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.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
“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.
One rendering of what the freestanding toilets might look like in Pioneer Square.
By Erica C. Barnett
Anyone who has walked through Seattle’s densest neighborhoods—First Hill, downtown, Capitol Hill—knows that it’s damn near impossible to find a public restroom outside libraries, parks, and tourist-heavy areas like Seattle Center and Pike Place Market. Past efforts to add public restrooms have ended poorly; in 2008, after spending around $5 million on installation, cleaning, and maintenance, the city tore down five freestandimg restrooms installed just four years earlier downtown and on Broadway in Capitol Hill.
During the pandemic, Seattle actually locked existing public restrooms and replaced them with port-a-potties, euphemistically referred to as “comfort stations.” Plans to install something as minimal as freestanding sinks for handwashing got ground up in the gears of concern-trolling masquerading as public process: How will the city maintain them? How can we keep homeless people from ruining them? Won’t people be at risk of tripping if there’s a hose on the sidewalk?
Given that history, it’s tempting to assume that the latest proposal for public restrooms, from a D.C.-based company called Throne Labs, will also run headlong into the Seattle process. But so far, the company’s proposal—a total of 11 freestanding restrooms across the region, each at cost of around $100,000 a year—is moving forward without too much friction. (Really straining—sorry!!—to avoid toilet analogies here). The Pioneer Square Preservation Board recently approved Throne’s proposal to add two of its restrooms in the historic district—a surprising turn from a board whose members recently debated allowing bike parking because it would require ahistorical flex posts and paint on the ground. The vinyl-clad loos have to be wrapped in images of trees, but won’t have to mimic historic bricks, an idea that was proposed and rejected.
The toilets—smaller than a trailer, but bigger than a Port-a-Potty—use a pump system called a vacuum macerator that pulls waste upward and allows water to flow down into toilets and sinks, allowing them to have running water without expensive plumbing. A bigger innovation (or downside, if you prefer your toilets low-tech and accessible right this second) is that the new restrooms only be accessible via an app, a QR code, text message, or an entry card. The first three options allow Throne to keep track of user ratings and to pinpoint which users are causing damage or overstaying the restrooms’ ten-minute limit, while the fourth is intended to make the restrooms accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a working phone.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
The proposed toilets, which will be installed through a contract with the Seattle Department of Transportation, are “not a perfect solution, but right now, if you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the day, there’s nothing for anyone unless you go to spend money in a business,” said Lisa Howard, executive director of the Alliance for Pioneer Square. “The other advantage of the pilot is that they’re looking at things that didn’t work out for X, Y, or Z reasons” in the past, Howard said.
Throne is working on several other contracts with local transportation agencies, including King County Metro, whose spokesman confirmed that it will be replacing two existing portable restrooms at the Burien Transit Center and the Aurora Village Transit Center in Shoreline at an estimated cost of $270,000 a year.
Jessica Heinzelman, who co-founded Throne Labs along with Fletcher Wilson and Ben Clark, said Throne toilets have succeeded in places where other types of mobile restrooms have failed because they “create accountability”—if someone trashes a restroom or smokes in it, for instance, the company can generally pinpoint their identity using sensors in the unit or from negative user reviews immediately after that person left.
“What we learned as we started talking to folks in the public space is, even when there are restrooms, if it’s getting vandalized, or if there’s shit smeared all over the wall, they just shut it down, and they don’t necessarily have the operational capacity to deal with that, and so people kind of stop counting on them,” Heinzelman said. “So [the question was], How do you offer publicly available private space and keep it nice and mitigate against misuse [by] the 1 percent of users that fuck up bathrooms for the other 99 percent?”
SDOT public space manager Joel Miller acknowledged that this kind of “accountability” could deprive some users of restroom access. “If somebody is repeatedly damaging the unit so it is going offline and other people can’t use it, that user would eventually lose access,” Miller said. “It’s not the perfect solution, that we have someone that might need access lose access, but it’s better than everybody losing access because the unit repeatedly goes offline.”
Heinzelman said that even in “high-risk” locations like MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where lots of homeless people hang out and live, fewer than 1 percent of users end up getting banned.
“I think partially it’s because if you give people the dignity and respect of having a nice space where they have enough room to change clothes, they have running water, and they can wash their their face, they want to keep it.” Heinzelman said. She confirmed that Throne hasn’t had any discussions about card distribution with local homeless service providers, but said they plan to do so once they’ve finalized their contracts. (PubliCola contacted several local service providers and only one had heard about the restrooms).
SDOT’s Miller says the city hopes to get the restrooms up and running in Pioneer Square before the World Cup games in June. One of the two restrooms will be located outside the stadiums at First Ave S and S. Charles Street; the other will be at Second Ave. S and S. Washington St.—about a block away from PubliCola’s office.
Both Heinzelman and Miller said the restrooms have to appeal to the general public, not just unsheltered people with fewer options. “We’re talking about it as a homeless issue, and we felt like the homeless absolutely need it, but you have a sustainability problem” if the restrooms are seen as a homeless service, Henzelman said. “When budgets are slashed, what gets cut? It’s the services for the people that don’t vote or can’t advocate for themselves. [We want to] create a service that everyone wants to use and everyone wants to fund because they are personally benefiting from it, but that also enables all members of society to use it.”
Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when we spoke with him for the podcast after the DSA’s “State of Downtown” event last week. It was Scholes and Sandeep vs. me on surveillance cameras, and since this is my site, I’ll reiterate my point: Even if we must accept some level of surveillance to live in the modern world, there has to be a higher barrier for surveillance by police, who have a history of arresting Black and brown people on pretext and otherwise violating people’s rights.
Highlights from this week’s council briefing about Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to add 1,000 shelter units this year included the total estimated price tag for the first 500 units—$17.5 million—and the estimated average annual operating cost for each new shelter unit—around $28,000 for each new shelterbed.
The Pioneer Square Preservation Board and local businesses have raised objections to a proposal to install bike and scooter parking spaces in 21 curbside locations in Pioneer Square, calling the proposal too much, too fast and claiming white lines and flex posts are out of keeping with the historic character of Pioneer Square.
In a highly anticipated announcement, Mayor Katie Wilson said she’s pausing the expansion of police camera surveillance planned for the Central District and Capitol Hill until results come back from an upcoming audit into the privacy and security of the footage. She also said the city will install 26 planned cameras around the stadium district in time for this year’s World Cup games but won’t turn them on without a “credible threat.” SPD will also turn off its automated license readers, at least for now, in response to a state law placing restrictions on where they can be used.
The city of Seattle settled last week with Seattle police officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a longtime officer who sued the department in 2023, alleging gender and racial discrimination. It’s the latest in a series of discrimination claims against the department, which continues to hire very few women despite adopting a goal of having a 30 percent-female recruit class by 2030.
Mayor Wilson’s shelter expansion and funding proposals are now in front of the city council, which was not alerted to the plan before Wilson announced it. Internal questions include whether an average cost of $28,000 a year will be enough to provide the services that are integral to the plan, and whether 250 people is too large for a tiny house village.
King County’s return-to-office mandate will be in place by this June, but many employees are still unhappy about their new commutes—arguing that they don’t need to drive to Seattle and sit at a desk that may be far away from their homes to do their jobs efficiently.
Responding to the Downtown Seattle Association’s fanciful descriptions of downtown consumers (from “Laptops and Lattes” to “Top Tier”), Josh predicts a revolution in this week’s Maybe Metropolis.
King County’s beautiful Brutalist Administration Building, closed since the pandemic. Photo by Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
1. The city of Seattle finalized a settlement last week with Seattle police officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a longtime officer who sued the department in 2023, alleging gender and racial discrimination. Bouldin will receive $750,000 in an agreement that also requires her not to sue the city again over the same claims.
SPD has settled a number of discrimination lawsuits in recent years, for amounts ranging from around $200,000 (paid to SPD sergeant John O’Neil, who was himself the subject of multiple discrimination complaints) to $3 million (paid to police captain Deanna Nollette, who claimed former chief Adrian Diaz discriminated and retaliated against her by demoting her and moving her to overnight duty after she alleged discrimination.
Bouldin, best known for her chess club for students in Rainier Beach, claimed in her lawsuit that her fellow officers and SPD officials subjected her to “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis that had “been ongoing and continuous throughout her entire career.” Among other allegations, Bouldin said SPD staff refused to give her a parking pass, mishandled her personal property, and retaliated against her when she complained about officers who allowed their dogs to “roam around” SPD’s south precinct.
The size of the settlement is unclear. Bouldin’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
The City Attorney’s office would not say how much the settlement was for. In the initial tort claim that preceded the lawsuit, Bouldin sought $10 million from the city, according to media reports.
In a statement, City Attorney Erika Evans said Bouldin “is a pioneer at the Seattle Police Department who has been a beloved and deeply trusted presence in our community for decades. The City is thankful this case was able to resolve.”
2. The city council is poised to consider legislation that would make it easier for the city to site and build tiny house villages, but the three bills—sent down by Mayor Katie Wilson without prior conversation with council members or staff—will likely face scrutiny.
Two of the proposals—one that would provide about $5 million in funding for future tiny house villages, and another that would allow the city itself to lease and prepare land for shelters—do not have committee assignments yet. The other, which would increase the maximum size of tiny house villages from 100 people to as many as 250, is sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster and will be heard in Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee.
It isn’t the cost of the proposal itself that’s currently raising eyebrows on the council: Most of the funding would come out of this year’s budget, which already includes money for shelter that can be used to build out the first set of 500 beds Wilson wants to add before the World Cup games in June.
Instead, councilmembers are raising questions about the size of the potential shelters (there’s a big difference between 25 to 50 tiny house units and hundreds), the fact that Wilson seems committed to tiny houses, specifically (Jon Grant, her chief homelessness advisor, worked at the city’s main tiny house village provider, the Low Income Housing Institute, immediately before joining Wilson’s office), and the level of services the new shelters will be able to provide for an average cost of $28,000, which is less than existing shelters that provide 24/7 on-site staff and wraparound support for chronically homeless people.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Behind the scenes, councilmembers have grumbled that Wilson didn’t work with them before dropping her legislation in an announcement that only Rob Saka, whose district includes SoDo and other areas with a large number of unsanctioned encampments and RVs, attended.
3. By June, most King County employees will be required to work from physical offices three days a week, and many employees are pushing back. (Seattle also has varyingin-office mandates that we’ve coveredextensively.) Editor’s note: This sentence has been corrected to reflect that June, not March 30, is the general deadline for Return To Office. According to the county executive’s office, different departments are implementing the new mandate on different timelines.
In a recent internal newsletter, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay expressed his “commitment to building a Better Government includes listening to staff and empowering you to identify challenges and bring forward solutions” [emphasis in original]. Some county employees, taking him at his word, used the newsletter as a forum to express their frustration with the mandate.
King County covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many King County staffers do not live in or near Seattle, where the county’s central office space is located. Several noted that their jobs require them to go to far-flung locations; forcing them to commute to an office downtown will mean sitting in a cubicle and attending meetings remotely instead, they argued.
A number of staffers said the return-to-office mandate takes away valuable family and leisure time, contributes to stress and demoralization, and costs real money. “As a blanket and rigid policy, it disproportionately harms parents and caregivers who must secure new, costly childcare to cover mandated office days,” one staffer wrote. “It places the greatest strain on lower-wage workers and especially single working parents. The mandate forces parents to spend less time with their children, so they can sit in a cubicle alone with a headset, taking the same Teams calls they would at home. It forces employees to budget for new expenses (childcare, gas, parking, etc.) in a burgeoning recession when gas, groceries, and utility prices are on the rise.”
“Many staff moved to more affordable housing when positions were fully remote. That is how many of us are surviving,” another staffer wrote. “The long-term effects of this lowered productivity will negatively impact the work we do and the providers we support.”
Several staffers raised concerns about crowding in the county’s downtown office spaces, including King Street Center and the Chinook Building. The county scaled back on office space during the pandemic, and is now scrambling to find places for workers to sit. One staffer from the Department of Public Defense said staffers will now be forced to conduct client interviews from offices where three desks have been crammed into spaces built for one, compromising confidentiality in the name of “boots on the ground” and office camaraderie.
Asked about the employees’ concerns, Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said the executive wasn’t taking a “one-size-fits-all approach” and has, for example, allowed employees to meet their return-to-office requirements by working from county offices outside downtown Seattle. “Departments are currently developing plans to meet the three-day in-office expectation while continuing to preserve telework flexibility where possible,” Craighead said. “This includes coordinating in-office schedules and using existing space creatively.”
Responding to concerns about new expenses and the need for work-life balance, Craighead said, “The Executive recognizes that employees are balancing many considerations, including commute times and family responsibilities. As the father of a newborn and a toddler, he understands firsthand how important flexibility is for working families. His goal is to strike a thoughtful balance between maintaining the flexibility we value and strengthening in-person collaboration so the County can continue delivering strong results for residents.”
The Wilson Administration’s ambitious schedule for opening up 500 new shelter beds.
By Erica C. Barnett
On Monday, the Seattle City Council got its first, partial look at Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to build 500 new shelter units by the end of May, and 1,000 before 2027. The mayor’s office is waiting until later this month to announce the sites they’ve identified for the first few new tiny house villages, so the briefing was mostly an opportunity for the council to ask questions about the proposal—including how much new money it will require, how the mayor’s office plans to get buy-in from neighborhood residents, and why the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), which manages the region’s shelter contracts, has been effectively cut out of the proposal.
The biggest news to come out of the briefing was the total estimated price tag for the first 500 units. According to city Budget Director Aly Pennucci, the mayor’s office has identified about $17.5 million to pay for the first 500 units. That number includes$4.8 million Wilson’s team previously identified from an underutilized Community Development Block Grant revolving loan ($3.3 million) and unused funds from a downtown development fee program dating back to the 1980s ($1.5 million), plus shelter funding from the city’s 2026 budget that hasn’t been spent yet. The average annual operating cost for each new shelter unit, according to Pennucci, will be around $28,000 for each new shelterbed.
That number is be lower than the cost of tiny house villages that feature the range of services, including case management, meals, and 24/7 on-site staff, that Wilson said would be among distinguishing features of the new shelters. For instance, the city allocated $5.9 million to the Low Income Housing Institute to add about 100 new tiny houses last year.
According to the mayor’s office, the $28,000 figure assumes that some shelters will cost less than the ones serving “high-acuity” clients, while some will cost more. In addition, some that are located on publicly owned land may end up paying essentially no rent, if the city can work out a deal with the owners.
At the same time, the legislation would allow the city to lease land at market rate, opening up more potential sites at a higher cost.
“We know that without services, these shelters are not successful, [and] because the people who cause the most disorder and have the highest impact on our community are people who have high needs and high acuity, we know we need 24/7 staffing,” Wilson’s chief of staff Kate Kreuzer said. “We want case management. We want integrated behavioral health support, so that when people come inside, they have the services they need, and then that is getting them on a pathway to housing.”
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
In addition to a bill that would allocate the $4.8 million, Wilson’s office sent legislation to the council that would allow the city’s Human Service Department to select shelter providers directly and allow the department of Finance and Administrative Services to lease the property for new shelters itself. If it’s approved, this streamlined procedure would sidestep the KCRHA and bypass the usual 9- to-12-month process for siting shelters, which includes a competitive bidding process and requires providers to negotiate their own leases, permitting, and site preparation.
Nicole Vallestero-Soper, Wilson’s director of policy and innovation, said the first shelters could open as soon as next month. Wilson’s land use bills will likely go through Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee, and the financing will probably go through Dan Strauss’ budget committee.
Councilmember Bob Kettle, seeming to conflate “housing first” with tiny house villages, said he supported the idea of “housing first” if it was a “photo finish with wraparound services” that would not include the kind of “actions that really allow [unsheltered people] to not be ready” to come inside. (Wilson’s plan is more “shelter-first” than “housing first,” in that it consists mostly of new shelter, not rapid rehousing for chronically homeless individuals).
“I really think that the services piece is key, and then setting [people] up for success is the encouragement piece, as opposed to making it easier to stay outside, for example, because there’s a lot of service-resistant folks,” Kettle said. Service providers generally reject the notion that unsheltered people are “service-resistant” or that people live outdoors because it’s “easy,” arguing that there are valid reasons people avoid shelter and services that have failed before, such as shelters that prohibit pets and programs that kick people out for failing to maintain sobriety.
As we reported earlier this month, Wilson’s office did not preview the shelter proposal for the council or secure support in advance, which has been the practice with previous administrations. According to Lin’s office, he has outstanding questions about how the Wilson administration plans to rapidly scale up shelter, how the mayor’s office will measure success, and what role the city will play in engaging with the people living near new shelter sites.
After taking office, new City Attorney Erika Evans discovered a backlog of thousands of cases left over from her predecessor, Ann Davison. The reasons for the backlog are complex, but Evans says she’s taking one step she believes will help: Reorganizing the city attorney’s office so that each case is handled by a single attorney from the beginning.
This week’s podcast was all about Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to add 1,000 shelter beds—primarily by building more, and larger, tiny house villages—before the end of 2026. We talked about what it will mean if Wilson is successful, particularly for those living in tiny houses while they wait for actual housing, which is expensive and challenging to site.
The Seattle Police Department announced a still-unreleased report showing that when its Real Time Crime Center (home to SPD’s controversial surveillance cameras) is involved in a criminal case, SPD is three times as likely to make an arrest. Although SPD framed an increase in arrests as “victims getting justice,” they did not respond to our questions about whether these were justified arrests or if they led to prosecutions or convictions.
Three local right-wing activists (including one, former FOX13 reporter Brandi Kruse, who has posted repeatedly on X, “I am not a journalist”) got big mad when they were denied access to a special press area in the state House chamber. They sued, and are currently losing. The guidelines for press credentials in Olympia are content neutral, but they do require that reporters are primarily engaged in news gathering and not working on behalf of political campaigns or for advocacy groups—a low bar all three activists failed to meet.
KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” invited guest Angela Rye on their show to attempt to discredit my reporting about staff complaints against the director and deputy director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. In a 10-minute segment, Rye claimed, inaccurately, that I had written an “unsourced” story with false information as part of a broader effort by Mayor Wilson and her deputy mayor, Brian Surratt, to remove Black leaders and other Bruce Harrell appointees from city departments. (Both Harrell and Wilson, like all mayors, replaced some of their predecessor’s department heads.) This week, KIRO ignored all my efforts to correct the record and explain my reporting process.
During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, Mayor Wilson cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event—framing a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority.
