Category: legislature

City Council, Density, homelessness, King County, legislature

This Week on PubliCola: April 4, 2026

Wilson and Zahilay Push Forward on Housing Rivera Wants to Audit HSD, and More.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, March 30

Ron Davis, Running for the State House on an Urbanist Platform, Says North Seattle Is Ready for a Change

Ron Davis, who ran for City Council in 2023 and narrowly lost to Maritza Rivera, is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda in his attempt to unseat longtime 46th District state Rep. Gerry Pollet and his slow-growth agenda.

Tuesday, March 31

Hannah Sabio-Howell Says It’s Time to Replace Longtime Legislator Jamie Pedersen

Just south of the 46th, renter and labor activist Hannah Sabio-Howell is making the case that 20-year incumbent Sen. Jamie Pedersen is no longer serving the progressive 43rd District well. Sabio-Howell argues that Pedersen is out of touch with Seattle’s renter majority, and favors compromise too much at a time that demands urgent action on affordability.

Wednesday, April 1

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

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay announced 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 Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is using to cut down on the cost of new tiny house villages in Seattle.

Thursday, April 2

Mayor Wilson Says She’ll Accelerate Comprehensive Plan and “Go Bigger” on Density

The mayor announced this week she wants to accelerate the remaining phases of Seattle’s comprehensive plan update by one year, add more density within a “reasonable walk” of transit stops, and restore and expand the proposed neighborhood centers—nodes of density inside traditional single-family areas. We spoke with Wilson about her vision to update her predecessor’s anemic proposal.

Friday, April 3

Councilmember Wants “Audit of Human Services Contracts.” That’s a Big Ask.

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera wants the City Auditor to do an audit of all Human Services Department contracts, she announced this week, in light of a damning King County audit that found evidence of waste, misuse of funds, and potential fraud. But “audit the human services contracts” is a big request for the city’s small audit office, and Rivera doesn’t have council support lined up.

Afternoon Fizz:

Rivera Plays Grinch to Library Supporters, Saka Holds Committee Hostage for Extended NBA Rally

After a parade of library supporters told Rivera’s select committee on the library levy the city should go beyond Wilson’s $410 million levy proposal, she said she would not be supporting a single amendment to the plan. “It would be fiscally irresponsible to increase the proposal given the city’s other needs,” she said.

And Rob Saka turned his transportation and Seattle Center committee into a 90-minute rally for bringing an NBA team to Seattle, asking hard-quitting questions like “what color do you want the team uniforms to be” and “how excited are you for the Sonics.”

Coming next week: The city council will have a full day of meetings to discuss the latest updates to the city’s Comprehensive Plan on Monday. The pro-housing Complete Communities Coalition is having a rally at City Hall to support more apartments in Seattle (RSVP here); Tree Action Seattle is urging the anti-housing homeowner contingent to show up too, telling their supporters that “street trees are not a solution”—only private lawns are.

 

Elections, legislature

Hannah Sabio-Howell Says It’s Time to Replace Longtime Legislator Jamie Pedersen

By Erica C. Barnett

Yesterday, we told you about onetime Seattle City Council candidate Ron Davis’ campaign to defeat longtime incumbent state Rep. Gerry Pollet, who’s represented North Seattle’s 46th District since 2011. Davis is hoping voters will reject Pollet, who’s run virtually unopposed for years, in favor of his go-fast urbanist vision.

Today, we’re focusing on a candidate who’s running against an even more entrenched, powerful incumbent: 29-year-old Hannah Sabio-Howell, a first-time candidate who’s running for state senate against 43rd District State Sen. Jamie Pedersen, who was first elected to the state house in 2006 and has run basically unopposed ever since.

Pedersen, who lives on Capitol Hill with his husband and four sons, was Lambda Legal’s lead counsel during the fight over marriage equality in the early 2000s and sponsored the state’s marriage equality bill in 2012. Around the same time, he helped organize and served as a plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit that overturned a Tim Eyman initiative requiring a legislative supermajority for tax increases.

Since those victories more than a decade ago, Pedersen has become known as an effective, moderate Democrat who represents an area whose politics and priorities have shifted leftward. This year, Pedersen shepherded the “millionaire’s tax” through the legislature—a 9.9. percent income tax on earnings above $1 million year. Many progressives were disappointed by the bill, which failed to meaningfully reduce sales taxes that are among the highest in the country.

Sabio-Howell, a First Hill renter and recent communications director for the statewide pro-labor group Working Washington, believes Pedersen’s concessions on the income tax show how he is out of touch with his own constituents. She also accuses Pedersen of capitulating on last year’s rent stabilization law, which capped annual rent increases at an 10 percent—”an amount we know is totally impossible for most people to absorb.”

“After two decades, those of us who live here in this district are looking around like, ‘I still barely can afford my one-bedroom apartment,’ or ‘I would like to have a kid, but that is completely foreclosed to me because I can’t afford $5,000 a month for child care,” Sabio-Howell said. “I think we are pretty tired of being told, ‘I’ve delivered for you,’ and then looking around and saying, ‘Where is it? What has been delivered when I can’t build the life I want to build here?'”

Sabio-Howell said Democratic lawmakers like Pedersen talk frequently about cutting deals and compromising to get things done, “but I think that cutting deals has been at the expense of what we could have won if we started first with our with with what our community has demanded and reaffirmed that we want”—things like funding for public defenders, affordable child care, adequately funded schools, and accessible higher education that won’t leave young people in debt for decades.

As an example, Sabio-Howell pointed to this year’s “Well Washington Fund” proposal from state Rep. Shaun Scott (D-43), which would have imposed a 5 percent payroll tax on large companies that pay workers more than $125,000 a year, similar to Seattle’s JumpStart tax. Although Scott’s bill went nowhere, Sabio-Howell said the proposal helped push moderate legislators like Pedersen out of their comfort zone. Scott was also one of 13 Democrats who pushed back against a proposed $550 million corporate tax break that was ultimately excised from the income tax proposal.

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“There is so much wealth among the ultra wealthy in our state, and I really think that for a state as progressive and pioneering and wealthy as ours, we have an opportunity to really build something that we could be proud of,” she said.

Sabio-Howell also pointed to the $100 million Gov. Bob Ferguson set aside to help cities hire more police as a potential source of funds for progressive priorities, such as fully funding public defense. “That [money] is not being used,” Sabio-Howell said. “It’s inaccessible. The people on the ground who would be in a position to use that money have literally said so. And that’s $100 million a year that we could be funneling into the upstream problems of people not having stable homes and warm, safe places to be.”

First-time candidates often enter campaigns with big ideas but few concrete plans for implementing them, and Sabio-Howell didn’t provide a roadmap to achieving her lofty goals. Universal child care, a top priority for Davis as well, would be costly, complex, and probably infeasible, especially since the majority Democrats have lately been cutting, not funding, child care and education programs. A statewide social housing plan “would be a very pioneering thing that I have not really seen” in other states, Sabio-Howell acknowledged.  And voters may be reluctant to throw out an incumbent who has risen through the ranks and now holds the highest position in the state’s upper chamber.

But Sabio-Howell thinks voters in the 43rd, which includes Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the University District along with parts of downtown, Lower Queen Anne, and Fremont, are ready for a change.

“For a risk-averse voter. I understand. I get it,” Sabio-Howell said. “Our current structure rewards seniority, but we know for sure that visionary policies are possible, when we elect fighters to get in there and go to the mat for them. And that’s what a newer generations of leaders will do.”

 

 

legislature, Urbanism

Ron Davis, Running for the State House on an Urbanist Platform, Says North Seattle Is Ready for a Change

By Erica C. Barnett

At least two Seattle candidates are betting that this is the year voters will decide to replace longstanding Democratic state legislators with progressive newcomers who want to move forward quickly with pro-housing, pro-worker agendas. If either succeeds, it will be a repudiation of the received wisdom that entrenched incumbents have an unshakeable advantage.

The first candidate, Ron Davis, will be familiar to PubliCola readers—he ran for City Council in northeast Seattle’s District 4 in the 2023 election, losing narrowly to Maritza Rivera in a year when moderates swept the council elections. Davis is running against 46th District Rep. Gerry Pollet. Pollet, appointed in 2011, leads an environmental group that advocates for cleaning up the Hanford nuclear site; as a legislator, he has worked to defeat or water down bills that would allow more housing in single-family neighborhoods.

In 2022, the state House Democratic Caucus voted to remove housing issues from Pollet’s committee—a decision that was quickly followed by several years of pro-housing legislation that forced cities dominated by suburban-style housing to allow apartments in neighborhoods, not just on busy streets.

Davis is hoping his North Seattle neighbors will get behind his explicitly urbanist agenda—and reject what he calls Pollet’s anti-growth approach.

“He’s been sort of the chief NIMBY in the Democratic caucus,” Davis said. “He does not want anything that involves changing the landscape in any way.” For instance, Davis points out Pollet’s opposite to accessory dwelling units, his support for adding additional environmental review to the long-delayed completion of the Burke-Gilman Trail through Ballard, and opposition to the low-density multifamily buildings known as “missing middle” housing.

“I think there is a set of people whose idea of being an environmentalist, like his, remains sort of stuck in the 1970s Malthusian, Thanos kind of worldview—like, ‘There should be less people in the world,'” Davis said. “I really don’t think that’s going to be most voters.'”

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(After we published this story, Pollet’s team contacted us to say that Pollet co-sponsored HB 1110, which required cities to allow up to six apartments per lot; that he co-sponsored a transit-oriented development bill we covered last year; and that he voted for a middle-housing bill, HB 1782, that included a huge number of loopholes and exemptions.

He also sponsored his own middle-housing bill,  HB 1981, which included poison-pill elements such as concurrency requirements—a common preemptive tactic for preventing new housing—and protections for historic buildings, trees, and “access to sunlight” in residential areas, among other provisions that would restrict new housing. Pollet sponsored amendments to water down both 1110 and 1782), for instance, and attempting to make it harder to build in areas at “high risk of displacement” where urbanists would argue more housing is also necessary.

Pollet has championed the inclusion of more affordable housing in new developments, backed rent stabilization bills, and supported adding back neighborhood centers that former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from Seattle’s comprehensive plan. However, he also argued the city should require private developers to ensure that up to 25 percent of all new units near transit are affordable to people making as little as 0 percent of median income (and up to 80 percent), an idea that seems designed to kill rather than encourage housing even without the bill’s language about protecting trees, historic structures, and access to sunlight.)

On the surface, there seem to be plenty of voters in North Seattle who agree, at least nominally, with Pollet’s slow-growth agenda; in 2024, running essentially unopposed (the other candidate was a Republican), Pollet got more than 83 percent of the vote.

But Davis thinks North Seattle voters will support his ambitious vision, which also includes universal child care; removing police accountability from the list of conditions police unions can negotiate as part of their contracts; replacing endless highway megaprojects with state investments in local transit; and using creative tools like revolving loan funds and state-funded Section 8-style vouchers to expand access to affordable housing and backfill federal funding cuts. All of this would probably require more funding than the state will take in from the “millionaire’s” income tax, which still has to withstand a court challenge after passing this year; Davis says that even with that tax in place, Washington’s tax system will still be more regressive than most other states.

Davis also said he wants to see stronger sanctions against ICE than Democrats in the legislature managed to muster so faåår.” I see our Democrats in Olympia saying, ‘Oh my God, there’s a fascist takeover of the federal government. It’s a threat to our basic freedoms,'” Davis said when we spoke late last month. “And then they’re like, ‘We have a mask ban that says maybe you could sue, but only if they violate your constitutional rights.’ I mean, God, are you fucking kidding?”

Davis said he’d support creating a state-funded “civilian response team” to serve as “the vanguard of resistance” if and when ICE descends on Washington state en masse. He’d also support legislation to “punish Vichy collaborators,” like a proposal last session that would have barred law enforcement agencies from hiring people who worked for ICE during the second Trump Administration.

In fact, Davis says he’d support going even further, by keeping them from taking “any state- or locally funded job, or contracting job, ever again.” Asked whether this kind of mass punishment paints every ICE employee with too broad a brush, Davis said, “I’m talking about who’s participating in this process [of targeting and abducting people perceived as immigrants] now. So you time bound it, and give people notice that they have six weeks or two weeks to quit or whatever.”

When Davis ran for council in 2023, he had a hyperlocal pitch: Elect me, and I’ll work to establish 15-minute neighborhoods and build “intermediate” housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness, including tiny house villages. Three years later, it’s clear that most of Seattle’s new urbanist policies were the result of action by the stateles  legislature, including Sens. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia) and Emily Alvarado (D-34, Seattle), which forced cities to allow denser housing near transit stops and in traditional single-family neighborhoods, to widespread NIMBY chagrin.

Davis said his own experience “putting together the coalition that passed the parking reform bill”—a Bateman bill that placed limits on how much parking cities can require in new developments—made him realize “I could get more done in just a few months” in Olympia than the council, with its Seattle Process, often gets done in years. Not only that, he said, the state has the power and funding potential to pull off bigger things—like universal child care, housing, and supplementary funding for local buses.

When I mentioned the conventional wisdom that legislators don’t have much power until they’ve been around a while, Davis pointed to examples like Bateman (elected in 2020) and Alvarado (elected to the House in 2022). “It’s not as if they showed up and the skies parted,” Davis said, “but I do feel like they’ve moved much more quickly, and they haven’t listened the conventional wisdom, which is that you have to put your head down for many, many years” before getting anything done.

Next up: Progressive renter Hannah Sabio-Howell challenges Sen. Jamie Pedersen, a member of the state legislature for 20 years.

legislature, Mayor Wilson, Media, Police

SPD Claims “300% Increase In Justice” Due to Surveillance Camera HQ; Judge Rules Against Activists in Press Pass Case

1.  The Seattle Police Department announced earlier this month that its Real Time Crime Center, which receives live feeds from dozens of police surveillance cameras trained on neighborhoods across Seattle, “Triples the Odds That a Victim Receives Justice.” That’s a bold claim for an operation that just got access to live surveillance footage late last summer, when the City Council approved the controversial cameras.

SPD, which is pushing Mayor Katie Wilson to expand police cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods, is using stats like this to convince Wilson that the benefits of surveilling Seattle residents outweigh privacy and overpolicing concerns. (And it appears to be working).

But what does a “300 percent increase in victims receiving justice” mean? SPD canceled a scheduled interview with PubliCola seven minutes before it was supposed to happen—according to Mayor Wilson’s office, SPD put out their press release before the mayor’s office had a chance to look at the report—so all we can go on is the scanty data they provided us prior to our scheduled interview.

That data shows that the 300 percent increase represents an uptick in how often a dispatch (such as a 911 call) resulted in an arrest, broken down further into arrests that included violent crimes and those that were primarily property crimes. Overall, 11.7 percent of dispatches that “involved” the RTCC in some way resulted in an arrests, while just 2 percent of dispatches where the center was not involved resulted in an arrest. The data does not show whether arrests resulted in prosecutions, the percentage of arrested people who went to jail, the demographics of arrestees, or how the RTCC was “involved” in the arrests.

Even with the lack of information beyond arrests, it’s important to note that SPD is describing arrests in themselves as a form of justice, when they could just as easily represent the kind of over-policing that often results when police concentrate their energy on specific neighborhoods and communities. As SPD’s blog post noted (in order to make the opposite point), the new cameras are not located randomly; they’re trained on “high-crime” neighborhoods, including Aurora Ave. N and downtown; if the planned expansion moves forward, SPD cameras are also coming to the Central District and Capitol Hill.

SPD’s blog post goes so far as to describe every arrested person as an “offender,” regardless of whether they were ever prosecuted or found guilty of a crime.

Unsurprisingly, the data showed that in general, SPD was more likely to arrest a person for calls that involved a violent rather than a property crime.

2. Yesterday, a US federal district judge ruled that three right-wing activists—Brandi Kruse, Jonathan Choe, and Ari Hoffman—were not entitled to press passes allowing them into the non-public press areas inside the state house and senate. The three had requested day passes from the Washington State Capitol Correspondents’ Association (CC, saying that they were journalists and should be allowed the same access as the rest of the press.

*Except when requesting special access to legislators, apparently

Kruse, a former FOX 13 reporter, has posted over and over (and over) on X, “I am not a journalist.” She frequently speaks at right-wing rallies, including a rally against trans children held at City Hall last year. Choe, a former KOMO reporter, works for Turning Point Media, the campus activism group founded by Charlie Kirk, and the Discovery Institute, the local right-wing think tank that spawned influential MAGA activist Chris Rufo. Hoffman is a onetime City Council candidate who has a talk show on KVI Radio; he also plagiarized PubliCola on at least one occasion, directly stealing quotes and reporting and representing our work as his own.

Both Choe and Kruse recently took part in a cringe-inducing praise circle at the White House, at which Kruse told Trump that supporting him had made her “more attractive.”

The CCA guidelines for press access say, “It is important that a line be established between professional journalism and political or policy work. This is the spirit in which the Legislature has offered access: The press should act as an independent observer and monitor of the proceedings, not an involved party. This means that we cannot endorse offering credentials to one who is part of, or may become involved with, a party, campaign or lobbying organization,” even if that person worked as a journalist in the past.

The judge in the case, David Estudillo, wrote in his ruling that the CCA rules require media to work for an organization “whose principal business is news dissemination” rather than political activities. Although the three activists accused the organization that issues press passes of being biased against them because of their political views, Judge Castillo noted that the legislature has issued badges to media across the political spectrum; the difference in this case, he wrote, was that all three activists’ main job is advocating and speaking on behalf of political campaigns and causes.

As an example, Estudillo noted that Kruse was a listed speaker at a recent rally outside the state Capitol advocating for two anti-trans initiatives targeting children. The first would overturn state legislation designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids from being outed to their parents if they confide in a trusted adult at school; the second would bar trans girls from participating in school sports. Kruse and the other activists were arguing, in essence, that they should be allowed to headline a rally calling for the repeal of state legislation on the Capitol Steps, walk inside, and demand special access to the state legislators they were just rallying against by claiming to be “media.”

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.”

housing, legislature

Elevator Followup: Reform Bill Watered Down
Dinkun Chen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Josh Feit

The state legislature got stuck on the second provision of the elevator reform bill we reported on earlier this month. The evidently controversial section would have directed the state’s Department of Labor and Industries to support harmonization between national and international elevator standards

Currently, elevators cost three times as much in the US and Canada as they do in the rest of the world, thanks to inflexible standards that limit elevator production, installation, and repair to a handful of companies. Among other issues, elevators have to be much larger here than in other countries, where builders can choose from a much longer roster of safe, reliable elevator companies.

The legislation, which passed the senate early this month before getting amended in the house this week, would still shrink elevator size requirements in smaller apartment buildings; that provision was a YIMBY goal to help lower costs for missing-middle housing. But the harmonization standard was meant to elevate Washington as a national example and lead other states to follow suit in a challenge to the elevator industry’s monopolistic hold over the US. That larger goal could have helped bring down elevator costs across the board.

As they say: follow the money.  While several groups testified in  favor of the original bill, including both the commercial real estate association and  housing density environmentalists from Futurewise and Sightline, there was only one opponent: The National Elevator Industry, Inc. Their lobbying firm? McBride Public Affairs.

It’s not so much that the elevator industry is writing gargantuan checks to McBride ($9,000 in total from the NEII and elevator company TK Elevator combined this month.) It’s that McBride’s list of clients—AMGEN, Boeing, Honda, McDonald’s, Uber, Molson Coors, and it goes on—means McBride has a hold over legislators. McBride’s client list is so all-encompassing, they also represent NAIOP WA, the real estate advocates who testified in favor of the legislation.

One of the main proponents of the bill is elevator reform advocate Stephen Smith; he wrote an influential in-depth study of the elevator industry oligopoly and its inflationary hold on the North American market. Smith wouldn’t speak to the behind scenes efforts of his foes to sway votes. But he quipped: “I hope it isn’t an anticompetitive effort to keep barriers to entry in the market and stop smaller manufacturers from entering.”