Category: Mayor Harrell

Affordability, housing, Mayor Harrell

Seattle Affordable Housing Awards Plummet Amid Economic Challenges
Office of Housing director Maiko Winkler-Chin

By Erica C. Barnett

The city will award far less money to affordable housing projects this year than it has in previous years—just $53 million, compared to $147 million last year. Those funds will pay for just four projects, including two in north Seattle, one in the Central District, and one in Beacon Hill. In comparison, last year’s awards—known colloquially as the “NOFA,” for the Notice of Funding Availability that starts the funding process each year—funded 12 projects across the city.

Another 18 projects that applied for funding this year will not receive it.

City officials, including Mayor Bruce Harrell and Office of Housing director Maiko Winkler-Chin, announced the awards yesterday at El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill; the event also included announcements about homeownership programs that are not part of the affordable-housing NOFA.

PubliCola reported on the reduction in funding on Tuesday; the Seattle Times had its own story on the awards yesterday.

A primary reason for the reduction, Winkler-Chin told PubliCola Wednesday, is the need to “backfill” projects that are unable to pay their construction loans due to issues like the increased cost of labor and construction materials (which went up 15 percent last year), the concrete strike, interest rate hikes, and “operational issues,” like tenants failing to pay their rent.

Typically, an affordable housing project gets a certain amount of funding from OH—say, $10 million— based on a set of assumptions about what the project will cost to build and how much revenue the project will take in from rents once it’s up and running. Those assumptions then inform the size of the loan the developer will be able to get from a bank after construction is complete and the building is leased up.

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If those assumptions are wrong—if, say, construction costs spike, there’s a concrete strike, and 20 percent of the tenants aren’t paying rent—the bank will reduce the size of the project’s “permanent” loan based on the new numbers, leaving a gap. If an expected $10 million loan gets reduced to $8 million, the Office of Housing will step in to fill that gap. And when that happens, say, 50 times, the gap works out to around $100 million—about the size of the reduction between 2023’s awards and this year’s.

Ben Maritz, an affordable-housing developer whose proposal the Office of Housing did not fund this year, said unpaid rents have become “the biggest problem” for providers who need those revenues to pay their construction loans.

Rents in subsidized housing, which are set by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development based on local median, have climbed much faster than wages for low-income people, making it harder and harder for tenants to keep up, Winkler-Chin said. “A lot of people are unable to really recover and pay their rent, and that does have an impact on how much of a loan a developer can get as they’re building up their housing.”

Another reason for the lower award amounts, Winkler-Chin said, was that the city had already “forward-committed” funding from the JumpStart high-earners payroll tax and the housing levy in previous years—guaranteeing funds for projects that were in the works but wouldn’t begin construction until later. About 43 projects funded in previous rounds of funding are currently in the works, the Office of Housing confirmed.

The JumpStart fund, most of which is supposed to go toward low-income housing, has reportedly been frozen as part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s effort to address an estimated budget shortfall of more than $220 million.

But there may be other factors contributing to this year’s relatively paltry awards.

The JumpStart fund, most of which is supposed to go toward low-income housing, has reportedly been frozen as part of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s effort to address an estimated budget shortfall of more than $220 million. Projects already funded through JumpStart will continue moving forward, but  revenues from the payroll tax are reportedly not being dedicated to new projects, reducing the overall pool of funds for affordable housing significantly. Last year’s city budget, for example, included $138 million for affordable housing from the payroll tax.

Asked about the reported freeze on the use of JumpStart funds for new projects, Harrell spokesman Jamie Housen said the City Budget Office’s “direction to the Office of Housing (OH) is to use JumpStart [Payroll Expense Tax] funds on housing. Payroll tax is one of several large revenue streams in the OH budget, and the annual NOFA opportunities are just one of the ways OH makes investments in the community. Other investments include supporting operations, maintenance, and services (OMS) for affordable housing providers—including wage increases for staff who work in affordable housing buildings—and providing support for increased costs on previously awarded projects.”

Every year since its inception, Seattle mayors have used JumpStart funds to fill budget gaps and fund priorities that aren’t in the JumpStart spending plan; last year, about $89 million in repurposed payroll tax revenues allowed the city to pile the budget with new programs (like the police surveillance system Shotspotter as well as generous police recruitment bonuses). This year, given the size of the deficit, it’s probably that the new council and Harrell will again view JumpStart as a solution to help close the revenue gap without cutting pet programs or laying off large numbers of city workers.

If the the payroll tax is converted, at some point in the future, into an all-purpose funding source for city needs, that would represent an abandonment of its official, legally codified purpose: Building new housing, funding small businesses, and supporting climate-friendly economic development.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Considered Hiring Ceis to Embed in Homelessness Authority, Council Starts Government 101 Briefings

Editor’s note: Due to a glitch, this article went out to newsletter subscribers earlier today but was not published on the site. We apologize for any confusion.

Mayor Bruce Harrell reportedly planned to hire controversial consultant Tim Ceis to serve as a city representative inside the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, where Ceis would work to reorganize and “fix” the organization, according to several sources. The plan to embed Ceis inside KCRHA hasn’t happened—PubliCola hears the mayor’s office decided it would be “too controversial”—but Harrell did manage to more or less singlehandedly appoint his longtime ally (and Garfield football teammate) L. Darrell Powell as the agency’s latest interim director.

It’s unclear whether the mayor plans to send someone other than Ceis over to the homelessness authority, which he recently criticized (along with Seattle-King County Public Health) to the Seattle Times, characterizing both the KCRHA and Public Health – Seattle & King County as “county” functions that should be doing a better job addressing homelessness and fentanyl, respectively, than they are. The city is actually a joint partner in both efforts, and provides a majority of KCRHA’s funding.

Ceis, a former deputy mayor whom Harrell hired to advocate for changes to Sound Transit’s station locations last year (Ceis received $310,000 to push for a plan that will eliminate stations near First Hill and in the Chinatown/International District), was recently criticized for his efforts to elevate business-backed candidate Tanya Woo, the business-backed candidate who lost last November to District 2 council incumbent Tammy Morales, to the city council. The eight elected councilmembers appointed Woo to replace former citywide councilmember Teresa Mosqueda late last month.

Neither Ceis nor Mayor Harrell’s office responded to requests for comment.

Now that Woo’s appointment is complete, the council has said it plans to get to work implementing the policy changes they promised during their campaigns, like hiring more police officers, getting “back to basics” like reducing visible drug use and filling potholes, and finding waste and inefficiencies in every city department.

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(Why they couldn’t start holding committees during the first month of their terms is unclear. The new council decided not to hold a single committee meeting until filling the vacant position. In contrast, the council filled the most recent several vacancies while holding committees and conducting a typical full roster of council business.)

But first, the new council members’ committee agendas consist of a series of Government 101-style briefings from city departments and council staff about what the departments do, how the division of powers works when it comes to the budget and executive departments, and how the city functions as a whole. On Monday, council central staff director Ben Noble held a briefing to explain how the city budget works. Throughout, new councilmembers offered suggestions about how the budget could change this year—including adopting a whole “new model” for budgeting, “benchmarking” Seattle’s spending on certain areas (say: homelessness or transportation) in comparison to what other cities, such as Houston, do; and “driving efficiencies” by “consolidating functions” that are being done by multiple departments.

“Taxpayers need to see some good return on investments, and members of the public, they’re just not seeing that today. And I think the number one area where the members of the public are seeing lack of ROI is in our homelessness spending.”—Councilmember Rob Saka

Councilmember Rob Saka, in particular, said he would like to see the overall city budget (written by the mayor’s budget office, but amended and approved by the council), change to reflect the values of the “two-thirds net new council,” which is politically to the right of the previous council. “We need to align our budget priorities with the priorities of everyone here that sits at the dais,” Saka said, “not that of previous councils.” Specifically, he added, the city’s “taxpayers… need to see some good return on investments, and members of the public, they’re just not seeing that today. And … I think the number one area where the members of the public are seeing lack of ROI is in our homelessness spending.”

Saka, along with new councilmember Maritza Rivera, promised to “audit the budget” during his campaign. On Monday, both said that they do not think a full “budget audit” is affordable or feasible. (The exact definition of a “full budget audit” has always been vague, and the city already conducts routine audits of its departments).

“It would be great to audit the full budget, but that’s not practical,” Rivera said. This is something their opponents noted repeatedly on the campaign trail, but both stuck with their “audit the budget” promise until the end of the campaign, abandoning it only once they were securely on the council.

homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Asks Embattled Homelessness Authority to Come Up With Budget Cuts

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has reportedly asked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to come up with budget cuts of between 2 and 5 percent; the city has the authority to do this because the KCRHA receives more than half its funding from the city. The request is a sign that the city’s budget crunch will directly impact the homelessness authority’s ability to expand or maintain the work its contractors do to address homelessness in the region.

It’s also more evidence, for those who are looking for it, of Harrell’s disillusionment with the agency, which has gone through tremendous upheaval (and a number of unsuccessful, very high-profile initiatives) in its first two years. Harrell has repeatedly expressed skepticism about the KCRHA’s approach, ranging from the agency’s efforts, under former CEO Marc Dones, to invest in new approaches like medical facilities for people with significant needs and single-family group homes for people exiting homelessness, to the size of the KCRHA’s budget itself, which Harrell has declined, even in good budget years, to significantly increase.

Harrell’s office would not specifically confirm the request for KCRHA to come up with cuts, but spokesman Jamie Housen said that “[g]iven the 2025 forecasted budget deficit facing the City, we are evaluating all options to drive efficiencies, optimize investments, and prioritize the needs of residents.”

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According to multiple accounts, Harrell chose the KCRHA’s new interim director, L. Darrell Powell, without much direct input from the KCRHA or King County, which provides nearly half the agency’s budget. Powell—a former financial director at the YMCA of Greater Seattle, United Way of King County, and the College Success Foundation—was Harrell’s teammate on the Garfield High School football team and more recently served on his mayoral transition team and fentanyl task force.

At a recent press conference announcing the new CARE Team, Harrell jokingly praised the “proud pop,” who was among the assembled supporters, for being the father of starting Husky cornerback Mishael Powell, who “won the Husky game singlehandedly” the previous week.

Housen said Powell’s “name came out of a meeting with the mayor and several members of the Mayor’s Office where multiple names were discussed and considered. I do not know if it was the mayor who first originated his name, but he certainly agreed with the suggestion.”

King County Executive Dow Constantine said he learned about the selection of Powell from Deputy County Executive Shannon Braddock, who “brought this name to me and told me about his qualifications and background. … I did not talk directly with the city, but others did, and understood that … the mayor knows him, and he sounded like a person who would be able to bring some good qualities to this still interim role, and hopefully gaining the confidence of the various parties [involved in] KCRHA, including the city of Seattle.”

The KCRHA has hired a search firm that ordinarily does executive searches for regional nonprofits to identify candidates for the permanent CEO position. As we reported, the search has been going slowly; the search firm, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group, just finalized a job description for the position last month.

Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Police, public safety, Uncategorized

Mayor’s Public Safety Plan May Not Include New Legislation, but Existing “Civility Laws” Leave Plenty of Room for Enforcement
Tents on Third Avenue near City Hall get a near-daily rapid response from the city and pop up again just as quickly.

By Erica C. Barnett

During a briefing on the city’s Downtown Activation Plan last week, Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess, Seattle Center Director Marshall Foster, and other city officials touted improvements to the waterfront (like a forthcoming Molly Moon’s ice cream shop at the “habitat beach” next to the new eight-lane waterfront highway in Pioneer Square) and progress on filling storefronts downtown with permanent businesses through the city’s post-pandemic Seattle Restored program.

Burgess also praised the Seattle Police Department for arresting nearly 200 people on drug misdemeanor charges in the last three months, then diverting most of them to LEAD (Let Everyone Advance With Dignity), the city’s pre-booking diversion program.

What Burgess didn’t mention were the details of a new citywide public safety plan the mayor’s office will be rolling out sometime near the end of this month, the details of which have been the source of intense speculation over the past several weeks. After the DAP briefing, Burgess told PubliCola that the plan will not include new legislation, but will be more of a “framework … setting a tone of what the mayor expects for public safety” from the police department, fire department, and new unarmed response teams.

For those concerned about a new crackdown on low-level crimes, the lack of new legislation may be cold comfort; laws currently on the books, but not generally enforced, include a “parks exclusion” ordinance that allows the city to ban people from parks for violating park rules; a law against urinating in public; and a ban on sitting or lying down on a sidewalk, “or upon a blanket, chair, stool, or any other object placed upon a public sidewalk,” in commercial areas between 7 am and 9 pm.

In his experience in the city, Burgess (a former police officer and city council member) said, “there has not been a mayor who has been as directive in what he wants to see in terms of public safety.” The forthcoming plan, he added, will “be very comprehensive, it will be specific in some areas, and it will be basically the mayor sharing his vision for what he expects our public safetuy departments” to do.

For those concerned about a new crackdown on low-level crimes, the lack of new legislation may be cold comfort; laws currently on the books, but not generally enforced, include a “parks exclusion” ordinance that allows the city to ban people from parks for violating park rules; a law against urinating in public; and a ban on sitting or lying down on a sidewalk, “or upon a blanket, chair, stool, or any other object placed upon a public sidewalk,” in commercial areas between 7 am and 9 pm. If Harrell’s new public safety plan includes directives to enforce existing laws like these, it would represent a significant escalation of SPD’s enforcement of low-level “civility” crimes.

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Last year, Burgess was reportedly behind efforts to enforce the existing disorderly conduct law—which is most commonly used to eject people from buses for disruptive behavior—within 25 feet of bus stops on Third Avenue, which would have empowered police to arrest people for everything from using drugs to smoking to playing amplified music at any location along the entire bus-only corridor.

A reporter asked Burgess during last week’s briefing if the city planned to revive efforts to crack down on low-level offenses on Third Ave. as part of the Downtown Activation Plan. He responded, “No,” but quickly added, “just to be real clear, it is a crime to do certain things in a bus stop or on a bus. And the police will use that [law], I imagine, at certain times, but there’s no focused effort in that regard.”

In the 1990s and early 2000s, then-city attorney Mark Sidran oversaw an era of aggressive enforcement of the city’s “civility” laws, which overwhelmingly targeted homeless people. (The Teen Dance Ordinance, Four-Foot Rule at strip clubs, and poster ban—yes, poster ban—targeted everyone else.) Does Team Harrell (and Burgess) plan to turn back the clock to the 1990s (or even the 2010s, when Burgess—as city council member—sponsored an “aggressive panhandling” law)? The new plan, once it’s released, will help answer that question.

City Council, Elections, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Issues Hiring Freeze as New Council Members Vow to “Audit the Budget”
City council finalist Tanya Woo was the only applicant to say “no” to the question, “If, after careful review and/or audit, the budget necessitates additional and/or increased revenue, do you support adopting new progressive revenue streams?”

By Erica C. Barnett

On Friday, Mayor Bruce Harrell instituted a hiring freeze across all city departments except police, fire, and the 911 response division, now known as the CARE Department. PubliCola broke the news on social media Monday morning. The hiring freeze will include exceptions, on a case-by-case basis, for “employees providing essential public services and employees backfilling for those using the City’s Paid Parental Leave or Paid Family Care Leave,” mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen told PubliCola on Monday.

Housen said the city “faces more significant fiscal challenges in 2024 than were previously known when the 2024 Budget was adopted, requiring immediate action to lessen the impact of increasing costs.”

The freeze, which applies to all vacant positions except those that were already in the hiring process as of Friday, is an attempt to save money in advance of this year’s budget process, when the city will need to a 2025 budget gap currently estimated at $229 million, with a larger shortfall projected in 2026.

While hardly unprecedented, the hiring freeze could serve as a preview for more dramatic cuts in the future.

In 2009, when the city faced a revenue shortfall of more than $70 million, then-mayor Greg Nickels announced hundreds of layoffs and imposed mandatory furloughs on many city workers who survived the cuts, slashing two weeks’ pay from their annual pay. In 2010, and again in 2011, then-mayor Mike McGinn prolonged the carnage, cutting jobs and putting employees on furlough until the financial crisis started to recede. The situation was so bad that McGinn actually broached the idea of imposing a hiring freeze on the police department, something that would be anathema today.

Since 2021, the mayor and city council have used time-limited funds or one-time, such as federal relief dollars and repurposed revenues from the JumpStart tax, to kick-start new program or pay for ongoing needs

The cuts, though arguably necessary, led to a long-term brain drain in departments like the Department of Planning and Development (now divided into separate planning and permitting departments), which eventually lost around 40 percent of its staff.

While the city has gone more than a decade without mass layoffs or furloughs, the issues causing the “structural” budget gap are arguably more daunting than those the city faced during the Great Recession. While the city is subject to the same uncontrollable economic factors as any business, including higher labor and construction costs, city officials made the problem worse by deciding, year after year, to address long-term needs with short-term resources.

Specifically, since 2021, the mayor and city council have used time-limited funds or one-time, such as federal relief dollars and repurposed revenues from the JumpStart tax, to kick-start new program or pay for ongoing needs—like the six-person CARE Team, which responds to low-acuity 911 calls, and wage increases for human services providers. This year’s budget also includes funding for the police surveillance program Shotspotter, which—while funded on a one-time basis with unspent SPD dollars—will almost certainly become an ongoing budget obligation.

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How well is the new council positioned to address these complex issues? During the campaign, many of the newly elected mebers said they wouldn’t consider raising taxes under any circumstances, or at least until the city agrees to “audit the budget” to find out where the city’s money is going.

During a public forum on Tuesday, all but one of the eight finalists for the open city council seat expressed support for such an “audit,” although none elaborated on what they thought such an audit would look like. (Only Vivian Song resisted the audit’s siren song, noting that an audit is a review of financial processes and transparency and the city is doing pretty good on both counts.)

During comments addressed to the council finalists, Council President Sara Nelson accused “the media” of spinning up “guilt by manufactured association” around Woo—an apparent reference to the fact that Harrell consultant Ceis wrote a letter encouraging business leaders who funded an unsuccessful pro-Woo campaign to help ensure her appointment.

Many of the finalists likened the city budget to household or business spending choices like a “cable package” (West Precinct Police Captain Steve Strand) or toilet handles in hotel rooms (Civic Hotel owner Neha Nariya, who said the city should “dig a little deeper” to cut costs). And Tanya Woo, the council’s presumptive choice, said “no” when Councilmember Cathy Moore asked the candidates if they’d support progressive taxes after a “careful review, and/or audit,” because, Woo said, “we just can’t keep taxing [and] asking for more money from small businesses.”

While there is certainly waste and redundancy in the city’s budget, particularly in city contracts (the mayor, for instance, has two Sound Transit liaisons, a city employee and a high-priced consultant, Tim Ceis), there probably isn’t $229 million of waste and redundancy, an amount that represents around 15 percent of the general fund.

During comments addressed to the council finalists, Council President Sara Nelson accused “the media” of spinning up “guilt by manufactured association” around Woo—an apparent reference to the fact that Harrell consultant Ceis wrote a letter encouraging business leaders who funded an unsuccessful pro-Woo campaign to help ensure her appointment. The “association” between Ceis, businesses, and the candidate businesses spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect, was not manufactured, but factual; you can read Ceis’ full letter in our post.

City Council, Crime, Density, Drugs, homelessness, housing, Mayor Harrell, Renters, State of Washington, zoning

Nine PubliCola Predictions for 2024

PubliCola columnist Josh Feit and PubliCola’s hoary original publisher (and Seattle Nice contrarian) Sandeep Kaushik are joining Erica here to kick off the year with some soothsaying.  Specifically tailored for PubliCola’s policy obsessed readership, these aren’t prognostications about 2024’s headlining concerns (like the threat of Trump II), but rather, as you’ve come to expect from the most in-depth local news site in Seattle, this is deep political wayfinding for the year in local politics ahead —The Editors

Sandeep Kaushik:

1. The Real Change, House Our Neighbors crowd announced just before Christmas they will put a measure on the Seattle ballot in 2024 to establish a permanent funding source for I-135, the social housing measure they passed in February. I will take the bait and predict that funding measure will fail.

I say this because I have yet to see any evidence House Our Neighbors has an actual, serious, and detailed proposal (you know, one that includes actual, vetted numbers) to build such mixed-income public housing in a way that is going to be operationally viable and fiscally self-sustaining (which was part of the original promise)—much less one that’s better than the well-established existing model for building affordable housing.

It’s one thing to ask voters to support a gauzily intersectional dream of a new, supposedly self-sustaining form of socialistic self-governing housing when there’s no price tag attached (57 percent of Seattle voters supported I-135), quite another when they’re asking for an endless stream of money before any proof of concept. It also doesn’t help that in developing I-135, its backers spent infinitely more time and thought on calibrating the mix of marginalized identities that are represented on the governing board than on an actual plan showing how this sort of housing would pencil.

Maybe House Our Neighbors will prove me wrong, and come forward in January with a viable proposal rather than just a leap-of-faith money ask. It’s quite possible that famously generous, progressively-inclined Seattle voters will pass the funding even if they don’t. And if that happens, maybe they’ll actually deliver on their dreams and promises. If so, fantastic! I would love to be proven wrong, and would be thrilled to see a new, viable, fiscally defensible model of public housing take root in Seattle. But I’m not holding my breath, and I going to predict that if they don’t have a real plan, Seattle voters won’t hand them a blank check.

2. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) will die a whimpering death in 2024. It pains me to make this prediction. In theory, a regional approach to homelessness policy makes enormous sense. In practice, though, the promise of regionalizing our homelessness response has—at least so far–face planted.

When KCRHA’s CEO, the charismatic and energetic Mark Dones, came on board in April 2021, and when KCRHA’s signature Partnership for Zero initiative to end visible homeless downtown was announced in February 2022, I was one of the cheerleaders for this promising new model.

But it was all downhill from there.

It soon became apparent that KCRHA had deep problems that seriously curtailed its effectiveness. To begin with, suburban buy-in to the idea of handing off and consolidating homelessness efforts in the KCRHA was nominal at best. Moreover, KCRHA had no independent funding source, and instead relied on pass-through funding from the city and King County, and that funding model quickly became fraught when some of the policies Dones advocated (no sweeps, opposition to tiny homes) ran counter to what some of their funders wanted.

The region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

The governing structure of KCRHA, with multiple boards and committees, turned out to be an unwieldy mess, and the powers that be made things much worse by ingraining some of the most chuckleheaded aspects of cultural progressivism—for example, the fixation on centering “lived experience” as opposed to, say, prioritizing actual experience running large organizations implementing complex policies—into that governance, leading to several high profile, avoidable scandals. Internal, back office operations were chaotic, and staff turnover high, leading to further credibility-sapping problems.

It all came to a head when Dones announced their resignation in May, and then when KCRHA admitted failure and threw in the towel on Partnership for Zero in September. A huge amount now rests on the search for a new CEO for the organization, and word on the street is there isn’t likely to be a hire for that critical position until the second half of 2024, if it even turns out that anyone with the requisite experience and skill sets wants the job. That means the region’s key agency for dealing with its most serious problem will remain largely rudderless for more than a year, as staff and talent continue to decamp for greener pastures.

Under that sort of slow death spiral circumstances, writing off KCRHA as a misfire—perhaps triggered by the CEO search producing underwhelming candidates—might be best option. Of course, pulling the plug would be a spectacular embarrassment, so maybe the powers that be will allow to KCRHA to limp along in some sort of awful twilight state for at least another year. But I’m going to go out on a limb and bet the end is in sight.

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3. The 2024 governor’s race will be the closest since Jay Inslee won his first term in 2012 by narrowly besting Republican Attorney General Rob McKenna, 51-48. First, Washington State voters are in a pretty sour mood, and Inslee, now exiting after his third term, has middling-to-underwhelming approval ratings. There was even a recent poll showing (relatively) moderate Republican Dave Reichert nipping presumed Democratic frontrunner Bob Ferguson in a head-to-head matchup.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s likely Reichert will actually win, given that he’s strongly anti-choice, but if he gets through the August primary —not at all a sure thing, since he faces a semi-serious challenger on the MAGA right in Semi Bird, and moderate Democrat Mark Mullet is also making a play to consolidate a cross-party middle coalition to leapfrog Reichert in the primary—he could (at least conceivably) make a race of it, particularly if Ferguson veers too far left. Anyway, if it is Reichert in the general, this is a race Democrats can’t take for granted the way they have the last couple of gubernatorial races, even if (as is also likely) Trump is the Republican presidential nominee this November.

Josh Feit:

1. Last year at this time, I predicted that after booting single-family-zone preservationist Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46, North Seattle) from his powerful position as chair of the local government committee earlier that month, the new wave of young Democrats in the state legislature would finally be able to pass some Yes-in-My-Backyard legislation.

Here’s me on December 22, 2022 writing about Rep. Jessica Bateman’s (D-22, Olympia) plan to authorize fourplexes in residential areas anywhere detached single-family homes were allowed: “With much better odds of passing their bills intact out of [new chair] Rep. Strom Peterson’s (D-21, Everett) committee than under Pollet’s provincialism, pro-housing legislators could bring some necessary state governance to Seattle’s failed local policies.”

Bam, they passed it. I was actually a little surprised. Bateman’s legislation made it legal in places like density-phobic Seattle to build four units per lot in residential zones, six units per lot within a quarter-mile walking distance of a major transit stop; and six units per lot in residential zones if at least two units are affordable housing.

Unfortunately, that’s way too progressive for Seattle. So, here’s my prediction for 2024 as the city updates the document that governs local zoning policy, its Comprehensive Plan: The newly elected slow-growth city council (I’m thinking of Joy Hollingsworth, Bob Kettle, and Rob Saka joining incumbent anti-growther Sara Nelson, along with Mayor Harrell himself) will use the Comp Plan update as an opportunity for undermining urbanism. First, they will come up with rules to minimize lot coverage, require setbacks, and establish height limits, along with levying hefty affordable housing fees that will keep housing developers from building any apartments in Seattle’s touchy neighborhood residential zones.

There’s also a provision that anxious city lobbyists statewide forced into Bateman’s bill that allowed local governments to limit the upzones to 75 percent of single-family areas.  I can see Seattle’s anti-housing faction using that “neighborhood character” card to stall density in hand-picked neighborhoods as well.

2. Speaking of pro-housing bills going awry: Watch for an attempt by state legislators to re-do last year’s stalled Transit-Oriented Development bill—legislation that would upzone land around light rail stations and bus lines—to disappoint pro-housing urbanists this year.

With the original senate TOD champion, Sen. Marko Liias (D-21, Everett), deciding not to sponsor the bill this year—I’m guessing he was frustrated by the overemphasis on inclusionary zoning (mandatory affordable housing quotas) that House Democrats tried to work into the bill last year—anti-developer lefties like Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) are now in control of the legislation. Count on minimal upzones near transit (say five stories as opposed to eight) and steep affordability requirements that will chill development.

TL;DR: The very thing the lefties say they want, lots of housing, won’t get built.

3. I’m going to be vague about this one, but here’s what I will say: Even though Mayor Bruce Harrell got the conservative council he wanted, look for new D-3 council member Joy Hollingsworth—who appears to share Harrell’s brand of homily populist politics (even more so than the others)—to begin clashing with him behind the scenes. By year’s end, her frustrations with Harrell will be evident at City Hall.

Erica C. Barnett: 

1. The pundit class (looking at you, Sandeep) may have convinced voters that a local law governing minor drug offenses, like using drugs in public, was the most critical issue in the 2023 election, when moderate candidates denounced lefties who opposed it. But 2024 will prove that the impact of the drug law will be minimal.

As we’ve reported, the city’s new law does not actually criminalize low-level drug offenses; the state legislature did that already, when it passed the so-called “Blake fix” earlier this year. Instead, it empowers City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people for using or possessing drugs in public; without the new law, only the King County Prosecutor’s Office could do so, and they have historically shown little interest in spending scarce county resources on these relatively minor offenses.

While Davison has reportedly been eager to prosecute drug users, the jail isn’t booking people on misdemeanor drug charges alone, making it hard for Seattle’s Republican city attorney to pursue this law-and-order approach to addiction. Meanwhile, as we predicted, putting drug offenders on the “diversion” track—which was supposed to appease progressives— has just meant that other people who would have received help through the city’s main diversion program, LEAD, are being displaced by people who get arrested first.

Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”?

It’s notable, too, that the city has done exactly one big, flashy event to show off its new authority to arrest people for using drugs in public, then send them immediately to LEAD, with no public follow-ups since October. The mainstream press dutifully reported on the event, noting that it resulted in ten people going to jail on outstanding felony warrants (my question: Given that SPD could have located, interrogated, and arrested this group for their serious offenses at any point, why didn’t they?) and 13 entering diversion.

The biggest reason you haven’t seen a spate of similar headlines about drug arrests leading to diversion since that initial push is that the city didn’t provide any additional funding for diversion; as we’ve reported, LEAD—which is no longer accepting community referrals, just referrals from arrests—will run out of money to accept new clients by May. A secondary reason is that Seattle always rolls out supposedly transformative (but, in this case, totally unfunded) new initiatives with a big burst of energy, only to let them fizzle—remember “Operation New Day”? We don’t either.

2. One area where the new council may throw its weight around is by reversing outgoing council members’ renter protection laws, including the $10 maximum late fee, 180-day notice for rent increases, bans on winter and school-year evictions, and the “first-in-time” law that requires landlords to rent to the first qualified applicant. As I reported this week, small landlords complained about the first-in-time law more than any other renter protection. The law, sponsored by outgoing Councilmember Lisa Herbold, was intended to help reduce the potential for landlords to discriminate against prospective tenants based on factors like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Although most of the city’s renter protections passed before his term, Harrell opposed the $10 maximum late fee, allowing it to pass into law without his signature earlier this year.

3. We may be entering a newly cozy era of mayor-council relations (with Harrell’s picks triumphing in nearly every 2023 council race), but camaraderie alone won’t solve the structural problems facing the city: Fentanyl addiction, a city budget deficit of nearly $220 million, the city’s inability to hire police despite generous financial incentives and a homelessness crisis for which Seattle is on the hook, at least financially.

The candidates who won this year talked a lot about resetting the culture at City Hall, finding fat in the budget and cutting it, letting police know they’re valued and trusted, and using a carrot (diversion) and stick (arrest and jail) approach to the addiction crisis. But the problems these platitudes purport to address are structural, and don’t respond readily to legislation: Every dollar of “waste” in the budget has a constituency (want to cut back on permitting times? Good luck doing that and instituting a hiring freeze) and many of the issues councilmembers brought up during their campaigns are structural and even nationwide, like police hiring. It’s one thing to denounce people for supporting proposals to reduce police funding three years ago, and quite another to solve a nationwide lack of interest among young people in becoming cops.