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.”
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.
DESC’s Steven’s Place offers permanent supportive housing for single adults in Interbay. The Trump Administration wants to limit funding for this type of housing for chronically homeless people.
By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle’s permanent supportive housing programs got a temporary reprieve from federal funding cuts last week, when the US Department of Housing and Urban Development walked back its new rules limiting the kind of housing programs that are eligible for federal assistance.
HUD abruptly decided to change how it funds local homelessness programs in November, imposing new restrictions on agencies like the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in the middle of a two-year funding cycle. Among other changes, the new rules would have eliminated most federal funding for permanent housing and required nonprofits to make ideological commitments against trans people and racial equity.
In the Seattle area, more than 90 percent of funds currently go to permanent housing, so the abrupt, midstream change threatened to cause chaos in Seattle’s housing system and put thousands of people on the street.
The National Alliance to End Homelessness, along with King County and other jurisdictions, sued HUD over the changes, and got a preliminary injunction from US District Judge Mary McElroy of Rhode Island in December, which initially prompted HUD to announce it was holding off off on the funding process indefinitely, leaving agencies that rely on federal funding in limbo.
Last week, though, HUD changed course, announcing it will operate under existing rules for this year’s funding applications as long as that injunction remains in place. The announcement doesn’t mean local agencies will get funds, but it does allow them to continue applying for federal dollars under pre-Trump rules.
The reprieve doesn’t exactly have local agencies and housing advocates breathing a sigh of relief. For one thing, even if Judge McElroy issues a permanent injunction (which could happen in early February), HUD could still challenge it, putting the case on a fast track to a Trump-friendly Supreme Court.
Even if federal funding for homelessness comes through as usual this year, experts who spoke to PubliCola said they expect the 2026 federal funding application to have the same restrictions as the one that’s currently being challenged in court, meaning that even in the best-case scenario, housing providers and the local governments that help fund them have just one extra year to figure out how to stay afloat without the kind of federal funding they’ve always relied on.
“For supportive housing of the kind we do, this money is a goner,” said Daniel Malone, head of the Downtown Emergency Service Center—the region’s largest recipient of HUD homelessness dollars. “The question is whether it’s now or later.” Malone is hoping the injunction stands, because at least “that kicks it out to the latter part of 2027 before it becomes a financial crisis.”
Last Thursday, about 40 local leaders, including representatives from advocacy groups, providers, Mayor Katie Wilson’s office, and all nine council offices, met to discuss the federal funding situation, including the current uncertainty about next year.
“We’re trying to pull together a strategy for how we move forward” in the absence of federal funding in 2027 and beyond, said Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who now chairs the council’s human service committee. “Part of the long-term sustainability conversation will be, how do we restructure and prioritize local dollars?” This includes the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s annual budget, which comes primarily from Seattle and King County, Rinck said. The city and county are both facing tens of millions in projected budget deficits starting in 2027 and 2028, respectively.
A 14-point plan for incoming Mayor Wilson, a new police contract that raises cops’ pay another 42 percent, a parking enforcement labor slowdown, and more.
Josh and I laid out a 14-point PubliCola manifesto for incoming mayor Katie Wilson, including everything from revamping the city’s comprehensive plan to allow more housing across the city, to building Park- and School-Oriented Transit. Also: Get rid of special rules that have enabled SPD to evade public disclosure and empowered mayor after mayor to sweep people living unsheltered without notice or assistance.
After announcing new rules for federal homelessness funding designed to defund permanent housing and housing-first programs, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development abruptly yanked its call for funding applications without specifying why—or when the application process will open again. The upshot is that programs serving thousands of people could face funding gaps starting early next year.
In a split vote (with Rinck, Lin, and Saka voting “no”), the city council approved yet another round of generous pay increases for cops, without the accountability measures that were promised when the city approved 23 percent retroactive pay hikes for police last year. While the new contract allows the CARE Team of unarmed first responders to expand and respond to some 911 calls without police in tow, it also imposes many new restrictions; for instance, CARE can’t respond to crisis calls if drug paraphernalia (like foil) is present or if it appears any “crime has occurred.”
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On the heels of the contract adoption, Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson announced that she’ll be keeping Police Chief Shon Barnes, along with the heads of Seattle’s other public safety departments, saying she expected him “to make SPD a place where professionalism, integrity, compassion, and community partnership are at the center of every action.”
After two years of negotiations with the city, the Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers Guild authorized a “realignment of enforcement priorities”—essentially, a work slowdown—to signal to city negotiators that they need a better contract. The issues at play include pay—parking officers’ pay is capped at $37 an hour, which the union argues is too low—and working conditions, like having to respond to calls on unpaid lunch breaks.
On the fourth anniversary of the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed some of the big stories of the week, including the new police contract, Wilson’s decision to retain SPD chief Barnes, and what HUD’s decision to yank its annual homeless program funding application might mean for people experiencing homelessness in Seattle (and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.)
On Tuesday, right before a court hearing in the lawsuit filed by Washington State and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced that it’s pulling the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for homeless investments—the subject of the lawsuit.
HUD filed a “notice of withdrawal” in the Rhode Island federal district court where the case is being heard, and claimed in their filing that the issues the state and NAEH raise in the lawsuit are now “moot.” The judge in the case, District Judge Mary McElroy, said the federal government’s last-minute withdrawal “feels like intentional chaos” during a hearing on Monday.
Local agency and elected leaders and a spokesperson for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority told PubliCola they’re still trying to figure out what the decision means for local agencies that rely on federal funds. HUD’s one-paragraph announcement shed little light on the timeline or potential changes, saying only that “the withdrawal will allow the Department to make appropriate revisions to the NOFO, and the Department intends to do so.”
The NOFO—there’s simply no way of getting around the acronym— is an annual funding process for homelessness programs, administered in the Seattle region by the KCRHA, acting as the region’s Continuum of Care. A mandatory committee, the Continuum of Care Board, considers a consolidated regional application for funds each year and approves it for transmission to HUD.
As we reported last month, HUD’s latest NOFO includes many provisions that could exclude KCRHA and other CoCs in blue states and cities from receiving funds, including provisions that prohibit funding for programs that acknowledge and accommodate trans and nonbinary people, those that help specific racial minorities, and those that allow—or have ever allowed—drug use on site.
Beyond those restrictions, the new NOFO also strictly limits funding for permanent housing of all types, from rapid rehousing vouchers to service-rich permanent supportive housing, to 30 percent of total NOFO funding. In Seattle, where more than 90 percent of HUD funding pays for permanent housing, this new restriction alone could put thousands of housed people back onto streets or into the overtaxed shelter system.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency has been planning since last month for the impacts of the delayed NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The November announcement left housing and service providers with just two months to submit new applications under completely different rules by January, with decisions from HUD coming down in May; now, it’s unclear when HUD will release a new version of the NOFO and what kind of restrictions on funding it will include.
According to Edge, some current homeless service contracts were scheduled for renewal in February, March, and April; if the NOFO gets delayed further, pushing back the January deadline for applications, even more contracts may expire without new funding, depriving these housing programs of federal funds.
Slide from KCRHA Continuum of Care board presentation illustrating the “hungry hungry hippo” nature of the competition for federal funding
One step KCRHA is taking to improve its competitiveness for federal funding is a new recruitment push that’s partly aimed at getting elected officials and at least one representative from law enforcement to join its Continuum of Care board. NOFO applications are judged on points; under the NOFO that HUD just pulled, the federal agency planned to allocate extra points for CoCs that have at least three elected officials, and at least one law enforcement official, on the board.
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Under its original 2020 charter, the CoC board was composed largely of members of the Lived Experience Coalition, an advocacy group, and is still made up largely of people with direct, sometimes current, experience with homelessness. The board has had its share of controversy over the years, including a meeting that devolved into a shouting match over the nomination of a man who’d been convicted of multiple sexual offenses involving minors as young as 13.
Since that controversy, the agency has tried to add more homeless service providers to the board and bring more conventional professionalism to its work. CoC meetings are generally less structured than typical government meetings, and often spin out into conversations about topics that are tangential to the official agenda; last week, for instance, a CoC meeting about the new NOFO included a digressive debate about whether a “dog catcher,” which is not an elected position, would have particular insights about homelessness that would make them a valuable elected addition to the board.
Later in that meeting, multiple board members appeared to be learning about the changes to federal funding requirements for the first time, asking a staffer questions about how the overall NOFO process works and what the potential impact of the changes will be.
Channeling the original Wilsonian 14 Points, we offer 14 policy suggestions for incoming mayor Wilson.
By Erica C. Barnett and Josh Feit
Seattle Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson doesn’t fit the old-school Seattle leftist stereotype personified by avenger socialists and NIMBYs who have historically aligned in a reactionary nativist coalition to oppose new housing. Wilson is too 21st century for such hokey self-righteousness. She’s more AOC than Bernie Bro—a nerd who examines the numbers, facts, and human consequences of city policies. We are confident her measured MO will guide her inspirational affordability agenda.
Channeling the original version of Wilsonianism, we hope the mayor-elect will consider the aspirational PubliCola agenda we’re laying out below with our 14-Point manifesto.
1. Reopen the Comprehensive Plan
The city’s comprehensive plan—the document that governs future growth in Seattle—was supposed to be finished in 2024, but got delayedagain and again by the torpid Harrell administration, which revised the plan repeatedly to lower (then slightly increase from that nadir) density limits. The city council still hasn’t passed the entire plan, pushing the zoning details off until 2026, along with the fate of urbanist amendments that died this year,.
A “docketing resolution” for next year will take up proposals to restore nine neighborhood centers—central nodes in neighborhoods where apartments will be allowed. (Harrell had city planners remove these higher-density areas from his proposal, so the city never fully studied them). Other proposals the council punted this year include the elimination of minimum parking requirements and a proposal to allow apartment buildings taller than six stories in neighborhood centers near frequent transit stops.
We think these changes are necessary and that the council should pass them as soon as possible next year. But since the comp plan is already delayed, why not take some more time with it and get the right plan for this urbanist moment?
Our modest—if aspirational—proposal: Wilson should send down legislation to allow allow six-story apartment buildings everywhere—and use her organizing chops to drum up support for the idea among renters, who’ve been the loudest voices opposing Harrell’s plan to preserve Seattle’s exclusionary status quo.
Maritza Rivera is going to fume that there hasn’t been enough “outreach and engagement” to single-family homeowners no matter what you do, so you might as well go big.
Oh, and while you’re at it? Allow bars and restaurants, not just small convenience and grocery stores, in every neighborhood—and let them stay open past 10pm!!—ECB
2. Funded Inclusionary Zoning (FIZ)
The problem with the noble policy of forcing developers to include affordable housing in any new multifamily development is that the projects often don’t pencil out. In turn, nothing gets built at all. Seattle’s mandatory housing affordability program (MHA), an inclusionary zoning mandate that requires developers to either include affordable units in new buildings or pay into a fund to support affordable housing construction, has actually contributed to a drop-off in new housing development.
Taking a cue from Portland, where a successful inclusionary zoning program recently saw projects worth hundreds of new units opt in during its first six months, Wilson should do the unthinkable: Give developers a property tax break to make the mandate pencil out. In other words, we shouldn’t tax things we want (affordable housing) by raising the cost of building it. We should encourage it by making affordable housing profitable to build.
Before you gasp at the idea of giving developers a tax break for building affordable housing, consider: We have a longstanding program, the state’s multifamily tax exemption (MFTE) program, that does just that. The problem is: That program isn’t a mandate. Developers don’t have to build affordable housing if they don’t want to.
FIZ, Funded Inclusionary Zoning, would combine the two affordable housing housing programs the city already relies on, MHA and MFTE—coupling the mandate to include affordable housing and the tax break to build it. —JF
3. The Night Mayor
The City’s Office of Economic Development has a Nightlife Business Services Advocate. Their job is to help after-dark venues like nightclubs and bars navigate licensing and compliance. Under Mayor Wilson, the role should be expanded beyond entertainment to support a full-blown evening ecosystem. Let’s have a well-staffed Office of the Night Mayor to promote, coordinate, and support a city that not only has vibrant nighttime businesses (tax breaks to help daytime businesses stay open later, please), but also weaves social services, night owl buses and shuttles, and vital commerce like drugstores into a thrumming evening environment that serves and supports everyone from night shift workers to 9-to-5ers who need to get shit done in the evening.
First initiative the Office of the Night Mayor: Identify murky streets and make them safer and more navigable with new lighting. Light it up, Mayor Wilson. —JF
4. Let CARE do their jobs
The city council is preparing to rubber-stamp the latest contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild, which has already been effectively approved by the five-member council majority who sit on the city’s contract negotiating team. We’d be happy—and impressed—to see the council reject and reopen the contract to add some real accountability measures in exchange for paying new officers $126,000 a year, but we’re not holding our breath.
One thing that can be reopened without a huge political lift, however, is the memorandum of understanding SPD signed with CARE—the Community Assisted Response and Engagement Team. While Harrell touted the fact that the new agreement will allow CARE to respond to low-risk 911 calls without a police escort, the MOU imposes new rules on the team that will make it hard to respond to most crisis calls.
Under the new rules, CARE responders can only respond to people who are physically outdoors, not inside a vehicle or any indoor space, and must abort the response effort if they see any indication a person has been using drugs or has committed any type of crime. They’re also banned from responding to encampments or if a person appears to be having a serious mental health crisis, among many other new restrictions.
These rules, which prohibit CARE from responding in most of the situations where they would be most useful, are untenable and will harm CARE’s ability to provide an alternative to sending armed officers to deal with people in crisis.
Given that the city just added $7 million to the budget to expand the CARE Team to 48 responders, it’s critical that the city allows them to do their jobs, even if the police union opposes it. —ECB
5. The Urban Pass
Inspired by NYC’s successful congestion pricing program (which has dramatically reduced car traffic, increased travel speeds, decreased greenhouse gas emissions, and is on track to raise $500 million its first year), Wilson should institute an Urban Pass for Seattle.
The Urban Pass would riff on the basic congestion pricing concept: Drivers could buy the pass for a monthly fee, which would give them discounted parking in the city’s 32 paid parking zones—districts that correspond to the highest-demand destinations in the city, such as Capitol Hill, Ballard, and South Lake Union.
Unlike NYC’s congestion pricing revenue, however, the money wouldn’t go to the transportation budget. Instead, it would fund multi-family housing in the low-density neighborhoods where many of the visitors to these high-demand areas live—including outside the city of Seattle. Clearly, the people who drive in to visit popular neighborhoods are fond of density too. So let’s give them some.
Adding more housing in low-density neighborhoods would also make frequent transit more sustainable in these parts of our city and the region. (As for the loss to the city on parking fees, SDOT should raise those base prices in concert with the Urban Pass discounts.) During her campaign, Wilson praised NYC’s congestion pricing model. Now that she’s in office, we hope she was in earnest. —JF
6. Make City Government Transparent Again
In recent years, we’ve seen the city moving to limit access to public information on every front, a trend that only accelerated during and after the pandemic. While the mayor can’t take direct action against individual public information officers who use their city positions to dissemble and mislead, she can set a tone of transparency with a few simple, immediate actions.
Start with the department that has the greatest aversion to transparency, SPD, by revising the 2017 city rule that the police department has been using to justify sitting on public disclosure requests for years. Under this rule, public disclosure officers are allowed to “group” multiple requests into a single request and to consider records requests from the same person or outlet consecutively rather than simultaneously. SPD has interpreted this rule to mean they are allowed to add any new requests from the same person into one giant mega-request, considering one sub-request at a time and putting any new requests at the back of the line. Instead of waiting for the Seattle Times to prevail in litigation (the Times is suing SPD over its anti-disclosure practices), just get rid of grouping altogether and make SPD’s public disclosure unit live up to its name.
Second: Hold open press briefings. Mike McGinn had his issues (and we reported on them), but one of his best moves was to periodically hold open meetings for the press with nothing specific on the agenda. Sitting at the table, rather than standing behind a rostrum, McGinn would take questions on just about any topic—a practice that not only made it possible for non-mainstream outlets to talk to the mayor directly on a regular basis, but that gave McGinn credibility as a mayor who valued transparency and was capable of answering detailed policy questions without a press staffer hovering nervously nearby to redirect and cut off questions. (The visually boring format also cut down on TV reporters with gotcha questions). The non-mainstream press will love you for having real conversations with us after four years of scripted responses, and the public will appreciate your commitment to open and transparent dialogue.
Third: Bring back the city directory! Former mayor Jenny Durkan removed the directory of city employees’ phone numbers and email addresses from the city’s website in July 2021, saying the underlying database was out of date. A promised “replacement solution” for this resource, which was the only place the public could access contact information for most people who work at the city, never materialized, and PubliCola has been periodically updating our own public database of city employees ever since. (It’s currently out of date because the city has been dragging its feet on my latest records request for the information, which I filed in June.). Restoring the directory—and bringing Seattle in line with state agencies and King County, whose employee directories are public—would signal transparency and bring back a resource many Seattle residents seeking to reach the right person at the city directly once found indispensable. —ECB
7. You’ve Heard of Transit Oriented Development (TOD). It’s Time for Parks and Schools Oriented Development—POD and SOD.
Since Erica is calling on Wilson to re-open the Comprehensive Plan (and rightfully so, given Mayor Harrell’s years of disinterest at best and outright sabotage at worst), let me propose two comp plan amendments: Upzones around parks and upzones around schools. The city’s highest-performing schools and most salubrious parks seem to serve more affluent and lower-density neighborhoods, meaning a privileged economic class has better access to them. Let’s make it so more people, including renters, can live near parks and schools by building more apartments nearby. —JF
8. Shady Zones
NIMBYs have successfully weaponized tree canopy as a tool for stopping new development.
For the record: Urbanists are pro-tree canopy. Instead of building single homes on single lots (which required sprawl and deforestation in the first place) urbanists are for building more densely, which by definition houses more people—leaving more room for greenery.
But as the Anthropocene accelerates into potential catastrophe, cities will need more sources of shade than tree canopy alone. YIMBYs should flip the script and weaponize development as shorthand for shade. To counter the shadows-are-bad mantra that has dominated building permit debates for decades, pro-development voices need to point out that the built environment can be a source of protection and cooling.
Ever find yourself choosing the shady side of the street on downtown sidewalks, seeking refuge in the cover of buildings? To fashion a truly resilient city, we need to start thinking in terms of awnings, walls, gazebos, park shelters, and yes, buildings themselves as vital cover from the extreme impacts of climate change.
We’re looking to Mayor Shady Wilson to add cooling infrastructure to the city’s resiliency agenda. —JF
9. Close the Sweeps Loophole
Another rule that’s ripe for revisiting is a city policy that has empowered Harrell’s Unified Care Team, a 116-member group of city employees that removes encampments, to sweep people and tents from public spaces with little or no notice and no referrals to shelter or other services.
The rule was designed to guarantee 72 hours’ notice and a referral to shelter before the city sweeps an encampment. But it contains a loophole previous mayors have exploited to sweep people from place to place for years. The rule allows sweeps with no notice or offer of shelter or services if an encampment constitutes a hazard or “obstruction”—a term Durkan and Harrell both interpreted broadly to include anyone located on public property. Editing this legislation to define “hazards” and “obstructions” narrowly will reduce the number of pointless sweeps, like the ones that have been going on for months Ballard, and make it less common for encampment residents to lose everything, including contact with their case managers, when they have to move. Pitching a tent in the middle of a heavily used playfield is an obvious obstruction, while sleeping in a secluded area of a public park obstructs nothing.
Homelessness will be a defining issue of Wilson’s tenure, so this is just one of many necessary steps. We think it’s a prerequisite for ending the kind of indiscriminate sweeps Wilson campaigned against.—ECB
10. Transit Validation
Just as big employers subsidize ORCA cards, so should big destinations: Lumen Field. T-Mobile Park. Climate Pledge Arena. Benaroya Hall. McCaw Hall. All these spots—particularly Benaroya, which is literally a stop on the Link light rail line—should zap a discount back into your ORCA card when they scan your ticket. (Three cheers to Pacific Science Center, one institution that already does a version of this. And I know Climate Pledge has its own Kraken app that includes free transit, but it’s the opposite of user-friendly and should just be rolled in with the ORCA pass).
As her first agenda item as a Sound Transit board member, Mayor Wilson, the former Transit Riders Union leader, should champion a program to subsidize rides to our city’s cultural destinations. —JF
11. Free the street vendors!
The city and county have made a very big deal recently about their efforts to crack down on street food vendors who lack the proper permits, but haven’t exactly made our city a hospitable place for licensed food vendors to operate legally in the first place. The city currently requires food trucks and street vendors to navigate a byzantine maze of rules and restrictions. For example, if you want to sell food near a residential area or public park, that requires a whole secondary approval process. This approach treats vendors like industrial polluters that should be kept away from people and each other rather than amenities that improve neighborhoods and commercial districts.
Launch a full assessment of the city’s street vending rules and get rid of unnecessary red tape that keeps people in most parts of Seattle from enjoying tacos, soft serve, kebabs, and all other kinds of portable food. The people want to eat! —ECB
12. The Bench Agenda
You know how the former Bloomberg administration in NYC is famous for building more than 300 miles of bike lanes? The Wilson administration should seek a similar legacy by flooding Seattle with benches. Start with a bench at every bus stop, complete with shelter to dovetail with the shade zones. But we also need benches dotting parks, in commercial hubs, in residential areas. And no—correlation fallacy!—benches don’t increase the homeless population. Homelessness already exists. Benches can simply make it more visible. Giving homeless people a place to rest isn’t such a bad thing. —JF
13. Defund (parts of) the Police
Wilson’s detractors, including the $1.8 million pro-Harrell PAC, tried to claim she plans to defund the police (and is responsible for the entire police defunding movement), an absurd but inflammatory claim that probably alarmed some people into supporting the incumbent. In a recent interview with Seattle Nice, Wilson reiterated that she supports hiring more officers and has no interest in defunding the police themselves, but is open to looking closely at spending on nonessential functions.
Our proposal, to paraphrase centrist city council members elected in 2023: Audit the fucking police budget (that is, examine discretionary spending and recent adds), and pare back spending on stuff we don’t need and that is actively harming communities.
One easy target: SPD’s Real Time Crime Center and surveillance cameras, which, under Harrell, have begun to proliferate in neighborhoods across the city. Harrell and SPD tried to ease civil liberties concerns by claiming it’s essentially impossible for the federal government to get hold of footage from the 24/7 cameras. But all the Trump Administration really needs is a subpoena—or a cop with access to the footage and an axe to grind against immigrants or people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care.
Police surveillance cameras have been around for decades, and there’s little evidence that they make a meaningful impact on crime. The cops dispute this, as do Harrell and other pro-surveillance officials around the country. But even if the cameras do occasionally provide evidence that SPD couldn’t get another way (such as the vast network of private cameras they’ve always used in investigations), that isn’t a worthwhile tradeoff for expanding surveillance in the age of Trump. We don’t have to build the panopticon! —ECB
14. Hang Out with State Sen. Jessica Bateman
Mayor Wilson: As you fill up your calendar with important get-to-know-you meetings, please set aside some time to meet with Olympia’s pro-housing, pro-density, pro-city rock star state Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22). Bateman, of course, is the mastermind behind HB 1110, which forced foot-dragging cities like Seattle to allow four-unit multi-family housing (up to six-units if two of the units are affordable) anywhere single-family housing is allowed.
Mayor Harrell spent his time in quibblingobstructionismwith 1110. Our suggestion to make Bateman your besty is our way of telling you to support rather than subvert the state’s progressive housing agenda, which has lapped Seattle’s progress toward density over the last decade.
Word is the upcoming session will come with pro-housing ideas like a land value tax, which would target low and underused properties like parking lots, prompting land owners to do more useful things like build housing. Seattle should be at the forefront supporting these efforts. —JF
That’s it for our Wilsonian 14 Points. Now, here are some low-hanging quick hits:
Tax new pickleball facilities to expand public access to youth sports.
Instead of pouring millions into “graffiti rangers” and other nonsense, create a fund that provides small grants to business owners for removing graffiti on their property.
Figure out this scooter and e-bike stuff—you can start by banning Class 2 e-bikes with throttles, which are just small electric motorcycles, from shared trails used by cyclists and pedestrians. (Washington Bikes is working at the state level to regulate higher-powered “e-motos,” which can go faster than the speediest e-bikes.)
Seize the opportunity (instead of “grabbing the ball”): Don’t speak in sports metaphors.
