King County Council chair Girmay Zahilay and budget chair Rod Dembowski want the county to impose a new sales tax of 0.1 percent to boost funding for the county’s criminal legal system, including sheriff’s deputies, prosecutors, public defenders, and diversion programs. The tax could help close the county’s $160 million budget shortfall.
As the Seattle Police Department faces multiple lawsuits by women alleging harassment, discrimination, and a toxic work environment, new police chief Shon Barnes and Mayor Bruce Harrell touted an uptick in police hiring, with a large group of men standing as a backdrop. So far this year, SPD has hired 60 new cops, just five of them women.
Joe Mallahan, the T-Mobile executive and 2009 mayoral candidate who lost to Mike McGinn in that year’s general election, is reportedly considering a run against Harrell. And Takayo Ederer, a Seward Park resident who’s been raising money to run for City Council District 2, has more household wealth than the entire current council combined.
A story on a new website started by a former Stranger reporter claimed, incorrectly, that the Seattle Public Library has ordered its staff not to record ICE raids in library buildings and to stand by and do nothing if ICE shows up. The site’s editor claimed SPL was “capitulating to fascism,” and doubled down on most of the inaccurate claims in the initial piece, which continued to spread online (and cause misguided alarm and outrage) all week.
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Not only is SPD failing to come close to its stated goal of hiring a 30-percent female recruit class by 20230, it’s going backward; this year alone, five women have left the department, canceling out the five new female hires. And the legislature chose not to save a successful program that helped people living in encampments come indoors and find housing, treatment, and other services through intensive case management.
Two years have gone by since Republican City Attorney Ann Davison unilaterally ended community court, which allowed some people charged with misdemeanors to bypass prosecution if they connected with social services. Last week, Davison rolled out a new “drug prosecution alternative” that is structurally identical to community court—and it doesn’t include some of the features Davison said were non-negotiable, like mandatory community service as a condition for receiving city services.
Council members have come up with a lot of ways to say “we should force more people to retain trees on their private property” over the years, but “private trees are better because street trees are expensive and get in the way of theoretical future projects” was a new one for me. The argument for forcing people to keep private trees always comes up in the context of developments that would allow more people to live in former single-family neighborhoods; “saving” a tree usually means preventing someone from building denser housing
Update on Mallahan: He’s still calling around, but apparently not getting any bites from local consultants. Update on Ederer: We hear she won’t make her campaign official during filing week, which runs from May 5-9. Finally, we put a council proposal to weaken the city’s ethics rules in a recent historical context.
This post has been updated to include more information about SDOT’s pothole budget.
Several recently elected members of the City Council raised a novel objection to pro-housing advocates who argued the city should allow more density and plant more public trees yesterday: Trees in the private yards of single-family houses, they argued, are better for people than those in parks and public rights-of-way.
The arguments against public trees took place during a discussion about the impact proposed changes to the city’s comprehensive plan would have on tree canopy. Two years ago, the city updated its tree code to place new restrictions on some tree removals; since then, groups like Tree Action Seattle have argued that the tree code will lead to the “clearcutting” of Seattle.
Whatever individual tree advocates’ motivations, the impact of forcing Seattle property owners to retain trees in their private lawns is to prevent density in Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods, worsening Seattle’s housing shortage as the population grows. (For people motivated by the desire to keep renters out of “their” neighborhoods, trees have largely replaced the blunter objections of the past, such as complaints that renters ruin people’s property values.) Advocates want to revamp the two-year-old tree code to make it difficult or impossible to remove large private trees for development or any other purpose, and Moore is their main champion on the council.
Addressing several staff for the city departments that deal with planning, land use, and trees, Moore kicked things off by saying that planting trees in street rights-of-way, such as planting strips and medians, is “problematic” and potentially “not sustainable” because sometimes the city ends up removing those trees anyway; for example, Moore said, a SDOT was “wanting to cut down all those trees” on a landscaped median on Beacon Avenue.
After staffers responded that most of those trees were actually going to stay in place—the city puts signs on trees to indicate that they could be removed, not that they will—Moore made her case that trees in people’s private yards are actually better than trees in parks and other public spaces.
“While you say everybody is 10 minutes’ walking distance from a park, not everybody is mobile,” Moore said, addressing city staffers who had been describing the city’s tree planting and maintenance program. “And also, I don’t think that you can necessarily get the benefit of a tree by it being in a park. I mean, sometimes the benefit of the tree is that you’re standing outside your apartment building or your house when it’s 90 degrees and you’re getting some relief from the heat. You have the benefit of looking out a window and seeing a tree that you might not see in a park.”
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Moving beyond parks, Moore said that planting trees in public rights-of-way could also be “problematic,” because the city might have to remove the trees later for unanticipated reasons. For example, she’s “received a lot of emails about Beacon Avenue,” where the city has to repair sidewalks damaged by the roots of large street trees, “[and] SDOT wanting to cut down all those trees,” Moore said. “I appreciate the idea of wanting to put trees in the right-of-way, but that, too, comes with with issues.”
The trees Moore was referring to were marked with evaluation notices earlier this year; as a staffer noted in response to Moore, most will be retained thanks to sidewalk redesigns that allow the trees to keep growing while keeping the sidewalk accessible to people with disabilities.
Moore also brought up her favorite straw-man argument, one I’ve never heard anyone actually make: People who want to allow private property owners to remove trees, she said, inaccurately believe that any new housing that gets built in its place has to be affordable. (In other words, she’s saying that you probably believe any townhouse that goes up in your neighborhood is reserved for a low-income person).
“So this narrative that [if we remove trees for development], suddenly we’re going to have affordable housing, is incorrect,” Moore said. “I challenge the department, [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections], to show me how many of these permits were for affordable housing, I submit to you that none of them were affordable housing.” This is the point when I started yelling “Literally no one has ever said that!” at my laptop screen.
Moore wasn’t the only council member to come up with reasons that forcing property owners to keep trees in their private yards was superior to planting and maintaining public trees.
Rob Saka, who set aside $2 million in last year’s budget to remove a traffic barrier that prevented illegal left turns into his children’s preschool, pointed out that if trees are allowed to grow tall in city rights-of-way, it makes it harder to remove them later for other “transportation purposes.”
“I definitely recognize that the right of way is it is an appropriate place to to plant trees and build our tree canopy,” Saka said, but “there are associated costs, nontrivial costs, associated with maintaining these tree canopies in our public right of ways.” Every year, SDOT’s budget for trees seems to “grow and grow. … I love arborists out there [but we’re] getting to a point, getting to a state where our ongoing annual maintenance costs for maintaining tree canopy alone, in shrubbery alone, eclipses our ability what we spend to repair basic potholes.”
“Planting trees is expensive,” Moore chimed in later, adding that the city should create a new fund to move existing trees, like a sequoia whose owner has become the target of protests, to other locations because the trees the city is planting now aren’t comparable to the ones in people’s existing yards. (City staff who compared new tree plantings to evergreens planted when Seattle was being developed were also being “disingenuous,” Moore said, because the new trees won’t live as long.)
SDOT’s general-fund budget for tree planting and maintenance is $11 million this year, up from $6.9 million in 2024 and $7.5 million in 2021. The general fund budget also includes $19 million for pavement maintenance and repair, which includes potholes—roughly the same amount as last year, and up from $15 million in 2023. Of that total, according to SDOT, about $4.2 million pays for pothole repair. Repairing each pothole costs a few hundred dollars.
The voter-approved 2024 transportation levy has an additional $29 million for urban forestry and citywide tree planting, and $67 million for pavement spot improvements, including potholes.
Planting “trees in a specific location,” Saka continued, has other inherent problems: “It limits our freedom to operate, and removes any flexibility, sense of flexibility or agility, that we need as a city. … So when you plant a lot of trees in rights-of-way and fully leverage that space, again, it limits our flexibility to accommodate new travel, new modes of travel, new traffic patterns, and make the most beneficial use of our roads that works for all.”
I have to admit, “street trees are a problem because you can’t move them” was a new one for me. So it was almost comforting to hear Moore return to a very, very old argument against adding density in single-family areas.
Contrary to what urbanists claim, Moore said, “it is disingenuous, I think, to talk about, you know, ‘if we don’t build density, then we’re going to sprawl.’ We are constrained by the Growth Management Act. If we don’t have density in Seattle, we’re not going to sprawl out, because we’re constrained by state law. So that’s a red herring, frankly. … People recognize when they’ve been sold a bill of goods.”
In reality, the red herring here is that the Growth Management Act prevents sprawl. King County’s growth management boundary—where, according to Moore, sprawl is prohibited— includes every sprawling bedroom community in the region, from Black Diamond and Maple Valley to North Bend and the Issaquah Highlands. (That sprawl exists, by the way, because developers cut down actual forests, as opposed to the “forest” of individual trees in people’s private yards that’s the subject of so much handwringing in Seattle.)
Moore’s wrong about the reason it’s happening, too. Seattle has created a housing shortage by adopting policies that prevent housing. That increases housing prices in Seattle and forces middle- and working-class people to move out into the sprawl that surrounds the city. The “bill of goods” is that Seattle’s anti-housing policies—and, yes, proposals to prevent development by forcing property owners to retain trees are anti-housing—don’t have consequences for the entire region.
We sat down with Adonis Ducksworth—a longtime skateboarder and Seattle Department of Transportation staffer who’s running to represent Southeast Seattle—to talk about density, social housing, and how to address and prevent gun violence in the district.
Acting county executive Shannon Braddock, appointed on a temporary basis several weeks ago, remains essentially an at-will employee until (and unless) the county council appoints her as interim executive through November. They were supposed to make a decision this week (after declining to appoint her at an earlier meeting) but now won’t do so until at least early May.
On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed the District 2 city council election, hacked crossing signals in Amazon’s neighborhood, and the potential closure of the Virginia Inn, an institution in Pike Place Market. Also, on this week’s episode of Are You Mad At Me?, the podcast Josh and I are doing about the movie Shattered Glass, we explain why everyone should watch this excellent movie.
When City Attorney Ann Davison and City Councilmember Cathy Moore pushed to urgently pass a new law allowing judges to ban sex buyers from Aurora Ave. N, they claimed the orders would help end gun violence and trafficking in the area. In the seven months since, there have only been five such orders, all issued after costly stings involving police pretending to be sex workers.
The homelessness authority released some new details about its latest statistical estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in King County. Unsurprisingly, homelessness has gotten worse, just as the state and federal governments prepare to make cuts to programs that bring people indoors.
One of the programs on the state’s chopping block is an encampment resolution program begun during the pandemic. Unlike the city of Seattle’s policy, which mostly consists of designating people as obstructions and sweeping them from place to place, the state program involves weeks of outreach and provides both case management and temporary lodging as part of a path to housing. The state budget would eliminate funding to address encampments in the future.
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New contracts from HUD’s Continuum of Care program, which provides about 11 percent of the region’s homelessness budget through grants to nonprofit providers, would require providers to check the immigration status of people seeking shelter and other services, and deny service to anyone who can’t prove they’re in the country legally. The regional homelessness authority hasn’t decided yet how to respond to the contracts, which also include anti-”gender ideology” language.
In his “Maybe Metropolis” column, Josh Feit touts legislation that would allow King County Metro to redevelop up to three underutilized park-and-ride lots as affordable housing—the ultimate transit-oriented development.
Aerial view of Shoreline Park-and-Ride via Google Maps.
By Josh Feit
We (Ed: Actually, Erica) gladly paid $7 an hour on a recent Friday afternoon for a street parking spot behind Capitol Hill’s Stoup Brewing. The reasonable fee is part of SDOT’s data-driven demand management program, which puts an appropriate price on parking, recognizing—sort of like NYC’s congestion pricing program—that popular destinations should be subsidized by the car-centric culture their urban density offsets. After all, density makes Capitol Hill’s go-to clubs, bars, restaurants, and shops possible in the first place.
Applauding the high cost of parking was on point because the event we were attending was a happy hour thrown by Sightline Institute, where more than 50 people crowded in to celebrate, I kid you not, a parking reform bill. Sightline, which has become an incubator of green metropolis legislation in Olympia, helped draft the bill, which had just passed the state legislature the day before.
Demand management is well and good. But the Sightline bill takes the next step: It prevents cities from requiring too much parking in the first place. The bill, which was sponsored by urbanist rock star Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), caps parking mandates statewide. For example, the bill says cities can’t require more than one parking space for every two units in new multifamily housing. Developers could still build more parking, but they’ll no longer have to.
There were free stickers on the tables proclaiming, in the style of parking signs: “End Parking Mandates.” And when Sightline’s parking reform guru Catie Gould jumped up on a table with a handful of drink tickets to thank everyone for coming—identifying herself as “the one who wrote” SB 5184—the crowd feted her like she was Bernie or AOC behind the mic on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.
Certainly, three cheers for the parking caps; I grabbed one of the free stickers. But it’s another bill that sets my war-on-cars heart aflutter. Where the Bateman/Sightline bill limits new parking, the one I’m giddy about actually nukes existing parking infrastructure—parking infrastructure that (unsurprisingly to those who have been predicting a transit future for years) is sitting largely empty.
According to King County Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer, only about 30 percent of the parking spaces in park-and-rides across the system are full on a typical day—and the most heavily used lots, at Northgate and on the Eastside, are only 60 to 70 percent full.
King County lobbied for a change in state law to allow for a different use at these properties: Affordable housing. Appropriately enough, the reform—which authorizes Metro to overhaul three pilot sites for now—came as an amendment to state Sen. Julia Reed’s (D-36, Seattle) transit-oriented development bill, broader legislation that’s about incentivizing affordable housing near transit hubs. (I wrote about Reed’s bill and its innovative funded inclusionary zoning progam earlier this session.)
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The un-pave paradise amendment, a friendly add from state Sen. Yasmin Trudeau (D-27, Tacoma), says WSDOT can select up to three park-and-ride facilities in King County so Metro can conduct a pilot affordable housing program that “releases [Metro from] any covenant imposed for highway purposes and replace it with a covenant requiring affordable housing.” “Gaining this flexibility,” Metro spokesman Switzer said, “would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service.”
You don’t have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist’s version of turning swords into ploughshares.
Switzer declined to specify which park-and-rides are being liberated, but the legislation specifies three large surface parking lots—each with between 300 and 1,000 parking spaces—in Kirkland, Shoreline, and South King County.
Go figure. Parking lots with 300 to 1,000 stalls are going underutilized. Props to King County Metro for turning those empty stalls into an opportunity for fulfilling the potential of transit infrastructure as a prompt to build affordable housing. Transit policy is land use policy. And King County needs more land use policy like this that authorizes affordable housing.
In a recent meeting of the Seattle City Council’s special committee on the comprehensive plan, Councilmember Cathy Moore laid out her case for imposing fees on new housing in the city’s traditional single-family areas, where—under a state law passed two years ago, HB 1110—the city is required to allow up to four units on each lot (or six within a quarter-mile of frequent transit stops or when two of the units are affordable.)
The council is gearing up to adopt “interim” zoning changes to comply with HB 1110, which Seattle must do by June; ordinarily, the city would have adopted the new rules as part of the city’s overall comprehensive plan update, but Mayor Bruce Harrell introduced his legislation far behind schedule, leaving the council with little time to consider the plan.
A half-dozen homeowner groups have appealed the plan, arguing that specific new “neighborhood centers”—commercial areas near transit where the proposed plan would allow apartment building—will harm the character of their historically single-family areas.
Simultaneously, the city is considering changes to its Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) legislation that would expand MHA to the new neighborhood centers, adding 21 percent to the area of the city that’s subject to MHA, while continuing to exempt the new “neighborhood residential” zones—the new name for the city’s former single-family areas—from the fees.
Moore’s objections boiled down to two main points. First, she argued against the concept of neighborhood centers, noting that the city is already increasing the amount of housing that can be built “throughout the city,” by allowing up to four units on every single-family lot. (Moore specifically opposes a new neighborhood center in Maple Leaf, which she argued would amount to “sacrificing” the entire neighborhood to density.)
Second, and more vociferously, she argued that the city should impose Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requirements on all new housing in former single-family areas, effectively mandating that developers build or fund the construction of at least one affordable unit for every three to five market-rate units they build.
MHA, which has been in place since 2019, allows developers to build more housing in certain parts of the city; in exchange, they agree to build affordable housing on site or pay the city’s Office of Housing, which funds housing elsewhere. The size of the fee varies depending on where in the city the new housing is located, and by how much of a height bonus developers receive. As housing construction slows, so do MHA revenues; currently, the City Budget Office projects that MHA will bring in $22 million in both 2025 and 2026, down from $68 million in 2022 and $59 million in 2023.
“We’re going to open up the city to tremendous development and density, which is good, but we need to make sure that we’re utilizing all our tools,” Moore said, “and MHA is a powerful tool. It can be tweaked, but to simply say it shouldn’t apply across the board, I think, is a missed opportunity. And again, it’s a calibration of, what are the costs that we consider valuable in this society?”
Representatives from the mayor’s office, the Office of Planning and Community Development, and two consultants that looked at the impact of the MHA program on housing in Seattle, BERK and Heartland pointed to 2024 BERK/Heartland study showing that developers of low-rise housing—the townhouses, fourplexes, and other low-density housing types that will be allowed in single-family zones under 1110—opted to build these units outside MHA areas because the additional height bonus didn’t benefit low-rise developers enough to make up for the large fees they would have to pay to build in those areas.
A separate study, from ECONorthwest, showed that “middle housing” developments are extremely sensitive to cost increases, falling off dramatically as the cost to develop each unit increases. That same study found that middle housing is currently feasible in only 19 percent of the proposed new neighborhood residential (former single-family areas), and most of those won’t be redeveloped; imposing new fees on new housing in those areas would make it far less likely that developers would choose to build new housing there.
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OPCD planning manager Geoff Wentlandt noted that by adding new neighborhood centers to the city’s zoning maps, the city will be increasing the areas of the city subject to MHA requirements by 21 percent. But imposing MHA fees on small developments in former single-family areas, Wentlandt said, would reduce the amount developers would make on projects below levels that most developers would be willing to accept. “We really want to prioritize seeing the production of middle housing in the new neighborhood residential zones. Everyone agrees that middle housing is a high priority, and want to make sure it comes to fruition,” Wentlandt said.
Moore pushed back on this, arguing that developers should be willing to accept lower profit margins in exchange for the ability to build in new areas. “My understanding is, in the past, when they were building, they expected 15 to 20 percent return on investment, and they’re still seeking those kinds of high level [returns],” Moore said.
“If you talk to some of the smaller for-profit developers… they’re not looking to make more than 10 percent return on investment. And so things do actually pencil out. When we talk about penciling out, are we talking about we’re penciling out at 15 percent profit, or are we talking about penciling out at 10 percent profit? Nobody’s really answered that question, what does it truly mean to pencil?”
Moore also suggested that OPCD was arguing that “six dollars”—the difference between a typical $22-per-square-foot MHA fee when the program was introduced and the $28 it costs today—is making it so that projects don’t pencil out. “I think we need a policy discussion about whether we think $6 to ensure that we continue to have affordable housing in the city is a cost that we think is appropriate for our developers to absorb and reduce their return on investment a little bit,” Moore said. “I guess I’m unconvinced that the $6 is really, across the board, going to be the thing that prevents affordable housing.” (The $6 change reflects an annual inflation adjustment, not an increase in real terms.)
Christa Valles, a senior advisor in the mayor’s office, pushed back on this, saying, “I would just like to be really clear we do not consider our position on this as backing away from MHA. … This is a really difficult environment right now for housing development, and we want to make sure that the infill that we hope to see under HB 1110 has the support that it needs to happen.”
According to the BERK study, the MHA fee itself makes up a small percentage of overall development costs; but, as costs for other elements of development increase, the fee can be a deciding factor in whether a project gets built. In real dollars, building four 1,250-square-foot units would add $140,000 to the cost to develop a property, using the current $28 “typical” fee. Even if a developer decided it was worth it to pay an extra $140,000 to build those four units, the fee would get passed on to future renters or buyers, making the housing less affordable.
Moore also suggested “carving out an exemption” to MHA requirements “for people, families, who are wanting to develop their lot,” as opposed to developers building the same type of housing for new residents.
Implementing the changes Moore suggested—that is, eliminating at least some neighborhood centers and imposing fees on all new development in the city’s traditional single-family neighborhoods—would make it far more expensive, less feasible, and less likely that middle housing would be built in neighborhoods across Seattle. Developers would reasonably opt out of building in places where they would make less money, choosing either not to build in Seattle or to concentrate new housing in areas where it has always been allowed—along large, busy arterial roads where Seattle’s renter majority is currently concentrated.
Cathy Moore earmarks $1 million to The More We Love, Sara Nelson talks housing in the stadium district, SCORE’s director defends the troubled jail, and more.
After PubliCola reported on substandard conditions at SCORE, a regional jail in South King County where at least 11 people have died over the last two years, jail director Devin Schrum defended her record to a sympathetic Renton City Council committee, calling the jail “human -centered” and safe.
Providers who assist victims of sex trafficking and other types of commercial sexual exploitation have spent months preparing collaboratively for a competitive bidding process for more than $1 million in new funding for a “receiving center” for survivors. Last week, they learned that Councilmember Cathy Moore had chosen to circumvent this process, awarding funds directly to The More We Love, a group that also holds the city of Burien’s homeless encampment response contracts.
Last year’s JumpStart payroll tax revenues came in $47 million shy of forecasts—a potentially significant problem if the trend keeps up, since the city chose last year to use the tax, which was supposed to be dedicated mostly to one-off capital projects, to fill a $250 million-plus general budget gap. And Councilmember Dan Strauss’ proposal to require “loud music venues” to sell earplugs to patrons ran into some skepticism from his colleagues.
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Council President Sara Nelson was our special guest on this week’s podcast, where we talked at length about her successful proposal to allow new apartments in the city’s stadium district (and I asked her if this housing, located in a busy commercial area, was just a distraction from the real need for new apartments in every neighborhood.
The city of Burien, which completely banned sleeping outdoors last year, spent more than $200,000 in 2024 fighting a lawsuit by the Seattle King County Coalition on homelessness and several unsheltered Burien residents. And the city’s glitchy new payroll system, Workday, gave some city workers unauthorized vacation days and failed to pay others for premium pay they were supposed to receive in lieu of benefits.
SEIU 925, the union the represents nearly 400 public defense attorneys and other staffers, raised questions about interim director Matt Sanders’ ability to lead the department amid low morale and concerns about caseload standards, and endorsed another candidate over their current boss. King County Executive Dow Constantine announced he picked Sanders for the job shortly before Sound Transit announced Constantine will be the transit agency’s new CEO.
Certainly, three cheers for the parking caps; I grabbed one of the free stickers. But it’s another bill that sets my war-on-cars heart aflutter. Where the Bateman/Sightline bill limits new parking, the one I’m giddy about actually nukes existing parking infrastructure—parking infrastructure that (unsurprisingly to those who have been
