Addiction, Guest Contributor

The Siren Song of Forced Drug Treatment
A crowd gathers outside Ross Dress for Less at Third and Pike in downtown Seattle. In addition to policing “hot spots” like this one, some officials and advocates have argued for forcing people who consume drugs in public into locked treatment facilities.

By Susan Collins

When big cities struggle with visible addiction, one solution that inevitably resurfaces is forcing people into treatment. In 2019’s “Seattle Is Dying,” locking people up for public drug use on an abandoned prison island was pitched as “an answer waiting for the right question.” And lawmakers across the nation are echoing this call. Forcing people into facilities where they can “get the help they won’t get themselves” seems to offer a mix of toughness, benevolence, and moral imperative that garners mass appeal.

I am not a politician or a pundit. I am seven years sober and have spent 30 years working in addiction treatment and research. Within my family and during my workday, I see that communities need safety, and people need more support. The status quo is unacceptable.

But “forced treatment,” also known as involuntary treatment, should remain an option of last resort, used only in extreme cases of grave disability or imminent harm to self or others. That is the position of the organizations clinicians look to for guidance, including Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the American Psychiatric Association, the UN, and the WHO.

That’s why Dr. Keith Humphrey’s New York Times op-ed, in which he asserts, “Forced treatment isn’t horrific. It’s a relief,” shocked me and many of my colleagues. Words matter. When echoed by lawmakers, they shape policy and public perception. And the public relies on experts to present the science carefully, especially when people are at their most vulnerable.

In his piece, Humphreys conflates various forms of “pressure” to get people into treatment, suggesting that there is little difference between involuntary treatment, “pressure” from friends and family, and mandated treatment imposed by a court. We need to be clear: Involuntary treatment, which some politicians and advocacy groups in Seattle have expressed interest in expanding, is not the same as these other, less coercive methods. Unfortunately, confusion around these concepts is being repeated by other scientists and journalists as well.

In the US, involuntary treatment is civil commitment, without consent, to treatment in a locked facility. Mandated treatment is different. It entails choices, albeit difficult ones, to engage in treatment and other milestones to avoid penalties, like incarceration or loss of child custody. Both involuntary treatment and mandated treatment are formal means of coercion. Neither is the same as “pressure” from family members. Blurring these types of coercion—as Humphreys’ op/ed did—confuses the science, makes it harder to make rational decisions about public policy, and takes the larger conversation off track.

Another unhelpful trope is that internal motivation to stop harmful alcohol and drug use is “rare” among people actively using substances. At least half of Americans with significant drug and alcohol problems have internal motivation so high they recover without formal treatment, much less “forced treatment.” Motivation is also dynamic; one-fifth of those who appear to have low motivation achieve recovery within months. Even brief voluntary interventions can strengthen motivation and spark change. In our own work with people with severe alcohol use disorder, internal motivation was surprisingly high and more strongly predicted positive outcomes than treatment attendance.

Humphreys also makes sizeable mistakes in quoting and interpreting the research on the efficacy of involuntary treatment and introduces red herrings around ideal comparison groups that obfuscate the scientific realities. For example, Humphreys’ desired “no treatment” control conditions are often not ethically viable and even cruel in the context of a randomized controlled trial in which people are experiencing severe symptoms. Arguably, voluntary treatment control conditions are more accurate “real world” comparison groups in randomized controlled trials because they represent the “system as usual” offerings – even with their gaps and problems.

When civil liberties are at stake, scientists cannot be careless. Fortunately, some colleagues have been meaningfully pushing back because the public deserves accurate information about involuntary treatment and its effects.

Decades of research on involuntary treatment are strikingly consistent and negative:

  • After careful review of involuntary treatment studies, none show definitively positive findings— they’re only null or negative.
  • A concerning number of studies show patients experience severe harms after involuntary treatment—including high rates of relapse, re-arrest, and overdose death after release.
  • The larger research landscape reveals a gradient in which less coercive treatments are less harmful and more effective in creating safe, sustainable change than more coercive treatments.

Confident about this clear evidence, I was recently asked to share it with an audience that included state lawmakers. I assumed we would be on the same page. We weren’t. Upon reflection, I wondered if high-level research data fails to respond to the felt need for on-the-ground solutions in one’s own community. There is an understandable urgency to do something.

Our sense of urgency should open doors to more voluntary, evidence-based solutions, not more coercion. But many find those doors are locked or hard to locate. My well-resourced colleague had to send her child out of state for timely treatment. In my own clinic, administrative rules and bottlenecks block people from directly seeking care with me. And colleagues across the US have shared that treatment for substance use disorders is never made a priority, “because it doesn’t make money.”

So, from the research and my own clinical experience, I know the system isn’t working. Fortunately, decades of research and listening to people who use substances have generated evidence-based, voluntary solutions that are consistent with SAMHSA’s recovery framework. These must be funded and supported:

  • Lower-barrier and community-based efforts—hotlines, self-help books, mHealth, mutual-help groups (12-step and SMART Recovery, among others), harm-reduction outreach and support—can help people curb harm and build recovery while staying in their communities.
  • Justice-system diversion and sustained case management helps people experiencing homelessness move toward permanent supportive housing, recovery support, treatment, and jobs.
  • Voluntary, evidence-based treatments for alcohol and substance use should be supported in both in-person and telehealth modalities. Access should be easy, timely, affordable, and aligned with patients’ values, culture, and needs.
  • Patients need systemic solutions to ensure they don’t fall through the cracks. They tell us they need solutions to bigger problems beyond substance use. These include managing co-occurring trauma, psychiatric disorders and medical problems, finding affordable housing or permanent supportive housing, and getting work.

Even if all those options are adequately funded, coercive measures might still be necessary. But even in locked facilities, involuntary treatment should provide patient advocates and offer the least-restrictive evidence-based care possible. On release, patients should have immediate access to the voluntary recovery support listed above. Too often, community health workers fight to secure treatment, only to see patients discharged within days to no support at all.

I agree with Humphreys and many in the field that more US-based evaluation of involuntary treatment is needed. Washington State is one of the few that requires reporting on the outcomes of involuntary treatment. Early results are more promising than elsewhere, but critical data gaps remain, including data on overdose and death upon release.

And in the meantime, more states should publish evaluations of their existing systems, tracking long-term recovery, overdose, and cost, as well as qualitative accounts of patients’ experiences in their own words. At the very moment when some federal data systems are being scaled back or shut down, independent state-level reporting is all the more essential. Without rigorous, transparent data, we cannot judge whether coercive treatments deliver benefit or cause harm.

We cannot afford carelessness in our conversations shaping policy. Once we sort through the definitions of our terms and exhaustively examine the research,  it is clear that involuntary treatment should remain a rare, last-resort option for life-threatening crises. It cannot substitute for a fully funded spectrum of voluntary care or become a shortcut for bottlenecks, underfunding, or political point-scoring.

History may not repeat, but it rhymes. From institutionalization to the mass incarceration of the costly and failed War on Drugs, coercive solutions always promised a utopian safety they did not deliver. The siren song of “forced treatment” expansion as a broad-based solution may sound like a “relief,” but it is more likely to bring harm to patients and, ultimately, fail communities.

Susan E. Collins, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and co-director of the HaRRT Center. She is a professor in the University of Washington School of Medicine’s’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, an adjunct professor at the UW Department of Psychology, and an adjoint professor at Washington State University’s Department of Psychology

The views in this article are her personal views and not that of UW Medicine or Washington State University.

 

 

Mayor Harrell, Police, Taxes

Harrell’s Latest Budget Spikes City’s Deficit by Piling On New Spending In Election Year
Screenshot from Mayor Bruce Harrell’s recorded budget speech.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s 2026 budget proposal is an election-year proposal that piles on funding for priorities that are broadly popular—including immigrant legal aid, small business assistance, and help for renters struggling to pay their bills—while deferring costs for major projects and using one-time funds to pay for long-priorities, including the city’s response to the Trump Administration’s policies and funding cuts.

The biggest new spending areas, as usual, are in the Seattle Police Department budget, whose budget will increase by around $35 million, including $26 million in new funding to pay for a net total of 76 new officers. The Real Time Crime Center, which monitors live CCTV surveillance cameras across the city, will expand, with $2 million in new funding for 12 new positions on top of at least $625,000 to expand camera surveillance into new neighborhoods.

Harrell’s budget expands new Police Chief Shon Barnes’ office substantially compared to that of his predecessor as permanent chief, Adrian Diaz. In 2025, the budget funded 70.5 full-time employees at the chief’s office, up from 59.5 the previous year. Next year, the budget expands Barnes’ office staff to 81.5 employees.

As we’ve reported, Barnes brought on his own team when he came to Seattle from Madison, WI, including a second deputy chief, a new assistant chief, a new chief of staff, a new executive director of crime and community harm reduction, and a new chief communications officer. The new positions, which all pay more than $200,000, add ongoing annual costs to SPD’s budget, including $1.34 million in salaries alone.

In all, Harrell’s one-year budget update increases general fund spending by more than $50 million, at a time when the city is facing an estimated $150 million revenue shortfall (with another forecast coming in October).

In 2027, Harrell’s budget assumes the budget will be $140 million in the red, an increase of $62 million over the $78 million deficit he projected for 2027 in last year’s budget. In 2028 and 2029, Harrell’s budget numbers get steadily worse, with a projected shortfall of $269 million in 2028 and $375 million in 2029. If he isn’t reelected in November, Harrell won’t have to deal with the consequences of this year’s spending spree; Katie Wilson will.

The JumpStart tax, which was originally dedicated to a specific set of spending priorities that included affordable housing, small business support, and Green New Deal programs, will once again serve as a slush fund to backfill general-fund priorities the city wouldn’t otherwise have the money to pay for. (Last year, the council passed legislation that allows this targeted tax on big businesses to pay for anything.) Almost half the anticipated 2026 JumpStart revenues—$189 million—are peanut-buttered all over the budget; my personal pick for the most off-topic use of this tax is $1.8 million for planning, cleaning, and emergency response for the FIFA World Cup soccer games.

The budget accounts for two new revenue sources that PubliCola has covered previously: A new business and occupation (B&O) tax that is supposed to mitigate Trump-era cuts, now expected to bring in about $81 million next year, and a 0.1 cent sales tax increase for public safety, which the council will have to approve by October 14 in order to start collecting revenues by next year.

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About $27 million of the new B&O tax will go toward mitigating Trump cuts and policies; the rest, a little more than $50 million, will go into the general fund to help address the budget deficit. (This idea was controversial for a hot second in July). About half the revenues from the sales tax increase, or around $20 million, will go to new public safety spending on programs like the CARE Team, treatment, and Health 99; the rest, like the majority of B&) tax revenues, will backfill general fund spending on existing city programs.

Overall, Harrell’s budget adds tens of millions of dollars of new spending and avoids tough choices at a time when the mayor is fighting an uphill battle for reelection, and pushes budget deficits and decisions about “one-time” allocations off to next year, when it’s very possible Harrell’s challenger Wilson will be in office.

That new spending includes millions of new dollars for graffiti abatement, prevention, and renewal, which Harrell and City Attorney Ann Davison have repeatedly suggested is one of the top public-safety problems in Seattle. (There’s even $160,000 to extend one-time spending for a “graffiti specialist,” funded in last year’s budget, who works with teens to get them to channel their creative energy toward city-sanctioned “graffiti art” and other “constructive” pursuits).

It also includes about $5 million, across several departments, to expand the city’s Joint Enforcement Team, which was in the news last year for a series of raids targeting so-called lewd conduct at gay bars on Capitol Hill. The team includes fire, police, and SDOT staff; it also targets mobile food vendors operating without a license, such as fruit sellers and taco stands.

On the campaign trail, Harrell has touted what he calls his superior budget expertise, calling himself an experienced executive who makes “tough choices” and deriding Wilson, the former head of the Transit Riders Union, as someone who never managed a budget over $200,000. Looking through the budget, though, it’s hard to find examples of tough choices, which might have included decisions such as finding $26 million for new police officers somewhere in SPD’s half-billion-dollar budget, rather than increasing SPD’s budget to pay for them.

Next year, whoever gets elected mayor, the city will have to decide whether to continue paying for a slew of new spending Harrell defined in his 2026 budget as “one-time” projects, a designation that means the budget does not have to account for them in future budget projections. If the one-time projects were included in those projections, they would increase those future deficits even more; if the next mayor makes them permanent, he or she will have to figure out how to pay for them, either with new taxes or by cutting other existing programs.

Here are just a few of the new programs for which Harrell’s budget provides no funding beyond 2026:

  • Expansion of the Fresh Bucks program to include larger benefits ($60 a month toward fresh food instead of $40) and more recipients. The budget calls this a “one-time expansion” using new B&O tax revenues; however, access to healthy food is not likely to be less of a problem in 2027 than it is next year.
  • $4 million in new spending, also from the B&O tax, to assist immigrants with naturalization, legal assistance, outreach, job training, and many other programs that have become urgently necessary under the Trump administration.
  • Funding to help food banks procure food and expand their services, including mobile food banks and home delivery. The one-time $3 million add in Harrell’s budget nearly doubles the amount the city’s Human Services Department currently spends on food banks.
  • $1 million for meal programs serving older adults, people experiencing homelessness, and other people who lack access to nutritious prepared meals.

Some of the one-time spends, as in all city budgets, are truly for one-time projects—including about $6 million in new spending for the 2026 FIFA World Cup games, which includes $495,000 for “community activations and celebrations,” $265,000 for a “FIFA coordinator,” and a $6.2 million FIFA operations reserve, on top of the currently unknown cost of police overtime while the games are going on.

The budget also include a number of cuts, which budget director Dan Eder said yesterday would protect “public-facing” city services. These come largely from eliminating one-time spending, cutting vacant positions and other unnecessary spending, and deferring projects that were supposed to happen this year until 2027.

Harrell’s budget also saves $3 million by removing a line item for a contract to transfer people arrested in Seattle to the SCORE jail in Des Moines; some skeptics considered this contract a bargaining chip to get the King County Jail in Seattle to start incarcerating more people accused of low-level misdemeanors, which it did, eliminating the need for the city’s deal with SCORE.

The city council will take up Harrell’s budget proposal starting tomorrow; the budget process runs through mid-November.

City Council, Density, Mayor Harrell, public safety, Taxes

Seattle Nice: CARE Team Expansion and a Missed Opportunity for Neighborhood Businesses

By Erica C. Barnett

Gearing up for Seattle’s 2025 budget season on the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposal to increase the local sales tax rate by 0.1 cent to pay for an expansion of the city’s CARE Team and 911 department, backfill $20 million in spending that currently comes from other sources, and add funding for firefighters, addiction treatment, and the fire department’s Health 99 overdose response team.

Governor Bob Ferguson gave cities and counties the authority to hike sales taxes to pay for public safety programs in his budget last year, effectively punting his promise to spend $100 million on police to local jurisdictions and forcing cities and counties to use a regressive sales tax increase if they wanted more public safety funding. King County already passed its 0.1-cent tax in June; assuming Harrell’s proposal passes, the total sales tax in Seattle will rise to nearly 10.6 percent.

We dug into what the new tax will pay for, as well as why CARE Team expansion is happening now, after a lengthy stalemate between the Seattle Police Officers Guild and CARE over what responsibilities SPD is willing to hand over to unarmed social workers.

Since 2023, a memorandum of understanding between CARE and the police department requires cops to go out with CARE on every call, limits the kind of calls CARE’s first responders are allowed to respond to, and restricts the size of the team to 24 people. That MOU expires at the end of the year.

Although new SPOG contracts typically drag on for years (the most recent contract, covering the years 2021 through 2023, passed in April 2024), that may not be the case this time, as we discussed, thanks to the recent primary election results, which had Katie Wilson leading incumbent Harrell outright.

In short, SPOG appears to be racing (relatively speaking) to wrap up their latest contract this year, betting that Katie Wilson might win the mayor’s race and be less willing than Harrell to provide concessions to the union without corresponding improvements to police accountability.

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This goes far beyond CARE, of course, but the new urgency around the contract seems to have produced a new willingness to give the team some of what it’s been asking for almost since its inception, including expansion from 24 to 48 tea members, the ability to go out on calls without a police escort and to respond to more types of calls where a social worker can do more good than officers with guns.

Harrell’s sales tax proposal, part of the 2025 budget he announced today, includes funding for CARE expansion, which suggests the MOU language may already be settled. As Sandeep put it, “The specter of Katie Wilson has scared SPOG into actually making the deal to allow alternative dispatch.”

Also this week, the guys gave me a lot of time to geek out over the council’s amendments to legislation implementing “phase 1” of the city’s comprehensive plan, which just passed last week.

Did they go into a boredom-induced fugue state? Who knows, but I did get an opportunity to talk about why I’d be thrilled to have bars, restaurants, and late-night corner stores in my own residential neighborhood. Unfortunately, the council foreclosed that possibility when they voted to restrict new businesses in neighborhoods to stores and to make them close no later than 10pm—a missed opportunity to give more people access to the kinds of things that make a city a city.

Media

Cascade PBS Lays Off News Staff, Citing Federal Cuts

By Erica C. Barnett

Cascade Public Media, the Seattle-based PBS affiliate that owns the long-running website Crosscut, is laying off most of its newsroom staff, eliminating 19 local news positions—16 of them filled— just months after finalizing a union contract with newsroom staff.

The cuts mean the end of the road for Crosscut, a nonprofit news website started by Seattle Weekly co-founder David Brewster and two former Weekly editors in 2007. Crosscut merged with the PBS station KCTS 9 and lost its original name in 2024, when both outlets became part of Cascade Public Media.

PubliCola reported the news exclusively on Bluesky earlier this afternoon.

In an internal email to staff, Cascade CEO Rob Dunlop said the decision to “cease production of our long-form journalism published online” was one of the “hard choices” the nonprofit had to make in response to federal funding cuts for local public media. “Sadly, we are joining public radio and television stations around the country who are making similarly difficult choices,” Dunlop wrote.

According to internal emails, Cascade PBS will “focus going forward” on video, including local series about history, hiking, and food, including Mossback’s Northwest, The Nosh, Nick on the Rocks, Out & Back, and Art by Northwest, and expand its quick-bite video series, The Newsfeed, to five days a week.”

“These are painful decisions to make and none of the impacted team members did anything to bring this about. They have served Cascade PBS and this region with passion and distinction. To the journalists affected, their work has earned much well-deserved recognition that has elevated our mission,” Dunlop wrote.

Dunlop blamed the layoffs on federal funding cuts in July that slashed $3.5 million of the station’s funding, or about 10 percent of its budget 10 . “While we had prepared for this possibility, it is still a significant blow to our organization and to public media nationwide,” he wrote.

Don Wilcox, Cascade’s director of programming, marketing, and communications, told PubliCola that the Trump Administration’s decision to shutter the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “is a seismic event that is reshaping public media nationwide. The permanent loss of more than $3.5 million each year is massive, and it’s forcing us to make difficult choices. We’ve decided the best way forward right now is to focus on the video programming that our communities have relied on for decades.”

Cascade has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from new members since the CPB announcement in July, and still more from current members who’ve increased their giving in response to the federal cuts. Wilcox, echoing Dunlop’s internal email, said Cascade can’t make financial decisions based on the upsurge in individual contributions.

“We know from experience that heightened, crisis-related donation levels are not sustainable, and there is no indication that federal funding will return,” Wilcox said. “It would be irresponsible to deplete our finite resources based on speculation or wishful thinking. This isn’t what any of us wanted, but it’s the most responsible course in the face of drastic cuts and an uncertain future.”

Cascade’s news reporters watchdog City Hall, do lengthy, in-depth investigations, and provide important analysis of what’s happening in state and local politics. It’s the kind of coverage that’s becoming increasingly rare in Seattle’s  media ecosystem, which has seen a fair amount of upheaval, including last year’s sale of the Stranger, in recent years. Josh Cohen, Cascade’s city hall reporter, covered news for PubliCola back in the early 2010s, and is a ubiquitous presence City Hall—a welcome face who we hope we’ll see again soon when another publication scoops him up.

The news team at Crosscut recently finalized a contract that included moderate wage increases after stalemating with management for more than a year. Among other wins, the Cascade PBS Union (part of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild) ensured a minimum starting salary of $67,000 for its unionized newsroom workers and guaranteed that no one in the bargaining unit would make less than $70,000 a year.

Last year, according to Cascade’s IRS filing, Dunlop had total compensation of more than $550,000. In all, Cascade’s nine executive staff made a total of more than $2.2 million.

Wilcox said there are no plans to cut compensation for executive-level staff. “We still need to attract and retain talent to support the success of the operation,” he said.

Courtney Scott, executive officer of the newspaper guild, said the union is “deeply disappointed that Cascade PBS is choosing to eliminate its newsroom and lay off of its reporters at a time when we need good, thoughtful journalism more than ever. We do not yet fully understand why this decision was made and we will be meeting in Cascade PBS executives and management in the coming days to discuss the impact on our union members and the reasoning behinds these decisions.”

Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson, a former Crosscut contributor who wrote an op/ed for PubliCola after Crosscut shut down its opinion page, has floated a democracy voucher-style program to fund local media, including small and nonprofit publications. Mayor Bruce Harrell has ridiculed that idea as “taxpayer funds for online blogs,” and called it an “unachievable goal.”

Wilson said that with the Trump administration “hellbent on dismantling our democratic institutions, this is a terrible time to be losing journalists.

“We desperately need a sustainable funding model for local news, and I believe Seattle can be a leader, Wilson said. “As mayor, I hope to develop such a program to strengthen our local news ecosystem and ensure that everyone has access to the information and analysis needed for a healthy civil society.”

Cascade management held all-staff meeting today at 3:00.

This is a developing story.

City Council, Density, housing

City’s Growth Plan Update Maintains Seattle’s Suburban Character, Including Mandatory Parking

By Erica C. Barnett

A process that started with a year-long delay ended in a cascade of votes on more than 100 recently introduces amendments last week, as the City Council adopted “Phase 1” of its 10-year update to the city’s Comprehensive Plan on Friday.

The comp plan, the document that guides how and where Seattle will grow in the future, gets a major update every decade; the one that’s currently in place, Seattle 2035, was launched through a series of open houses in January 2014 and signed into law in October 2016. Outreach and engagement for the latest update, which Mayor Bruce Harrell dubbed the One Seattle Plan, began in January 2022, and the council just adopted the first part of the final proposal in September 2025.

The mayor’s office contributed a year to that extended timeline by repeatedly pushing back the release date for their plan, which was the subject of extensive internal debate over how much new housing the city would allow in traditionally walled-off single-family neighborhoods. (Seattle hasn’t had strict single-family-houses-only zoning for years, but its land use patters are starkly suburban, with one house per lot in the vast majority of the city’s residential land.)

While those internal deliberations were going on, the city did an environmental study of five different versions of the plan, ranging from “no action” to an option that would have allowed modest new density in neighborhoods along with even more rental housing in the places where it’s already allowed—generally, large commercial centers and along busy arterial roads. During their 2023 campaigns, most of the City Council candidates who would go on to win their elections said they supported this option or another, denser alternative crafted by housing advocates, known as Alternative 6, indicating broad support for significantly more housing across the city.

In March 2024, Harrell finally released a first draft of his “One Seattle Plan.” The proposal, a drastically scaled-back version of a more ambitious plan the city’s Office of Planning and Development put forward, was roundly derided by housing advocates, including the city’s own Planning Commission, as woefully inadequate to meet the housing needs of hundreds of thousands of new residents Seattle is expecting over the next 20 years. (Former District 4 council candidate Ron Davis, who was defeated by Maritza Rivera, called it “a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis.”)

After that round of backlash, Harrell’s office released a new draft of the plan in October that slightly increased density in a few parts of the city—mostly by restoring six of the 48 “neighborhood centers” that were part of OPCD’s rejected early draft of the proposal. This new version now included 30 neighborhood centers—areas within about 800 feet commercial “nodes” or major transit stops, where future zoning changes could allow 3- to 6-story apartments.

Months of additional outreach and engagement followed. Housing opponents deployed their usual arguments against the modest density updates in the plan, from pleas to protect Seattle’s suburban-style neighborhood character to claims that a handful of small apartment buildings in up to 30 locations would be tantamount to “clearcutting”  Seattle and killing baby orcas and endangered birds. They also rolled out a perennial complaint among people who want Seattle to stay the same: There wasn’t enough outreach. They didn’t feel “heard.”

The council ranged from sympathetic (Cathy Moore, who previously said she supported Alternative 5, said allowing apartments in Maple Leaf would destroy the neighborhood, and Maritza Rivera tried to ensure no apartments could be built in upscale neighborhoods in her district) to unmoved by these arguments.

Mostly, the council wanted to restrict housing in historically single-family areas and continue channeling new apartments to noisy, polluted arterials. Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a Central District renter who doesn’t own a car, was the exception: She consistently argued for more density and would go on to try, unsuccessfully, to restore more of the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan.

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While all this was going on, state legislators forced the city—all cities, in fact—to allow at least four units of housing on every residential lot, or six if two of the units are affordable. The city was supposed to pass legislation to comply with that law, House Bill 1110, as part of the comprehensive plan update; instead, because the plan was so far behind schedule, the council passed “interim” legislation to meet a state-imposed deadline in May.

That gets us, more or less, to the past six weeks, when after months of relative torpor, the city council took up more than 100 amendments to the two pieces of legislation that make up this part of the comprehensive plan update, passing dozens of changes over the course of several days. (The council will take up other aspects of the plan, including changes to parts of the city that are already dense, next year.)

Some of the amendments, like Dan Strauss’ proposal to strip out a planned neighborhood center around the existing Phinney Ridge commercial district and “replace” it by restoring a neighborhood center near the Goodwill store in Ballard, came so late in the process that advocates were scrambling to understand the impact even as the council was voting to approve them.

Others, like Maritza Rivera’s “compromise” amendment giving the director of the city’s planning department new authority to force developers to change their site plans to preserve existing trees and enlarging mandatory “tree protection areas,” were so late-breaking they were only available on paper, hot off the printer, to people present in council chambers. One of the explicit purposes of that amendment, which passed, is to “preserve and enhance the city’s physical and aesthetic character.”

A page from Maritza Rivera’s “compromise” amendment 102, handed out in the room at city hall and not available online when the council approved it.

The council’s changes will, generally speaking, decrease the overall size of the city’s neighborhood centers, with the greatest reductions in council districts whose representatives are wary of (or outright oppose) dense housing in areas dominated by single-family houses. Rob Saka (West Seattle), Joy Hollingsworth (Capitol Hill and the Central District) and Maritza Rivera (Northeast Seattle) successfully excised large swaths of their districts from planned neighborhood centers, arguing in each case that “community” in the area opposed new housing and that Harrell’s plan had failed to take into account the unique features that made these areas inappropriate for apartments.

Joy Hollingsworth proposed her own last-minute amendment to preserve the “donut hole” of low density between Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the Central District, but pulled it last week, saying she would reintroduce the exemption as separate legislation in the future.

The council rejected efforts by Alexis Mercedes Rinck to restore some of the neighborhood centers Harrell’s office eliminated in their draft plan, arguing that including any new density would require a lengthy environmental review, making the final comp plan update even later than it already is. Allowing more density, council members like Strauss noted, will likely trigger a review under the State Environmental Policy Act, while preserving existing apartment bans does not. Allowing apartments in these areas also opens the city up to citizen appeals, which tend to happen whenever the city proposes allowing more, or any, apartments in single-family areas.

Citing advice from the city attorney’s office, the council put all of the proposals to increase density or substantially change the, including the last-minute changes Strauss proposed for his district, in a “docketing” resolution for future council consideration.

The council also rejected Rinck’s proposal to eliminate local mandates that require developers to build parking for new apartments across the city, making the familiar argument that allowing apartments without parking would clog streets and make it impossible for existing residents and people patronizing local businesses to park conveniently.

And although they approved an amendment allowing corner stores throughout residential areas (rather than just on literal corners, as Harrell proposed), they rejected a Rinck amendment that would have allowed stores and restaurants to stay open past 10pm, and allowed other types of businesses, such as bars, in neighborhoods. Bob Kettle, in particular, blanched at the idea of bars and late-night bodegas, arguing that they were “a recipe for disaster on the public-safety front.” [Notice of correction: This paragraph originally said the legislation also prohibits restaurants; it allows restaurants as long as they close by 10pm.]

The council did add some modest height and density bonuses for specific types of housing the city wants to encourage, including privately developed stacked flats (small apartment buildings with each unit on a single floor, distinguished from multi-story townhouses and larger apartment buildings) and social housing. But they rejected Rinck’s proposals to make it easier to build accessory dwelling units on existing lots, yanking several amendments that would have provided density bonuses for ADUs after a lengthy executive session on Friday. Those amendments, too, are now part of the docketing resolution for future consideration.

Overall, the new plan continues to embrace the city’s longstanding strategy—going back to the 1990s—of concentrating new apartments in a few already dense areas while minimizing density in traditional single-family neighborhoods and keeping it relatively low in “urban villages” (now rechristened “urban centers”).

The amendments that occupied so much of the council’s time over the past several weeks will serve, on balance, to reduce the amount of new housing allowed in Harrell’s already scaled-back plan, keeping Seattle’s existing zoning patterns firmly in place except in a few, sharply proscribed areas that could see the reintroduction of the kind of small apartment buildings that were once allowed in residential areas across the city.

But urbanists shouldn’t totally despair. The next council will likely include at least two new pro-housing members (Dionne Foster, running against Sara Nelson, has a commanding lead, while both Eddie Lin and Adonis Ducksworth, running to replace appointee Mark Solomon in District 2, have expressed support for density). That could improve the short-term prospects for amendments like Rinck’s, and make future changes to the comp plan (which can be amended every year) more politically palatable.

The full council won’t vote on the final “Phase 1” legislation until October or November, after additional environmental review of the amendments they just approved. They’re supposed to take up “Phase 2,” which includes zoning changes in the new neighborhood centers as well as the denser urban centers and regional centers, is supposed to start in December.

This Week on PubliCola

This Week on PubliCola: September 21, 2025

Seattle’s plan for growth, CARE team expansion, and more stories you might have missed this week.

Monday, September 15

What That Day-Long Comp Plan Hearing Was About

The city council spent the week blasting through amendments to Phase 1 of the long-delayed comprehensive plan, the framework for growth across the city. I took a look at the ones that came up most often during a day-long public comment period on Friday, including amendments about trees, social housing, parking, and density.

Seattle Nice: Does Police Surveillance Make Us Safer?

On this week’s podcast, we discussed the new police cameras that are going up in so-called “high-crime areas” around Seattle. Are police cameras effective at preventing and solving violent crimes—the stated purpose of the legislation—or are they another expensive tool to make it look like SPD is taking care of people’s safety in marginalized communities?

Tuesday, September 16

Police Department Acknowledges Using AI, But Says It Isn’t “Substantive” Enough to Label

Under the city’s AI policy, every city department is supposed to get specific permission for new AI tools like ChatGPT and, if they use AI “substantively” in their writing, clearly label the content as AI-generated along with the name of the tool. After resident filed a complaint against the department over several blog posts and internal communications that seemed AI-generated, SPD acknowledged to PubliCola that they have used AI, but denied using it for anything more than grammar checks and similar non-substantive edits.

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Wednesday, September 17

Late-Breaking Comp Plan Change Would Restore Low-Density “Donut Hole” Between Capitol Hill and Central District

In a last-minute amendment to the comprehensive plan her committee has been discussing for months, Council Joy Hollingsworth proposed reducing density in her district by preserving the existing, low-density zoning on an area between Capitol Hill, First Hill, and the Central District. Although Hollingsworth would end up pulling the proposal for now, the amendment was one of several big last-minute proposals that the public had no chance to see or weigh in on.

Thursday, September 18

Tiny House Village in Southeast Seattle Remains Stalled as Winter Approaches

Plans to open a new tiny house village in Southeast Seattle have stalled over an apparent lease dispute, according to the organization, Nickelsville, that has been trying to work with the Harrell administration to open a shelter at the site since 2023.

Friday, September 19

Harrell Proposes New Sales Tax to Expand CARE Team, Fund Treatment, and Backfill Budget

Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed a new 0.1-cent sales tax and rolled out a plan to spend it. About half the money would backfill spending on existing programs, like LEAD and CARE, that currently get funding from other sources. The rest would expand non-police public safety programs, including expansion of the CARE Team from 24 to 48 members—a win that indicates CARE may get more concessions from the police union in its next contract, currently in negotiations.