Category: podcasts

homelessness, podcasts

Alarming Audit, Missing Millions: Is the End Nigh for KCRHA?

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s 🚨emergency episode🚨 of Seattle Nice, we discussed a damning new forensic report into the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s finances, which revealed that the agency could not account for millions of dollars in public funds.

As I reported earlier today, the audit revealed that the KCRHA couldn’t account for $8 million; it also revealed an “administrative overspend” of more than $4 million, on top of a previously reported programmatic overspend of more than $6 million. Beyond the missing money, the repord raises serious concerns about the KCRHA’s accounting practices and use of restricted funds, some of which may have been used for unauthorized purposes.

We discussed what Sandeep described as the “overlapping failures” early in the agency’s history, when the founding CEO, Marc Dones, established a culture in which lived experience of homelessness took primacy over traditional government qualifications, a practice that pushed many of the people who had been managing homelessness contracts at the city of Seattle out and set the agency on a path of lackadaisical record-keeping, few formal financial controls, and accounting practices that included reconciling funds over chat, email, and constant revisions to Excel spreadsheets, rather than traditional government accounting practices.

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A number of elected officials at the city and county have already called for the dissolution of the KCRHA, expressing outrage at the audit findings. That process, if it happens, will be long and arduous, and could spell the end of the much-touted “regional approach to homelessness,” which was the ostensible reason the KCRHA was created in the first place.

But as we also discussed, the city and county—the KCRHA’s two primary funders—also bear some responsibility for letting the agency’s finances and accounting get so out of hand and allowing their bank accounts to fall so far into the red. The KCRHA has long served as a bit of a punching bag for its primary funders, but it was it set up to struggle from the very start, when the city and county signed an agreement creating the agency that did not give KCRHA its own funding source, making it basically a pass-through agency that was occasionally allowed to do side missions—like the ill-fated “Partnership for Zero,” which was supposedly going to end unsheltered homelessness downtown.

The KCRHA’s board will meet at 3:00 on Friday, when it will hear from both agency CEO Kelly Kinnison and Clark Nuber, the agency hired by the city and county to do the forensic report. The public can tune in to the meeting on Zoom.

Affordability, Density, podcasts

Will Dialing Back Fees on Housing Fix Seattle’s Construction Crash?

 

Photo by Joshua T. Garcia, via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 license.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep and I brought on two special guests to explain why developers want a holiday from Mandatory Housing Affordability fees, which are added on to of the cost of every new multifamily residential building in Seattle. The fees pay for affordable housing (or a developer can skip them by building affordable units on sight), but they’re bringing in less money than ever as housing development slows.

Since MHA passed, in 2019, Seattle has undergone a political evolution on housing. Density, which neighborhood activists and most political leaders once saw as having an entirely negative impact on neighborhoods, is increasingly seen as a necessity as Seattle’s renter majority grows. Many people no longer agree that the city should segregate renters from property owners by restricting them to dirty, polluted arterials far from parks, libraries, and tree-lined streets. There’s a growing consensus that to reduce the cost of housing, you have to build more of it.

Our guests this week, land use and housing consultant Natalie Quick and former Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, don’t go so far as to call for a total repeal of MHA, but they do make a strong case for its eventual replacement with an incentive-based approach called funded inclusionary zoning. FIZ, which we’ve covered at PubliCola before provides tax breaks, similar to Seattle’s existing Multifamily Tax Exemption program, in exchange for a requirement that developers build affordable units on site. Instead of charging a fee for housing, which drives up rents, FIZ makes it possible for affordable and market-rate housing to coexist.

As Marco points out, housing slowdowns don’t just lead to a shortage of housing, driving up rents. They also deplete city resources, because when developers decide it’s too expensive to build, the city loses out on all other kinds of non-MHA revenues, from sales taxes on materials to taxes on real estate transactions to property taxes on the housing itself.

This one’s a wonky episode, but one well worth listening to if you want to understand why so little new housing—particularly larger units—is getting built right in Seattle right now and what the city could do to reverse the trend.

Editor’s note: This story originally identified Marco Lowe as the former Office of Economic Development director. This error has been corrected.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson’s Shelter Plan, King County Assessor’s Stalking Charges, an Ambitious Library Levy, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

If you aren’t listening to Seattle Nice, the weekly podcast I co-host along with political consultant (and my former Stranger colleague) Sandeep Kaushik and longtime reporter and producer David Hyde, now’s a great time to tune in—in the last couple months, we’ve talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin about plans to increase density across the city, debated Mayor Katie Wilson’s apparent plan to move forward with the police surveillance cameras she once opposed, and talked to Downtown Seattle Association director Jon Scholes about the DSA’s unusually sunny forecast for the future of downtown.

This week, we talked about the mayor’s plan to build 500 new tiny house village-style shelter units by this summer, stalking charges against the King County Assessor (who has refused to step down despite a unanimous King County Council vote demanding his resignation), and the latest library levy, which Sandeep said was just another example of Seattle’s willingness to pay any amount of taxes for any purpose.

Sandeep said he was impressed by the mayor’s announcement last week that the city will open 75 new shelter beds in Interbay and expand tiny house villages in two other locations. The biggest unheralded news, he thought, was the announcement that T-Mobile, Starbucks, and Microsoft are all helping to fund the mayor’s initial shelter push, kicking in around $3 million so far.

As someone who’s genuinely excited by Wilson’s ambitious agenda but skeptical about her ability to upend the Seattle Process, I argued it’s too early to declare victory—noting, for instance, that the last time the city participated in a privately backed venture to address homelessness, the “Partnership for Zero” effort to eliminate visible homelessness downtown, they got burned—that initiative, spearheaded by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, fell apart when it proved harder to house people directly from the street than the homelessness agency anticipated, and funders pulled out, forcing the partnership to shut down in 2023.

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People who’ve been around Seattle’s homelessness system for a while say they’re hopeful about the mayor’s plan, but I’ve also heard concerns that it’s too focused on a single shelter type—tiny house villages—and too optimistic about the timeline for siting nearly 1,000 more tiny house units around the city in the next nine months. Another concern is cost—Wilson’s team has said the average tiny house unit will cost $28,000, all in, but that estimate seems low, given the higher cost of existing villages with the kind of wraparound services and 24/7 security Wilson has suggested will be available at each site.

All that said, you know who didn’t really even bother trying to add shelter in Seattle? Wilson’s predecessor Bruce Harrell, who promised to add 2,000 “shelter or housing” units by the end of his term but ended up using dubious math (taking credit for shelters that were underway by the time he took office, for instance) to claim he had actually added 3,000. (In reality, by the end of Harrell’s term, there were around the same number of shelter beds in Seattle as when he took office). In other words, even if Wilson gets no further than the initial 100 or so additional tiny houses she announced last week, she’ll have increased shelter more than Harrell did in his entire four years in office.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

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

By Erica C. Barnett

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

City Council, Density, homelessness, podcasts, Police

Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin: “Go As Big As We Can” On Growth in Comp Plan
Image via Seattle.gov

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who’s serving his first term representing Southeast Seattle’s District 2. He’s the third council member to represent this district since 2025, when Tammy Morales resigned just one year into her second term; she was replaced by Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for SPD who served until Lin was elected in November.

As head of the council’s land use and comprehensive plan committees, Lin will oversee the work of updating the plan that guides the city’s growth and density for the next 10 years, as well as zoning and land use decisions like whether to grant developers a temporary break from the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that allowed taller, denser housing in some areas in exchange for fees that fund affordable housing.

We talked to Lin about those fees and whether they’re working as designed. While MHA has brought in tens of millions a year for affordable housing, developers argue it has increasingly squelched development, by adding significant costs at a time when market-rate housing developments barely pencil out. Lin talked (favorably but cautiously) about a different concept called Planned Inclusionary Zoning, which requires developers to build affordable housing but offers them tax breaks, rather than charging a fee, to make it more feasible for them to build.

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“We absolutely want to go as big as we can” in the remaining parts of the comp plan, Lin said, by expanding the areas where housing is allowed (as The Urbanist pointed out recently, the city’s planning department actually reduced density along several arterials in wealthy neighborhoods). Lin said “we need to be going deeper into the neighborhoods” with density, as well as restoring the neighborhood centers former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from the plan, nodes of density where modest apartment buildings will be allowed.

We also asked Lin about the new dynamics on the council, Mayor Wilson’s new plan to build tiny house villages all over the city, and police surveillance cameras, a program Wilson once opposed and now seems likely to expand.

After pointing out that many people want cameras in their neighborhoods, including people who live in the Chinatown-International District, Lin said he’s still not happy that the cameras were expanded without any analysis of whether the “pilot” program launched last year (and immediately expanded) was effective and protected people’s privacy. His outstanding concerns, Lin added, have to do with the potential for the footage to end up in the hands of the Trump Administration, which could use it for immigration enforcement or to target people seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. That’s the focus of an audit Wilson has commissioned, but hardly the only reason to question mass surveillance by local police.

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Does Mayor Wilson Really Believe Police Surveillance Enhances Safety?

By Erica C. Barnett

Was Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to audit the safety and security of police surveillance cameras a classic “split-the-baby” compromise, a pro forma move with a foregone conclusion, or a thoughtful approach to ensure public safety for Seattle residents? That’s our topic of discussion on Seattle Nice this week.

As I reported last week, Wilson announced she would leave all the existing cameras up and recording while the Policing Project, out of New York University, does a “privacy and data governance audit” to determine whether outside entities, such as federal immigration authorities, could access camera footage and use it to target people caught on camera in Seattle. (There’s no such thing as privacy in public places, but until lthe cameras were installed last year, Seattle residents were not under routine camera surveillance by police.) Assuming the report says the cameras are reasonably safe from outside access, Wilson said, her administration will work to strengthen city laws restricting access to the footage.

Wilson also said the city would hold off on installing new cameras in the Central District and Capitol Hill, but will install dozens of new cameras around the stadiums south of downtown, where six World Cup games will take place in June. For now, these new cameras will only be turned on if there is a “credible threat.”

In justifying her decision to keep existing cameras rolling and install new ones, Wilson said she trusts SPD to use the cameras wisely to solve crimes. “I know that cameras can be, have been, and will be useful tools to solve crime in Seattle and in countless other cities across the world,” she said. (Indeed, police cameras cover every in across the UK and China, but the United States has its own traditions and values that, at their best, have prioritized individual rights like privacy).

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“There’s no doubt that these cameras make it easier to solve some crimes, including serious ones like homicides, but also, cameras are not the one key to making our neighborhoods safe,” Wilson said. “And on the other hand, there are legitimate concerns about privacy over surveillance and potential misuse of surveillance technologies. But also, these cameras are not the primary threat to immigrants, trans people or people seeking reproductive health care in our country right now.”

At Wilson’s press conference last week, I asked a question about how her values were guiding her decision on whether to expand the police department’s ability to surveil Seattle residents. Say the audit comes back golden, and she says, “Great, let’s expand the program.” That’s not just an endorsement of a particular camera system’s safety; it’s a statement of Wilson’s values, and one where her position has flipped since the campaign, when many voters were excited to support a candidate who didn’t want to give SPD even greater powers.

Maybe Wilson’s values have shifted. Maybe SPD has convinced her that crimes really will go unsolved without 24/7 video surveillance, despite the fact that the cameras have only existed for nine months. Or maybe the camera supporters she’s talking to in neighborhoods with high crime rates have convinced her that surveillance is a form of safety and social justice, as the mayor has often suggested. In any case, my guess is that more police surveillance cameras are coming, and that Wilson will expand them again in the future. Once you’ve decided that it’s simply unsafe not to have surveillance in some places, it’s very hard to justify not providing the same level of “safety” to other neighborhoods, and eventually the whole city.