Alexis Mercedes Rinck sits in council chambers while the rest of the council meets remotely from their offices on the other city of City Hall, where they retreated after a group of public commenters chanted and yelled at them.
By Erica C. Barnett
Hey PubliCola readers! I’ve been out of town, so posting this week was a little lighter than usual. Here’s what you may have missed:
Earlier this month, after a last-minute email complaint campaign, city officials suddenly decided that Tent City 4 could no longer move to a new location at the Lake City Community Center, setting off a chaotic week of negotiations. Eventually, the city allowed the self-managed community to move to the long-planned site, but only on a temporary basis until a more “appropriate” location can be found.
Meinert, who once owned bars and clubs around Seattle, joined a lawsuit filed by the city of Burien to overturn a voter-approved minimum wage, arguing that it conflicts with a competing measure passed by the Burien City Council while the campaign for the voter initiative was going on. The two wages, Meinert argues, make it unclear how much he’s supposed to pay staff at his restaurant in Burien.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Despite a budget shortfall and a temporary freeze on hiring for civilian positions, the Seattle Police Department is sinking up to $5.8 million into yet another recruitment ad campaign—this one by a Phoenix-based police recruitment marketing firm. Hiring is up at SPD after the city increased cops’ starting salaries to $103,000 last year.
A city council committee voted to advance legislation that will revise the city’s ethics code to allow council members to vote in their own financial interest, eliminating a law that requires council members to recuse themselves when they have a clear financial conflict of interest. The higher ethical standard has persisted for more than 40 years, including 10 under district elections—undermining council members’ argument that district council members’ constituents would be newly and uniquely disenfranchised if their representatives couldn’t vote even when they have financial conflicts.
After several days of frantic negotiations, Tent City 4—a self-managed encampment of more than 100 homeless adults and children who have been laying the groundwork for months to move from the Seattle Mennonite Church in Lake City to the site of the former Lake City Community Center—will be allowed to move. Temporarily.
“After gathering all the facts, I directed the Human Services Department to offer Share/Wheel a short-term lease at the Lake City Community Center for the next one to six months until a more appropriate location can be selected,” Harrell told PubliCola in a statement. “Share/Wheel has accepted, and this agreement is effective immediately, so all residents who rely on TC4 can access its services without interruption.”
The city has planned for months hand control of the land over to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which planned to lease the community center land, which is slated to to the encampment. But as PubliCola reported exclusively on Wednesday, encampment residents and organizers learned at the last minute that the move had been scuttled by city officials, including District 5 (North Seattle) City Councilmember Cathy Moore and Mayor Bruce Harrell, thanks at least in part of a late-breaking email campaign by opponents of the encampment.
Moore’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Michele Marchand, from SHARE/WHEEL, said that after a morning meeting with KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison and Seattle Human Services Department director Tanya Kim “went as expected with another request to stay at Mennonite church, this time for just two weeks” while the city secured an alternative site. “Camp leadership said no.” Then, at 4:30, Kim told camp residents they could move to the community center site and they “accepted, and cheered.”
The residents, Marchand said, “are SO relieved and proud of sticking together and winning this victory—feel it’s not just great for us, but also Lake City and Seattle. … Camp is in great spirits and many supporters are coming to celebrate and help move.”
Tent City 4, like other sanctioned encampments that have existed across Seattle for most of the past decade, never stays in one place permanently. It’s part of a compact with host sites like the Mennonite Church and the people living around the sanctioned encampment. Encampment residents and a church representative said that going back on their commitment to the community was not an option—which was not a problem until last week, when city officials suddenly began raising objections.
Despite this longstanding commitment, as of late Friday, Moore, Harrell, and KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison continued to insist that they were working on a deal that would allow the encampment to stay at the Mennonite Church. According to sources involved in the discussions, Harrell told Tent City 4’s supporters that he had just learned about the purported issues with the encampment’s relocation this week.
After it became clear that the city’s posture had changed toward Tent City 4, a group of 23 elected officials, including 18 state legislators and one City Councilmember, Alexis Mercedes Rinck, wrote a letter urging the city and KCRHA not to renege on their deal.
“Displacing more than 100 people now—without the support that has made Tent City 4 a stable and accountable presence_ undermines both the residents who’ve worked hard to rebuild their lives and the neighborhood that has stepped up to be part of the solution,” they wrote.
“To be clear: the situation we face today is the direct result of process failures by the City of Seattle and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. It is unacceptable for the burden of these decisions to fall on the people who live in and care about Lake City—including the residents of Tent City 4—who have acted in good faith, met every expectation, and done their part to support a dignified transition.”
It’s unclear what will happen after the agreement to allow Tent City 4 to relocate to the community center site expires. Nor did the mayor’s office or Moore explain what they found “inappropriate” about allowing the encampment to move to the former community center, which is slated for redevelopment into mixed-income affordable housing.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
As of Friday, the city was discussing two possible replacement sites—one at the former Thunderbird Treatment Center in Rainier Beach, and another at a site formerly occupied by LIHI in Interbay. Either location would likely require support from the district council member for the area; Mark Solomon, who represents South Seattle’s District 2, reportedly said the Rainier Beach site was unacceptable, which leaves Interbay or potentially a site to be determined at some point in the next few months.
The sanctioned encampment has been controversial in the past, but now has a long record of being a good neighbor; Peter Lagerwey, from the Mennonite Church, told PubliCola they were “fantastic” neighbors.
“We’re sorry to see them go and we would invite them back in a heartbeat,” he said.
Rinck said she was “relieved” at the decision. Tent City 4 residents said that if they didn’t find a new location by today, they would be forced to set up an unsanctioned encampment on public land.
Although Tent City has been doing outreach since February, holding a public meeting and handing out hundreds of flyers to people who live around the new site, Harrell said they shared responsibility, along with the city and KCRHA, for the situation.
“Everyone involved in this process can do more to ensure future moves are streamlined and effective,” Harrell said. “Improving coordination among the City, KCRHA, and Share/Wheel will allow for strengthened community engagement and more effective process timelines that lead to better outcomes and remove uncertainty from similar situations going forward,” Harrell said.
Harrell also said other parts of the region should do more to help people like Tent City’s residents (who, just to reiterate, spent months laying the groundwork for their relocation to the city of Seattle-owned community center site.) “We also continue to expect partners across the region to do their part to offer and advance solutions that support those living unsheltered,” Harrell said.
Back in February, SHARE and WHEEL—the shelter providers and homeless advocacy groups that have run self-managed tent cities in Seattle for many years—began doing outreach about plans to relocate Tent City 4 from its current location at the Seattle Mennonite Church in Lake City to the site of the former Lake City Community Center four blocks away.
Ten tent city residents fanned out across the neighborhood, knocking on doors and handing out about 500 flyers notifying residents about the move, and the group held a well-attended community meeting where only two people objected to the new location, according to several people who were present. One of those, a woman who worried that the community would block access to a farmer’s market, withdrew her objection after realizing it would not. “We had nothing but a positive response,” WHEEL organizer Michele Marchand said.
By design, Tent City never stays on one site for more than a year—a commitment that helps mitigate community concerns about their presence. Their lease at the church ends on Saturday, May 17, and all 104 residents, including families with a total of 17 kids, plan to leave that day. Until last week, they planned to sign a lease with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to move to the community center site, with Journey Christian Church serving as the “faith sponsor” at the new location.
Last week, however, something changed, according to several people directly involved in planning the move, and the city decided not to give KCRHA control of the land. (KCRHA had planned to add Tent City 4 to its master lease agreement with the city, which hands authority over city-owned properties to KCRHA for the duration of the lease. Previously, the city’s Human Services Department would sign agreements with providers directly for the use of city-owned land.)
In response, the homelessness authority informed Tent City representatives that their lease would not be on the agenda for a KCRHA governing board meeting on May 15, as previously planned. That means that the relocation they’ve been planning for months won’t go forward—and they’ll have to move somewhere else, potentially to public land where they do not have formal permission to be.
Lisa Edge, a spokeswoman for the homelessness authority, said, “KCRHA and Seattle Human Services Department continue to receive community input and are reviewing it.”
Several people involved in the negotiations say Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore, whose north Seattle district includes Lake City, is behind the sudden reversal; one said she became “apoplectic” when she learned the encampment was moving to a new site in her district last week and reached out to KCRHA to stop it from moving forward.
Moore is a member of the KCRHA’s governing board of elected officials, which—thanks to the elimination of a separate implementation board late last year—now makes all major decisions for the homelessness authority. (Previously, the implementation board approved such leases). The sudden shift, according to SHARE/WHEEL’s Anitra Freeman, came “in spite of [Moore] being really friendly to us in the past.”
Moore declined to respond to detailed questions about her role in the decision to deny Tent City 4 a lease at the new location.
Kate Jacobs, a spokesperson for Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office, said the city “supports a solution that results in a new location for Tent City 4 that meets the needs of the people who reside there and the broader community.” We followed up with additional questions about why the city is transferring control of its own land to KCRHA—a move that effectively shifts responsibility for what happens on city property to the homelessness authority— and will update this post when we hear back.
Several people involved in negotiating the move say Tent City 4 was the target of a late-breaking email campaign directed at elected officials, including Moore and Harrell. In a meeting with Tent City 4 residents last week, Marchand said, KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison told the group that “they’ve been flooded with … form emails” opposing the sanctioned encampment.
Pete Lagerwey, a member of the Seattle Mennonite Church, said Tent City has only had a positive impact on the neighborhood. “They’ve been fantastic neighbors,” Lagerwey said, picking up trash in the neighborhood and providing 24-hour safety patrols. “We’re sorry to see them go and we would invite them back in a heartbeat.”
Edge, from KCRHA, said the agency “is committed to helping resolve this issue” and is working with SHARE/WHEEL and the city to “identify a property for them to move to. KCRHA has asked SHARE/WHEEL and the current faith sponsor to consider extending the current lease while the issue is resolved.”
But Tent City 4 representatives say they plan to keep their word to the neighborhood and leave on May 17, whether they’ve reached an agreement on the community center site or not. “Our backup plan, no matter what, is to keep our word and move somewhere else,” said Brandon, a resident of the encampment. “That’s non-negotiable.”
The Mennonites are supporting Tent City 4’s commitment to move on schedule. “They’re a poor people’s organization and all they have is their own good word and trust,” Lagerwey said. “We’re not going to extend the lease, because we’re going to help them keep their word.”
Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, called Tent City 4 “a well-organized self-managed group with a long track record” that has moved from one location to another dozens of times without incident. “This is the easy stuff,” Eisinger said. “If Seattle can’t figure out how to help 100 people who manage their own shelter move, how is this city ever going to site anything, shelter or supportive housing, anywhere?”
Mayor Bruce Harrell turns to address a group of new SPD recruits at a hiring announcement Monday.
1. Earlier this week, we reported that the Seattle Police Department has only managed to hire five women, out of 60 new recruits, so far this year—a result that falls far short of the city’s “30 by 30” goal of having a 30-percent female recruit class by 2030. (To meet that goal, SPD would have had to hire 25 women so far; the five women represent 8 percent of the new recruits.
But the story is actually worse than that, because women are actually leaving the department at a much faster rate than SPD is recruiting new women to replace them.
In 2025 so far, according to the mayor’s office, 24 people have left SPD. Five of those were women. So not only does the net increase in female officers this year stand at zero, more than 20 percent of the people who have left the department are women. Put another way: SPD is losing women far faster than it is replacing them.
New police chief Shon Barnes said this week that the department was looking at why some women don’t pass recruiting requirements and may “give them another look,” adding that lots of departments have trouble hiring women.
He didn’t address ways the department could make women more likely to apply for jobs in the first place, since the real issue isn’t so much that women are applying and failing but that women don’t see SPD as a good place to work and advance their careers—understandably so.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
2. The final state budget adopted by the legislature last week failed to restore funding for a critical program that has successfully moved hundreds of unsheltered people indoors.
The program, a collaboration that includes Purpose Dignity Action, REACH, and the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, resolves encampments in state rights-of-way by providing sustained outreach, intensive case management, and hotel-based shelter to former encampment residents. Unlike Seattle’s policy of aggressive sweeps, the program sticks with people and gets them indoors long-term; since 2022, more than two-thirds of the people in the program remain housed.
The budget the state legislature passed reduced funding for the program from $75 million to $45 million, which is just enough to continue services for people already enrolled in the program, but not enough to keep the “front door” open by resolving new encampments in the future.
Carolanne Sanders Lundgren, PDA’s chief campaigns officer, said that while nearly everyone, including people living in encampments, “agree that no one should be living in those conditions,” the systems that are in place to deal with encampments “do not do a good enough job of connecting people to real help that makes sense for their lives and circumstances.”
By slashing funds to the program, Sanders Lundgren said, the budget “halts all progress. The bigger picture is that as social and economic instability continue to grow, the need for resources like [right-of-way] outreach and temporary lodging–which provide immediate relief and a bridge to long-term stability–will only increase.”
We sat down with Adonis Ducksworth—a longtime skateboarder and Seattle Department of Transportation staffer who’s running to represent Southeast Seattle—to talk about density, social housing, and how to address and prevent gun violence in the district.
Acting county executive Shannon Braddock, appointed on a temporary basis several weeks ago, remains essentially an at-will employee until (and unless) the county council appoints her as interim executive through November. They were supposed to make a decision this week (after declining to appoint her at an earlier meeting) but now won’t do so until at least early May.
On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed the District 2 city council election, hacked crossing signals in Amazon’s neighborhood, and the potential closure of the Virginia Inn, an institution in Pike Place Market. Also, on this week’s episode of Are You Mad At Me?, the podcast Josh and I are doing about the movie Shattered Glass, we explain why everyone should watch this excellent movie.
When City Attorney Ann Davison and City Councilmember Cathy Moore pushed to urgently pass a new law allowing judges to ban sex buyers from Aurora Ave. N, they claimed the orders would help end gun violence and trafficking in the area. In the seven months since, there have only been five such orders, all issued after costly stings involving police pretending to be sex workers.
The homelessness authority released some new details about its latest statistical estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in King County. Unsurprisingly, homelessness has gotten worse, just as the state and federal governments prepare to make cuts to programs that bring people indoors.
One of the programs on the state’s chopping block is an encampment resolution program begun during the pandemic. Unlike the city of Seattle’s policy, which mostly consists of designating people as obstructions and sweeping them from place to place, the state program involves weeks of outreach and provides both case management and temporary lodging as part of a path to housing. The state budget would eliminate funding to address encampments in the future.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
New contracts from HUD’s Continuum of Care program, which provides about 11 percent of the region’s homelessness budget through grants to nonprofit providers, would require providers to check the immigration status of people seeking shelter and other services, and deny service to anyone who can’t prove they’re in the country legally. The regional homelessness authority hasn’t decided yet how to respond to the contracts, which also include anti-”gender ideology” language.
In his “Maybe Metropolis” column, Josh Feit touts legislation that would allow King County Metro to redevelop up to three underutilized park-and-ride lots as affordable housing—the ultimate transit-oriented development.
New federal contracts for homeless services include a requirement that providers deny benefits to undocumented immigrants, King County Regional Homelessness Authority deputy CEO Simon Foster told the King County Council this week. Foster warned that the new restrictions, which have not appeared in previous federal contracts, could result in people losing services they already access and avoiding homeless providers for fear of deportation.
“We know that citizenship verification requirements have a chilling effect that extends throughout the community, and even documented individuals are less likely to seek help if they are afraid of the repercussions to themselves, their friends and their family,” Foster said.
The new language showed up in the KCRHA’s first 2025 grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, which provides about 11 percent of KCRHA’s funding. In keeping with new, Trump-era boilerplate for other federal grants, the new language also says agencies must certify that they won’t use the funding in ways that “promote ‘gender ideology'” or violate several new executive orders, including one denying federal funds to “sanctuary cities.” A judge temporarily blocked the sanctuary city order on Thursday.
Under the terms of the contract, KCRHA would be required to “administer its grant in accordance with all applicable immigration restrictions and requirements, including the eligibility and verification requirements” from the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as welfare reform. That law prohibits undocumented immigrants from receiving federally funded services, with some exceptions whose interpretation is entirely up to the “unreviewable” discretion of the attorney general, according to the law.
In 2016, then-attorney general Loretta Lynch issued guidance affirming that homeless service providers could spend federal funding on programs that provide shelter, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and outreach to undocumented immigrants. Under Trump, that guidance has been removed from HUD’s website.
The new rules also say that KCRHA, or the nonprofit agencies that provide services and housing (the language is ambiguous), has to check the immigration status of every person seeking housing, shelter, or services in a massive federal database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE. According to the contract language, KCRHA “must use SAVE, or an equivalent verification system approved by the Federal government, to prevent any Federal public benefit from being provided to an ineligible alien who entered the United States illegally or is otherwise unlawfully present in the United States.”
KCRHA is currently considering its legal options, which could include suing the federal government. Earlier this month, the agency’s governing board held a lengthy, unscheduled executive session to discuss “federal funding impacts,” going into closed session under an exemption to the open meetings act that allows private conversations about litigation or potential litigation.
The agency, unlike the city or county governments, has a legal department of one—general counsel Edmund Witter. Although suing (or joining a larger lawsuit) creates legal risks, so would signing the grant agreement. If the KCRHA agreed to exclude undocumented immigrants from services and avoid funding “gender ideology,” it could open the agency up to legal liability from activist lawsuits. It’s easy to see, for instance, how providing shelter where queer and trans people feel safe would count as “gender ideology” under the new Trump administration’s rule.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you. CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, said SKCCH fully expects “to see attempts to insert irrelevant and odious requirements and restrictions on federal funds that keep people housed in our community” coming from the federal government.
“We have to make sure we can keep people safe, housed, sheltered, and helped regardless of where they were born, who is in their household, and how they pay their rent,” Eisinger said. “Local government and any philanthropic partners who concern themselves with housing and homelessness should be creating robust reserves to ensure that we are not at the mercy of the billionaire sociopaths.”
It’s unclear how any of this would work, in a purely practical sense. Searching SAVE to see if someone is in the country legally is expensive (the government charges for each search), and neither KCRHA nor nonprofit service providers currently have access to the database. Most service providers won’t want to be in charge of asking for people’s virtual papers as a condition of providing services, and the possibility of mixups—between people with the same name, for instance—raises major due process issues, according to a person familiar with the legal issues.
Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a former director of subregional planning and equitable engagement at KCRHA, said immigrants, particularly new arrivals, were already apprehensive about accessing the homelessness system before Trump’s election, because of the fear of deportation and the stigma of being homeless.
“It’s a much more invisibilized homelessness experience,” Rinck said. “People naturally feel anxious about accessing any type of government services already,” she said, without having to prove their eligibility for a place to sleep at night. “I think the broad idea is that they’re just going to use any measure to prevent immigrants from tapping into any program or services.”
PubliCola has reached out to HUD’s regional office, as well as several organizations that could be impacted if the new restrictions go into effect, and will post an update if we hear back.
But the story is actually worse than that, because women are actually leaving the department at a much faster rate than SPD is recruiting new women to replace them.
By Erica C. Barnett