Maybe calling them “stacked flats,” rather than “apartments,” was a stroke of genius.
On Tuesday, the City Council adopted legislation that will allow eight-unit apartment buildings on every residential lot in the city—or up to ten units if the developer preserves trees or adds “green“ landscaping features, like bioswales and green roofs, to new housing construction. These apartments are known as “stacked flats” because they’re on top of each other, unlike multi-level townhouses that are generally offered for sale, not for rent, at prices far out of reach to most Seattle residents.
The legislation, part of the comprehensive plan package the city council adopted this week, doesn’t spell out eight units, but if you do the math, that’s what it works out to on a 5,000-square-foot lot with a standard 60 percent lot coverage.
Developers who go for the green bonuses will also get to build up to four stories, rather than the standard three. (Logically, four stories makes more sense for eight-unit buildings, allowing two per floor, but maybe some enterprising new councilmember will suggest revisiting that limit). That’s more density than the state required cities to allow under 2023’s HB 1110, which allows four units on all residential lots statewide, or six if two of the units are affordable. The council adopted interim rules to comply with HB 1110 earlier this year.
The changes were part of the council’s final vote of 2025 on the city’s comprehensive plan, the long-debated, much-delayed document that governs how and where Seattle can grow. The council’s comprehensive plan committee already adopted most of the changes that were finalized this week back in September, but had to put off a final vote while the city’s planning department completed environmental review on some new amendments and gave the public an opportunity to comment on the changes
Mayor Bruce Harrell’s comprehensive plan proposal came in a year behind schedule, a delay that has pushed some comprehensive plan legislation to next year, including legislation to enact new zoning in low-rise areas, establish new boundaries for dense “regional centers” and urban centers, and potentially add more “neighborhood centers” near transit stops where taller apartment buildings will be allowed.
Density opponents on the council will have another opportunity to argue that Seattle isn’t ready for more housing, and that the city hasn’t done sufficient outreach to “neighborhoods,” meaning single-family homeowners, before allowing renters to live in new parts of the city. But, thanks mostly to Harrell’s delays, they’ll be joined by two new council members who are fans of density, Eddie Lin and Dionne Foster, and a mayor who’s an unabashed urbanist.
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.
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.
On Friday, several private and nonprofit affordable housing developers joined Mayor Bruce Harrell to criticize his challenger Katie Wilson’s proposal to move unsheltered people into vacant units in “workforce” housing developments, saying it would be a “disaster” to try to mix chronically homeless people in with the general population in these buildings.
“Our experiences and independent data have shown that people struggling on the street with behavioral health challenges cannot just be placed in an apartment and succeed,” Harrell said.
“According to the 2024 Point in Time Count, most people living unsheltered in King County have a physical, cognitive or general disability, a third of those surveyed said they live with severe mental illness, and nearly half said they struggle with substance abuse. … Scattering people in buildings across the city where the services to address addiction and mental health health issues do not exist, will be a disaster.”
Currently, thousands of units funded with city dollars, many of them small studios with rents comparable to what’s available in the private market, are sitting vacant. Some developers have argued that these will fill up as construction slows and rents for market-rate studio apartments increase.
Karen Lee, the CEO of Plymouth Housing, described the intensive services provided in Plymouth’s buildings, which are designed to serve chronically homeless people who, by definition, have disabling mental or physical conditions. “For them to rejoin society, it takes care, it takes compassion, it takes knowledge, and it is doable. But [living] in an apartment building for working-class folks that is staffed with a building manager and some cleanliness staff—that is not the environment” for success, Lee said.
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Wilson, contacted this afternoon, said she never proposed putting people who need permanent supportive housing in empty apartments at buildings that lack supportive services—an approach that helped doom the “Partnership for Zero” program to swiftly end visible homelessness downtown, which Harrell supported, last year.
Instead, Wilson said, she wants to create subsidies for “low-acuity” people who don’t require intense, round-the-clock care, freeing up shelter beds by helping people who’ve been stuck in shelter for long periods move on to housing. “Obviously, we need to pay close attention to who we’re placing where, and we don’t want to replicate the kind of problems that have ben happening recently with putting high-acuity homeless folks in buildings that aren’t equipped to handle them and without the supportive services that they need on site,” Wilson said.
“If you look across our shelter system, there are a lot of low-acuity homeless folks who are kind of stuck in the system because we don’t have throughput to affordable units for them. … The success of this plan is going to rely on appropriately placing people” in housing that fits their needs, Wilson continued.
Harrell has repeatedly said that recently homeless people do not belong in the same living environment as the “teachers and baristas” for whom workforce housing is designed. Wilson’s strategy, he said, “will actually create more vacancies as these buildings experience the well-known issues” seen in permanent supportive housing, such as fights, overdoses, and frequent 911 calls. “[It] will be a disaster.”
Wilson disagreed that formerly homeless people can’t thrive in regular affordable housing. “If you have someone who is coming out of homelessness, who doesn’t have serious behavioral health problems, who maybe has a disability, they’ll be a fine neighbor,” Wilson said. “Obviously we need to assess people, but the idea that, categorically, these are different kinds of people [is wrong]. There are teachers and barista who are homeless.”
On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s election-year budget proposal, a one-year plan for 2026 that increases spending by more than $50 million, including “one-time” programs that will almost certainly require ongoing funds. Harrell’s budget also adds $26 million to hire new police officers, on top of the Seattle Police Department’s existing budget; public safety, including police and fire, now makes up more than half the city’s discretionary budget.
The one-time spending in Harrell’s budget includes temporary funding for programs that are likely to lose federal funding under the Trump Administration, as well as assistance for immigrants being targeted by the federal government. These needs are likely to accelerate, rather than diminish, over the next several years.
Sandeep and I actually agreed that the city should be doing more to address future budget deficits (Harrell’s budget, not counting the one-time funds, assumes a deficit that will grow from $140 million in 2027 to $374 million in 2029). Where we departed ways was on the question of whether the city should be “”goring some oxes” in the budget by telling some human services organizations they’re “not going to get money because we’re not seeing results. … I think there would be a human cry coming from the progressive side saying, this is austerity budget[ing]. ”
While it’s definitely true that slashing the city’s budget for human services would anger progressives, I argued that the call for cuts seems to always focus on programs designed to help people directly with needs like food, housing, and other basic needs, rather than departments like SPD, whose funding only goes up every year. (Police are always a sacred cow, never a gored ox). This year, public safety departments will consume more than half the city’s discretionary budget, with SPD accounting for half that amount, at $486 million.
Perhaps the city could reduce some of this year’s expansion plans for SPD, I suggested, by taking a peek into the extremely opaque police budget and finding some money there; personally, I’d stop the CCTV surveillance program, which Harrell added to the budget as a new ongoing obligation last year, and look for other places where money is sitting unused or being spent ineffectively.
We also talked about the King County Council’s recent vote to ban the use of rent-pricing software like RealPage. David noted that bans on rent-fixing software are similar to “trust-busting,” in which the federal government cracked down on mergers, price-fixing, and other anti-competitive practices. Landlords use algorithmic pricing tools to charge the highest rent possible, a rate that can vary day by day—much like Ticketmaster, Expedia, and Uber use “dynamic” pricing to determine the price of tickets, flights, hotels, and rides.
Finally, we all issued our verdict on former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s endorsement of Harrell. Our assessment: A big “whatever.”
A process that started with a year-long delay ended in a cascade of votes on more than 100 recently introduces amendments last week, as the City Council adopted “Phase 1” of its 10-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan on Friday.
The comp plan, the document that guides how and where Seattle will grow in the future, gets a major update every decade; the one that’s currently in place, Seattle 2035, was launched through a series of open houses in January 2014 and signed into law in October 2016. Outreach and engagement for the latest update, which Mayor Bruce Harrell dubbed the One Seattle Plan, began in January 2022, and the council just adopted the first part of the final proposal in September 2025.
The mayor’s office contributed a year to that extended timeline by repeatedly pushing back the release date for their plan, which was the subject of extensive internal debate over how much new housing the city would allow in traditionally walled-off single-family neighborhoods. (Seattle hasn’t had strict single-family-houses-only zoning for years, but its land use patters are starkly suburban, with one house per lot in the vast majority of the city’s residential land.)
While those internal deliberations were going on, the city did an environmental study of five different versions of the plan, ranging from “no action” to an option that would have allowed modest new density in neighborhoods along with even more rental housing in the places where it’s already allowed—generally, large commercial centers and along busy arterial roads. During their 2023 campaigns, most of the City Council candidates who would go on to win their elections said they supported this option or another, denser alternative crafted by housing advocates, known as Alternative 6, indicating broad support for significantly more housing across the city.
In March 2024, Harrell finally released a first draft of his “One Seattle Plan.” The proposal, a drasticallyscaled-back version of a more ambitious plan the city’s Office of Planning and Development put forward, was roundly derided by housing advocates, including the city’s own Planning Commission, as woefully inadequate to meet the housing needs of hundreds of thousands of new residents Seattle is expecting over the next 20 years. (Former District 4 council candidate Ron Davis, who was defeated by Maritza Rivera, called it “a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis.”)
After that round of backlash, Harrell’s office released a new draft of the plan in October that slightly increased density in a few parts of the city—mostly by restoring six of the 48 “neighborhood centers” that were part of OPCD’s rejected early draft of the proposal. This new version now included 30 neighborhood centers—areas within about 800 feet commercial “nodes” or major transit stops, where future zoning changes could allow 3- to 6-story apartments.
Months of additional outreach and engagement followed. Housing opponents deployed their usual arguments against the modest density updates in the plan, from pleas to protect Seattle’s suburban-style neighborhood character to claims that a handful of small apartment buildings in up to 30 locations would be tantamount to “clearcutting” Seattle and killing baby orcas and endangered birds. They also rolled out a perennial complaint among people who want Seattle to stay the same: There wasn’t enough outreach. They didn’t feel “heard.”
The council ranged from sympathetic (Cathy Moore, who previously said she supported Alternative 5, said allowing apartments in Maple Leaf would destroy the neighborhood, and Maritza Rivera tried to ensure no apartments could be built in upscale neighborhoods in her district) to unmoved by these arguments.
Mostly, the council wanted to restrict housing in historically single-family areas and continue channeling new apartments to noisy, polluted arterials. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a Central District renter who doesn’t own a car, was the exception: She consistently argued for more density and would go on to try, unsuccessfully, to restore more of the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan.
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While all this was going on, state legislators forced the city—all cities, in fact—to allow at least four units of housing on every residential lot, or six if two of the units are affordable. The city was supposed to pass legislation to comply with that law, House Bill 1110, as part of the comprehensive plan update; instead, because the plan was so far behind schedule, the council passed “interim” legislation to meet a state-imposed deadline in May.
That gets us, more or less, to the past six weeks, when after months of relative torpor, the city council took up more than 100 amendments to the two pieces of legislation that make up this part of the comprehensive plan update, passing dozens of changes over the course of several days. (The council will take up other aspects of the plan, including changes to parts of the city that are already dense, next year.)
Some of the amendments, like Dan Strauss’ proposal to strip out a planned neighborhood center around the existing Phinney Ridge commercial district and “replace” it by restoring a neighborhood center near the Goodwill store in Ballard, came so late in the process that advocates were scrambling to understand the impact even as the council was voting to approve them.
Others, like Maritza Rivera’s “compromise” amendment giving the director of the city’s planning department new authority to force developers to change their site plans to preserve existing trees and enlarging mandatory “tree protection areas,” were so late-breaking they were only available on paper, hot off the printer, to people present in council chambers. One of the explicit purposes of that amendment, which passed, is to “preserve and enhance the city’s physical and aesthetic character.”
A page from Maritza Rivera’s “compromise” amendment 102, handed out in the room at city hall and not available online when the council approved it.
The council’s changes will, generally speaking, decrease the overall size of the city’s neighborhood centers, with the greatest reductions in council districts whose representatives are wary of (or outright oppose) dense housing in areas dominated by single-family houses. Rob Saka (West Seattle), Joy Hollingsworth (Capitol Hill and the Central District) and Maritza Rivera (Northeast Seattle) successfully excised large swaths of their districts from planned neighborhood centers, arguing in each case that “community” in the area opposed new housing and that Harrell’s plan had failed to take into account the unique features that made these areas inappropriate for apartments.
Joy Hollingsworth proposed her own last-minute amendment to preserve the “donut hole” of low density between Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the Central District, but pulled it last week, saying she would reintroduce the exemption as separate legislation in the future.
The council rejected efforts by Alexis Mercedes Rinck to restore some of the neighborhood centers Harrell’s office eliminated in their draft plan, arguing that including any new density would require a lengthy environmental review, making the final comp plan update even later than it already is. Allowing more density, council members like Strauss noted, will likely trigger a review under the State Environmental Policy Act, while preserving existing apartment bans does not. Allowing apartments in these areas also opens the city up to citizen appeals, which tend to happen whenever the city proposes allowing more, or any, apartments in single-family areas.
Citing advice from the city attorney’s office, the council put all of the proposals to increase density or substantially change the, including the last-minute changes Strauss proposed for his district, in a “docketing” resolution for future council consideration.
The council also rejected Rinck’s proposal to eliminate local mandates that require developers to build parking for new apartments across the city, making the familiar argument that allowing apartments without parking would clog streets and make it impossible for existing residents and people patronizing local businesses to park conveniently.
And although they approved an amendment allowing corner stores throughout residential areas (rather than just on literal corners, as Harrell proposed), they rejected a Rinck amendment that would have allowed stores and restaurants to stay open past 10pm, and allowed other types of businesses, such as bars, in neighborhoods. Bob Kettle, in particular, blanched at the idea of bars and late-night bodegas, arguing that they were “a recipe for disaster on the public-safety front.” [Notice of correction: This paragraph originally said the legislation also prohibits restaurants; it allows restaurants as long as they close by 10pm.]
The council did add some modest height and density bonuses for specific types of housing the city wants to encourage, including privately developed stacked flats (small apartment buildings with each unit on a single floor, distinguished from multi-story townhouses and larger apartment buildings) and social housing. But they rejected Rinck’s proposals to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units on existing lots, yanking several amendments that would have provided density bonuses for ADUs after a lengthy executive session on Friday. Those amendments, too, are now part of the docketing resolution for future consideration.
Overall, the new plan continues to embrace the city’s longstanding strategy—going back to the 1990s—of concentrating new apartments in a few already dense areas while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods and keeping it relatively low in “urban villages” (now rechristened “urban centers”).
The amendments that occupied so much of the council’s time over the past several weeks will serve, on balance, to reduce the amount of new housing allowed in Harrell’s already scaled-back plan, keeping Seattle’s existing zoning patterns firmly in place except in a few, sharply proscribed areas that could see the reintroduction of the kind of small apartment buildings that were once allowed in residential areas across the city.
But urbanists shouldn’t totally despair. The next council will likely include at least two new pro-housing members (Dionne Foster, running against Sara Nelson, has a commanding lead, while both Eddie Lin and Adonis Ducksworth, running to replace appointee Mark Solomon in District 2, have expressed support for density). That could improve the short-term prospects for amendments like Rinck’s, and make future changes to the comp plan (which can be amended every year) more politically palatable.
The full council won’t vote on the final “Phase 1” legislation until October or November, after additional environmental review of the amendments they just approved. They’re supposed to take up “Phase 2,” which includes zoning changes in the new neighborhood centers as well as the denser urban centers and regional centers, is supposed to start in December.
By Erica C. Barnett
