Category: homelessness

City Council, Civil Rights, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police

This Week on PubliCola: March 7, 2026

Expanding tiny house villages, inside-out density, city council staff unionization, and more news you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Tuesday, March 3

As City and County Consider Banning New ICE Facilities, Local Jails Are Exempted from Seattle’s Ban

The city and King County are both passing temporary bans on new ICE detention facilities in areas under their jurisdiction, but only one’s—Seattle’s—does not apply to local jails. As emergency legislation, the Seattle moratorium needs seven of nine votes to pass, and some councilmembers reportedly balked at language temporarily prohibiting new jails, even though no new jail is planned in Seattle.

Wednesday, March 4

An Alternative Approach to Creating Affordable Housing: Inside-Out Urbanism

In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit argues that urbanists should look inward to create new density in neighborhoods, by focusing on changes to buildings themselves (rather than zoning) that could allow more apartments. “Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.”

Wilson Announces First Steps Toward 1,000 Shelter Beds: Simpler Leases, Larger Tiny House Villages, More Money for Shelter

Mayor Katie Wilson announced the first part of her big push to add thousands of new shelter beds in her first term. Under the proposal, the city would lease land for new tiny house villages directly, reducing red tape for nonprofit shelter providers, and the city would allow much bigger villages—up to 250 units. The city council still has to approve (and potentially amend) Wilson’s plan, which she rolled out without securing a council sponsor or feedback from council members.

Thursday, March 5

Civil Rights Office Director Put On Leave Over Employee Complaints, Union Alleges Interference in Investigation

The head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights, Derrick Wheeler-Smith, and his deputy are both on paid leave after the city launched an investigation into allegations of discrimination, harassment, and bias by his staff. PubliCola detailed the employees’ claims in a story last week. The union that represents SOCR employees has filed an EEOC complaint challenging the neutrality of the investigation, after Wheeler-Smith notified a city HR investigator about PubliCola’s forthcoming story in February, saying his employees’ claims were specious and part of an effort by the deputy mayor to oust him by planting false stories in the press.

Friday, March 5

City Council’s Legislative Aides Vote to Unionize

Legislative assistants for City Councilmembers have voted to unionize. While previous unionization efforts went nowhere, this one has strong support, thanks to reportedly poor working conditions in some council offices and growing dissatisfaction with the pay disparity between council aides and people doing similar jobs in other departments.

Police Chief Says “We Don’t Take Sides” in Protests

During a presentation on the Seattle Police Department’s plans for responding if federal troops or ICE descend on Seattle, Police Chief Shon Barnes said SPD is neutral during protests, arguing that social media videos and the press use sound bites or misleading photos to misrepresent SPD’s actions.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Wilson Announces First Steps Toward 1,000 Shelter Beds: Simpler Leases, Larger Tiny House Villages, More Money for Shelter

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson introduced three pieces of legislation on Wednesday that she says will reduce barriers to tiny house villages—groups of small, freestanding shelters—by reducing bureaucratic obstacles, freeing up money, and removing a cap on the size of tiny house villages that Wilson called out of step with nationwide best practices.

Framed by tiny houses-in-progress at Sound Foundations’ 15,000-square-foot tiny house production facility in SoDo, Wilson said the legislation is just the beginning of a plan to dramatically reduce visible homelessness and get people into shelter as a step toward permanent housing.

“We have twice as many homeless people in Seattle as we have shelter beds, leaving thousands of people with nowhere to go,” Wilson said.  “We also have a responsibility to make sure that everyone can access and enjoy our parks, trails, sidewalks and other public spaces. But we can’t just keep moving people from place to place, and calling that progress. The single most important thing we can do to address our city’s homelessness crisis is to rapidly expand emergency housing.”

Wilson’s first bill would allow the city, through its Department of Finance and Administrative Services, to directly lease and prepare land for tiny house villages and other types of noncongregate shelter. Wilson said the 56-word amendment may seem like “a small and technical change,” but will relieve shelter providers of the obligation to negotiate their own land deals with property owners, prepare sites for opening, and connect new tiny house villages to electricity, water, and other utilities, a process that can push opening dates back months.

The second piece of legislation would significantly increase the cap on the size of individual villages. New villages, currently capped at 100 residents, could have as many as 250, with a limit of one such large shelter per council district (or nine citywide). Additional villages could have no more than 150 residents.

Wilson also announced that her office has identified $4.8 million in unspent city funding to help stand up new shelters, which the third piece of legislation would appropriate. The mayor has pledged to open up 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of her first year, 500 of those before the FIFA World Cup comes to Seattle in June.

Speaking to PubliCola late Wednesday afternoon, Wilson said she’s focusing on shelter because it’s a high-impact strategy that can be implemented quickly—unlike housing, which costs more and takes longer to build.

“Right now, the big thing is just that we need to make an impact fast. We’ve seen the number of unsheltered homeless folks going up and up and up, year after year, and it takes time to build housing,” Wilson said. “To me, the most important number is how many people are sleeping unsheltered in Seattle, and I think we’re going to be adjusting [strategies over time] to make more of an impact.”

Several supporters of Wilson’s plan who spoke on Wednesday sounded notably cool on aspects of “housing first,” the idea that people can’t recover from addiction and other behavioral health challenges until they’re in stable, permanent housing. Conservative politicians and talking heads have made “housing first” a bogeyman for all kinds of supposed giveaways to unworthy lowlifes, but the concept is also a matter of debate among homeless advocate themselves, and the pendulum in Seattle appears to be swinging toward a new kind of shelter-first approach—one where shelter (and mandatory case management) is a prerequisite for housing, at least for people with complex needs.

“Strong shelter programs with robust support services can be a game changer in achieving stable, permanent housing placements,” Fé LopezGaetke, co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (PDA), said. “In fact, taking three to six months to stabilize a person significantly improves outcomes for those who go on to permanent housing. Housing providers benefit when tenants come in with a lot more support and when a lot of obstacles to recovery and stabilization have already been tackled.”

This is a dramatic turnabout from the rhetoric of, say, 2020, when anti-shelter sentiment was thick in the air. The thinking at that time was that there is no such thing as a person who isn’t “housing-ready,” and that housing, not shelter, is the best way to stabilize a person with addiction or behavioral health issues that are exacerbated by living on the street. In a city without adequate permanent supportive housing (housing designed specifically for people with disabling conditions), people were getting stuck in the shelter system, and a renewed focus on housing was seen as a more effective way of addressing homelessness.

This focus on housing, rather than shelter, led to approaches like the Partnership for Zero, a pandemic-era public-private partnership that was supposed to rapidly “end” visible homelessness downtown. That program shut down in 2023 after housing 230 people.

At the exact same time, the PDA was launching its JustCARE and CoLEAD programs, which included hotel-based emergency shelter combined with  intensive case management, health care, and housing navigation. This model of shelter, proponents now argue, is more effective at getting people into permanent housing than either those that move people from tents into apartments or older, non-“enhanced” shelter models.

Chief Seattle Club director Derrick Belgarde, who spoke at Wilson’s event, told PubliCola Wednesday afternoon that the people who are most successful in CSC’s permanent supportive housing are the ones who’ve gone through mandatory case management at one of their shelters, which include two tiny house villages, first. “If ‘housing first’ is getting people off the streets, getting people in a safe room with a door, then it’s good, but when we’re talking about permanent housing, we haven’t been fans,” Belgarde said.

People can be kicked out of a CSC shelter for behavior that wouldn’t get them evicted from permanent housing, and as a result, they’re far less likely to start fights, blast music, or engage in other un-neighborly behavior once they move into a housing unit, Belgarde said. “In our shelters, it’s not even about shelter—it’s about a program to build community and get life skills and keep them safe, with a roof over their head.”

Wilson’s office suggested that the city will be ready to sign leases on several properties shortly after her legislation passes, assuming the city council approves it (more on that in a moment.) But they wouldn’t say yet where the properties were, or if they’ll include the very large villages Wilson’s proposal would authorize.

“Obviously, we don’t want to just put 250 people in a huge tent and be like, “OK, here you go!'” Wilson told PubliCola. “It’s going to be based on a case-by-case analysis.”

Belgarde said his organization is unlikely to apply to build much larger tiny house villages than the ones they currently operate. “I’m not opposed to other people trying it. I’m not an expert on anybody else’s community,” Belgarde said. “I know about our own unique trauma, and I know where the a chronically homeless person sits, as far as their acuity level and their needs. A 100-person shelter would be downright dangerous for us. We’re not going to entertain the idea of opening a shelter that large.”

Low Income Housing Instititute director Sharon Lee, who also spoke at Wednesday’s event, said if LIHI was to build a very large tiny house village, they would divide it into separate “neighborhoods” to prevent it from feeling dangerously large. Currently, LIHI’s biggest tiny house village has 73 units.

One group the discussion about enhanced shelter leaves out is people who don’t need intensive case management—those who are homeless due to economic circumstances like job loss and evictions for unpaid rent. During the campaign, Wilson proposed providing rent subsidies to some of these “low-acuity” homeless folks to move into tax-credit-subsidized housing units that are currently sitting vacant because there’s a glut of subsidized studio and one-bedroom units that cost about as much as market-rate apartments.

“You won’t be surprised to hear that we are going to be looking at ways to move low-acuity folks into some of the vacant units in our affordable housing sector with some kind of rent subsidy,” Wilson told PubliCola. “That will be a strategy that will take people who are hanging out in the shelter system, putting them into a housing situation, and hopefully freeing up some space in shelter that is set up to deal with higher-acuity folks.”

“Among the homeless population, there are a number of people who just can’t pay the rent—the working homeless person, the person who finally got into recovery and now is employed,” Lee said. “They can live in regular workforce housing. I think it’s a valid model, and it’s a lot cheaper to do it that way than to subsidize vacant units.”

Belgarde, echoing comments LopezGaetke made during the announcement at Sound Foundations, said his main concern about the new push for shelters is that shelter becomes a path to housing, rather than a final stop. “If there’s any worry, it’s a worry that it’s not the solution,” he said. We don’t want people to see there’s not any more tents on the sidewalk and think we’ve solved it, because you haven’t solved it if people are just sitting in a tiny house village.”

Wilson still has to get her legislation through the council. In a break from longstanding practice at City Hall, Wilson did not secure a City Council sponsor for her proposals, discuss the wording or sequencing of her legislation, or ensure that the legislation would get a committee hearing before announcing her legislation publicly. (She also left her own press conference shortly after she spoke without answering questions, prompting audible grumbling from reporters.)

This approach has raised some eyebrows in council offices. Ordinarily, the mayor and allies on the council work behind the scenes to draft legislation and secure support from council members before doing a public rollout; instead, the council has been left wondering who, exactly, is supposed to back Wilson’s bill and even which committee it’s supposed to go through.

“Now that the three bills have been transmitted to council, we need to determine which Councilmembers will sponsor each bill, whether they should move together or through separate committees, and which committee or committees are the right fit,” Council President Joy Hollingsworth told PubliCola Thursday. “We also need time for central staff analysis regarding the legislation and for the executive to answer initial questions as well. We will also invite and offer the executive an opportunity to come to a council briefing to discuss their legislation. Our goal as a body is to run a transparent and open legislative process.”

City Council, Courts, homelessness, housing, LGBTQ+, Police

This Week on PubliCola: February 14, 2026

 

Nine stories you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, February 9

Bill Targeting Sex Buyers Would No Longer Result in Immediate Felony Charges

State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex has been amended; under a version that passed narrowly out of committee, buying sex would be a gross misdemeanor and sex workers would get access to services in lieu of jail. Proponents of the original, harsher bill said the new version fails to crack down enough on the “demand” side of sex work, and suggested that lenient prostitution laws allowed traffickers to go unpunished.

Tuesday, February 10

Sex Worker Advocates Demand Action from the City After Prosecutors’ Dehumanizing Presentation

The changes to the state law we covered Monday came partly in response to a lurid presentation by local prosecutors at a city council meeting, which included photos of identifiable, brutalized women and graphic details of assaults. Advocates for sex workers, also appalled by the presentation, issued a list of demands for the city, including a separate panel on non-carceral, humane approaches to abuse and trafficking and the inclusion of people with direct experience in policy discussions about sex work.

ACLU Drops Lawsuit After City Attorney Evans Drops Blanket Affidavit Against Judge

City Attorney Erika Evans and the ACLU of Washington announced that the ACLU is dropping its lawsuit against the city over a policy instituted by Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, that disqualified Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases for almost two years.

City Council Gets New Central Staff Director

City hall veteran Ben Noble, who’s currently in his second stint as director of the city council’s policy-oriented central staff, is retiring in March after more than two decades at the city. His replacement, Lish Whitson, is another city old-timer who has worked on four comprehensive plan updates, including the upzone of Seattle’s former single-family enclaves last year.

Family of Jaahnavi Kandula, Pedestrian Killed by SPD Officer in 2023, Reaches $29,011,000 Settlement with City

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office settled for $29,011,000 with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old student who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour in 2023. The $11,000 is a pointed reference to a comment made by Daniel Auderer, then the vice president of the police union, that the city could just “write a check” for that amount because that’s all Kandula’s short life was worth.

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Wednesday, February 11

Tax For Social Housing Brought In Twice the Original Estimate, Mirroring Early JumpStart Results

Funding for Seattle’s new social housing developer, which the City Council approved in a 7-0 vote yesterday, is coming in significantly higher than anticipated: In its first year, the developer will receive an estimated $115 million to acquire existing apartment buildings and develop new ones. The revenues mirror early returns from the JumpStart payroll tax, which is also a tax on large companies that pay high wages.

Thursday, February 12

Review Finds Multiple Police Failures Preceded Violent Response to Counterprotests During Anti-LGBTQ Event in May

The city’s Office of the Inspector General released a report today finding that the Seattle Police Department’s actions during the anti-trans “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” rally, held by an extremist group called Mayday USA, showed a bias against counter-protesters who showed up to demonstrate against the right-wing event. After chatting amiably with security for the anti-trans group, officers began referring to protesters as “transtifa.”

Friday, February 13

New Councilmember Dionne Foster Tells Seattle Nice: Police Cameras “Should Be Turned Off and Come Down.”

On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, David, Sandeep, and I interviewed new City Councilmember Dionne Foster. Our conversation touched on encampment removals, police surveillance cameras, the upcoming library levy, and the

Homelessness Authority Rescinds Tiny House Village Grant, Gives Money to Salvation Army Instead

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has rescinded a $3 million grant it gave the Low Income Housing Institute to build 60 new low-barrier tiny houses outside King County’s youth detention center, claiming LIHI delayed the process by failing to secure a site in time. The money, which LIHI secured in last year’s city of Seattle budget, will now go to the Salvation Army to convert 35 of its existing transitional housing units into shelter.

homelessness

Homelessness Authority Rescinds Tiny House Village Grant, Gives Money to Salvation Army Instead
LIHI Director Sharon Lee speaks at the opening of Rosie's Tiny House Village in the University District
LIHI Director Sharon Lee speaks at the opening of Rosie’s Tiny House Village in the University District

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has rescinded a $3 million grant it gave the Low Income Housing Institute to build 60 new low-barrier tiny houses outside King County’s youth detention center, claiming LIHI delayed the process by failing to secure a site in time.

Tiny houses are small, freestanding, heated structures that provide shelter for one or two people. Unsheltered people often prefer tiny houses to other kinds of shelter because they provide privacy and a door that locks.

The money will now go to the Salvation Army, which will use it to convert some of the existing transitional housing beds at its William Booth Center in SoDo into non-congregate emergency shelter beds, according to KCRHA. While the converted rooms are technically “new” shelter beds, they aren’t really additive, since the people living in the existing transitional housing will either have to leave or see their housing downgraded to emergency shelter.

“Without this funding, we may have had to close beds,” Salvation Army spokeswoman Sara Beksinski said.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency “chose to prioritize speed of implementation in the competition for these funds,” KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said. “Because LIHI could not perform in the period clearly outlined for the second location, we proceeded with an award to the next highest rated applicant, the Salvation Army.”

The Salvation Army’s original application was for $1.1 million; we have a call out to find out if this is how much the KCRHA awarded them and, if so, what will happen to the rest of the funds.

The $3 million more than half the funding—nearly $6 million—LIHI worked to secure for tiny house villages in the Seattle’s 2025 budget. The other half is funding a new tiny house village in North Seattle called Olympic Hills, which opened last month. The second shelter was a joint project between LIHI and Purpose Dignity Action’s CoLEAD program, which provides temporary lodging and intensive case management to people with physical and behavioral health needs; now, CoLEAD will relocate its operation to the North Seattle village.

In late January, LIHI appealed KCRHA’s decision, pointing to the agency’s own delays in approving contracts that were funded back in 2024, and says they were blindsided by the agency’s decision to take back the funds less than three months after they sent LIHI a letter signing off on the county-owned site.

“We should ask why the KCRHA’s [Request for Proposals] process took so long, given the homelessness crisis,” LIHI director Sharon Lee wrote in her appeal. Although the city council approved the funding in late 2024, the city didn’t announce the awards until the following July. “We believe it is KCRHA, not LIHI, that delayed the overall timeline in creating two new villages.”

Lee acknowledged that LIHI experienced hiccups securing a location for the second shelter, but said King County Executive Girmay Zahilay had made it clear that securing the King County site was a high priority for his new administration. As backup, Lee said, LIHI also secured an agreement with Mount Baker Housing for a second site—the old Thunderbird Treatment Center in Rainier Beach, which the housing nonprofit plans to redevelop in about three years.

“We were excited to have the county commit to finally doing something” with tiny houses, Lee said.

The KCRHA didn’t let Zahilay know they were rescinding LIHI’s funding for the planned tiny house village at the county site,  his office confirmed.

“Our office was not aware that KCRHA was going to rescind funding and award it to another provider, and we expressed disappointment that they did not update or coordinate with our administration before making this decision,” Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said.

Zahilay is currently “having initial conversations with stakeholders about the potential to site a tiny home village at the juvenile justice center property,” Craighead said. “Before a tiny home village is sited, we would need to engage with staff at the facility, see robust neighborhood outreach plans and timelines, and understand how services would be prioritized for those in need in the immediate area.”

The city’s budget didn’t explicitly grant the $6 million to LIHI, because all large contracts must go through a standard bidding process. But it was LIHI that secured the funding, working with City Councilmember Bob Kettle to add the money in 2024, with the understanding that it would fund tiny house villages or some other form of new noncongregate shelter.

In a letter rescinding KCRHA’s funds, KCRHA’s deputy director, Jeff Simms, blamed LIHI for the delays, saying the homelessness authority had already granted one extension to give LIHI more time to nail down a location and that this violated the KCRHA’s “preference for applications that had a site located and prepared for operation.”

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But LIHI said the timeline was significantly more complex than the KCRHA was letting on, and pointed to another email from Simms, in October, saying that  “LIHI has met the requirements of the [request for proposals] to have located a site for operation of a second non-congregate shelter” at the juvenile detention center or the former treatment center.

That letter did note that KCRHA might “take steps” to reallocate the money to another agency if LIHI didn’t secure a site by December. Lee says LIHI signed a letter of intent with Mount Baker Housing to lease their Rainier Beach site and sent a copy to KCRHA in mid-December, but never heard anything back until the agency rescinded their funding in January. “For a whole month, there was silence, until they yanked the contract,” Lee said.

KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison rejected LIHI’s appeal earlier this month, and LIHI’s efforts to get city officials to intervene have been unsuccessful so far. Kettle, who got the money into the city budget back in 2024, told PubliCola, “We understand LIHI’s frustrations but also KCHRA’s need to press forward. We will work with both to move ahead on other important projects in [Council District 7] or that have important public safety impacts.”

A spokesman for Mayor Katie Wilson’s office, Sage Wilson, told PubliCola, “We’re not going to comment on the details of a dispute between LIHI and KCRHA. However this situation does underscore the importance of accelerating the development of emergency shelter, which is why the mayor has already issued an executive order doing just that.”

LIHI and KCRHA have long had a tense relationship, going back to the time of founding CEO Marc Dones, who frequently clashed with Lee over funding for her projects. Lee said she isn’t done fighting over the rescission, and she’s talking to KCRHA’s governing board about what she considers overreach by Kinnison and Simms.

Meanwhile, she said, “We are going to continue to develop tiny house villages, because we know that the mayor is very supportive and we think there are going to be other opportunities for us.” LIHI just opened a new tiny house village in Tukwila and is working to site a new RV safe lot, with tiny houses, in West Seattle.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Transportation

Wilson Issues Orders to Speed Up Transit and Shelter, Will Replace More Harrell Appointees

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson issued two executive order on Thursday. The first is aimed at speeding up the production of shelter in the run-up to this year’s World Cup games and beyond. The second will help speed up the city’s slowest bus, the 8, by finally painting a long-planned bus lane on Denny Way.

Wilson announced the orders at a meeting of her transition team at El Centro de la Raza on Beacon Hill.

More news is expected out of Wilson’s team in the next week, including the dismissals of several high-profile department heads appointed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell.

City Light CEO Dawn Lindell, appointed in 2024, is out, internal sources tell PubliCola (no word on her replacement yet). So, we’ve heard, is interim Office of Labor Relations interim director Chase Munroe—a Harrell appointee who worked, on city time, on behalf of the Royal Esquire Club, a private men’s club with longstanding ties to Harrell. Adrienne Thompson, a onetime labor policy advisor to ex-mayor Jenny Durkan who applied for the labor relations in 2022, will reportedly be Munroe’s replacement as interim director.

Other departments that could see changes in the next week include the Office of Housing (currently headed by Maiko Winkler-Chin) and the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (headed by Hamdi Mohamed, who’s also a Seattle Port Commissioner.)

Wilson’s first executive order, on homelessness, sets a deadline of March for a multi-department work group to “identify all possible financial incentives, permitting changes, and policy changes” that could help the city build new shelters and housing quickly. The group will also “identify City-owned property that could be used temporarily or permanently to support shelter and housing opportunities.”

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The order also directs the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations to work with other governments to identify additional public land that could be used for shelter and housing, and directs the Human Services Department to identify existing shelter programs that have room for expansion.

Wilson has pledged to add 4,000 new shelter beds and housing units by the end of her term, with a short-term goal of adding 500 before the World Cup games here in June.

Wilson will have to find funding for the new shelter projects in the existing city budget. Last year, the city council set aside a little over $11 million to help address potential funding cuts from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, which had changed its guidelines for funding housing projects to emphasize short-term housing over the type of permanent housing projects that rely on HUD funding locally.

After a judge ruled that HUD couldn’t change its standards in the middle of a funding cycle, the department allowed the application process to move forward under the old criteria. HUD could still pull the rug out from under providers by refusing to fund projects next year, but if it doesn’t, that $11 million could be used to fund Wilson’s shelter push.

There’s also the 116-member Unified Care Team, which removes encampments and costs the city upward of $30 million a year. Although the council adopted a Rob Saka-sponsored amendment prohibiting Wilson from spending the UCT’s budget on other purposes, some creative reallocation could put the giant team to better use.

Wilson said she’s evaluating how the UCT prioritizes encampments for removal and may change them. As an interim step, Wilson halted a planned removal of an encampment in Ballard after meeting with encampment residents earlier this week; on Thursday, she said she wanted to gain an “understanding, from the perspective of folks who are living outside, what can we do to make the process of an encampment removal more comprehensible and just maximize the the opportunities for people to get into a better situation.”

Wilson’s second executive order directs the Seattle Department of Transportation to immediately paint a long-delayed bus lane on Denny Way, a change that will help the most infamously delayed bus in the city, Metro’s Route 8, be a little less late. Last year, under Harrell, SDOT rejected the bus lane, arguing that giving buses priority would make drivers late. Wilson said the bus lane would run, at a minimum, from Fifth Ave. to Fairview, the most congested section of the route.

“I know the feeling of waiting at the stop for the bus to come and it’s 30 minutes late or 40 minutes late,” Wilson said. “I know the feeling of sitting on the bus knowing that you could be walking up that hill faster than that bus is going.”

homelessness, housing, legislature

Bills Would Crack Down on City Efforts to Banish Homeless People, Shelter, and Housing

By Erica C. Barnett

In previous legislative sessions, lawmakers have successfully overruled efforts by cities, including Seattle, to keep renters out of neighborhoods that were once exclusively single-family, and have even reined in suburban cities that have tried to ban shelter and emergency housing altogether. (Thanks, Jessica Bateman!)

This year, pro-housing lawmakers want to stop cities from taking advantage of loopholes that have allowed them to prohibit market-rate and emergency housing, and to stop cities like Seattle from banning ground-floor apartments, among other proposals to crack down on local NIMBY policies.

Rep. Strom Peterson (D-33, Edmonds) has introduced legislation, House Bill 2266, that would require cities and counties to allow all forms of STEP housing—that’s shelter, transitional, emergency, and permanent housing—in any area that isn’t zoned for industrial use. The bill would also prevent jurisdictions from passing regulations for these types of housing, including shelter, that are more restrictive than the ones the apply to any other type of housing.

The bill expands on 2021’s House Bill 1220, which required cities to allow shelters and permanent housing in all areas where hotels or market-rate housing are allowed, but provided a carveout for “reasonable” restrictions “for public health and safety purposes.” Cities, Pedersen said, took that loophole and ran with it, rejecting shelters because they were within 1,000 feet as the crow flies from another shelter or a school, “even through it wasn’t really 1,000 foot walking distance,” Peterson said.

Last year, Peterson and other legislators proposed a fix that would have given the Department of Commerce “a very big hammer”—if the department determined that local rules limiting housing weren’t reasonable, they could withhold state funds—but that idea proved too unpopular, and potentially expensive, to pass last year.

“‘Reasonableness’ is the word that haunts me,” Peterson said.

This year’s legislation is more straightforward, and it doesn’t include dispute resolution through the Department of Commerce; instead, it states flatly that jurisdictions must allow all types of STEP housing and can’t apply zoning or design rules that are different than those that apply to other residential housing.

Peterson says the changes reduce the potential cost of the new rules—an important factor in a year when lawmakers are trying to close a more than $2 billion budget gap—and takes out any ambiguity about “reasonable” restrictions.

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Cities have been more receptive to some parts of the bill than others, Peterson said. “On the plus side, and I think this is a pretty significant step, cities have said that they believe permanent supportive and transitional housing shouldn’t be treated differently than market housing. … Where we’re running into some issues is on the shelter and emergency housing side.”

Some cities have argued they should be allowed to impose requirements that would preclude certain people, such as people who have criminal records or active addictions, from accessing shelter, a proposal Peterson says could violate state fair housing laws. Others have argued that shelters should be subject to special regulations on noise and litter. “My retort back is, doesn’t the city have noise and litter restrictions? Why is [shelter] being treated differently?”

Rep. Mia Gregerson, D-33 (SeaTac), has proposed legislation this year that could work in tandem with Peterson’s prohibition on shelter and housing bans. House Bill 2489 would prohibit cities and towns from passing bans on sleeping and other activities necessary for survival “unless the city or town can demonstrate that adequate alternative shelter space was available at the time and place of the conduct.”

Gregerson said the proposal is a clarified version of last year’s House Bill 1380, which would have required cities that restrict people’s ability to sit, lie down, keep dry, or sleep on public property to have “objectively reasonable” regulations on these activities. “Last year’s bill was an attempt to really provide total local control” over anti-camping laws, Gregerson said; but as with 1220’s “reasonable” restrictions on shelter, the phrase turned out to be too squishy. “Cities wanted more definition,” Gregerson said.

This year’s bill says that cities can’t ban such “life-sustaining activities” unless adequate shelter is available, and defines the minimum requirements for a shelter to be considered “adequate.” For example, shelters must allow people to stay with their partners or pets, be accessible to people with disabilities, and be located inside the city that has a law banning homeless people from public property.

That last provision could be controversial. Cities without any year-round, general admission homeless shelters at all, like Burien, have passed laws banning people from sleeping in public; in other cities, such as Kirkland, efforts to establish shelters to get people out of parks and off sidewalks have met with fierce resistance. (Burien has one year-round high-barrier program that includes shelter for nine women.)

“One low-turnout election” can completely upend the leadership of small cities, Gregerson noted; in that context, “We’re trying to be the adults in the room—can we come around the table and say we all want people to have a space to live?” After last year’s “productive conversations” about HB 1380, Gregerson said she’s hoping to get traction on a bill that balances local control with the reality that banishing homeless people doesn’t solve homelessness.