsheltered. While they certainly carry their share of trauma, they do not generally suffer from the issues that our urban unsheltered community goes through. They are ready, able, and eager to work and grow in their new community. A small amount of targeted assistance will get most asylum seekers into a place where they have work permits, a job, and stable housing.

We are calling on our local, county, and state government to step in and do what the federal government has failed to do: Care for the asylum-seekers and help them become a part of our community while they wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated. Concerned citizens should write to their elected officials (a list of state local officials can be found on the new VoteWA Voter Portal) and let them know that helping this worthy group of new Americans should be a priority.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

Today, Salvador is living in the county-funded hotel and working as a translator and community organizer among the asylum seekers; he’s also enrolled at Seattle Central College, working toward his GED. Pedro and his sons are working in construction and building toward a life of independence in their new country.

Meanwhile, in December 2023, the most recent month for which data is available, 302,034 people were processed at the southern border, an annualized rate of 3.6 million and an increase of roughly 50 percent increase over the record-breaking rate of the most recent fiscal year.

Washington has long taken pride at being a Sanctuary State and rejecting xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment. Now is the time to invest in welcoming and embracing our new neighbors and letting them join our community with dignity.

Palmira Figueroa is an immigrant, a community organizer and long-time immigrant rights advocate. Ben Maritz is an affordable housing developer based in Seattle.

Guest Contributor, homelessness, Police

At the Black Lives Memorial Garden, 12/27/23
Photos by Elisa Chavez.

By Elisa Chavez

It’s before sunrise in Cal Anderson Park, and the place is buzzing with cops. Caution tape. Two excavators lumber like cretaceous beasts. (Google: The average daily price for Excavator rental in Seattle, WA is $1589, subject to availability.) The soil is foaming. Garden plots are being stabbed at with spades.<

I keep thinking, I was going to bring my favorite coffee creamer. I was going to make biscuits.

Rewind: yesterday. The sky is doing that delicate pastel thing. Here on earth, there’s a dozen or so of us—”us” being a fluid term that encapsulates a collection of gardening enthusiasts, anarchists, unhoused neighbors, queerdoes, and whatever the fuck I am. I am wearing a sweater with a fur collar and cuffs because you’ve got to dress up for occasions that matter. We wait for the cops, and when they don’t come, we celebrate with instant coffee, bagels, and potatoes fried on a communal skillet.

I look out at the winter sprigs of green. They’re hopeful. I read in a book about urban planning that it’s good for humans to look at plants. It soothes our brains, to say nothing of our lungs.

If you know what the Black Lives Memorial Garden is, and you’re not in favor, you’re probably thinking of filth. Disorder. Eyesores. You are a little bit right, but not for the reasons you think.

Rewind: 2020. The Black Lives Memorial Garden was, in my estimation, one of the only unalloyed goods to come from CHOP/CHAZ. When I think back to that summer, I see babies tear-gassed in their cribs. I see my friends suffering wounds at the hands of Seattle police that would take years to fully heal. I see Antonio Mays, Jr., the teenager from San Diego. He was shot in the head by CHOP security, to resounding silence from activists and much salivating from fascist trolls.

This, to me, is city magic. The bright, unstable alchemy of different people bumping up against each other. It’s not a safe magic, because every interaction with others opens us to violence and heartbreak. But the unbidden, the unlooked-for, the un-predictable–that can bring blessings into your life.

It’s an old story, when you think about it. Out of suffering, a seed. Swords to ploughshares. At a community song event in November or so, someone actually did present the group with the gift of a spade that had been forged from melted-down guns. This garden is lousy with metaphors. So okay, there’s the background. Police violence, autonomous zones, plants. The Seattle Parks Department alleges they conducted some community outreach concerning the garden in 2020 and 2021. They have not provided evidence of any outreach undertaken after 2021.

In the time since, two things have happened: The Black Lives Memorial Garden has hosted Juneteenth events, grieving circles, cooking lessons, pollinator appreciation days, and more. And Seattle’s homelessness crisis has deepened to a profound underworld of human misery.

Put simply, this area of Cal Anderson is gross.

You can go to Nextdoor if you’re hungry for details, or you can call it the natural result of human people with human bodies not having shelter. I’d guess folks congregate in this area because it’s got some of the city’s only public restrooms, as well as a bunch of underutilized spaces. There’s the totally empty wading pool, which I’ve never seen with water in it. There’s something called the “field house.” Sure, if you say so. Whatever the exact reason, the area around BLMG is a place where people feel (sort of) safe and (sort of) out of the way.

A shitty cauldron: The psychic wound of CHOP, the human-abject result of folks living unsheltered, a few plots of indigenous plants. For some of Seattle, BLMG became the scapegoat for everything wrong with the city.

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I watch a man stabbing away at the soil, trowel in hand. He’s surrounded by police, partly for the light their flashlights provide and partly, presumably, for protection against the scattering of BLMG supporters past the north end of the caution tape. As he hacks and digs, I’m reminded of my trashiest college hookup. The same frantic finger-jabs apply. “There’s not a prize in the cervix!” I told my friends later, to peals of scandalized laughter.

There’s not a prize under this earth. Not to the city. Gardeners yell, “At least let us come and help you remove the plants!” “Let someone who knows what they’re doing help!”

We yell a lot of other things too.

“Are you proud of your work?”

“You’re soulless, dishonorable people!”

“Way to uproot indigenous plants, you colonizing fucks!”

“I hope your mom leaves you for being such a bad child!”

Try to be kind: Heckling is the language of the unheard. Try to understand: It hurts when someone destroys what you’ve spent years creating. Physically.

Someone posted the deputy mayor’s phone number and said call, so I called. It was 8:37 am. I heard children in the background, the clattering of breakfast things.

Sorry dude. I didn’t want to do city stuff this early in the morning either.

The deputy mayor claimed that the mayor’s office attempted to negotiate, but “the group” that tends the garden said no. I asked him why one small group would have the final word on something that affects the rest of us. Why weren’t the residents of Capitol Hill asked what we want? He hustled me off the phone.

For what it’s worth, the gardeners didn’t say no. They said, “We can’t meet unless you promise to stop sweeping the people who are sheltering in Cal Anderson.” And that might sound unreasonable to you, but you haven’t broken bread with those folks. You haven’t heard them mourn their loved ones, or been told that the garden saved their lives. And you may not have considered that when the City of Seattle “sweeps,” they don’t measure their success in people connected to services, or length of time a public space has stayed unoccupied. They measure it in bodies moved.

Without the garden, I wouldn’t have learned that the Filson dumpsters are a great source of salvaged fabric, or signed up for a Luhshootseed newsletter, or done detective work through a man’s soggy EBT documents to help him connect to a case worker from his health insurance.

Believe me if you want, or disbelieve me. There used to be a garden. Now it’s gone.

I’d never set foot in a P-Patch. I don’t know what the P stands for. And my best friend has long since stopped asking me to water her plants when she’s out of town. Without the Black Lives Memorial Garden, I would never have learned a damn thing about indigenous plants.

Which is not the only virtuous knock-on effect the garden’s had for me. Without it, I wouldn’t have learned how to talk to strangers again. I wouldn’t have realized a long-cherished dream of acting as a personal stylist. (Seriously. I hosted a free community boutique during a Solstice party, and I swear, the clothes I fished from bins at the Goodwill Outlet came to life when the right person tried them on.) I wouldn’t have learned that the Filson dumpsters are a great source of salvaged fabric, or signed up for a Luhshootseed newsletter, or done detective work through a man’s soggy EBT documents to help him connect to a case worker from his health insurance.

Maybe I could have done these things some other way. But the fact is, I didn’t. Not until the garden.

This, to me, is city magic. The bright, unstable alchemy of different people bumping up against each other. It’s not a safe magic, because every interaction with others opens us to violence and heartbreak. But the unbidden, the unlooked-for, the un-predictable–that can bring blessings into your life.

Seattle has one less cathedral today. I hope not for forever.

Elisa Chavez has lived in Seattle for more than ten years, most of those in Capitol Hill. She is a poet who has been a Town Hall artist-in-residence and the Seattle Review of Books’ inaugural poet in residence. Her bilingual poetry project, Miss Translated, tackles identity, passing, and the things that get lost in translation.”

This post originally appeared on Medium.

Density, Development, Guest Contributor, housing

Ten Questions to Ask About the City’s Draft Comprehensive Plan Update
A satellite view shows a typical suburban-style north Seattle neighborhood, with one detached single-family home per lot.

By Andrew Grant Houston

It’s December 2023, and as a local architect and housing advocate, I—along with many  other Seattleites—have now been waiting more than eight months since the city’s initial April release date for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the Housing Element of Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan Update. 

The DEIS currently identifies five possible paths for Seattle’s growth over the next 20 years and how that growth—or lack thereof—will impact our urban and natural environment.

Although the Comprehensive Plan is a complete vision that includes a number of elements (as defined by the state’s Growth Management Act), typically the most contentious and complex of these elements is the Housing Element, which sets the upper limit for how many housing units Seattle will plan for in the next 20 years. This element, and the public engagement that will come with it, is a once-in-a-decade opportunity for Seattle residents to voice our views about whether that the number of homes in Seattle is sufficient or insufficient for us as well as future Seattleites, and to weigh in on where new homes should be added. 

The city of Seattle has delayed releasing the draft statement multiple times, which should tip you off as to just how critical the Housing Element update is. But if you aren’t the sort of person who spends their time either wishing Seattle looked more like Paris or hoping your neighborhood will be preserved in amber until the end of time, what are the questions you should be asking yourself as you attempt to engage with such an important topic? There are certainly a multitude, but here are my top 10.

Population Growth

In May, the Seattle Times reported that, according to census data, Seattle is the fastest-growing large city in the United States. How does this news change the proposed number of housing units in the EIS draft, given that people are moving here faster than new homes are being produced?

Planned Growth vs. Actual Growth

How does the housing allocation proposed in the previous Comprehensive Plan, compared to actual housing production since that time, influence the proposed number of units in the Draft EIS, given our current housing deficit?

Zoning Capacity vs. What is Actually Built

New buildings typically have a lifespan of 50 to 100 years, meaning that there are tracts of land that have been developed since the previous Comprehensive Plan that may see zoning changes but will not see any actual increases in housing over the next 20 years. Are these parcels included in calculations around achieving increased housing capacity as part of the Draft EIS, or are they excluded?

Mandatory Housing Affordability

How is the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program being factored into the number of proposed housing units, given that the Community Indicators Report (September 2020) released by the City’s Equitable Development Initiative identified a need for 68,000 “affordable” units at all income levels below 80 percent of Seattle’s area median income, as well as the latest numbers from the city on MHA showing that just 7 percent of all housing units created over the last year qualify as “affordable?”

Homelessness

King County’s Point in Time count showed an increase in unsheltered individuals in 2022 compared to 2020, from 11,751 to 13,368. How does this increase in unsheltered homelessness influence the types of housing allowed as part of the Comprehensive Plan, as well as the allowed uses across Seattle?

The Urban Village (UV) Strategy

The Seattle Planning Commission’s 2020 paper “Evolving Seattle’s Growth Strategy” noted that the current Urban Village strategy perpetuated inequities that have existed in Seattle land use patterns since the creation of the city. A focus on equality would allow more homes in all neighborhoods, whereas a focus on equity would allow more homes in areas where historic redlining prohibited people of color from living and neighborhoods that have seen little to no change in zoning since the implementation of the Urban Village strategy in 1994. Does the draft EIS address this and if so, how? 

The 15-Minute City

How does the concept of creating a “15-Minute City” influence where the city will allow commercial or non-residential uses in each neighborhood? How does this inform the minimum number of homes we will allow on every lot in Seattle?

Climate Refugees

In 2023, we’ve seen a massive increase in heat waves across the US and in other countries. Given Seattle’s relatively mild climate, as well as the city’s status as a sanctuary city, how does the potential increase in climate refugees over the next 20 years the plan covers influence the number of proposed housing units across the city?

Trees

What methodology is being used to ensure that the tree canopy across the city is preserved or increased while also taking into account reductions in the buildable area on individual lots that may be necessary to achieve this goal?

The Climate Future of South Park

At the beginning of this year, South Park experienced a king tide, which flooded the neighborhood. Given that climate change will increase instances of this kind of phenomenon, including rising sea levels, does the Comprehensive Plan consider any forms of managed retreat and the impact climate change will have on proposed housing and development capacity in South Park and around the Duwamish floodplain?

 

The questions I’ve outlined above may appear intimidating, but I share them because, just as an informed voter is the best kind of voter, an informed citizen is the best kind of citizen. Seattle must change the way we do business in order to become the city we all wish it was for every resident—a place where everyone can work, live, and play safely and in community together. 

But in order to get there we must first map the difficult road ahead. We must recognize that we are in a tumultuous time but that by working together we make overcoming the major issues our city faces that much easier for all of us. The Draft EIS must be the first plan for how we move forward, toward a Seattle for everyone. And if the city tries to turn away from this path, whether due to fear or a delusional sense of nostalgia, it’s up to us to collectively reject that false future.   

When the draft plan is released, I encourage everyone in Seattle to take just five minutes to make one comment on the plan. That comment can simply say “we need to be more ambitious in how many homes we’re planning for” or “we need to be honest about how many people want to live here.” The amount of good each comment could do for our city would mean a lot less time having to write op-eds like this and a lot more time spent out enjoying all the best aspects of what it means to live here. 

Andrew Grant Houston, also known as Ace the Architect, is the Founder and Head of Design of House Cosmopolitan, an architecture and urban design practice focused on celebrating culture and creating places where people belong. A former candidate for Mayor of Seattle in 2021, he also serves on the board of Futurewise.

Equity, Guest Contributor, Transit

What’s So Scary About Transit Riders? 

By Anna Zivarts

“I have to ride the bus. I have to deal with the scheduling, the condition of the street, getting to and from the bus. Does the schedule work with common arrival times for work, or are you gonna be stuck somewhere an hour before? Is there somewhere you can take shelter in the case of bad weather? All that stuff that if you’re not a regular bus rider, you’re not aware of.”

  • Aileen Kane, Washington nondriver

“Because many on [transit] boards tend to be car drivers, they really haven’t internalized what it means to be a transit rider. Those decisions determine whether you as a transit rider are going to be able to keep a job, going to be able to continue to be a caregiver, going to be able to continue to go to school.”

  • Judy Jones, Washington nondriver

In the spring of 2022, I can remember sitting on a bus, attempting to keep a five-year old entertained while I dialed in to give public comment at a Ben Franklin Transit board meeting. 

That spring, the board at Ben Franklin Transit (which provides transit in the Tri-Cities region) began discussing a plan to cut the sales tax that funds transit. The resulting revenue loss would necessitate cuts to transit service, including the likely elimination of Sunday service. 

In response to this proposal, Disability Rights Washington joined with labor, local advocates and staff from Transportation Choices Coalition to fight back. We reached out to the nondrivers we knew in the region and asked them to share their stories with the media and in public testimony.

Thankfully, after a series of high-stakes meetings, the board voted against the proposed tax cuts and transit service reductions. But that day in April, as I sat on the bus listening to the first of these meetings, I got angrier and angrier. It was very clear that the transit board members proposing the tax cuts and service reductions didn’t rely on transit themselves, nor had many of them ridden a bus in recent memory.

I thought back to how I’d heard many stories like this from the other nondriver advocates I organized with, advocates who for years had been attending transit board meetings and pushing for service that worked better for the people who needed it the most. 

In the fall of 2020, Disability Rights Washington launched the Disability Mobility Initiative to start organizing nondrivers across our state. We started by trying to interview nondrivers from every legislative district about how they get around, the barriers they face, and what they would change to make their communities more accessible. To date, we have 275 stories that are documented in our nondriver storymap, the visible part of our organizing work that eventually led to state-funded research showing that nondrivers make up 30 percent of our state population.

Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’” 

In these interviews, I kept hearing anecdotes—especially from the older nondrivers who had gotten frustrated and decided to show up at a transit board meeting—about how frustrating it was to discover that transit boards were made up of elected officials who themselves didn’t rely on transit, and in many cases, thought they were too busy or their time was too valuable to use the service they managed.

Vivian Conger, a blind nondriver from Walla Walla, shared that when she attended her local transit board meeting, she was shocked to learn that one of the board members had ridden transit for the first time that very day. Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’” 

In Washington State, a Public Transit Benefit Area (PTBA) is a governing body established by state code to create and run a transit agency. Current Washington state laws dictate the composition of PTBA boards, which include local elected officials from the area plus a nonvoting labor seat.

After hearing so much frustration from nondriver advocates, and after the experience with the Ben Franklin board, we collaborated with other advocates prior to the 2023 legislative session on a bill that would have added a voting seat for transit riders on these PTBA boards. Unfortunately, although the bill was drafted, opposition from transit agency lobbyists killed it before it was filed.

It’s unclear why having a voice for transit riders is so threatening. Perhaps it’s because labor has also been asking for a voting seat. Last year, they were successful in getting legislation introduced and will be working to get it passed again during the 2024 session. 

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Ensuring bus drivers have a voting seat on transit boards is critically important too, especially considering how much agencies across the state have struggled with staffing. In their 2022 report, “Bus Operators in Crisis” the national transportation think tank TransitCenter notes: “The disconnect in who holds central office and leadership positions (majority white and male) and frontline staff (majority people of color), can impact people’s commitment to the job, their perception of advancement opportunities, and overall frustrations. … Frontline workers, who are demographically more reflective of riders, have particular expertise about day-to-day operations and regularly interact with the public, yet are typically not included in decision-making.” 

There’s a similar divide between the daily experience of transit riders and transit boards. TransitCenter’s 2022 “Who Rules Transit” report notes: “Most transit agency boards in the U.S. operate without much public attention, and many are unrepresentative of the public they serve, composed of people unfamiliar with transit itself or the communities and people transit serves.”

The path to becoming an elected leader and therefore being eligible to serve on a transit board is extremely difficult for most nondrivers. After participating in the Week Without Driving, Councilmember Neal Black from Kirkland reflected, “It’s kind of hard to imagine how someone who didn’t have access to a car could do the job of a city council member. Our expectations are to be in a lot of different places, and a lot of different times. In a suburban city like ours, it’s a challenge to do that without driving, and that means there’s a large segment of our population excluded from serving in this role.” 

At the same time, many transit boards across the state struggle to get engagement and attendance from elected leaders who have many other responsibilities and priorities outside of serving on transit boards as one of their many committee assignments.

Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook.

“Most of our board members are not frequent transit riders. We recognize the direct stake that riders have in public transit, and Clallam Transit’s board discussed adding rider representation but decided against it because current Washington State law isn’t clear about whether this would be a properly constituted transit board,” said Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a Clallam Transit board member and Port Angeles City Councilmember since 2018. “We need clear state statutes that make for better representation on transit boards especially by non-drivers. This is a simple policy that ensures ‘nothing about us without us,’” he added.

Intercity Transit in Thurston County has rewritten its bylaws to include community members in their board as voting members. In fact, they have three voting community representatives, and their current chair is a community representative. Since the seats were added, every time the board composition has come up for a vote, they voted to retain these voting seats. 

Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook. 

Of note, not every transit agency in our state is authorized through PTBAs, although many are. King County Metro and Sound Transit both have different board structures. We hope that the change in the PTBA structure is the first step in more universal representation across all transit boards. For example, we are eager to support King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci’s suggestion that Sound Transit’s board should include rider representation.

For people who can grab their keys and drive where they need to go, transportation isn’t a major concern. But for those of use who can’t drive or can’t afford to, transportation access is something we think about for hours a day: As we’re waiting in the rain for a delayed bus, as we’re trying to figure out the schedules to transfer between one county’s system and another, as we’re mapping the least stressful, best lit, and least hilly route to an unfamiliar bus stop.

We care deeply about how transit works because it is such a major part of our every day and can make the difference between getting to do the things that connect us to our communities—things like running errands, seeing a friend, or getting to an appointment. Without functional transit, we can be stuck at home—or, if we’re lucky, reliant on a friend or family member having time to drive us. 

Instead of fighting us, transit agencies should harness this passion, this commitment, and our years of expertise to make transit better. 

Anna Zivarts is a low-vision mom and nondriver who was born with the neurological condition nystagmus. She directs the Disability Mobility Initiative at DIsability Rights Washington and launched the #WeekWithoutDriving challenge. Zivarts serves on the boards of Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium, League of American Cyclists, and Commute Seattle. In 2024, her book When Driving Isn’t an Option: Steering Us Away from Car-Dependency will be published by Island Press. 

Guest Contributor, homelessness, housing

Seattle’s Vehicle Impoundment Policy Betrays Contempt, Not Compassion, for Those Living Homeless

By The Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett

In January 2023, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority announced that addressing homelessness in King County would cost about $12 billion and require “tens of thousands more units of housing.” Local officials immediately balked. Two earlier plans to address homelessness were unable to address homelessness successfully, so why should the region spend billions more?

But the alternative, especially for people living in vehicles, has been increasingly onerous and cruel.

This past summer, I filed public records requests with the city of Seattle for all vehicle impounds between January to May 2023. I filtered these impounds to include only that were most likely to be vehicles used as residences: RVs, Campers, Detached Trailers, and Buses, and found that 1,441 of these four vehicle types were impounded over just five months.

The four most common impound reasons included, in order of severity, were: Violations of the city rule requiring vehicles to move every 72 hours, improper licensing (such as expired tabs), having a detached trailer, and parking in prohibited areas, such as residential neighborhoods and retail zones.  The list justifying impounds also included another 17 violations, such as: Parking too close to a sidewalk or a stop sign; blocking a trail; determined to be junk; illegal blocking, such parking in front of a hydrant; parking in a loading zone; improper curb orientation; double-parking; and parking in an intersection, all as determined by a parking enforcement or police officer.

When the KCRHA has to use its limited funds, which come largely from Seattle, simply to keep people cast to the streets by impounds alive, that money is wasted and success continues to elude us. People will blame the regional authority, when in fact, it is as much the failure of every city to address their frequently punitive control of the streets.

The city does not offer people shelter prior to any of these impounds, since in every case, their owners are violating some law. Yet in my view, this appears to constitute a violation of Martin v Boise, the Ninth District Court of Appeals ruling that requires cities to offer shelter before they order anyone living in homelessness to move from a public location.

Why are so few people who are swept while unsheltered—and living in a vehicles counts as unsheltered homelessness, according to HUD—not offered shelter? The city may well argue that Martin does not apply to vehicle residents since the ruling says nothing about people living in vehicles. Maybe more compelling is that there is nothing close to an adequate amount of shelter available. And for people living in any vehicle other than a passenger car, leaving their vehicle for a single bed in a shelter—basically all that is ever offered—is nonsensical.

This shortage of shelter spaces also impacts the formal process the city uses for responding to vehicle residents who are asked to move by the Unified Care Team, which carries out the city’s formal Remediations, Relocations, and Removals program. Under this program, staff from the Human Services Department are required to offer shelter to every unhoused person who must move. Vehicle residents who decline shelter and cannot move have their vehicles impounded.

But even if the city offers some kind of shelter in every case—which some city-funded outreach providers dispute—if the people living in a vehicle are: 1) a couple; 2) pet owners; 3) with children; 4) trans; 5) and so on, there often are no appropriate shelters.

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During 12 years of outreach in Seattle to those living in vehicles, I’ve seen that funding is only half the answer to addressing homelessness. Yes, money is needed to provide services and such. Yet elected officials also control the streets and all the public terrain where homeless persons encamp—the other half of the reality of homelessness. By enforcing laws to impound vehicles where people are living, the city is imposing brute force in the form of sweeps, setting back efforts to assist those living homeless to move toward stability.

Elected officials may well balk at the overall cost of addressing homelessness. But the hidden impounds I’ve described have a cost as well. When the KCRHA has to use its limited funds, which come largely from Seattle, simply to keep people cast to the streets by impounds alive, that money is wasted and success continues to elude us. People will blame the regional authority, when in fact, it is as much the failure of every city to address their frequently punitive control of the streets.

In Seattle, there was a better agreement from 2011 to 2020, through the Scofflaw Mitigation program initiated by the Mike McGinn administration. The 2011 Scofflaw Ordinance, which allowed the city to boot and impound vehicles if their owners had four or more unpaid tickets, threatened an enormous escalation of impounds. We in the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness approached the mayor and jointly formulated a partnership with parking Enforcement and the Municipal Court.

The group we formed was, and is, called the Scofflaw Mitigation Team, and for more than 10 years it kept impounds from tickets in the single digits. The current administration ended the program in 2022. Now, 1,441 impounds have occurred in just five months.

The agreement was that parking enforcement would inform us when any vehicle was close to accumulating four tickets, putting it at risk of impound. We would then do outreach to address the tickets and provide whatever the person needed to get their vehicle moving again. The group we formed was, and is, called the Scofflaw Mitigation Team, and for more than 10 years it kept impounds from tickets in the single digits. The current administration ended the program in 2022. Now, 1,441 impounds have occurred in just 5 months, from violations the administration has deemed impound-worthy.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who during World War II sought to halt the harm in Germany, described the attitude of the nation’s leaders, which also spread among many of the German people, as “a contempt for humanity.” Does this describe some of the attitudes we who are housed have toward those unhoused? Does it describe some of the attitudes of those we’ve elected to govern? Do we have a collective “contempt” for the unhoused?

Key questions for our future include: Can we suspend law enforcement long enough to help the vulnerable? Can’t we do better for our vulnerable neighbors than “sweeps?” Are we half-hearted?

These are questions for jurisdictional leaders and for all of us who vote for them. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has stated it is against sweeps as a tool for addressing homelessness. Why? Because it wastes precious money, and because too many people are dying. But the authority cannot change exacting harm via the law without elected leaders putting unhoused people first, or at a minimum, setting aside “contempt.”

The Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett is the director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, in residence at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church.