housing, land use, legislature, Maybe Metropolis, Urbanism

Turning Park-and-Rides Into Housing
Aerial view of Shoreline Park-and-Ride via Google Maps.

By Josh Feit

We (Ed: Actually, Erica) gladly paid $7 an hour on a recent Friday afternoon for a  street parking spot behind Capitol Hill’s Stoup Brewing. The reasonable fee is part of SDOT’s data-driven demand management program, which puts an appropriate price on parking, recognizing—sort of like NYC’s congestion pricing program—that popular destinations should be subsidized by the car-centric culture their urban density offsets. After all, density makes Capitol Hill’s go-to clubs, bars, restaurants, and shops possible in the first place.

Applauding the high cost of parking was on point because the event we were attending was a happy hour thrown by Sightline Institute, where more than 50 people crowded in to celebrate, I kid you not, a parking reform bill.  Sightline, which has become an incubator of green metropolis legislation in Olympia, helped draft the bill, which had just passed the state legislature the day before.

Demand management is well and good. But the Sightline bill takes the next step: It prevents cities from requiring too much parking in the first place. The bill, which was sponsored by urbanist rock star Sen. Jessica Bateman (D-22, Olympia), caps parking mandates statewide. For example, the bill says cities can’t require more than one parking space for every two units in new multifamily housing. Developers could still build more parking, but they’ll no longer have to.

There were free stickers on the tables proclaiming, in the style of parking signs: “End Parking Mandates.” And when Sightline’s parking reform guru Catie Gould jumped up on a table with a handful of drink tickets to thank everyone for coming—identifying herself as “the one who wrote” SB 5184—the crowd feted her like she was Bernie or AOC behind the mic on the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.

Certainly, three cheers for the parking caps; I grabbed one of the free stickers. But it’s another bill that sets my war-on-cars heart aflutter. Where the Bateman/Sightline bill limits new parking, the one I’m giddy about actually nukes existing parking infrastructure—parking infrastructure that (unsurprisingly to those who have been predicting a transit future for years) is sitting largely empty.

According to King County Metro spokesman Jeff Switzer, only about 30 percent of the parking spaces in park-and-rides across the system are full on a typical day—and the most heavily used lots, at Northgate and on the Eastside, are only 60 to 70 percent full.

King County lobbied for a change in state law to allow for a different use at these properties: Affordable housing. Appropriately enough, the reform—which authorizes  Metro to overhaul three pilot sites for now—came as an amendment to state Sen. Julia Reed’s (D-36, Seattle) transit-oriented development bill, broader legislation that’s about incentivizing affordable housing near transit hubs. (I wrote about Reed’s bill and its innovative funded inclusionary zoning progam earlier this session.)

 

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The un-pave paradise amendment, a friendly add from state Sen. Yasmin Trudeau (D-27, Tacoma), says WSDOT can select up to three park-and-ride facilities in King County so Metro can conduct a pilot affordable housing program that “releases [Metro from] any covenant imposed for highway purposes and replace it with a covenant requiring affordable housing.” “Gaining this flexibility,” Metro spokesman Switzer said, “would be really important to help both the state and King County Metro achieve their shared goals around transit oriented development and building housing conveniently near frequent and reliable transit service.”

You don’t have to convince me, Jeff. Turning parking into housing is an urbanist’s version of turning swords into ploughshares.

Switzer declined to specify which park-and-rides are being liberated, but the legislation specifies three large surface parking lots—each with between 300 and 1,000 parking spaces—in Kirkland, Shoreline, and South King County.

Go figure. Parking lots with 300 to 1,000 stalls are going underutilized. Props to King County Metro for turning those empty stalls into an opportunity for fulfilling the potential of transit infrastructure as a prompt to build affordable housing. Transit policy is land use policy. And King County needs more land use policy like this that authorizes affordable housing.

Josh@PubliCola.com

homelessness, immigration, Trump

New Federal Homelessness Contracts Appear Designed to Exclude Undocumented Immigrants

By Erica C. Barnett

New federal contracts for homeless services include a requirement that providers deny benefits to undocumented immigrants, King County Regional Homelessness Authority deputy CEO Simon Foster told the King County Council this week. Foster warned that the new restrictions, which have not appeared in previous federal contracts, could result in people losing services they already access and avoiding homeless providers for fear of deportation.

“We know that citizenship verification requirements have a chilling effect that extends throughout the community, and even documented individuals are less likely to seek help if they are afraid of the repercussions to themselves, their friends and their family,” Foster said.

The new language showed up in the KCRHA’s first 2025 grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care program, which provides about 11 percent of KCRHA’s funding. In keeping with new, Trump-era boilerplate for other federal grants, the new language also says agencies must certify that they won’t use the funding in ways that “promote ‘gender ideology'” or violate several new executive orders, including one denying federal funds to “sanctuary cities.” A judge temporarily blocked the sanctuary city order on Thursday.

Under the terms of the contract, KCRHA would be required to “administer its grant in accordance with all applicable immigration restrictions and requirements, including the eligibility and verification requirements” from the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, better known as welfare reform. That law prohibits undocumented immigrants from receiving federally funded services, with some exceptions whose interpretation is entirely up to the “unreviewable” discretion of the attorney general, according to the law.

In 2016, then-attorney general Loretta Lynch issued guidance affirming that homeless service providers could spend federal funding on programs that provide shelter, transitional housing, rapid rehousing, and outreach to undocumented immigrants. Under Trump, that guidance has been removed from HUD’s website.

The new rules also say that KCRHA, or the nonprofit agencies that provide services and housing (the language is ambiguous), has to check the immigration status of every person seeking housing, shelter, or services in a massive federal database called Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE. According to the contract language, KCRHA “must use SAVE, or an equivalent verification system approved by the Federal government, to prevent any Federal public benefit from being provided to an ineligible alien who entered the United States illegally or is otherwise unlawfully present in the United States.”

KCRHA is currently considering its legal options, which could include suing the federal government. Earlier this month, the agency’s governing board held a lengthy, unscheduled executive session to discuss “federal funding impacts,” going into closed session under an exemption to the open meetings act that allows private conversations about litigation or potential litigation.

The agency, unlike the city or county governments, has a legal department of one—general counsel Edmund Witter. Although suing (or joining a larger lawsuit) creates legal risks, so would signing the grant agreement. If the KCRHA agreed to exclude undocumented immigrants from services and avoid funding “gender ideology,” it could open the agency up to legal liability from activist lawsuits. It’s easy to see, for instance, how providing shelter where queer and trans people feel safe would count as “gender ideology” under the new Trump administration’s rule.

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Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, said SKCCH fully expects “to see attempts to insert irrelevant and odious requirements and restrictions on federal funds that keep people housed in our community” coming from the federal government.

“We have to make sure we can keep people safe, housed, sheltered, and helped regardless of where they were born, who is in their household, and how they pay their rent,” Eisinger said. “Local government and any philanthropic partners who concern themselves with housing and homelessness should be creating robust reserves to ensure that we are not at the mercy of the billionaire sociopaths.”

It’s unclear how any of this would work, in a purely practical sense. Searching SAVE to see if someone is in the country legally is expensive (the government charges for each search), and neither KCRHA nor nonprofit service providers currently have access to the database. Most service providers won’t want to be in charge of asking for people’s virtual papers as a condition of providing services, and the possibility of mixups—between people with the same name, for instance—raises major due process issues, according to a person familiar with the legal issues.

Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a former director of subregional planning and equitable engagement at KCRHA, said immigrants, particularly new arrivals, were already apprehensive about accessing the homelessness system before Trump’s election, because of the fear of deportation and the stigma of being homeless.

“It’s a much more invisibilized homelessness experience,” Rinck said. “People naturally feel anxious about accessing any type of government services already,” she said, without having to prove their eligibility for a place to sleep at night. “I think the broad idea is that they’re just going to use any measure to prevent immigrants from tapping into any program or services.”

PubliCola has reached out to HUD’s regional office, as well as several organizations that could be impacted if the new restrictions go into effect, and will post an update if we hear back.

homelessness, King County, legislature

State Budget Cuts Could Halt Successful Encampment Resolution Program
Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck

By Erica C. Barnett

A program started under former governor Jay Inslee to resolve encampments on state-owned rights of way could shut down this year, advocates and King County elected officials warned on Tuesday, unless state Democrats restore funding to continue the program in this year’s budget. The program, unlike the daily sweeps that have become part of the urban landscape in Seattle, involves extensive outreach and, for most participants, ends in housing.

Currently, both the House and Senate versions of the budget reduce funding for the right-of-way program, as it’s known, from $75 million a year to $45 million a year. That funding, advocates said Tuesday, would only be enough money for the program to continue housing people from past encampments, not to provide ongoing outreach and shelter for new encampments in the future. To keep the program at current levels—accounting for inflation, capital costs, and payments to WSDOT for costs associated with physical cleanups—the state would need to restore $40 million to the budget.

Speaking at the Arrowhead Gardens senior housing complex in Highland Park, near the former site of an infamous encampment that was resolved through the program, King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said, “We do not see results in getting people inside by sweeping people out of sight and from one location to another. We do not create trust with our housing service providers by making it harder for them to find people when there’s actually a unit available.”

In King County, the right-of-way program is run by Purpose Dignity Action, which created a program called CoLEAD to provide temporary lodging during the pandemic. Unlike previous efforts to shut down encampments through brute-force sweeps, the PDA’s program resolves encampments by providing sustained outreach, intensive case management, and hotel-based shelter to former encampment residents.

The strategy is more expensive than the sweep-and-repeat approach, but unlike sweeps, it has a strong track record of keeping people housed. According to the PDA, the program has resolved 23 encampments and moved 479 people into housing in King County since 2022, with more than two-thirds of those individuals still housed.

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“Without restored funding for those programs, the front door will close. In other words, we will not have an encampment resolution program that cannot resolve new encampments,” Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said on Tuesday. “No new encampments will be resolved if this goes forward. But we know there’s a way that we can fix this, and leaders from the local and state level have a moral imperative to ensure that there is a path forward for this work to continue.”

Diane Radischat, president of the resident community at Arrowhead Gardens, worried out loud about what would happen if money for the right-of-way program dried up. Already, she said, people are beginning to set up tents and RVs in the area.

The people who have set up encampments on Myers Way are “not the cooperative ones,” Radischat said, “but they still need help. They still need services, and we cannot give up on them ever. So we can’t afford for the state to take any money away from this program in any fashion at all. If the money disappears, what you think will happen? People will just suddenly be all fine, and we don’t have to worry about them anymore?”

After the meeting, Mosqueda told PubliCola that along with restoring the cuts to the right-of-way program, state legislators also need to pass (and Governor Bob Ferguson needs to sign) the $12 billion progressive revenue package that state Democrats have proposed this session. “It’s not a zero- sum game,” Mosqueda said. “We cannot take funding from another bucket to invest in this evidence based program—it needs to be additive so that we are also investing in upstream safety net programs with new revenue from the state.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Mosqueda said the King County Regional Homelessness Authority needed the ability to raise revenues on its own, rather than serving exclusively as a pass-through agency for funding from outside sources.

Last year, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci proposed spending $1.8 million of the county’s budget to supplement the right-of-way program, calling it a “bright spot” at KCRHA, but the council voted it down 7-2, with only Balducci and Jorge Barón voting yes. Then-budget chair Girmay Zahilay urged a “no” vote at the time, citing the need for fiscal discipline amid a growing county budget deficit. Both councilmembers spoke Tuesday in favor of the state budget request.

homelessness, King County, State of Washington

As Cuts to Critical Programs Loom, Latest Count Shows Sharp Increase in Homelessness

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s update on its 2024 “Point In Time Count”—a statistical analysis based on interviews that took place over two weeks in January and February—shows that the number of unhoused people in King County increased by about a quarter between 2022 and 2024, a period when the city of Seattle actually lost shelter beds and had to be forced by the state legislature to allow more housing inside its single-family enclaves.

According to the KCRHA’s new, more detailed report on the count, there were 16,868 people experiencing homelessness in King County in 2024, up from 13,368 in 2022.

KCRHA’s fact sheet on the count says that a statistical analysis based on interviews with a relatively small number of unsheltered people is “better than the traditional volunteer PIT Count” because it results in a more realistic number. “Most people in the data science and homeless services sector agree that this traditional hand count results in an undercount, which may mask the full scale of the problem,” the fact sheet says.

KCRHA plans to reduce a more detailed report this summer, staffers said yesterday. But a high-level breakdown of the numbers, comparing the probable number of unsheltered people in each “subregion” of King County, shows that the entire shelter system provides fewer than half the beds needed to accommodate the number of people living outside, dispelling a common canard that there is “plenty of shelter” if only people would “accept” it. The disparity was worst in North King County, where there are about 10 unsheltered people for every available shelter bed.

The numbers reflected the racial disparities that persist in the region’s homeless population—Black, Latino, and Native American people were disproportionately likely to be homeless—and suggest (via pie chart) that two-thirds of the region’s unsheltered people are chronically homeless.

KCRHA’s new chief research and data officer, Timothy Thomas, showed the council a slide indicating that just 10 percent of people leaving the shelter system “exited” back into homelessness, while 27 percent had a “successful exit” into some form of housing. That leaves most of the people percent unaccounted for, Councilmember Claudia Balducci noted. “Where are the other 63 percent?”

Thomas bounced the question to Janelle Rothfolk, KCRHA’s deputy chief community impact officer (these titles!), who responded, basically, that the agency doesn’t know. “This would account for people who are still in in the shelter during that time, and people who were unsuccessful,” Rothfolk said. “So that would be the remaining [people] who were who exited to unknown destinations or back to the streets, or they’re still in the shelter when the year ended.” The average time each person spends in shelter has continued to increase over the past several years, so beds are also turning over less frequently.

Balducci also questioned the KCRHA staffers’ emphasis on the fact that the percentage of people housed through rapid rehousing programs—essentially, time-limited vouchers for market-rate housing—had increased 7 percent. While that number was an improvement, Balducci said, the number of households KCRHA housed through these programs actually declined about 18 percent, so that the apparent 7 percent increase is coming out of a much smaller number.

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“Basically, we’re serving less people, but they are more successful,” Rothfolk acknowledged, noting that the amount KCRHA had to spend on rapid rehousing also declined.

Funding for homeless services, which flows into KCRHA primarily through the city, county, and federal governments, will almost certainly decrease this year and in future budgets. About 11 percent of the agency’s budget, or around $23 million, comes from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care (CoC), which is facing cuts along with the rest of HUD. The Trump Administration has also said it will withhold CoC grants if agencies fail to comply with a number of onerous conditions, such as prohibitions on diversity, equity, and conclusion programs and programs that promote “gender ideology.” For KCRHA, these would include programs for LGBTQ and particularly trans youth, programs that aim to address racial disparities in homelessness, or programs that are aimed at basically any marginalized group.

Meanwhile, the state budget—which largely funds the county’s Department of Community and Human Services, as well as providing direct funds to KCRHA—is facing a multi-billion-dollar shortfall that Governor Bob Ferguson has resisted addressing with new taxes, such as a lift on the 1 percent property tax increase cap or a wealth tax.

A significant chunk of the shortfall comes from a decline in the state’s document recording fee on real estate transactions,, which funds homelessness services; revenues from that fee are expected to be several hundred million dollars short this year, as the housing construction market stalls. In the past, the state has backfilled that shortfall through the Department of Commerce; but, according to King County budget director Dwight Dively, that isn’t happening this year.

“Both the House budget and the Senate budget that came out a few weeks ago did not have the full document recording fee backfill, and, frankly, weren’t even close,” Dively told the council. “So assuming that that’s where the state budget ends up, there will be revenue that we’ve budgeted from the state in the second half of this year for document recording fee backfill that we will not get. … In that circumstance, either we have to immediately cut funding for homelessness services, and we all understand the consequences of that, or we have to find another revenue source to at least temporarily back fill that, and that’s the general fund.”

County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda suggested another path: If the county, state, and federal government all lack the funding to keep the region’s already inadequate homelessness system intact, the KCRHA should be empowered with its own taxing authority. (The city and county made the explicit decision to deny the KCRHA taxing authority in 2019.) In LA, Mosqueda noted, “they didn’t just stand up a regional homelessness authority. They stood up a funding mechanism” through voter-approved tax measures. “We did not add the ability for KCRHA to have taxing authority. And I think that that was a misstep then.”

KCRHA’s funding model has come under scrutiny from state auditors as well as city and county leaders, many of whom have privately questioned whether the organization has a future. In the years since the city and county created the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in 2019, the authority has been whittled down from an aspirational effort to address homelessness regionally, rather than city by city, into an essentially administrative agency that moves money between its funders and the nonprofit service providers who make up the homelessness “system.”

In presentations last week (to the agency’s governing board) and Tuesday (to the county council), KCRHA staff explained that the authortiy starts each year with no money in its bank account and starts going into the red as soon as the year begins, relying on ongoing what loans from the county and cash advances from the city to pay its contractors. Before last year, the KCRHA frequently paid providers late, prompting widespread complaints; they also failed to bill the city on time for some expenses, according to an October 2023 audit report.

Like other pass-through agencies, KCRHA operates on a “reimbursement model,” which “inherently results in significant cash flow challenges due to the lag between incurring expenses and receiving funds,” according to a February staff report. In February, the state auditor found that this model, which relies on “informal cash advances” and loans, is putting the KCRHA’s “current service levels and future obligations at risk.”

KCRHA pays interest on its loans, which takes away money that could otherwise be spent running the agency. According to the auditor, between January 2023 and September 2024, the KCRHA spent $431,000 on interest alone. On top of that, the KCRHA overdrew its checking account, racking up $35,000 in overdraft fees.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency is now set to receive cash advances from the city every quarter, but it still has no reserves in case the city decides to change the arrangement in the future, or King County stops providing periodic loans.

City Council, Courts, Police

Seattle Leaders Said “Stay Out” Orders Would Reduce Gun Violence and Sex Trafficking. So Far, They’ve Issued Five.
Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore (with Councilmember Bob Kettle and City Attorney Ann Davison in the background) unveils legislation re-criminalizing “prostitution loitering” and SOAP orders last year.

By Erica C. Barnett

When City Attorney Ann Davison and Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed, and the City Council passed, laws reinstating the crime of “prostitution loitering” and empowering the city to issue “Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution” orders banishing people from Aurora Ave. N, they said the new laws would empower them to immediately start addressing gun violence in North Seattle.

By prosecuting men who patronize sex workers and threatening them with arrest for merely venturing inside the vast SOAP zone, Davison and City Councilmember Cathy Moore insisted, the city would reduce the number of shootings in the area, which, they said, are driven by pimps fighting over territory. Cracking down swiftly and decisively on sex buyers, Moore claimed, would help “address…commercial sexual exploitation in this area, and associated gun violence” by deterring men from patronizing sex workers on Aurora.

More than seven months after the law passed, however, the city has only issued five SOAP orders—a pace that shows none of the urgency proponents expressed when pushing the laws through against widespread objections last year. All but one are against indigent men who are represented by public defenders. In most cases, to qualify as indigent, a person must make less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level, or just over $24,000 a year, or demonstrate that they have no ability to pay any amount for an attorney. Only one of the SOAP defendants is white, and one required an English interpreter.

Overall, since October, Davison’s office has filed charges against a total of nine men for prostitution loitering or “sexual exploitation,” the city’s term for patronizing a sex worker—a surprisingly low number, given the priority Davison and the city council placed on passing the new laws as quickly as possible last year.

A spokesman for Davison’s office, Tim Robinson, said the City Attorney’s Office (CAO) had “discovered a problem where Seattle Municipal Court [personal recognizance] screeners were releasing suspects arrested on prostitution-related charges without a hearing date. That delayed the ability of the CAO to request a SOAP order.” In the future, he said,”we expect to see an increase in the number of SOAP orders issued in a timely manner,” Robinson said.

Court records show five cases in which a man arrested for a prostitution-related offense was released on personal recognizance without a SOAP order; three of those men later got SOAPed and are among the five banned from Aurora.

All five of the SOAP cases are currently pending, meaning that the men are prohibited from entering the SOAP zone even though they haven’t admitted to, or been convicted of, any crime. The zone encompasses Aurora Ave. N between N. 85th St. and the city line at N. 145th, plus the equivalent of three city blocks on each side of the street.

Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, who issued two of the five SOAP orders (the others were issued by Judge Faye Chess and Pro Tem Judge Thomas Zilly), said he considers requests for SOAP orders on a case-by-case basis.

“SOAP orders can be an effective tool for judges, but they should not be used arbitrarily or automatically when an individual is charged with a prostitution-related crime,” said Shadid, who was speaking for himself as a judge, not the court as a whole. “Relevant factors for a SOAP order might include previous convictions for prostitution-related crimes, previous convictions for domestic violence related crimes, ensuring the defendant is able to shop and work without impediment, and whether the defendant receives services in the area.”

Of the five men who received SOAP orders, three had been arrested previously for attempting to pay for sex and had the charge dismissed, according to court records.
Because each police sting on sex buyers involves as many as 20 officers—including multiple decoy officers, teams of arresting officers, and multiple surveillance teams that can serve as backups—the price tag for each of these arrests is significant. (SPD previously declined to estimate the cost of each sting.)  Before going undercover, officers have to go through a two-day “decoy school” to learn the “language” of sex work, act out various scenarios, and practice hand signals to let observing officers know if they’re in distress and when it’s time to swoop in for an arrest.

Police reports describe the events leading up to each man’s arrest. In one sting, two men approached an undercover officer outside the Jack-In-the-Box on Aurora, saying they had just gotten off work and wanted to “shower before,” according to the police report. In another, a man (who required an interpreter in court because he is not fluent in English) drove up and asked the officer—who was dressed in “a leopard print jacket, neon green tank top, hot pink mid-thigh length skirt and thigh high gray suede boots,” according to the police report—if she was a cop. When she said she wasn’t, he asked if he could touch her breasts, giggled, and told her he was “scared.”

Another man, who was arrested in the Lowe’s parking lot, later told a judge that he lived inside the SOAP zone, making it hard for him to avoid the area. A fifth man asked how much an undercover officer charged for sex, then “responded by saying ‘hum’ and something not intelligible,’ then drove off before police arrested him.

Whatever you think of sex work (a large majority of Americans think it should be legal), it’s hard to see how arresting these men, holding them in jail, prosecuting them for misdemeanors, and banning them from Aurora accomplishes the city’s ostensible goal of eliminating sex trafficking and gun violence in the area. It’s a bit like going after cartels by arresting people who use drug outdoors because they’re homeless—the city is targeting the lowest-level offenders, those financially least able to defend themselves, instead of working with county and state prosecutors to apprehend the people actually committing serious crimes.

“These charges and orders have not—and will not—stop sex trafficking or gun violence. Experience shows that these policies fail to achieve their stated goals and, in fact, exacerbate the very issues they claim to address” said Matt Sanders, Interim Director of the King County Department of Public Defense.

Pointing to UW professor Katherine Beckett’s book condemning Seattle’s earlier use of of drug and prostitution “stay out” zones, Banished, Sanders said Seattle’s earlier experience with SOAP zones has already demonstrated that they don’t work and make sex workers more vulnerable to violence and exploitation.

“If the City genuinely seeks solutions to these complex issues, the path forward has already been clearly articulated by academics and service providers who testified before the City Council,” Sanders said. “Effective strategies include improving access to emergency shelter paired with supportive services, increasing the availability of affordable housing, and providing economic support programs. These evidence-based approaches, not punitive and counterproductive SOAP orders, offer real hope for meaningful change.” 

At a time of mass deportations and crackdowns on even legal immigrants, it’s also noteworthy that, according to public defenders, most of the men who get busted for patronizing street sex workers are immigrants. White men have more discreet ways of buying sex, and they’re more likely to be represented by private attorneys, rather than overworked public defenders.

Davison’s office says SOAP orders and stings are part of a strategy “to try and establish an environment of accountability for human trafficking on Aurora. We want sex traffickers and buyers to believe that there is a reasonable likelihood they will be arrested and face meaningful consequences. SOAP orders are one component of that strategy to reduce human trafficking and the associated gun violence.”

Business, City Council, Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: City Council Shakeup in Southeast Seattle

And on Are You Mad At Me?: Why You Should Watch Shattered Glass!

By Erica C. Barnett

After last week’s grim assessment of how local leaders are (and mostly aren’t) preparing for the dual impact of city funding shortfalls and federal funding cuts, we turned this week to a more hopeful subject: Who will represent Southeast Seattle’s District 2 on the City Council next year?

Tammy Morales stepped down at the beginning of 2025, saying her colleagues had bullied her and made it impossible to get anything done, and the council appointed Mark Solomon, whom Morales defeated in 2019, to the seat. (Solomon was the second candidate to be vanquished by Morales and subsequently appointed to the council; the first was Tanya Woo, who went on to lose to Alexis Mercedes Rinck.) Four candidates have filed for the position so far: Assistant City Attorney Eddie Lin, SDOT staffer (and, until recently, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s transportation advisor) Adonis Ducksworth; business owner Takayo Ederer; and city building inspector and union leader Jamie Fackler.

I think the candidates for District 2 have more diverse viewpoints than the pigeonholes pundits are slotting them into—the usual “left,” “center-left,” and “moderate” (conservative by Seattle standards) “lanes.”

Lin, for example, floated the idea of a new levy to fund gun violence prevention programs—but also told me he supports beefing up the police department to crack down on “disorder” and “open-air drug markets” while the city figures out a way to address the addiction and poverty that lead to drug sales and petty thefts. Ducksworth, who is strongly associated with Harrell, said that while he may not have supported Proposition 1A, the measure that funded social housing, he’s “extremely happy it did pass” and will do everything in his power to make it a success. (Harrell campaigned against 1A, favoring an alternative that would have raised no new funds and would not have built social housing).

And Fackler, a union shop steward who said he was motivated to run by Prop. 1A’s success, went deep on the need to eliminate the red tape that’s currently hindering development in Seattle, including utility hookup requirements that can quickly make housing projects infeasible.

It’s too soon to say how many more candidates will get into these races before the May 9 filing deadline—there’s often a rush—but we will note that the biggest vote-winner in local election history, Position 8 (citywide) rep Rinck, is not facing any serious opposition so far. The same can’t be said for Position 9 (also citywide) Councilmember Sara Nelson, who faces a formidable challenger in Dionne Foster, the former director of the lefty Washington Progress Alliance, who we interviewed earlier this year.

In addition to the upcoming elections, we discussed the (potential) closure of the Virginia Inn, a Pike Place Market institution that is in an apparently intractable dispute with its landlord, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority. Sandeep and I hope they can work it out; David says that as anti-NIMBYs, we’re hypocrites for opposing the closure of a business we happen to like.

Also this week, it’s time for another episode of “Are You Mad At Me?,” our limited-run podcast about the great, underappreciated journalism movie Shattered Glass. The film, released on 2003, is about the downfall of serial fabulist Stephen Glass, a journalist for The New Republic who was caught fabricating stories after reporters for a digital startup started digging into his blockbuster piece about teenage hackers working as security consultants.

This month, Josh and I will tell you why you—yes, YOU—should watch this excellent film, even if you don’t think you care about the subject matter.

To quote the New York Times’ A.O. Scott, who reviewed Shattered Glass when it came out in 2003, it’s “an astute and surprisingly gripping drama not only about the ethics of magazine writing, but also, more generally, about the subtle political and psychological dynamics of modern office culture.”