Category: housing

City Council, Courts, homelessness, housing, LGBTQ+, Police

This Week on PubliCola: February 14, 2026

 

Nine stories you may have missed this week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, February 9

Bill Targeting Sex Buyers Would No Longer Result in Immediate Felony Charges

State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex has been amended; under a version that passed narrowly out of committee, buying sex would be a gross misdemeanor and sex workers would get access to services in lieu of jail. Proponents of the original, harsher bill said the new version fails to crack down enough on the “demand” side of sex work, and suggested that lenient prostitution laws allowed traffickers to go unpunished.

Tuesday, February 10

Sex Worker Advocates Demand Action from the City After Prosecutors’ Dehumanizing Presentation

The changes to the state law we covered Monday came partly in response to a lurid presentation by local prosecutors at a city council meeting, which included photos of identifiable, brutalized women and graphic details of assaults. Advocates for sex workers, also appalled by the presentation, issued a list of demands for the city, including a separate panel on non-carceral, humane approaches to abuse and trafficking and the inclusion of people with direct experience in policy discussions about sex work.

ACLU Drops Lawsuit After City Attorney Evans Drops Blanket Affidavit Against Judge

City Attorney Erika Evans and the ACLU of Washington announced that the ACLU is dropping its lawsuit against the city over a policy instituted by Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, that disqualified Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi from hearing criminal cases for almost two years.

City Council Gets New Central Staff Director

City hall veteran Ben Noble, who’s currently in his second stint as director of the city council’s policy-oriented central staff, is retiring in March after more than two decades at the city. His replacement, Lish Whitson, is another city old-timer who has worked on four comprehensive plan updates, including the upzone of Seattle’s former single-family enclaves last year.

Family of Jaahnavi Kandula, Pedestrian Killed by SPD Officer in 2023, Reaches $29,011,000 Settlement with City

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office settled for $29,011,000 with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, the 23-year-old student who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour in 2023. The $11,000 is a pointed reference to a comment made by Daniel Auderer, then the vice president of the police union, that the city could just “write a check” for that amount because that’s all Kandula’s short life was worth.

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Wednesday, February 11

Tax For Social Housing Brought In Twice the Original Estimate, Mirroring Early JumpStart Results

Funding for Seattle’s new social housing developer, which the City Council approved in a 7-0 vote yesterday, is coming in significantly higher than anticipated: In its first year, the developer will receive an estimated $115 million to acquire existing apartment buildings and develop new ones. The revenues mirror early returns from the JumpStart payroll tax, which is also a tax on large companies that pay high wages.

Thursday, February 12

Review Finds Multiple Police Failures Preceded Violent Response to Counterprotests During Anti-LGBTQ Event in May

The city’s Office of the Inspector General released a report today finding that the Seattle Police Department’s actions during the anti-trans “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” rally, held by an extremist group called Mayday USA, showed a bias against counter-protesters who showed up to demonstrate against the right-wing event. After chatting amiably with security for the anti-trans group, officers began referring to protesters as “transtifa.”

Friday, February 13

New Councilmember Dionne Foster Tells Seattle Nice: Police Cameras “Should Be Turned Off and Come Down.”

On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, David, Sandeep, and I interviewed new City Councilmember Dionne Foster. Our conversation touched on encampment removals, police surveillance cameras, the upcoming library levy, and the

Homelessness Authority Rescinds Tiny House Village Grant, Gives Money to Salvation Army Instead

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has rescinded a $3 million grant it gave the Low Income Housing Institute to build 60 new low-barrier tiny houses outside King County’s youth detention center, claiming LIHI delayed the process by failing to secure a site in time. The money, which LIHI secured in last year’s city of Seattle budget, will now go to the Salvation Army to convert 35 of its existing transitional housing units into shelter.

City Council, housing

Tax For Social Housing Brought In Twice the Original Estimate, Mirroring Early JumpStart Results
Mayor Katie Wilson speaks to the crowd at Tuesday’s “State of Social Housing” town hall.

With $115 million (almost) in hand, the social housing developer says it’s ready to start buying up apartments.

By Erica C. Barnett

Funding for Seattle’s new social housing developer, which the City Council approved in a 7-0 vote yesterday, is coming in significantly higher than anticipated: In its first year, the developer will receive an estimated $115 million to acquire existing apartment buildings and develop new ones. That’s more than twice the $53 million the campaign for last year’s ballot initiative, House Our Neighbors, estimated for first-year revenues last year.

On Tuesday, the City Council unanimously approved an interlocal agreement that will allow the Seattle Social Housing Developer to start spending the money to purchase and develop social housing—mixed-income apartment buildings with permanently affordable rent, governed by a board consisting primarily of renters.

“We continue to have one of the most regressive tax systems in the country in this state,” Mayor Katie Wilson said at a “State of Social Housing” event at El Centro de la Raza Tuesday night, “and it is very gratifying to know that we’re going to be able to use a little bit of that wealth and put it to work building housing and operating housing.”

The higher-than-expected early revenues, Wilson noted, mirror what happened with the JumpStart tax, a tax Seattle’s largest businesses pay on employee compensation above a threshold that grows with inflation every year. (This year, the tax will apply to employees wages above $194,000 a year). “This city is filthy rich,” Wilson said. “We just kind of, like, tapped into a vein and opened a little spigot, and $400 million a year” came out. 

Social housing is funded through a similarly structured tax; employers pay 5 percent of annual compensation to any employee above $1 million; for instance, if an Amazon worker makes $1,100,000 a year in wages and other compensation, such as stocks, Amazon would pay $5,000 for the portion above $1 million.

Tiffany McCoy, the interim director of the social housing developer, said that because of the funding, “hundreds of people this year will benefit from housing that remains permanently affordable, housing that is publicly owned and passed down through generations, housing that works for people that are a variety of income levels and helps prevent them from falling into homelessness.”

McCoy was previously co-director of House Our Neighbors, the group that proposed and passed two social housing initiatives, I-137 and Proposition 1A. She became interim CEO after the developer’s board fired its original CEO, Roberto Jimenez, an affordable housing developer from California. Among other issues, HON and some board members were frustrated that Jimenez never moved to Seattle from California. 

On Tuesday, McCoy noted that “naysayers” will continue to oppose the developer’s model and question whether social housing, including the developer’s model of resident governance, can work in Seattle. “But let them critique us. We will continue to build, and whether we’re opening our first, second, tenth building, our doors will remain open to all,” McCoy said.

The comparison Wilson made to the JumpStart tax is instructive—and could serve as a cautionary tale. While JumpStart continues to bring in more money each year than originally forecast, it never actually brought in $400 million in a single year; that number was an estimate for 2024 that turned out to be optimistic to the tune of $47 million.

Because the city has staked so much of its general-fund budget on the tax, which was originally earmarked for housing and small business support, big revenue fluctuations have the potential to create shortfalls that impact basic city services.

Although former mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget assumed revenues from JumpStart would quickly bounce back, it seems just as possible that they’ll keep declining: Because fewer than 500 companies pay the tax (and fewer than 10 provide the bulk of JumpStart revenues), the funding is volatile and heavily dependent on corporate decisions by companies like Amazon, which just cut thousands of employees in the Seattle area. The money coming in is still higher than the city anticipated when the council approved the tax, however.

The social housing tax applies to a much smaller number of companies (and a smaller number of employees at those companies): About 170, according to McCoy. Taxing the richest of the rich in this way makes sense from a political perspective—it’s easy to get voters to support taxes that will only affect a relative handful of the biggest corporations with the wealthiest workers—but the tax could prove even more variable than JumpStart, and the developer could see diminishing returns if companies fire workers or move them out of the city.

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At a presentation to the council’s housing committee on Wednesday, the developer’s Chief Real Estate Development Officer, Ginger Segal, said the developer plans to issue bonds this year and again in 2028, when the developer will run out of money and need to issue more. Bonds are a type of loan that a developer pays back with revenues, such as rent or public funding. The social housing developer plans to pay the bonds back at a rate of about $20 million a year, Segal said. ”

Segal said market conditions are favorable right now for the developer to focus on buying up buildings. By 2028, Segal said, the organization plans to acquire more than 800 existing units and convert them into social housing; by 2031, they plan to have constructed more than 600 new units.

Initially, the developer plans to encourage existing tenants to stay and rent units to lower-income people as they become vacant in order to meet a planned balance between lower- and higher-income residents; eventually, Segal said, units will become vacant and the developer will maintain a mix by renting to renters at all income levels, from 0 to 120 percent of the Seattle median income.

During that presentation, McCoy said one issue the developer could face soon is a section of the social housing developer’s charter that says the housing it creates “must be permanently protected from being sold or transferred to a private entity or public-private partnership.”

“We are finding, with some banks, that they don’t feel we could put the buildings up as collateral if we wanted to take out big debt to fund our mission,” McCoy said.

“After the next few years, I think we’ll have to reevaluate and see if we want to encumber more of that tax revenue,  or if we want to start encumbering the buildings” by putting them up as collateral for loans, Segal said. “But I think we need the flexibility to encumber the buildings, because otherwise we might have financing tools that we can’t use.”

housing, Mayor Wilson, Police, public disclosure, zoning

This Week on PubliCola: February 8, 2026

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, February 2

With a Year of Zoning Changes Ahead, Mayor Wilson Can Still Put an Urbanist Stamp on the “One Seattle Plan”

With the second phase of the city’s comprehensive plan well underway (and the next two planned), the city is starting to implement the zoning that makes the new comp plan, designed under former mayor Harrell, a reality. And there’s still time for Harrell’s urbanist replacement, Katie Wilson, to put a pro-housing stamp on the city’s main planning document.

Wednesday, February 4

Police Department Reverses Course on Public Records After Lawsuit Loss

The Seattle Police Department complied with a court ruling by giving people with more than one open public disclosure request an actual (if moveable) date when they plan to provide records for each request. Previously, SPD discouraged people from filing more than one records requests by placing every request but one in “inactive” status.

Thursday, February 4

Top Advisor to Mayor Wilson Leaves Temporary Job After Ethics Director Reverses Course

After okaying Mayor Wilson’s decision to hire Purpose Dignity Action director Lisa Daugaard as a temporary advisor on homelessness, the city’s ethics director reversed course, advising Daugaard that the hire represented a potential conflict of interest. As a result, Daugaard—an influential member of Wilson’s transition team—left her new position just 10 days into her planned six months at the mayor’s office.

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Where Was the Police Chief During a Recent Spate of Deadly Shootings?

Police Chief Shon Barnes was out of town over the weekend, when a spate of shootings left three dead and three injured. SPD wouldn’t say where he was (we asked), but his family lives in Chicago and he visits them at home regularly on weekends while renting an apartment in Seattle.

Friday, February 5

Elevating the Affordable Housing Issue

In his latest Maybe Metropolis column, Josh Feit reports on a Washington state proposal that would make accessible housing more affordable by reforming elevator standards that too often result in no elevators in new buildings at all.

Affordability, housing, legislature, Maybe Metropolis

Elevating the Affordable Housing Issue

By Josh Feit

How can we increase affordable housing production? According to Senate Bill 5156, one button we can press is elevator reform. Sponsored by State Sen. Jesse Salomon (D-32, Shoreline), the legislation would allow the state to change current elevator rules that—practically speaking—force builders to buy from an elevator manufacturing oligopoly. His idea: Allow smaller elevators as a way to bring down the cost of housing.

In 2024, a 100-page white paper from the Center for Building in North America outlined how a clutch of firms, including Otis and Kone, have signed onto a binding labor agreement  mandating a set of inflexible elevator specifications that define and limit elevator production in the US and Canada. These specifications, including exclusive propriety installation and repair standards, cut out a bevy of reputable and safe elevator makers that serve the rest of the world.

Prompted by the 2024 report, pro-housing advocates nationwide have been making elevators a YIMBY agenda item. As part of this lift, Sen. Salomon’s aspirational bill would allow changes to Washington state’s building code that could, according the urbanist nonprofit Sightline, increase the production of affordable, smaller-scale multifamily housing: “Apartment buildings with at most six stories and at most 24 units,” specifically, per Salomon’s bill.

The logic goes like this: State-by-state elevator regulations mandate unnecessarily oversized elevators.  As a result, according to the CBNA report,  elevators in North America are more expensive than elevators in the rest of the world. The report found that elevators cost around $50,000 to install in Europe while in the US and Canada, “these installations start at around $150,000.”

As the summary report on Salomon’s bill notes, this means that “currently, buildings either must have large elevators or [developers] are likely not to build them at all.” This second point gets at a cruel irony about opposition to the legislation.

One rationale for the current size standards is to ensure that elevators accommodate disabled tenants who rely on wheelchairs and make it possible for medics to fit stretchers onto elevators in emergencies. And it’s true that the elevator downsize recommended for smaller buildings in Salomon’s bill—they could take up about 17 percent less floor space—could mean elevators wouldn’t be able to accommodate a fully extended gurney. Citing emergency response concerns, the Washington Fire Chiefs and the Washington State Council of Firefighters testified against the bill last year, when it ultimately failed.

However, under Salomon’s recommended changes, elevators would still be ADA-compliant (current state law requires elevators to be much larger than ADA requirements). And, as Sightline notes: The new guidelines would still have enough room to spin a wheelchair around, plus another person, as well as a slightly tilted gurney. More importantly, they say, having a slightly smaller elevator is better than having no elevator at all.

“Perversely,” as the proponents of elevator reform at California YIMBY put it, North American rules actually make buildings less safe for people who need to be transported by gurney and less accessible for those who rely on wheelchairs.

“While larger elevator cabins make it easier to transport patients,” a California YIMBY blog post on the former issue argues, “the high costs the requirement imposes also increases the likelihood that buildings will not have any elevators at all, and that emergency responders will have to carry the patient down multiple flights of stairs.”

The CBNA report made a similar point about wheelchairs. “The United States and Canada now require the largest elevator cars in the world … a perverse disincentive that some developers respond to by simply building walk-ups.” In these buildings, people who are unable to navigate the stairs are restricted to living on the first floor.

Stephen Smith, the author of the elevator-reform report, acknowledges that he doesn’t know how many elevators aren’t getting built that otherwise would if the bespoke regulations didn’t govern the US market. But he stands by his report’s conclusion that “walk-up complexes are … being built, at a scale and to heights that are unique in the developed world.”

He explains: “I spent a lot of time poring over new apartment listings in Germany, Italy, France, and Spain and noticed that virtually all new four-story apartment buildings had elevators, and most new three-story buildings did too. In the US, virtually no new three-story apartment buildings have elevators.”

Smith says that when it comes to four-story apartments, his best guess is that it’s about “50/50” split on new apartments having elevators or not. As for the extremes,” Smith adds: “I have found examples in LA of five-story buildings without elevators, and six-story walk-ups in NYC and Seattle.”

Smith’s report does have telling data comparing elevators per capita in European and Asian countries versus in the U.S. and Canada. The difference is dramatic. Canada and the US come in last with four and three elevator cars per capita, respectively. In comparison, Switzerland, Spain, and South Korea come in at 27, 23, and 15. (Greece tops the list at 41.)

Elevator-free apartments also make housing inhospitable to the broader universe of people who can’t navigate stairs easily or at all and who are looking for affordable housing. Conversely, as I noted, if developers do include the pricey, larger elevators in their projects, it raises building costs. And this too undermines the broader universe of people seeking affordable housing by making the housing too expensive.

Certainly, developers aren’t loopy enough to skimp on elevators in tall buildings. That’s why Salomon’s bill puts the focus on allowing smaller elevators in smaller buildings; changing state guidelines per Salomon’s bill wouldn’t violate any federal rules. (Salomon’s bill doesn’t recommend any changes to bigger buildings; it simply directs the state to “support” efforts to harmonize national and international standards in the hope of beginning a multi-state effort to make North American elevator guidelines line up with the rest of the world’s.)

Fortunately, small-scale multi-family housing such as stacked flats, condos, and small apartments are exactly the kind of housing that urbanists believe will have the biggest impact on supply: Four-and six-story developments are examples of “missing-middle housing” that would fit seamlessly into traditional low-density single-family zones; these are neighborhoods that largely exclude lower-income families, renters in particular.

As Uytae Lee, a pro-city videographer who worked with Sightline to promote elevator reforms, says in his elevator-reform agitprop video: By making more neighborhoods accessible, elevators are “an essential part of our transportation network … a core part of a city’s infrastructure.”

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, zoning

With a Year of Zoning Changes Ahead, Mayor Wilson Can Still Put an Urbanist Stamp on the “One Seattle Plan”

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Office of Planning and Community Development rolled out legislation this week that will implement “Phase 2” of the city’s 10-year update to its comprehensive plan, the document that guides density and zoning in Seattle. Former mayor Bruce Harrell officially dubbed the proposal the “One Seattle Plan,” in keeping with his campaign and mayoral catch phrase.

The legislation complements the comp plan updates City Council adopted last year by increasing the density of housing allowed in 30 new Neighborhood Centers—areas within about 800 feet of existing commercial “nodes” or major transit stops—and expanding Urban Centers, where significantly more apartments are allowed.

The new plan will simplify the requirements for developers to build apartments in midrise areas. OPCD staff said apartments rarely get built in the existing midrise zone, because the four-story height restriction is too low to justify building and because Midrise has the most complex requirements of any zone in the city.

“Today, every single project that is built in a midrise zone has to come in and get a departure [from the standards because these are so complicated,” OPCD strategic advisor Brennon Staley said during a briefing on the legislation last week.

The legislation was finalized under former mayor Bruce Harrell, so it doesn’t bear Mayor Katie Wilson’s stamp. Wilson ran an explicitly urbanist campaign, with a commitment to allowing more housing in more places—something she’ll have a chance to demonstrate in later phases of the comprehensive plan.

Under Harrell, the city delayed the comprehensive plan update repeatedly, which is one reason it’s now broken up into four separate phases; the first phase, which got Seattle into compliance with a state law passed in 2023 requiring more density in former single-family areas, passed in December.

The zoning update also increases the amount of housing that’s allowed along “corridors”—areas directly adjacent to streets with frequent transit routes. As Doug Trumm at The Urbanist reported last week, OPCD reduced the size of some corridors in response to incumbent residents’ complaints about allowing too many apartments near single-family houses.

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“Today in the city, there are really very, very different viewpoints about housing,” Staley said. “There are people who own their home for a very long time. It’s been a great investment. … There are other people who think they will need to leave Seattle because they can’t afford a place to live.” The final legislation, he said, is an attempt to “recognize that both those types of opinions are valid.”

Efforts to accommodate homeowner complaints about apartments—that is, renters—have long been a centerpiece of Seattle politics. The result has been decades of anti-growth policies. Some, like exclusive single-family zoning, have only been eroded by outside intervention—it’s unlikely that Seattle would have allowed up to six units on every residential lot if the state legislature hadn’t passed House Bill 1110, which forced the city’s hand. Others, like the longstanding practice of segregating apartment buildings from single-family areas by concentrating them on busy, polluted arterials, remain in effect and are baked into the comp plan update.

Within those constraints, the remaining phases of the comp plan leave plenty of room for the new mayor (and progressive urbanists on the council, like Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dionne Foster, and Eddie Lin) to allow more housing in other parts of the city.

After Phase 2—the “centers and corridors” legislation—the city will rezone the existing regional and urban centers, which include downtown, Northgate, and Capitol Hill. That will happen later this year and early next year, as will consideration of of nine more neighborhood centers, which require additional review because Harrell removed them from his plan.In  Phase 4, in 2027, the city will upzone areas around frequent transit stops—another density gift from the state legislature, which forced cities to add more housing near transit through House Bill 1491 last year.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story incorrectly described the city’s midrise zones as allowing six-story apartment buildings. That describes one of the city’s lowrise zones; midrise zones allow taller buildings. The story also misstated when the city will consider adding new neighborhood centers to the plan; that will be later this year, not in the first quarter of this year. 

housing, legislature

Legislation Would Open Up Commercial Areas, and Ground-Floor Spaces, to Housing
Sen. Emily Alvarado, D-34

By Erica C. Barnett

State Senator (and former Seattle Office of Housing director) Emily Alvarado (D-34, West Seattle) is sponsoring a bill this year that would require cities and counties to allow housing in every area where commercial development is allowed.

If it passes, the legislation will be another win for housing advocates who’ve worked over the past several sessions to pass bills aimed at local NIMBY regulations, including a bill from Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) that forced cities like Seattle to allow at least four housing units per residential lot.

Bateman’s a co-sponsor on Alvarado’s bill, which came as a request from Governor Bob Ferguson. It could significantly change the landscape in suburban cities like Redmond and Kirkland, where anti-growth activists have fought plans to replace low-density commercial uses—like two sites in north Kirkland where a Michael’s and a Goodwill are currently located—with housing.

Seattle’s zoning generally allows housing in neighborhood commercial areas, so that part of the bill wouldn’t require huge changes here. But the bill would impact Seattle in a different (and, many urbanists would argue, long-overdue) way: It would also prohibit cities from requiring ground-floor retail spaces as part of new mixed-use housing developments, except in areas around light rail stations. Seattle requires ground-floor retail in most mixed-use areas.

Currently, according to a report by HR&A Advisors, 71 percent of the lots, or land parcels, that would be impacted by the legislation have prohibitions or restrictions on ground-floor residential development.

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Housing advocates and developers have long argued that mandatory ground-story retail is an impediment to housing development, since retail space often remains vacant; that vacant space costs money to build and maintain but provides no revenue, and can be detrimental to neighborhoods.

“There is a lot of underused land, and that’s especially true as the market dynamics have changed for both office and commercial,” Alvarado said. “We’re seeing lots of vacant strip malls, empty office parks, and even in mixed-use zones, you see a lot of vacant retail.”

At a hearing on the bill last Friday, opponents argued that allowing people to live on the ground floor of residential buildings will harm cities’ ability to raise revenues, hit job targets, and support small businesses. “Sales taxes are untapped and can be very significant compared to residential property taxes, which are capped and much smaller,” Association of Washington Cities representative Carl Schroeder said. “We are hearing from cities who are concerned that this will erode their ability to support local small businesses who are not in a position to build standalone structures, in contrast to national chains.”

Scott Bonjukian, a Seattle urban designer, argued that removing prohibitions on ground-level housing outright seemed like “a bit of an overreach based on a temporary economic situation. … These [mandates] are usually in place for good reason, in limited locations to reinforce downtown main streets or shape a transit oriented development.”

Testifying in favor of the bill, Sightline’s Dan Bertolet pointed to an analysis by the pro-housing group that found the bill would increase the amount of land where housing is allowed by 62 percent statewide.

In cities like Seattle, “there’s no shortage of retail spaces in the vast majority of our downtowns and commercial centers,” Bertolet said. “What those centers almost always do have, though, is a shortage of housing, and the problem is mandating money losing ground floor retail and new apartment buildings only makes it less likely that new housing gets built.”

Alvarado said “there has been far more pushback” on allowing housing on the ground floor of apartment buildings than allowing housing in commercial areas more broadly.

“I think cities want the autonomy to determine the look and feel of their communities. and they think that markets are cyclical and at some point there will be more opportunity to bring in more retail on ground floors,” she said. “My argument is there is a lot of stalled development right now, and if we can reduce barriers to get some housing built, that in and of itself is an economic benefit to cities, counties, and the state.”