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.
An interview with Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson, federal cuts that could leave thousands homeless, the city council adopts a budget that pushes off hard choices, and much more.
Changes to the type of homelessness programs the Department of Housing and Urban Development will fund could slash most federal funding for permanent housing in Seattle—a shift that will force the city and King County to come up with new funding sources or allow thousands of people to fall into homelessness starting next year. We took a deep dive into the local implications of the changes.
On this week’s show, we debated how Katie Wilson won the mayor’s race, why she won it, and how incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell tried to keep her from winning it. We also discussed Harrell’s claims, during and after his concession speech, that there had been “anomalies” in King County Elections’ vote count and his insistence to the end that it’s “offensive” to ask whether he understands the affordability challenges Seattle residents face in 2025.
Incoming King County Executive Girmay Zahilay is the first new executive in 16 years, and he’s shaking up the executive’s office and county departments, announcing around 100 layoffs last week. Some staff reported feeling shocked and demoralized by the changes, which Zahilay’s transition team says are a normal part of every election.
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The city council made a number of last-minute changes after mayor-elect Wilson was elected, including provisions designed to force the new mayor to preserve the encampment-sweeping Unified Care Team, which has swelled to 116 members. The budget also bans the city from spending money on harm reduction supplies for drug users (except needle exchange, which has reached a degree of cultural acceptance even among centrists), and requires incoming city attorney Erika Evans to preserve her predecessor Ann Davison’s approach to misdemeanor drug crimes.
We had Mayor-Elect Katie Wilson on Seattle Nice this week for a wide-ranging interview about her priorities as mayor—as well as how she plans to deal with the massive budget deficits set up by Mayor Bruce Harrell and the city council and the constraints the council has placed on her administration.
The “audit the budget” cohort of councilmembers elected in 2023 haven’t cut spending as they promised during their campaigns. Instead, they’ve approved most of the new programs Mayor Harrell has proposed while adding their own. The result is a budget that plunges into nine-figure deficits starting in 2027, when incoming mayor Katie Wilson will have to figure out how to address the budget cliff her predecessor, and the council, kept pushing off.
In a packed Friday Afternoon Fizz, we reported on King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison’s visit, with The More We Love director Kristine Moreland, to learn about a Christian recovery program for homeless people in Baltimore; Mayor-Elect Wilson’s plans to simplify and reorgnize the mayor’s office; who will be the next City Council president; and my appearance on a recent episode of City Cast, the new podcast about Seattle.
1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has signed a contract with Barb Oliver, the head of tiny house builder Sound Foundations, to serve as a chief policy advisor to agency CEO Kelly Kinnison. Oliver is a longtime advocate for sheltering people in tiny houses—if you’ve ever read a Danny Westneat column about how there are tons of little freestanding shelters “just sitting around in a warehouse,” waiting to shelter people, you’ve read quotes from her. (The underlying problem isn’t really that there aren’t enough structures for people to live in, but that it’s often incredibly hard to site tiny house villages because of NIMBY objections).
According to Oliver, her title will be Senior Advisor for Special Projects. PubliCola has requested additional information about the contract, including the dollar amount, from KCRHA. Late last month, the agency eliminated 28 positions, including high-level roles like finance director and general counsel, to save money; shortly afterward, Kinnison hired five new people, including one man whose proposed hiring earlier this year led to several internal complaints by people who all ended up losing their jobs in the layoffs.
2. Earlier this month, Kinnison took a trip to Baltimore, MD with The More We Love director Kristine Moreland and Compass Housing Alliance preseident Christopher Ross to learn about a Christian recovery program operated by the Helping Up Mission in that city.
Helping Up, like Union Gospel Mission and other religious missions across the country, is an explicitly Christian organizations that requires recovery program participants to participate in religious services, a controversial practice even among some faith-based homeless service providers. Helping Up’s Spiritual Recovery Program teaches participants “Spiritual 101 through Bible studies, chapel, and discipleship,” according to the mission’s website.
The program also includes mandatory “work therapy.” According to a profile in Baltimore magazine, program participants do 80 percent of the work of running the program.
KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge described Kinnison’s trip to Baltimore as “an opportunity to learn from [Helping Up Mission’s] successes,” and said the group “partners with Johns Hopkins University, are well respected at the federal level, and provide critical resources to people experiencing homelessness.”
Asked if KCRHA hopes to invest local funding in similar groups, Edge said KCRHA already contracts with many faith-based groups, like Catholic Community Services, The Salvation Army, and Muslim Housing Services. KCRHA’s budget indicates that funding for these groups is generally limited to shelter, not religious programs like Helping Up’s addiction program.
Edge did not respond to questions about whether KCRHA plans to contract with The More We Love. The group, which Moreland started as a for-profit company selling private encampment “sweeps” to landowners, has received contracts for encampment outreach in Burien and for its “high-accountability” shelter program in Renton, which provides temporary lodging to women seeking to leave the sex trade on Aurora Ave. N.
3. Although both Dan Strauss and Bob Kettle have been rumored to be the top contenders to replace outgoing City Councilmember Sara Nelson as council president, the consensus choice appears to be a different person entirely: District 3 Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth.
4. I was on the City Cast Seattle podcast this week, talking about the local impact of federal cuts to funding for permanent housing, the changes coming to city and county government as a new mayor and King County executive take over, and what “Seattle Nice” means to me, as one-third of the Seattle Nice podcast. What does it say about me that when they asked me what I’d do with an extra $51, my brain immediately went to complaining about Seattle’s overpriced, mostly mediocre food?
5. Mayor-elect Katie Wilson is planning to reorg the mayor’s office significantly from the way it’s been run under her last several. predecessors. The biggest change, according to an internal document provided by the transition team, is that Wilson will have just one deputy mayor (and two other direct reports, a chief of staff and a director of departments), as opposed to four deputy mayors under Harrell, a setup that has led to internal power struggles and factionalism in the mayor’s office.
Having a smaller, more “clearly-delieated” team of top staff will mean everyone has a clear role, and putting one person over all the executive departments will help Wilson’s administration empower department directors (another goal outlined in the internal memo), who have often had to accept top-down direction from the Harrell administration instead of collaborating on decisions as policy experts.
My favorite suggestion in the memo, though, is “No drama”—a constant feature of Harrell’s administration. There’s a whole section about how to achieve this, but the bottom line is this: “We don’t think you should hire jerks.” What a novelty!
DESC’s Hobson Place, a permanent supportive housing development that provides housing and health care for chronically homeless people. Image via Runberg Architects.
The city and county are working on plans to offset potential federal funding cuts under the Trump Administration.
By Erica C. Barnett
Major changes to the way the federal government funds programs that house people experiencing homelessness could put most of Seattle’s homelessness system at risk at risk, and thousands of people living in the Seattle area could become homeless as soon as next year as the Trump Administration shifts homelessness funding from permanent housing to short-term transitional housing with new strings attached.
“This is another cruel policy choice intentionally designed by the Trump Regime to harm our most vulnerable community members, and once again local governments are being asked to step up to meet the moment,” Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said last week.
The potential cuts come from changes to an annual funding process known as a Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, which is administered in Seattle by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, acting as the Continuum of Care (CoC) for the Seattle region. (A spokesperson for the KCRHA did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, including phone calls and text messages, last week).
Currently, housing and rental assistance programs in Seattle and King County receive around $67 million of federal funding through this process, almost all of which—around $60 million—goes toward permanent housing. Of that amount, around $36 million, or 60 percent, pays for permanent supportive housing for people with disabling behavioral health conditions, such as severe addiction or mental illness, who need intensive case management and other services in order to stay stably housed.
Under the new rules, just 30 percent of federal funding can pay for permanent housing of any kind, including rental assistance; the rest must go toward short-term approaches like temporary housing. Assuming current funding levels, the new rules would provide less than $20 million for permanent housing, potentially putting thousands of people who are currently housed back on the street, including 4,500 in the Seattle area alone.
“This crisis should horrify and unite us,” said Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness. “[T]he ideologues are firmly embedded and the attempts to defund housing are even worse than feared.
In addition to reducing funding for housing in general, the new regulations stipulate that permanent supportive housing—a kind of service-rich long-term housing designed specifically for people whose disabling behavioral health conditions have made it impossible for them to retain housing on their own—should only be for people with physical disabilities and those who are elderly.
Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone said says this change represents a complete misunderstanding of why permanent supportive housing exists, not to mention the needs of people with physical disabilities. DESC, which receives about $20 million a year in federal funding for its permanent supportive housing and rental assistance programs, stands to lose a quarter of its supportive housing budget because of the federal changes.
“The vast majority of people with physical disabilities don’t need what you would call ‘support’—they need physical accommodations,” like wheelchair ramps and grab bars, Malone said. Permanent supportive housing provides similar accommodations for behavioral health conditions. On-site behavioral health services “are what allows someone to be successful in retaining their housing, and this administration is turning that on its head,” Malone said.
At a webinar on the changes last week, two HUD representatives, both previously affiliated with Seattle’s right-wing Discovery Institute, reportedly alarmed participants with their ignorance about the purpose of permanent housing. One, Robert Marbut, is the head of the Interagehcy Council on Homelessness. During the first Trump administration, he advocated for forcibly moving homeless people to “campuses” on the outskirts of cities on the threat of arrest. The other, Caitlyn McKenney, worked briefly as a research fellow at the Discovery Institute after graduating college in 2022; she’s now a HUD policy advisor on homelessness.
During the webinar, Marbut and McKenney told reportedly housing and service providers from around the country that they could easily follow the new rules by simply converting their permanent housing units into short-term transitional housing with mandatory treatment that would quickly cure whatever behavioral health problems people have, such as lifelong addiction or schizophrenia.
“Instead of understanding that mental illness and substance use disorder are often lifelong disease processes, HUD is instructing communities to move stably housed people by the tens of thousands into transitional housing (with a two year maximum stay) and require them to work and accept treatment, despite much evidence that this is a failed approach,” Eisinger said.
Imposing treatment and work requirements on people with long-term disabilities is also impractical, since most housing projects receive funding from many sources (such as state Low-Income Housing Tax Credits) that are earmarked for permanent housing.
On top of all that, the Trump administration has repeatedly delayed the release of the NOFO, which was supposed to come out last summer. The delay leaves housing and service providers with just two months to meet an end-of-year deadline to submit new applications under completely different rules; it also means that money for both new and existing programs won’t start flowing until later in the year, after funding for existing programs runs out.
“Homelessness is a current, large problem across the country, and they’re effectively doing something that will put federal homelessness dollars more or less on hold because they waited so long to come out with this,” Malone said.
Malone says HUD could fix the problem for this year by simply extending the existing contracts and letting providers spend the next six months coming up with new proposals before releasing another NOFO in the summer of 2026—something even Republican lawmakers, whose own districts stand to lose millions in federal funding under he new rules, have requested.
Local Solutions
It’s far from certain that the Seattle area will get the same amount of federal funding it has in the past, because the new rules penalize progressive policies adopted by most blue cities. Programs that operate on harm reduction principles, like those that allow people to use drugs on site, are no longer eligible for federal funding; those that include any kind of racial preference or explicitly acknowledge the existence of transgender people are also out. Organizations that check people’s immigration status get preferential treatment under the new rules.
Even if HUD agrees to delay its funding process until next year—a big “if,” given the Trump administration’s wrecking-ball approach to governance—the city, county, and state will need to come up with creative ways to address and offset the likely cuts. Last week, state and local leaders met to discuss options to fill the gap.
One (complex, but likely) option is to swap out funding for programs that currently rely on federal dollars, like permanent supportive housing, for programs that come closest to meeting the new criteria. The city, for example, might decide to pay for direct rental subsidies with local funds that previously paid for abstinence-based treatment, applying for federal dollars for the treatment program.
Lisa Daugaard, co-director of the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action, whose CoLEAD program moved people living in state-owned rights-of-way into housing before the state defunded it earlier this year, said, “With care and a strategic approach, it’s likely that we can put together a strong application for comparable funding to what we currently receive, but it’s also clear that much of what we propose should be different from our region’s traditional Continuum of Care package.”
This option, which would have to take place on a tight timeline, would require nonprofits that have never applied for federal funding to get up to speed on the application process and apply for funds, knowing that if they don’t get picked, their current funders (the city, county, or both) might not be able to backfill the losses. For nonprofits, that scenario creates considerable risk, and it’s still unclear what incentives the city and county might offer to make it worth their while.
Since swapping is unlikely to close a potential gap on its own, the city and county are also working to create reserves, or contingency funds, in their 2026 budgets that could help keep programs going.
This week, King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda is introducing a budget amendment that asks incoming County Executive Girmay Zahilay to propose a supplemental budget by March that establishes a reserve to address any federal funding shortage. Although the amendment doesn’t require a specific dollar amount, it does note that the total gap is at least $36 million, and calls out three types of funding—new revenues, existing county budget reserves, and any funds left unspent at the end of 2025—as sources for the reserve.
“The Continuum of Care funding is the fabric of our safety net,” Mosqueda said. “It helps people not only stay housed, but get access to the critical services they need to stabilize people. If there are going to be impossible contingencies tied to federal dollars that make it hard to not only house people but meet their health needs, we need to step up to make sure that the Continuum of Care is truly a continuum.”
County Councilmember Jorge Barón, who is supporting Mosqueda’s amendment, said the county “should be advocating and doing whatever we can to have federal support in this area—we should not give up and assume all is lost—but at the same time, we need to be cognizant of the fact that there’s risks in this area and we should prepare to have contingency funds available if the worst outcomes do turn out to be true.”
Given limited funds, Barón said, the county opted not to add a lot of new spending in this year’s budget, and to use most of the proceeds from its new public safety sales tax, about $175 million, to address its own budget deficit and preserve funding for programs that would otherwise be cut—like the Salvation Army homeless shelter in SoDo, which started during COVID and relied on federal emergency funds.
That’s a sharp contrast to the city of Seattle, where, in an election-year swan song, Mayor Bruce Harrell piled tens of millions of dollars in new spending onto an already unsustainable budget that the council is currently in the process of padding further.
In addition to Harrell priorities like graffiti removal and police surveillance, the proposed budget included $8 million in one-time funds for new shelter, plus $4 million for a new Pioneer Square encampment resolution program that would be run jointly by the Downtown Seattle Association and Purpose Dignity Action.
“The Pioneer Square effort, which could later move to other neighborhoods if continued, would bring back the same model used in the Right of Way encampment resolution program, and JustCARE before that,” in advance of the FIFA World Cup games next year, Daugaard said.
But many advocates, including Eisinger and Rinck, argue that now is not the time to invest in new homelessness programs. “We should not be spending public dollars do something new before we have secured the housing that exists,” Eisinger said. “This is a crisis. In a crisis, you have to make hard decisions. I do not in any way, shape, or form believe that we should be putting money into a whole slew of new things during an authoritarian takeover.”
Last week, Rinck passed a budget amendment that prohibits the city from spending $11.1 million of the $11.8 million allocated to the new shelter beds and the Pioneer Square encampment resolution program until at least next year, when HUD releases the details of its 2026 grants. An amendment from Councilmember Bob Kettle removed $700,000 of the total to fund a quarter of the proposed encampment pilot, for which the PDA has already master-leased an apartment building. Combined with the $9 million Harrell’s budget set aside to address federal funding cuts, the money will bring the city’s total contingency fund to $20.4 million.
Arguing for her proposal on Friday, Rinck said it was important to “pause on expansions for the next couple of months until we resolve and understand the outcome” of the changes to federal funding requirements.
Council members who support sweeps, surveillance, and graffiti vigilance expressed outrage about federal funding cuts—Maritza Rivera, referring to Trump, said, “I just can’t understand why anyone would not want to house people, feed people, care for children, care for families”—but couldn’t seem to find a spare dime in other parts of the budget to help offset those federal cuts.
In fact, the council took proactive steps to prohibit the incoming Katie Wilson administration from using city funds to pay for needs like shelter and housing in the future. Rob Saka, who delivered his own high-volume diatribe against the Trump Administration, proposed an amendment prohibiting the new administration from repurposing funds dedicated to Harrell’s newly expanded encampment sweeps team on any other purpose. After several councilmembers delivered paeans to the team and its longtime advocate, outgoing deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, they passed Saka’s spending restriction on a 6-2 vote, with Rinck voting no and Dan Strauss abstaining.
