Density, Development, Maybe Metropolis, neighborhoods

Maybe Metropolis: The NIMBY Illusion
Image via Grand Illusion Cinema (Facebook)

By Josh Feit

Back in 2018—as a Gen X traitor, evidently—I editorialized against saving the Showbox. I was opposed to making policy based on ’90s nostalgia and was for building new housing coupled with the $5 million in affordable housing funds the development would generate from the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program.

At the time, a City Hall legislative staffer asked me in earnest if there was any spot around town that would turn me into a NIMBY if it was slated to get torn down and replaced with fancy condos? I honestly couldn’t think of anything that fit the bill.

But now comes the latest in Seattle-is-changing news: The Grand Illusion, the independent movie house at 50th and University Way NE (the Ave), may be the next casualty of real estate development. It’s still not 100 percent clear what the fate of the Grand Illusion will be, but according to a January 23 Daily Journal of Commerce report, real estate developer Kidder Mathews is offering the building for $2.8 million on behalf of the theater’s longtime owner. For now, the theater, which has been around since 1970, has signed another two-year lease, and they say they’re set on finding a new home.

The news hits me in the gut. True story: Just 10 days before I read about the Grand Illusion’s hazy future, I went to a movie at the groovy theater (for the first time since the pandemic, and likely even well before that). Excited to find the place as lively as ever—a disheveled goth was working at the combo ticket/refreshments booth before a nearly sold-out Friday night show—I ended up making a contribution to the nonprofit the very next day. Over the years, I’ve seen countless indie, foreign, art, and cult films at the Grand Illusion while eating a bucket of popcorn heavily dusted in nutritional yeast. I even attended former Seattle city council member Nick Licata’s wedding there, sitting in the rickety yet plush red seating. I’ve also spent a healthy dose of time in the adjacent tortured-poet coffee shop. The Grand Illusion defines Ave culture.

The countercultural Seattle landmark is in a precarious spot because current Seattle zoning prohibits housing and businesses just about everywhere else in the city.

As a pro-development urbanist, I could be called a hypocrite for fretting over the fate of this charming, grunge-y spot. But actually, the potential closure of the Grand Illusion simply confirms the basic problem with Seattle’s zoning code I’ve been writing about for more than 20 years. The reason developers buy up spots in exciting locations like 50th and the Ave. is because these spots are typically located in the few slices of the city that are zoned for multi-family and mixed-use development. “Under current zoning, the listing … estimates that a six-story building could yield 31 apartments,” the DJC reported.

This fact underscores an even more germane point: Offing the Grand Illusion for density is redundant. The block where the theater now stands already works the way a smart city should, with its surrounding dense zoning and plentiful transit. Unfortunately, the area is an oasis of six- and seven-story neighborhood commercial zoning in a desert of land zoned for low-density and single-family housing (and no commercial space). We don’t need more businesses and housing on the Ave.—we need them in the surrounding low-density residential zones.

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The YIMBY position remains as it has always been: Put more housing and businesses in the suburban-esque tracts of Seattle where we should have more economic diversity. Unfortunately, with density cordoned off into just 25 percent of the city’s residential land, developers have limited places to build. And so it’s the dense urban areas where beloved, longstanding institutions—Piecora’s on Capitol Hill, Mama’s Mexican Kitchen in Belltown, Tup Tim Thai on Lower Queen Anne—get replaced by apartments. Meanwhile, the strictly single-family tracts stay untouched as the people who live there see their assets grow.

I’m not going to start a petition drive or sign onto a “Save the Grand Illusion” campaign—a la the cringe-worthy, largely white and Gen X effort to save the Showbox. Instead, I’ll point out that the news comes with an explanation slow-growthers won’t like: The Grand Illusion isn’t on the chopping block because of some pro-developer bent in Seattle’s zoning rules. The countercultural Seattle landmark is in a precarious spot right now because current Seattle zoning restricts housing and businesses just about everywhere else in the city.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Density, housing, land use, legislature, Transit

Seeking Compromise, Lawmakers May Preserve Local Parking Mandates in This Year’s Pro-Housing Bills
Photo of empty parking garage
Mandatory parking often sits empty, especially in dense neighborhoods near transit stops. Photo credit: Enoch Leung from Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Ryan Packer

Democrats in Olympia are making good on their pledge to remove local regulatory barriers to housing by proposing bills that would require cities and towns to permit diverse types of new housing. Many of these bills are being passed over the objections of local elected officials, who are wary of changes in state law that take away their authority to maintain status-quo land use policies.

But while lawmakers seem willing to go against the recommendations of some cities when it comes to density limits, they seem more hesitant about getting rid of local parking requirements. Parking requirements add costs to new housing—garages aren’t cheap to build—and are often unnecessary as cities become denser and easier to navigate without a car. Cities across Washington currently require a certain number of parking spaces for each new housing unit they permit, though Seattle has removed that requirement for buildings close to transit lines.

Many of the bills proposed this session remove or reduce minimum parking requirements in order to reduce construction costs. But those provisions are now proving to be a sticking point for both parties.

Rep. Julia Reed (D-36, Seattle) is leading the charge to eliminate parking minimums, particularly in areas that are close to transit. “A lot of these parking minimum laws that are in place from cities and counties, they were created a while ago and they’re not really revisited that often,” Reed said. “It’s not tied to how people really move around that neighborhood, it’s tied to an assumption that parking is needed.” Reed cited the high cost of parking spaces in new buildings: $50,000 or more per spot.

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Reed’s House Bill 1351 would prohibit cities from requiring parking in new buildings within a half-mile of frequent transit lines, and within a quarter-mile of half-hourly bus service. But by the time that bill passed the house local government committee this week, the restriction only applied to areas within a quarter-mile of any level of transit service. And even that major change wasn’t enough to get any Republicans in the committee to vote for it, in a year when Democrats are counting on some Republican votes to get their housing votes across the finish line.

The state senate is where that support might matter the most. When the bill’s senate counterpart received a hearing earlier this month, it was a Democrat, Sen Claudia Kauffman (D-47, Kent), who expressed concerns with how this would impact downtown Kent, where street parking is generally free. “If you start reducing [required parking] because of the transit center, it’s going to reduce people’s ability to have their car. … For me, this doesn’t work within the transit system that we have,” Kauffman said. “In my area this just wouldn’t work.”

Many of this year’s senate housing bills would also reduce or remove parking minimums. Senator Marko Liias’ (D-21, Edmonds) Senate Bill 5466 would require cities to allow substantially denser developments around transit stations, and would ban parking minimums within three-quarters of a mile of any major transit stop.

“It doesn’t make sense, when we’re saying [that] in a transit zone, the way we want people to move is by transit, to also require and guarantee that you can get to those destinations by car,” Liias said at the bill’s first public hearing. “Overlaying the two creates really incompatible and inefficient land uses. … When we require parking minimums, that’s when we get empty parking lots right next to light rail stations.”

Under the new version of the bills allowing more apartments near transit, a potential fourplex just outside a transit corridor would have to include  four parking spaces, which might push a homeowner or developer to consider a different type of building altogether—like a single-family home.

Housing advocates are in broad agreement that it’s essential to eliminate parking minimums as part of this year’s housing bills. “If the bill doesn’t do that, local parking mandates will force developers to build more parking than communities need, and that excess parking will undermine the state’s goals to create transit-oriented communities that give residents good alternatives to cars,” Dan Bertolet of the Sightline Institute, the Seattle-based think tank, testified at a committee hearing on SB 5466 this week. A 2021 paper by a researcher at Santa Clara University showed that when Seattle reduced required parking near transit in 2012, developers built 40 percent fewer parking spaces, translating to around 18,000 fewer stalls and over half a billion dollars in reduced housing costs.

Though it’s still early, efforts to weaken parking restrictions are already becoming a trend. This week, the house and senate housing committees approved both House Bill 1110 and its counterpart Senate Bill 5190, which require cities inside the Seattle and Spokane metro areas to allow fourplexes on all residential lots, and sixplexes close to transit. But both chambers did so only after approving a new version that allows cities to require at least one parking spot for each housing unit for areas away from transit, when the previous version only allowed them to require one spot per lot. That means a potential fourplex just outside a transit corridor would have to include four parking spaces, which might push a homeowner or developer to consider a different type of building altogether—like a single-family home.

Even as that bill passed its senate committee with his vote, one of its Republican sponsors, Sen. John Braun (R-20, Centralia), said he isn’t ready to vote “yes” when it gets to the Senate floor, suggesting there’s more bartering ahead on the Senate. A majority of Republicans in both chambers oppose the bills in the name of maintaining local control—as opposed to supporting them based on developers’ private property rights, a traditional conservative position.

With the proposals to eliminate parking minimums getting the most vocal pushback from local leaders, and many lawmakers apparently listening to those concerns, these urbanist provisions might be the first casualties as deadlines approach and leaders in both chambers look to create compromises to reach a deal.

ryan@publicola.com

City Council, Elections, Urbanism

Tech Entrepreneur Ron Davis Says He’s the Urbanist Choice for City Council District 4

By Erica C. Barnett

Ron Davis, a tech entrepreneur and urbanist who’s running for the District 4 (northeast Seattle) city council seat being vacated by one-term Councilmember Alex Pedersen, is a first-time candidate who decided to run before he knew Pedersen was leaving his seat—spurred on, he told PubliCola, by frustration with the incumbent’s intransigence on housing, taxation, and the city budget. “Alex was a wall-builder extraordinaire—he literally uses the power of the regulatory state to keep people out of high opportunity neighborhoods,” Davis said. 

Davis, who announced his candidacy on January 31, grew up in a working-class family that rose into the middle class through what he calls “almost the fairy-tale American dream,” enabling him to go to Harvard Law School school and ultimately create and sell off a software company that aimed to reduce burnout and stress for call-center employees. Since selling that company, he’s been a sales executive and consultant for tech companies, and more recently started getting involved in local politics, joining the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association, 46th District Democrats, Sound Transit’s Citizen Oversight Panel, and the boards of Futurewise and Seattle Subway, a pro-transit group.

If that seems an awful lot like the resume of someone who’s been planning to run for office for a while, Davis doesn’t disagree. “I have a lot of passion for local land use and transit, and although there area lot of levers that can be pulled at the state state level and other places, I care about my local community and I was represented by someone that made me crazy.” After talking with local political leaders, campaign consultants, and policy experts, it “became clear that that [running for council] was the best fit,” Davis said.

“The 15-minute city concept has been really abused here to justify urban villages. It’s supposed to be that every person lives in a 15-minute city, not little 15-minute neighborhoods that are stuck on arterials everyone can drive through.”

If he’s elected, Davis said, he’ll push for a more inclusive housing strategy for the city, starting with the city’s comprehensive plan, which is up for a major revision this year. The city’s decades-old “urban village” strategy, which concentrates multifamily housing along busy arterial roads while reserving most of the city’s residential land for suburban-style single-family houses, is on the table.

“The fact that all five [comprehensive plan] options still include urban villages is preposterous,” Davis said. “The 15-minute city concept”—the idea that everyone should be able to access what they need within 15 minutes without a car—”has been really abused here to justify urban villages. … It’s supposed to be that every person lives in a 15-minute city, not little 15-minute neighborhoods that are stuck on arterials everyone can drive through.”

Davis, unsurprisingly, connects density to homelessness—you can’t solve homelessness without housing, and you can’t build housing in cities where it isn’t allowed—but he also said he supports adding a lot more shelter while the region ramps up housing investments, a view that puts him in the company of both the King County Regional Homelessness Authority and Mayor Bruce Harrell.

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“You can throw a million social workers at a problem—and we do need more, and they need to be paid a living wage—but at some point, if they don’t have resources to offer, they’re going to be limited in what they can do,” Davis said. “I think one of the mistakes that we on the left have made is [not acknowledging] it takes a ton of money and time to build the houses. We have to build the housing. I’m 1,000 percent for that. But … I am for intermediate solutions while we build,” like tiny houses and safe lots for people living in their vehicles, Davis said.

The city recently convened a new progressive revenue task force to come up with recommendations to increase revenues at the local level—including, potentially, for affordable housing. At the same time, Gov. Jay Inslee has proposed a statewide ballot measure to authorize $4 billion in bonds to fund thousands of new units across the state.

Davis said he supports both those efforts, but when it comes to housing for people experiencing homelessness in King County, “I would rather see a serious King County tax, so that it would be genuinely regional, and … so that various individual governments wouldn’t have an incentive to defect and hold everyone else hostage.” Currently, only King County and Seattle fund the regional homelessness authority, although four north King County cities recently voted to contribute.

Davis is currently one of three people seeking the District 4 seat—the others are socialist UW grad student Matthew Mitnick and former Teresa Mosqueda opponent Kenneth Wilson—but the race for this open position will almost certainly get more viable candidates in the months before the May filing deadline. State Rep. Gerry Pollet, who was a rumored candidate for the seat, did not respond to PubliCola’s questions last month.

Affordability, Elections, Guest Contributor, housing, labor

Guest Editorial: City Employees Need Social Housing
Image via City of Seattle.

By Karen Estevenin, Executive Director, PROTEC17

Collective action is the heart of the labor movement. As a public sector union, PROTEC17 members work together to improve conditions at our own workplaces. What is often lost in the public understanding of unions is how we also strive to improve the communities where we live.

The inadequate and shrinking supply of affordable housing in our region has become a crisis. That’s why our union, along with a number of coalition partners, is supporting Initiative I-135, which would create a public developer to build and acquire permanently affordable social housing in Seattle.

During the 2010s, Seattle saw some of the highest rent increases in the country, with an average rent increase of more than 90 percent. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, rent increases approached 20 percent per year between 2021 and 2022. The current median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle is $1,895, an amount that prices many Seattleites out of their own neighborhoods.

PROTEC17 represents the largest number of union workers at the City of Seattle. Through mobilization, negotiating strong contracts, and workplace wins, union members’ ability to create positive change undoubtedly fosters a better workplace and livelihood for themselves and their colleagues. However, with the rising cost of living and housing in Seattle, it is increasingly difficult to raise city employees’ compensation to fit the realities of living in Seattle. The simple fact is that too many city employees cannot afford to live in the very city they support, shape, and serve.

It is in this context that I-135, the social housing initiative, offers a proactive, transparent, and inclusive pathway to the development of truly affordable housing in the city of Seattle. I-135 does this by creating a Public Development Authority that will enable the city of Seattle to acquire properties, renovate existing housing, and build affordable homes, removing the pressure for profits and allowing more collective and collaborative management. The authority itself will be directed by a public oversight board composed of renters, union members, experts in affordable and green development, as well as City Council and Mayoral appointees. It is collective action in action and as an ongoing model.

Housing created by the authority would include units to fit a mix of household sizes, as well as units that are affordable to a cross section of tenants—from those with extremely low incomes to those making up to 120% of Seattle’s median income. If passed, the tools provided by I-135 will be a critical component to restoring and maintaining living communities that cross incomes, ages, and backgrounds.

For these reasons, and many more, a broad range of community, labor, and small business partners have come together to support I-135.  Join us in this collective action and vote YES on I-135. Let’s give our city the opportunity to create affordable housing by and for the people.

Karen Estevenin is the executive director of PROTEC17, a member-powered labor union representing nearly 10,000 public employee professionals across the Pacific Northwest. PROTEC17 members work in city, county, and state government, public health, and beyond to support the programs and services that our communities rely on everyday.

Affordability, legislature, Poverty

Bills Would End Requirement that Low-Income, Disabled People Pay Back Cash Benefits
Dawnetta Sparks, who testified in Olympia last week, had to pay back more than $4,000 in state benefits when her Social Security disability came through.

By Andrew Engelson

When Dawnetta Sparks, who lives in Spokane, became disabled several years ago, she qualified for Washington state’s Aged, Blind, and Disabled (ABD) cash assistance program, which provides a small source of income to people who become temporarily disabled or are waiting to qualify for federal disability benefits. 

Sparks said that she waited 18 months to finally receive Social Security disability support—and then, because of a quirk in the ABD program, she had to pay the the state of Washington nearly $4,000.

“When you have a limited income and you receive your payment and you have no other income at all, you can’t afford to pay for rent or the lights or nearly anything at all,” Sparks told the House human services committee in Olympia last week, “and then the first part of your money goes to pay back the state.”

A bill introduced by Rep. Emily Alvarado (D-34, West Seattle) would end the requirement that ABD beneficiaries pay back their benefits.

ABD is generally considered a “bridge” benefit to hold people over while they wait to qualify for Social Security disability. If a person is approved for federal disability benefits, they eventually receive a lump sum from the federal government to pay them for benefits they did not receive while waiting. So the logic is that because Social Security pays back those missed benefits, people need to pay the ABD benefits back to the state.  But because ABD benefits are so low, people often use the lump sum payment from Social Security to pay for unmet needs or debts, such as medical bills or a rental deposit, that accumulated while they were surviving on ABD alone.

The Aged, Blind, and Disabled (ABD) cash assistance program has been underfunded for more than a decade: Starting in 2011, when benefits were slashed to help address a budget shortfall, ABD participants received just $197 a month, an amount the Department of Social and Health Services finally adjusted to $417 last year.

To recoup the ABD benefits it paid while people were waiting for Social Security to come through, the state garnishes recipients’ federal disability payments—which average just $900 a month—the same way a collection agency might garnish a person’s paycheck. For people who are living life on the margins, the process of paying back ABD often becomes a time of financial insecurity.

In addition, ABD has been underfunded for more than a decade: Starting in 2011, when benefits were slashed to help address a budget shortfall, ABD participants received just $197 a month, an amount the Department of Social and Health Services finally adjusted to $417 last year.  “We know that it’s still not enough in many high-cost areas—like in my district—for people to cover their basic needs,” Alvarado said.

About 21,000 people in Washington currently receive ABD. According to figures from the Department of Social and Health Services, 57 percent of those receiving ABD have some form of mental illness, and 33 percent are homeless. Meanwhile, the average time to qualify for Social Security disability benefits has climbed to 147 days as the backlog of applications in the US has soared to more than 1 million.

ABD recipients are some of the lowest-income people in the state. “You essentially have to have almost zero or almost no income to qualify for ABD,” said Sara Robbins, a policy manager for the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, who once represented ABD recipients as an attorney. “When they got approved for Social Security,” Robbins said, “and found out that the state was taking some of their benefits to repay their back payment, it was really devastating for my clients.” 

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According to Alvarado, eliminating the pay-back requirement would cost about $20 million per year, a fairly modest slice of the state budget. 

Alvarado, who’s in her first term, served as deputy director and director of Seattle’s Office of Housing. She said keenly aware of how flaws in the state’s ABD system sometimes push people into homelessness. “Every dollar in people’s pockets makes a difference to be able to help afford rent, to cover the cost of food, and to help cover basic necessities,” Alavarado said.

Those who receive ABD can also qualify for the state’s Housing and Essential Needs program (HEN), another cash benefit that helps extremely low-income people pay for rent, utilities, household items, and transportation. While HEN benefits can technically last up to 12 months, DSHS starts the clock ticking when someone applies for HEN. A bill sponsored by Sen. Claire Wilson (D-30, Auburn) would, in addition to reforming the ABD pay-back issue, also guarantee HEN benefits for a full 12 months, regardless of how long the application process takes.

Gov. Inslee’s proposed operating budget boasts about adding a permanent increase of $15 million to the HEN program, but Washington Low Income Housing Alliance noted in a press release that this is technically only a boost compared to 2019 levels. The baseline operating budget for the program is $104 million, and that jumped to $130 million in 2021– thanks to significant boosts from federal COVID-19 relief programs. 

Michele Thomas, policy director for WLIHA, noted that despite the proposed baseline increase, Inslee’s 2023-25 budget would effectively result in an $11.5 million cut to HEN from the previous biennial budget, “which could critically affect access to housing,” Thomas said. 

City Council, Elections, Equity, housing, Police, Transportation

They Want to Stay: Tammy Morales and Andrew Lewis on Why They’re Running for Reelection

By Erica C. Barnett

A lot has been written—including here on PubliCola—about the coming mass exodus from the Seattle City Council. Five council members—Lisa Herbold, Kshama Sawant, Alex Pedersen, and Debora Juarez— have either said they will not run for reelection this year or that they will run for a different office. At least four, and probably five, council seats will be filled by new people next year; depending on how things shake out, the most senior council member could have just four years’ experience.

Amid that churn, two freshman council members—Tammy Morales and Andrew Lewis, whose districts encompass southeast Seattle and downtown, respectively—have said want to stay on the job. (Dan Strauss, who represents northwest Seattle, has not announced his intentions yet.)

In conversations with PubliCola, both cited unfinished business, a need for continuity in the legislative branch, and a sense of optimism about the future among their reasons for running again despite a working environment that has been chaotic, toxic, and full of unexpected challenges—including the COVID pandemic, a racial reckoning whose promise is largely unfulfilled, and a mainstream backlash against people experiencing unsheltered homelessness.

“None of us expected the kind of term we had… and it takes a toll,” Morales said. “There were definitely times when I was like, ‘What the hell? This was not what I expected.’ It’s stressful and I don’t begrudge any of my colleagues for wanting to find a different way to give back to the community.”

That said, Morales added, “given that I represent a district that has historically been ignored, I don’t want to lose momentum.”

When Morales ran for her seat four years ago, she focused on issues like preventing economic displacement and ending encampment sweeps. Four years later, she says she’s still focused on those issues, but with a deeper understanding of how the city’s policies promote gentrification and make long-term solutions to Seattle’s housing crisis a complex challenge. “I’m especially interested in seeing through the comprehensive plan”—a planning document that guides housing, parks, jobs, and transportation in Seattle—”and really trying to change the way we manage growth in the city … so we’re not just rubber-stamping a perpetuation of the existing strategy,” Morales said.

“We know that transit corridors have high rates of pollution associated with them, at least the way we have allowed them to be built. Now we’re saying, ‘put a lot of poor people there and let’s use them a as buffer between homeowners and the road.'”

For example, Morales said, one major reason for the housing shortage is the city’s decades-old “urban village” strategy, which concentrates dense housing along busy, polluted arterial roads while locking up most of the city’s residential land for suburban-style single-family houses. Next year, the city will adopt a new comprehensive plan that will guide development for the next 20 years, and some of the options under consideration would concentrate development along “transit corridors”—those same busy, polluted arterials.

Morales wants to work to ensure that doesn’t happen.

“We know that transit corridors have high rates of pollution associated with them,” Morales said, “at least the way we have allowed them to be built,” with buses and cars competing for space along fast-moving arterials like Rainier Ave. S. “Now we’re saying, ‘put a lot of poor people there and let’s use them a as buffer between homeowners and the road.'”

Morales, who has a background in urban planning, emerged as a vocal advocate for pedestrian safety during her term, a time when almost half the fatal crashes in the entire city of Seattle occurred in her district. For decades, the city has failed to meaningfully address traffic violence along most of Rainier Ave. S., with the exception of the gentrified Columbia City neighborhood, where a controversial road-narrowing project successfully calmed a section of the road where crashes were once frequent.

Morales has been critical of the Seattle Department of Transportation’s uninspiring traffic-calming efforts, like lowering the speed limit on arterials by five miles an hour and posting signs encouraging drivers to slow down.

“We need to design roads differently so that people slow down” while also enforcing traffic laws in places where people continue to speed—for example, with automated traffic cameras that result in warnings, then fines, Morales said. “I drive down Rainier and I see people blow past me in the bus lane, the turn lane—that is a problem. But we’re not going to solve it with a public education campaign.”

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If she’s reelected, Morales said she plans to focus on building generational wealth for Seattle residents of color through programs like community land trusts, which enable low-income people to buy homes, programs that help potential homebuyers qualify for loans, and a pilot program, which she’s introducing this spring, to give developers incentives to work with small, community-based groups to build 35 small affordable housing project throughout the city.

In addition to securing public funds for public parks, beach restoration, sidewalks, and other “quote-unquote back to basics things,” Morales says her office has “really increased the explicit discussion of racial equity” on the council. “When I first got here and I was talking so much about racial equity, I feel like I got a lot of pats on the head,” she said. “Because of the team that I’ve built and the work [we’ve done[ on behalf of District 2, I think other council member are  talking more about the need to center racial equity and acknowledging the ways that the South End has been left out.”

Lewis, like Morales, said he’s motivated to run again by the desire to complete work that he started in his first term, particularly when it comes to alternatives to police response. For more than two years, the city has been debating whether and how to establish a program that would send unarmed civilian responders to some non-emergency calls, with little progress; last year, Mayor Bruce Harrell agreed to move forward with a small pilot program while his office and the police department continue to analyze 911 call data.

During his confirmation hearing last month, then-interim Police Chief Adrian Diaz estimated that over the next two years, the police department would gain a net total of about 18 officers, assuming the rate at which officers leave the department continues to decline. “We have to have leaders who are willing to soberly acknowledge that even that 982 number may unfortunately be an optimistic one,” Lewis said. “We have a civic consensus that we need more police, but where that conversation never goes is that it may be necessary, but it’s not in and of itself sufficient.”

While Lewis noted that Harrell has been far more willing to work with the council, in general, than his predecessor, Jenny Durkan, the time could eventually come to “call the question” on civilian responders by amending the city charter to create a new department dedicated to certain kinds of non-emergency calls.

“We have this really difficult and intractable public safety challenge that comes down to the fact that—very, very stubbornly—we haven’t been doing the things that we need to do as a modern American city to keep people safe,” Lewis said. “I don’t know what it is about our local politics that holds us back from making similar progress that other cities have,” like Denver and Albuquerque, which both set up alternative response programs in 2020, during nationwide calls to reduce reliance on police for many types of emergencies.

Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller, a moderate Democrat, is “not too dissimilar from the folks who tend to be mayor in the city of Seattle, but … they have a very mature (alternative response) system while we are still screwing around on this,” Lewis said.

“To the extent that things are more collegial now, the council didn’t really change all that much but the mayor did. Maybe that is a clue to where the preponderance of the problem was.”

Lewis currently heads up the council’s homelessness committee, and has advocated for more spending on tiny house villages, in particular, throughout his term. If he gets a second term, he says he’d like to serve on the council’s transportation committee in addition to working on homelessness and police accountability.

“My district has quite a few bridges that need work done,” including the high bridge to Magnolia, Lewis said. “I think bridges are going to be a dominant infrastructure issue over the next decade, because we are going to see more bridge failures.” Part of the problem, he added, is that “there’s been a lot of instability” at the Seattle Department of Transportation, which has had five directors since 2018.

“Despite the fact that we’ve come up with a lot of resources that we’ve directed toward bridges as a council, SDOT hasn’t taken that money and actually done anything to help those bridges. A lot of that money gets reshuffled for other priorities or put on hold.” Urbanists, meanwhile, often understandably advocate for other priorities, like safe bike lanes and pedestrian safety projects, instead of road infrastructure that primarily serves cars. Continue reading “They Want to Stay: Tammy Morales and Andrew Lewis on Why They’re Running for Reelection” →