Category: housing

City Council, Courts, Density, homelessness, housing, Mayor Wilson

This Week on PubliCola: April 11, 2026

Shelter expansion, anti-apartment pushback, Northeast Seattle gets dedicated cops, and a bunch of other stories you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, April 6

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we talked about how Mayor Katie Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on the city’s comprehensive plan. We also talked about City Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit the Human Services Department.”

Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

Speaking of which, here’s what we know about that proposal: Rivera believes that in light of King County’s audit, which found serious problems with some its own human services contracts, the city should audit its own human services contracts. The auditor’s office told us this would be a long, involved process; generally, their audits are more focused and happen at the direction of more than just one councilmember.

Tuesday, April 7

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

A meeting on the proposed comprehensive plan update, which could allow some apartments in parts of the city that are not directly on large, polluting arterial roads and highways, broke down along predictable lines: Renters and housing advocates asked for the right to live in Seattle’s quieter neighborhoods, and housing opponents argued that allowing apartments near them would be tantamount to clear-cutting Seattle, murdering orcas, and making birds go extinct.

Wednesday, April 8

SPD Dedicates Three Officers to Magnuson Park, Citing Success with “Disorder” and Property Crimes During Pilot

The Seattle Police Department is permanently assigning three officers to the area around Magnuson Park, a large lakefront park in an affluent part of Northeast Seattle where residents, and Councilmember Rivera, have been calling for more cops to crack down on loud summertime parties and street racing. The park is home to hundreds of low-income residents who live in apartments run by two nonprofits; it’s also where police shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a woman who called 911 during a mental-health crisis.

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Thursday, April 9

Larger Library Levy Moves Forward

The city council added nearly $70 million to a $410 million library levy renewal that will be on the ballot this year, including new funds for repairs and maintenance at the downtown library, air conditioning for libraries that don’t have it, and more electronic copies of popular books. Rivera voted against every amendment, citing the need for fiscal responsibility as the city approaches a state-imposed cap on property tax levies.

Founder of AI Worker Surveillance Startup Appointed to Ethics Commission

Evan Smith, formerly of Starbucks, created a system for companies to spy on retail workers by recording all their conversations and using AI to analyze their speech for compliance with company policy. Councilmembers Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth nominated him to serve on the city’s Ethics and Elections Commission.

County Assessor Pleads Not Guilty to Stalking, Must Wear Ankle Monitor in Five-Year No Contact Order

John Arthur Wilson, who has refused to step down from his elected role as King County Assessor despite being arrested for stalking and harassing his ex-fiancée, was slapped with a five-year no-contact order while awaiting trial on stalking charges. He’ll have to wear an ankle monitor to ensure he doesn’t come within 1,000 feet of his ex; his term expires at the end of this year.

Friday, April 10

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

Seven years ago, the city approved Mandatory Housing Affordability fees on new development; the fees fund affordable housing projects, or developers can build affordable units on site. Since then, development has slackened and the cost of building has gone up, and developers say the fees are a major reason. Now, they’re asking the city to lower the fees temporarily. But the request raises larger questions about how Seattle funds affordable housing, and whether it’s smart to treat apartments like a negative thing by charging special fees on new development.

Also this week: I covered two stories exclusively on Bluesky.

First, the mayor met with opponents of police surveillance cameras in a Zoom town hall that was clearly frustrating for both sides. (I attended a watch party at Stoup on Capitol Hill.) Wilson seems committed to turning on the cameras proposed by her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, and approved by the previous city council, and opponents of police surveillance feel betrayed by the mayor they supported, in part, because they thought she shared their commitment to getting rid of the cameras.

Second, Wilson announced that the city has secured a site for the first 75 units of new shelter of her term—a small step toward the 1,000 new shelter units she promised during her first year. The announcement came at a public meeting where the mayor moderated a panel and took questions from the public, a dramatic departure from the way most previous mayors have rolled out big announcements.

I also talked about these stories and more on Hacks and Wonks with Crystal Fincher on Friday; we also discussed the lawsuit that was filed this week to stop the state’s new high-earners’ income tax, some sheriff’s opposition to a new law saying they can’t serve if their law enforcement certification has been revoked, and more.

 

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City Council, Development, housing

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

By Erica C. Barnett

A group of apartment builders is asking Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council to consider rolling back the fees they pay every time they build new housing. The developers, calling themselves the Seattle Housing Roundtable, are asking the city to reduce Mandatory Housing Affordability fees by 90 percent this year, followed by an 80 percent reduction next year and a 75 percent reduction in 2028, with a goal of permanent MHA reforms by the following year.

According to Ian Morrison, an attorney with the land use firm McCullough Hill, MHA “was a good idea when it was originally envisioned, at a time when interest rates were much lower and the economic climate was a lot more positive and predictable.” But, he added, “What we’re seeing now, using the city’s own data, is MHA as a part of a project that was viable in the late 2010s no longer work.   That means housing will not be built in Seattle today.”

The Seattle City Council approved MHA in 2019 as the final component of former mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA). The program made developers build affordable housing or pay a fee every time they built new apartments in Seattle’s multifamily areas (at the time, Seattle still had single-family zoning). In exchange, they were allowed to build more densely.  The framework took for granted that new market-rate apartments have a negative impact on neighborhoods that developers must mitigate by funding affordable housing.

This consensus has shifted just in the seven years MHA has been in effect, as scarcity has made apartments increasingly unaffordable and more people understand that density is an environmental necessity and an answer to growing demand for housing. At the same time, the funding MHA produces for affordable housing has plunged from a high of $74 million in 2021 to just $22 million last year as development has slowed. Last year, developers filed applications to build fewer than 2,000 new apartment buildings, a drop of almost 90 percent from a peak of 17,400 units in 2020.

Developers and land use attorneys we spoke to seemed reluctant to say outright that the city should get rid of MHA altogether, although it negatively impacts their bottom line. Holly Golden, a land use attorney at HCMP Law Offices, said that with lower fees, “you’d still see millions of dollars of MHA fees, plus new construction jobs and permit fees to keep [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections running during the building downturn. … Getting projects started provides a huge financial benefit to the city budget at a time when they really need it.”

Taxes on construction are inherently volatile, and there’s a real question about whether MHA aligns with the reality of Seattle as a majority-renter city with an acute housing shortage. If the city agrees to an MHA “holiday” and development rebounds, a surge in other funding sources like the Real Estate Excise Tax could help offset the loss of MHA dollars.

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Not every jurisdiction funds affordable housing by charging a fee on development. PubliCola has reported on a concept called funded inclusionary zoning, in which developers get tax breaks for including affordable housing in their projects. The concept flips the script on development, treating density (i.e. apartments, i.e. renters) as a good thing while also ensuring that affordable housing gets built. Developers aren’t charitable organizations—if a project doesn’t make sense to them, they won’t build it—so instead of penalizing new housing with fees, cities like Portland are trying incentives to build new housing at all income levels.

“There are ways to ensure that inclusionary zoning programs work for the long term and are well calibrated to ensure they don’t impede housing,” Morrison said. “But getting those details right takes time.”

Eddie Lin, the head of the city council’s land use committee, told us on a recent episode of Seattle Nice that he’s “open to a temporary reduction in MHA fees. It needs to be tailored to the right size to get construction going, but not more than we need.”

Eliminating MHA completely, Lin continued, is a nonstarter; the fee, he said, remains “incredibly important for developing additional affordable housing. … We want to be mindful of not giving away too much more than we need to.” MHA reform, he said, might include addressing the fact that developers currently have to pay a fee for building in low-rise zones but not in neighborhood residential—the former single-family zones that now allow essentially the same density as low-rise areas.

Ray Connell, managing director at the developer Holland Partner Group, said it’s possible the impact of MHA and other taxes and regulations in real time by looking east across Lake Washington. “All the cranes are in Redmond,” where fees are lower, “so projects get started,” Connell said. “It’s amazing to go over there and see a bunch of new projects and cranes in the sky. Why is it happening over there? It’s not a hard cost issue, and it’s not an interest rate issue. Yes, it’s the jobs… but it’s also the additional fees that we have to face on this side of the lake.”

Redmond recently adopted an aggressive inclusionary zoning package that says 10 percent of all new units in housing with 10 or more units must be affordable. In four years, Connell said, “there won’t be cranes in certain areas of Redmond. … We can’t get those areas of Redmond to work anymore.”

City Council, Density, housing, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

By Erica C. Barnett

As the council takes up the remaining “phases” of Seattle’s latest 10-year comprehensive plan update—which, as a reminder, was subject to repeated delays by the Harrell administration starting in 2023—opponents of new housing are pulling out all the stops to convince the council that allowing renters to live in neighborhoods will destroy urban forests, kill birds and orcas, and make life unbearable for property owners across the city.

Homeowners, including many who made a point of ID’ing themselves as “native Seattleites,” predicated environmental disaster, community fragmentation, and the extinction of various animal species during several hours of public hearings yesterday on the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan, which would establish density limits in new “neighborhood centers” and along major bus lines and rapid transit routes.

The proposed changes, which would leave the overwhelming majority of the city’s residential land untouched, would give more renters access to neighborhoods with ample public trees, safe sidewalks, and quiet streets. Currently, most rental housing is restricted to highways and large arterial roads, which spew pollution directly into apartment windows and are among the city’s most dangerous, noisy, and unpleasant places to live.

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On Monday afternoon, activists even trotted out a group of young children to perform a song-and-dance routine about “lot sprawl”—a concept promoted by Tree Action Seattle, a group that opposes denser housing in neighborhoods on the grounds that new housing often results in the removal of trees on what were formerly private lawns. “Big trees, we need them so,” the children belted. “Lot sprawl has got to go.”

The agenda of most tree activists in Seattle isn’t about adding street trees or maintaining and replacing trees in parks, where a plurality of the city’s tree loss actually occurs.  In a recent action alert, Tree Action said explicitly that  “street trees are not a solution” to tree loss because there isn’t enough room in public right-of-way to achieve a 30 percent tree canopy citywide. (In reality, development in single-family areas amounts to a tiny fraction of overall tree loss in Seattle.)

As I noted on Bluesky yesterday, little kids don’t understand housing policy, much less arcane concepts like “lot sprawl.” Using children to promote an adult political agenda is particularly ironic in this case, since anti-housing policies will make it impossible for most kids who are six years old today to live in Seattle when they grow up.

You know who can't understand housing policy? Little kids trained to sing a song on behalf of their parents' anti-housing political agendas. You know who won't be able to live in Seattle if we don't allow more housing? People who are little kids today.

— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T23:02:40.796Z

The fever-pitched backlash is occurring alongside a larger push to go bigger on housing in the remaining phases of the comp plan. This push is coming largely from young Seattleites and others who belong to Seattle’s renter majority, which is getting increasingly fed up with both rising rents and the limited options for people who can’t afford to buy a typical million-dollar house in Seattle.

Last week, Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she wants to accelerate the adoption of the comp plan update, restoring the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan and expanding the frequent transit zones where new apartments will be allowed beyond the (frankly embarrassing) half-block that’s in the current proposal. While Wilson’s proposal isn’t on the council’s agenda yet, it figured heavily in the comments both for and against the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan.

During the recess between the two public hearings, supporters of Wilson’s “taller, denser, faster” agenda rallied outside City Hall for a competing vision of Seattle—one where renters have access to the neighborhoods many homeowners want to keep to themselves.

Wilson herself kicked off the rally by thanking the group for gathering to support a “deeply important, if somewhat esoteric, topic of the day—Seattle’s municipal zoning codes!”

“Last week, you heard me announce my administration’s taller, denser, faster housing program. I guess that’s the official name now,” Wilson said. “What that means is that we’re going to start with a more inviting, optimistic assumption of our growth capacity. … We are going to plan to allow more housing in every neighborhood, creating an equitable distribution and meaningful housing choices. Every neighborhood should be an open, welcoming place for people and families to live.”

The opposition to Wilson’s plan is going to be fierce, as people who bought houses decades ago fight to restrict where housing can go and impose tree planting and retention mandates on apartment developers that do not apply to them. But there was heartening news for housing advocates yesterday, too. After the rally, which also featured disability advocate Cecelia Black, Community Roots Housing leader Colleen Echohawk, and City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, pro-housing activists filed upstairs to testify in favor of Wilson’s more inviting, optimistic vision.

One of them, Jason Weill, introduced himself as a longtime Seattle resident and homeowner who was “excited about all the growth and vibrancy happening in our city” but “really concerned about the rising housing costs and the constraints that we have on where we can build housing. I’ve lived in apartments built so close to I-5 I could hear highway noise 24 hours a day, and air pollution was a constant health hazard because I could only cool my apartment by opening the windows.”

Apartment renters across the city can relate to this exact situation—as someone who rented apartments on or within a half-block of three major roadways with nonstop, heavy traffic, I certainly could. The city’s renter majority—a population that  includes the mayor herself— is pushing back on the belief, enshrined in our zoning codes, that only homeowners deserve access to the most livable parts of our city. It’s now up to the city council to resist the urge to maintain the unsustainable status quo.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster; Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson is a renter on Capitol Hill, giving her a unique perspective that differentiates her from any previous mayor, and she plans to keep renting through her term. On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed how Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle (and struggling to afford escalating rent) may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on what’s left of the city’s comprehensive plan update.

In Wilson’s tree-lined neighborhood, single-family houses and apartment buildings mingle effortlessly with newer townhouses and condos, all within a short walk of multiple bus routes and a light rail station. In other words, this mayor has actually experienced the benefits of renting in a neighborhood with lots of trees, walkable amenities, and frequent transit, making her less susceptible to NIMBY arguments that apartments destroy neighborhood “character” or make neighborhoods unlivable.

As Sandeep pointed out, public opinion in Seattle has moved consistently in a YIMBY (yes in my backyard) direction for at least the past decade. That’s good news for Seattle’s renter majority—brand-new housing, though not affordable in itself, takes pressure off Seattle’s acute housing shortage—and bad news for NIMBYs who want Seattle to stay the same as it was when they bought their houses for $23,000 in the ’70s.

We also discussed Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit Human Services Department contracts.” Sandeep and David think it seems like a pretty good idea in light of an audit at the county’s equivalent department that found widespread problems among “high-risk” contracts—why not “look under the rock” and see what’s there? “From my side, we’d want to make that a campaign issue,” Sandeep said—perhaps previewing what Rivera’s reelection campaign will look like?

 

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I countered that as with the Equitable Development initiative, Rivera seems to be fixating on contracts in one specific area (the DCHS contracts were largely first-time contracts with small Black- and brown-led nonprofits) rather than considering which type of contracts across all city departments are worth scrutinizing for waste, fraud, and abuse. (I also noted that the smaller contractors targeted in the DCHS audit do not generally contract with the city.) Sandeep said these kinds of contracts came out of the “peak woke period” after COVID and so should be subject to greater scrutiny.

As I reported, auditing $300 million in human services contracts is far more complex than the kinds of audits Seattle’s auditor typically does, and would tie up resources for years at a small office with just five audit staff. Just as a factual matter, I’ll stand by what I said on the podcast: No matter how much we agree that it would be great for all public contracts to face close scrutiny (no one supports waste, abuse, or fraud), given that the city will never have the resources to audit every contract, the city has to make choices. If that choice is always to audit human services providers and never audit police spending, for instance, that’s an expression of priorities, not an objective assessment of what kind of city spending merits extra scrutiny.

homelessness, housing, King County

County Executive Floats Countywide Housing Levy, 500 New Housing Units or Shelter Beds by Mid-2027

By Erica C. Barnett

In an announcement that echoed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to add 500 new shelter units by this summer, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said Tuesday that he’s launching a new plan to add 500 units of “shelter and housing” in the next 500 days, or by mid-August 2027, and will convene a work group to discuss a potential countywide housing levy. Some of the new shelter or housing could be on county-owned land, similar to the strategy Wilson is using to cut down on the cost of new tiny house villages in Seattle.

Other elements of the “Breaking the Cycle” plan include improving performance metrics, reducing regulatory barriers, and better data collection and distribution.

“We want to know where are people falling through the cracks, where are services not connecting, and which programs are actually helping people stabilize,” Zahilay said at a press event Tuesday morning. “And then we’re going to use that information to make better decisions about how we invest public dollars by shifting resources to more programs that are delivering results.”

The overall plan, which Zahilay is calling “Breaking the Cycle,” consists largely of work groups that will report on ways to improve the responsiveness and effectiveness of existing county programs. Three months into his term, Zahilay is laying out a process, not presenting a finalized policy agenda or proposing legislation.

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But the two marquee elements of Zahilay’s announcement—the 500-bed commitment and the potential housing levy—do raise questions whose answers will determine the success of his plan. Will housing units (and shelter beds) that are already in the pipeline count toward the 500-unit goal, as the Urbanist suggested? How many will be housing, and how many will be shelter? Both these issues came up when former mayor Bruce Harrell promised to add 2,000 “units” of shelter or housing over four years, declaring victory even when the city ended up with less shelter overall, and claiming credit for projects that were begun under his predecessor’s turn. Zahilay’s proposal is, pointedly, for “net” new beds or units, so presumably he’s eager to avoid a “mission accomplished”-style Pyrrhic victory.

During an onstage conversation with Wilson and Housing Development Consortium director Patience Malaba at the HDC’s annual fundraising luncheon on Tuesday, Zahilay noted that the county has to rely on two main revenue sources: Sales and property taxes. (In 2024, Zahilay—then a King County Councilmember—proposed spending $1 billion of the county’s debt capacity on bonds to pay for workforce housing; that plan has not come to fruition).

“We do have to take a hard look at weighing those tradeoffs” between higher taxes and more housing, Zahilay said. “Of course, we need more revenue to fund critical services, especially to our most vulnerable neighbors—and we need to be careful about what kind of impact that has on cost of living.”

 

Density, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

An Alternative Approach to Creating Affordable Housing: Inside-Out Urbanism
Image of a four-unit apartment building
Sneaky urbanism adds housing inside the existing buildable footprint—and can be a way to expand the footprint in advance of major zoning changes.

By Josh Feit

The city of Seattle was supposed to be done with its 10-year comprehensive plan update more than a year ago, in December 2024. The comp plan is the document that governs local land use and zoning, which means it’s also about where the city will (and won’t) allow more density. As you know, it’s now 2026.

This should give you an idea of how many deadlines we’ve missed. Here we are, 14 months on, and pro-housing advocates are still waiting as the city braces for yet more debates over the specifics of the Neighborhood Center and Urban Center strategy that, sigh, continues to cordon density into tightly constricted areas.

We don’t have the luxury of waiting for the city to take action. It’s time to take matters into our own hands—at least as we wait for the new pro-density council members like Eddie Lin and Dionne Foster to join forces with Alexis Mercedes Rinck and new self-avowed urbanist Mayor Katie Wilson to get the zoning right. In the meantime, I’m hopeful about an emerging method to usher in the dense housing we need citywide to address the affordability and climate crises: Instead of fixating on wholesale land use changes, focus on discrete housing regulations with piecemeal reforms. Devious density.

I’m not advocating for timid tinkering around the edges. I’m thinking of ingenious hacks that are possible within the restrictive height limits, contorted floor area ratio guidelines, and setback requirements that currently define and limit the number of units you can fit into an apartment building. Like rearranging how you pack your suitcase rather than buying a bigger suitcase, affordable housing advocates should change the construction equation inside apartment buildings themselves.

Pro-density progressives in Washington state have already had success with this sneaky inside-out approach. In 2025, they won parking reform, which maximizes the square footage available for housing by lowering building costs and forgoing the need for carports and underground garages. Similarly, in 2023, advocates succeeded in passing the nation’s first-ever single-staircase bill, a reform that frees up space for more units in the same building footprint by getting rid of unnecessary two-staircase mandates.

Another recent bit of tactical urbanism, passed last year, made an exception to mandatory setbacks (the distance a building must be from the street and other lot boundaries) for smart construction methods like mass timber, passive house, and modular construction, as well as for affordable housing units.

In the current legislative session, pro-housing advocates are now on their way to passing elevator reform, which will lower costs for developers, hopefully hastening construction of more units.

As I reported last week: While the elevator industry stripped out a push for universal reform, urbanists are still set to pass a deceptively specific change at the ground level. The legislation will change elevator size guidelines for apartment buildings up to six stories tall, lowering costs and allowing more units. This detail-oriented code change will open the doors to multifamily housing in neighborhoods where the the overall zoning remains antagonistic to this type of renter-friendly development.

Consider this “within-the-envelope”-approach a pro-housing hack against the classic anti-density refrain about “neighborhood character.” (The housing “envelope” is the planning term for the ultimate size allowed for a development after all the setback, density, height, and other parameter guidelines are taken into account.) By adding the potential for more units within buildings that are visually in sync with the surrounding area, pro-housing advocates may reveal what intransigent NIMBYs actually mean when they say “character.”