Tag: homelessness

City Council, homelessness, Trump, Uncategorized

Grim Outlook for Local Homelessness Programs Under Trump’s Slash-and-Burn Cuts
KCRHA deputy CEO Simon Foster

By Erica C. Barnett

During the second meeting of the City Council’s special committee on the impact of federal funding cuts last week, housing and homeless service providers laid out in stark terms what will happen when, not if, cuts to federal funding for housing development and services for people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity kick in.

The housing impacts alone will be broad and widespread across every kind of affordable housing, from buildings financed privately through federal tax credits to permanent supportive housing that relies heavily on federal support.

Services that help keep people housed, such as health care, will also become harder to access, as the Trump administration targets Medicaid recipients—cutting funds and imposing work requirements on the state’s poorest residents, including many with disabilities that make it impossible to work.

Meanwhile, the region’s homelessness agency stands to lose the federal funding that is the agency’s third-largest funding source, and is now facing a choice about whether to comply with the administration’s new mandate to verify their clients’ immigration status and provide that information to ICE.

“We know that immigration verification requirements have a chilling effect that extends throughout the community, and that even documented individuals are less likely to seek help,” King County Regional Homelessness Authority deputy CEO Simon Foster said, because “they are afraid of the repercussions to themselves, their friends and their families.”

The meeting offered a first look at the impacts federal cuts will have on the housing and homelessness system locally. The speakers—who, in addition to Foster, included Naomi See from Hunt Capital Partners, Jess Blanch from Enterprise Community Partners, interim Chief Seattle Club director James Lovell, and Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone—described a bleak cascade of consequences.

– KCRHA, which received $66 million directly and indirectly, through King County, from HUD’s Continuum of Care program last year, is bracing for cuts that could impact ongoing contracts with housing providers and direct subsidies to help people stay in their housing. Overall, nearly 2,200 formerly homeless people could be at risk of losing their housing from federal cuts, along with another 2,300 in transitional housing and other programs. More than 240 people in programs funded through KCRHA could lose their jobs if the programs they operate are eliminated.

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– The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which helps fund most affordable housing projects, could drop in value dramatically, limiting its effectiveness. LIHTC is complicated to explain, but basically, states award federal tax credits to developers who sell them to investors at a discounted rate—say, 90 cents on the dollar. If that rate gets too low for the developers to build their projects, they have to seek funding from “gap funders,” like the city and county, or forego building.

The reasons this is happening, See said, are at least twofold: Corporate tax rates are likely to increase soon, which makes investors place a lower value on housing tax credits, and tariffs on Canada and Mexico are likely to increase the cost of materials used in construction, including drywall and lumber, making it harder for new housing to pencil out.

– The state’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which helps low-income people pay their utility bills and weatherize their homes, could be cut. Earlier this month, the Trump administration eliminated the entire federal LIHEAP program as part of the mass firings at the Department of Health and Human Services, throwing the future of state-level programs in question.

According to Jess Blanch, from the affordable housing funder Enterprise Community Partners, Washington received $66 million from the federal government for LIHEAP last year, providing utility assistance to households with an average income of 150 percent of the federal poverty rate— $22,590 for a one-person household or $46,800 for a household of four.

– Cuts to two federal programs that help house people and keep them housed, Section 8 and the less-known Section 4, which helps community-based housing providers build capacity to increase their effectiveness, could dramatically increase homelessness, Blanch said. Enterprise and one of its partners recently received notice from DOGE that “due to our supposed non compliance with the DEI executive order,” HUD is freezing their funds, impacting providers like DESC that were set to receive grants.

– Individual organizations that rely on federal funding, including DESC, stand to lose huge chunks of their operating budgets thanks to slash-and-burn cuts at HUD, HHD, and Medicaid. Malone noted that DESC gets about a quarter of its funding from federal sources. In late March, DESC learned that a federal grant that funds outreach and engagement with opioid users had been eliminated (along with the entire federal agency that oversees substance use and mental health treatment across the country), forcing DESC to “scramble to figure out what to do about how to manage the loss of those funds,” Malone said.

– Funding for opioid addiction treatment through Medicaid could also be at risk, since Trump seems determined to go after states that expanded Medicaid. “Reductions in federal cost share of Medicaid expansion would result in a huge hit to the state, and the state would have to figure out how they were going to continue people on health insurance if that were to happen,” Malone said.

These are state and federal issues, not merely local ones, but the city could make funding decisions that help offset the current and future cuts. Revenue is one option, although the council has not shown much appetite for new taxes—a modest capital gains tax, proposed by Rinck and her colleague Cathy Moore during last year’s budget, could provide some funding, but the council majority rejected this option, arguing that there wasn’t enough data about the need for funding rent and food assistance.

Lovell, from the Chief Seattle Club, noted that “no matter what we do, that level of federal funding that’s at risk cannot simply just be absorbed without something having to go away. And the only way to prevent that, I think, is with a different revenue source” from the state, King County, or the city. Lovell said the council would “probably have to have a special budget session just to kind of brush up on what the federal impacts have been and how they’ve passed through to the city.”

So far, the committee has focused on surfacing problems, rather than identifying solutions that the council can advocate and implement. That has value in itself—but only if the rest of the council chooses to listen and take action based on the flood of, yes, data they’re receiving about people who will be directly impacted by the cuts.

homelessness, Police

“Unacceptable”: Burien City Manager Complained to Police Chief, Sheriff About Lack of Immediate Response to His 911 Calls
Burien’s Town Square Park, as seen from City Hall (via Google Maps)

By Erica C. Barnett

We’ve reported before on Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon’s habit of calling 911, sometimes multiple times a day, to report on the presence of people he believes are using drugs, setting up tents, or behaving oddly outside the window of his office at Burien City Hall, which overlooks Town Square Park in downtown Burien. But emails obtained through a records request show that he took things a step further earlier this year when he felt the police weren’t responding quickly enough to his requests for immediate, in-person service.

In February, just a few weeks before the Burien City Council passed a law that effectively makes it illegal for unsheltered people to sleep in the city, Bailon contacted then-Police Chief Ted Boe directly to complain that he had been on hold with the city’s non-emergency 911 response line for 25 minutes after he called “to report ongoing open drug use and an encampment commencing within Town Square Park.”

“This is the second time that I encounter this problem,” Bailon told the police chief. “Please help me to understand why this continues to happen with KCSO’s 911 system, and what caused this issue this evening.” At the bottom of the email, Bailon attached a screen shot of his phone capturing the length (25 minutes and one second) of the call in progress.

As a point of comparison, when former city council member Lisa Herbold texted then-Seattle police chief Carmen Best in 2020 to say she was concerned about a dilapidated trailer that showed up her house, which she believed someone had set up as part of a political stunt, she was admonished and fined $500 by the city’s ethics and elections commission.

In another incident, an administrative assistant for the city received a call from a woman who claimed to be “from Eastern Russia” saying that “Homelessness is an issue everywhere, not just in Burien, and illegals were going to get that lady on the video,” according to the staffer’s summary.

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The staffer took “that lady on the video” to be Councilmember Akey, who was caught on tape confronting a group of unsheltered people outside her downtown Burien condo and telling them she would call the police on them if they didn’t leave. (At the time, they had the legal right to set up tents on the sidewalk until 6 in the morning).

Bailon again complained to Boe directly, this time demanding to know why police had not come out to take the staffer’s report. The police chief investigated and informed Bailon that there had been a error by the call taker, and told Bailon if the staffer would call 911 again, the police would log the call and send someone out immediately to take her report.

In response, Bailon demanded that Boe send someone out immediately without the need for a 911 call, adding, “911 command staff need to be proactive on this failure and approach the City to correct the issue. It is very common for 911-non emergency to take up to and over 20 minutes to accept a call, and I do not want my team to have to wait for extended periods of time due to a failure on the part of a 911 operator and the 911 system.” (In Seattle, the non-emergency line is separate from 911 and callers have to leave a message.)

Boe responded by telling Bailon that the woman had been reprimanded for her mistake, and asking him again to have a staffer call 911.

Instead of making the call, Bailon escalated his complaint to Boe’s boss, King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall, sending her what was by now a lengthy email thread and complaining that Boe had “dismissed my request on two separate occasions and, instead, instruct the City to call 911 again to file a new report. This is unacceptable. I do not understand the reason for the City being instructed to file a new report instead of the 911 system fulfilling its obligation to the City of Burien.”

The head of patrol for the sheriff’s department responded to Bailon’s email to Cole-Tindall, explaining that if Bailon didn’t want to wait for police to come out to City Hall, someone could easily take a report over the phone; all the city staffer needed to do was call 911 again and someone would take the report or come to City Hall right away. Instead of taking either route, Bailon said he didn’t understand why the sheriff’s office was forcing him to make a “special request” to have an officer sent over, and insisted, again, that the police send someone over without another 911 call.

By the end of the email thread PubliCola reviewed, two days had elapsed between the initial call and Bailon’s email refusing, for the fourth time, to have someone dial 911 again.

It’s unclear whether the administrative assistant ever filed a report about the phone call from the woman “from Eastern Russia,” which the email thread indicated the city at least initially considered a high-priority “threat.”

City Council, homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell

After Series of Hurried Meetings, Homelessness Authority Decides to Continue Search for Permanent Leader

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has decided to continue its search for a new CEO, PubliCola has confirmed, after two high-level meetings in the past week at which agency officials and search committee members discussed whether to continue the hiring process or begin “winding down” the agency.

Last week, as PubliCola exclusively reported, former governor Christine Gregoire and Seattle Metropolitan Chamber director Rachel Smith wrote a letter to other members of the CEO search committee urging the committee to pause the hiring process until the agency’s future is clear; in their letter, Smith and Gregoire cited “challenges the agency has faced and/or been unable to respond to” along with ongoing questions about the agency’s governing structure. The KCRHA is headed up by an implementation board of subject-matter experts who make policy and budget decisions, and a governing committee made up mostly of elected officials board that is supposed to approve the implementation board’s decision.

The CEO search committee met on Friday. The original plan for that meeting was to whittle down a list of a dozen candidates for the permanent CEO position, currently filled by interim CEO Darrell Powell, who has reportedly applied for the permanent job. The agency has been without a permanent leader since its first CEO, Marc Dones, resigned last May.

There’s an existential issue at play here: Can the KCRHA can be successful if it’s directly controlled by political actors at King County and the city of Seattle, which together provide most of the authority’s funding?

Instead of talking about the candidates, the search committee discussed the broader future of the agency. Some committee members, reportedly including Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore, argued that the KCRHA needs to come up with a new governance structure before appointing a CEO in order to create a sense of stability at the agency. This, the theory goes, could lead to a deeper pool of more qualified applicants.

Moore declined to comment for this story, citing an NDA, and others involved in the internal conversations about KCRHA’s future did not respond to questions or declined to speak on the record. (The NDA, as described to PubliCola, pertains to the appointment itself, including the list of applicants. It does not restrict people from talking about the process in general or about other questions we had for Moore, such as how she would like to see the KCRHA’s governance change.)

The second meeting, held earlier this week, was called to discuss those governance concerns. It’s unclear whether the group reached any consensus about how the agency will be governed in the future. However, sources familiar with the discussions say representatives for Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine expressed their strong support for the KCRHA and its “regional approach” to homelessness. Last month, Harrell’s office announced the city was stripping KCRHA of its authority over encampment outreach and homelessness prevention, but Harrell’s office suggested it it might consider handing these responsibilities back to the authority at some point in the future.

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Many Seattle officials have argued that the KCRHA’s two-board structure (three if you count the federally mandated Continuum of Care board) is confusing and grants too much power to unelected experts who aren’t directly accountable to voters. Those with long memories will recall that this was also a heated debate back in 2019, when the KCRHA was created; at that time, the non-elected implementation board was seen as a bulwark against political influence.

One possibility, according to sources close to the discussions, is that the KCRHA will eliminate the implementation board and incorporate a handful of homelessness experts into the governing board, which would become the agency’s main decision-making body. There’s an existential issue at play here: Can the KCRHA can be successful if it’s directly controlled by political actors at King County and the city of Seattle, which together provide most of the authority’s funding?

Last year, the KCRHA was supposed to re-bid the entire homelessness system—a huge undertaking that could mean ending longstanding contracts and opening new ones with first-time providers—but that was put on hold to give the agency time to address immediate problems, including late payments to service providers.

Powell, who was Harrell’s pick to lead the agency, has been on the job for just over two months; earlier this week, the authority hired King County Department of Community and Human Services’ emergency response director, Hedda McClendon, as Powell’s interim deputy, after the mayor’s office proposed her name to Powell by email in January.

Guest Contributor, homelessness, housing

Seattle’s Vehicle Impoundment Policy Betrays Contempt, Not Compassion, for Those Living Homeless

By The Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett

In January 2023, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority announced that addressing homelessness in King County would cost about $12 billion and require “tens of thousands more units of housing.” Local officials immediately balked. Two earlier plans to address homelessness were unable to address homelessness successfully, so why should the region spend billions more?

But the alternative, especially for people living in vehicles, has been increasingly onerous and cruel.

This past summer, I filed public records requests with the city of Seattle for all vehicle impounds between January to May 2023. I filtered these impounds to include only that were most likely to be vehicles used as residences: RVs, Campers, Detached Trailers, and Buses, and found that 1,441 of these four vehicle types were impounded over just five months.

The four most common impound reasons included, in order of severity, were: Violations of the city rule requiring vehicles to move every 72 hours, improper licensing (such as expired tabs), having a detached trailer, and parking in prohibited areas, such as residential neighborhoods and retail zones.  The list justifying impounds also included another 17 violations, such as: Parking too close to a sidewalk or a stop sign; blocking a trail; determined to be junk; illegal blocking, such parking in front of a hydrant; parking in a loading zone; improper curb orientation; double-parking; and parking in an intersection, all as determined by a parking enforcement or police officer.

When the KCRHA has to use its limited funds, which come largely from Seattle, simply to keep people cast to the streets by impounds alive, that money is wasted and success continues to elude us. People will blame the regional authority, when in fact, it is as much the failure of every city to address their frequently punitive control of the streets.

The city does not offer people shelter prior to any of these impounds, since in every case, their owners are violating some law. Yet in my view, this appears to constitute a violation of Martin v Boise, the Ninth District Court of Appeals ruling that requires cities to offer shelter before they order anyone living in homelessness to move from a public location.

Why are so few people who are swept while unsheltered—and living in a vehicles counts as unsheltered homelessness, according to HUD—not offered shelter? The city may well argue that Martin does not apply to vehicle residents since the ruling says nothing about people living in vehicles. Maybe more compelling is that there is nothing close to an adequate amount of shelter available. And for people living in any vehicle other than a passenger car, leaving their vehicle for a single bed in a shelter—basically all that is ever offered—is nonsensical.

This shortage of shelter spaces also impacts the formal process the city uses for responding to vehicle residents who are asked to move by the Unified Care Team, which carries out the city’s formal Remediations, Relocations, and Removals program. Under this program, staff from the Human Services Department are required to offer shelter to every unhoused person who must move. Vehicle residents who decline shelter and cannot move have their vehicles impounded.

But even if the city offers some kind of shelter in every case—which some city-funded outreach providers dispute—if the people living in a vehicle are: 1) a couple; 2) pet owners; 3) with children; 4) trans; 5) and so on, there often are no appropriate shelters.

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During 12 years of outreach in Seattle to those living in vehicles, I’ve seen that funding is only half the answer to addressing homelessness. Yes, money is needed to provide services and such. Yet elected officials also control the streets and all the public terrain where homeless persons encamp—the other half of the reality of homelessness. By enforcing laws to impound vehicles where people are living, the city is imposing brute force in the form of sweeps, setting back efforts to assist those living homeless to move toward stability.

Elected officials may well balk at the overall cost of addressing homelessness. But the hidden impounds I’ve described have a cost as well. When the KCRHA has to use its limited funds, which come largely from Seattle, simply to keep people cast to the streets by impounds alive, that money is wasted and success continues to elude us. People will blame the regional authority, when in fact, it is as much the failure of every city to address their frequently punitive control of the streets.

In Seattle, there was a better agreement from 2011 to 2020, through the Scofflaw Mitigation program initiated by the Mike McGinn administration. The 2011 Scofflaw Ordinance, which allowed the city to boot and impound vehicles if their owners had four or more unpaid tickets, threatened an enormous escalation of impounds. We in the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness approached the mayor and jointly formulated a partnership with parking Enforcement and the Municipal Court.

The group we formed was, and is, called the Scofflaw Mitigation Team, and for more than 10 years it kept impounds from tickets in the single digits. The current administration ended the program in 2022. Now, 1,441 impounds have occurred in just five months.

The agreement was that parking enforcement would inform us when any vehicle was close to accumulating four tickets, putting it at risk of impound. We would then do outreach to address the tickets and provide whatever the person needed to get their vehicle moving again. The group we formed was, and is, called the Scofflaw Mitigation Team, and for more than 10 years it kept impounds from tickets in the single digits. The current administration ended the program in 2022. Now, 1,441 impounds have occurred in just 5 months, from violations the administration has deemed impound-worthy.

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who during World War II sought to halt the harm in Germany, described the attitude of the nation’s leaders, which also spread among many of the German people, as “a contempt for humanity.” Does this describe some of the attitudes we who are housed have toward those unhoused? Does it describe some of the attitudes of those we’ve elected to govern? Do we have a collective “contempt” for the unhoused?

Key questions for our future include: Can we suspend law enforcement long enough to help the vulnerable? Can’t we do better for our vulnerable neighbors than “sweeps?” Are we half-hearted?

These are questions for jurisdictional leaders and for all of us who vote for them. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has stated it is against sweeps as a tool for addressing homelessness. Why? Because it wastes precious money, and because too many people are dying. But the authority cannot change exacting harm via the law without elected leaders putting unhoused people first, or at a minimum, setting aside “contempt.”

The Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett is the director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, in residence at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church.

Courts, homelessness

City Can Continue “Obstruction” Sweeps for Now; Ex-KCRHA Director Turns In First Work on City Contract

1. Last Friday, a state appeals court issued a ruling staying any enforcement of a King County Superior Court decision finding Seattle’s rules on “obstruction” encampment removals unconstitutional. The city defines an “obstruction” as any encampment, tent, person, or property that is located in virtually any public space, including remote areas of public parks. The stay comes in response to an appeal filed by City Attorney Ann Davison’s office on Friday, and allows the city to continue its practice of no-notice sweeps, which have ramped up dramatically under the Harrell Administration. Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case have until August 11 to respond to the city’s appeal.

As we reported last month, two formerly homeless people, Bobby Kitcheon and Candace Ream, sued the city, with the help of the ACLU of Washington, after the city subjected them to repeated sweeps. According to the lawsuit, both Kitcheon and Ream lost all their possessions, including irreplaceable family mementos as well as IDs, insulin and other medications, and food, each time the city arrived to remove their tents from a new location.

In his order, Superior Court Judge David Keenan found that the city’s rule violates people’s privacy and constitutes “cruel punishment” under the state constitution because the city’s definition of “obstruction”—which includes any tent or person sleeping in any area of a public park, for example—”allows the City to move unhoused people who are not actual obstructions, without offering unhoused people shelter.” Under a Ninth Circuit ruling called Martin v. Boise, cities are not allowed to remove homeless people from a location without offering them shelter except in certain circumstances, including when a tent or person is blocking others from using a public space, such as a sidewalk.

The city’s appeal of the superior court ruling rests on the argument that the city’s rule allowing no-notice removals of encampments when they are “obstructions” can’t be “facially” invalid—that is, unenforceable on its face— because the rules can be applied constitutionally; in other words, because there are cases where a tent is actually obstructing the public use of a space, such as a sidewalk, the city is claiming the law can’t be invalid in its entirety.

The city attorney’s office, using outside attorneys, is also arguing that because the two plaintiffs are now housed and were never subject to civil or criminal charges, they lack standing to challenge the city. It’s worth noting that as a matter of practice, the city does not fine or charge people for sleeping in public; instead, it conducts sweeps.

Additionally, according to the city’s appeal, “even if respondents had standing, Mr. Kitcheon and Ms. Ream were not involuntarily homeless because they were repeatedly offered shelter by the City and voluntarily left City-funded shelter.” As we have reported many times, people often decline shelter or leave the shelter beds the city assigns them because the beds are not appropriate for their circumstances; in Kitcheon’s case, according to the lawsuit, the only shelters that were generally available were single-gender and would have forced him and his wife to separate.

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Davison’s office also argued that people have no right to privacy inside their tents when those tents are located on public property. PubliCola is not a lawyer, but this does raise an obvious question about how far the city’s right to invade people’s personal space extends.

Over the weekend, for example, housed people camped out along Lake Washington during Seafair; would Davison claim a right to send workers to barge into those tents and seize everything inside them, since they are, according to the city’s own rules, obstructing the use of public space? Or does the city’s “heightened interest in protecting the health and safety of the community (both housed and unhoused) and accessible use of public property and rights of way” only apply when the people camped out in public space have nowhere else to go?

Page two of the four-page document representing 10 hours, or $2,500, of Dones’ $60,000 contract with the city.

2. PubliCola has received the second of 10 “deliverables” provided by former KCRHA director Marc Dones as part of their ongoing, $60,000 contract with the city of Seattle, which involves researching how Medicaid funding might be used to pay for homeless services.

The document, which—according to Dones’ contract—represents 10 hours’ worth of work, is a spare timeline and 375-word summary of the work Dones is supposed to do, including “framework development,” interviews with stakeholders, and “iterating the framework report” with Harrell’s office. The city is paying Dones through December.

As we’ve reported, Dones left the KCRHA at a time when many agency staffers and government officials with oversight authority over the agency had begun to express a lack of confidence in their leadership. The contract is worth three months’ salary for Dones—the minimum they would have been likely to receive in severance if they had been fired instead of leaving voluntarily.

Drugs, Economy, homelessness, land use, Mayor Harrell

“Downtown Is You”: Harrell Unveils New Downtown Plan Against Backdrop of Anti-Sweeps Protest

Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks to a crowd of supporters and press at Westlake Park

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell gathered supporters in Westlake Plaza Wednesday morning to announce his latest downtown activation plan, officially titled “Downtown Is You.” But the press event was initially sidelined by a group of anti-sweeps protesters holding signs and chanting, “stop the sweeps” and other slogans from a few feet away. After halting his prepared remarks, Harrell hopped down from the stage and attempted to get the protesters to be quiet, but gave up and returned to the stage after several responded that they didn’t trust his offer to talk to them in a different venue.

“Westlake Center is a center for civic engagement,” he told the audience. “Unfortunately, that’s not civic engagement—that’s just yelling.”

“These [unsheltered] folks you see down here, they’re not strangers to me. I grew up on these streets,” Harrell continued. Gesturing toward the group of young activists, he added: “How dare anyone say I’m going to sweep anybody. I don’t see anyone over there I grew up with.”

Under Harrell, the city has dramatically increased the speed and frequency of encampment removals.

The seven-point downtown plan Harrell announced Wednesday does not directly address encampments. However, it does envision a downtown occupied by shoppers, sports fans, and residents of new high-rise apartment towers along a section of Third Avenue between Stewart and Union Streets, where drug users and unsheltered people frequently congregate. The proposed upzone includes the block that includes a McDonald’s and a check cashing outlet as well as the block anchored by Ross Dress for Less.

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At a press briefing on Tuesday, mayoral advisor (and soon-to-be deputy mayor) Tim Burgess said “several” developments in the area were “ready to go” once a proposed upzone goes through. The proposal would increase the maximum height for new buildings from 170 feet to 440 (460 if new developments include child care or education facilities) on about five blocks that are adjacent to a area where 450-foot-high buildings are already allowed. The city’s land use database does not include any active permits for these blocks.

On Tuesday, Burgess said the proposed rezone reflects “a recognition that we need to make some dramatic changes in order to shift what’s been several decades now of problematic street uses and disorder.”

Police almost outnumbered protesters during a demonstration at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s announcement of his downtown activation strategy.

Harrell’s plan also includes legislation to allow a broader mix of uses on the ground floor of buildings (apartments or conference spaces instead of retail, for example) and throughout buildings themselves, in the form of “vertical residential neighborhoods within buildings” that allow residents to access everything they need, from child care to retail stores to pickleball courts, inside their buildings.

The idea is a nod to the fact that—Harrell’s back-to-work order and admonishments notwithstanding—many people have continued to work at least partly from home, leaving significant vacancies in downtown office buildings. “I don’t think this is a philosophical shift away from retail” serving downtown office workers, McIntyre said Tuesday. “It’s embracing some flexibility and some new ideas and wanting to encourage a different mix on the ground floor area as the as the city continues to change.”

Another piece of legislation would make a half-block of Pike Street between First and Second Avenues pedestrian-only, connecting Pike Place Market Market to—well, one half-block of downtown directly adjacent to, but not part of, the market. (Asked whether the mayor would consider prohibiting car traffic in Pike Place Market—where pedestrians compete for space on the historic brick streets with exhaust-spewing cars—Office of Economic Development director Markham McIntyre said the city was still “talking to Pike Place Market … to figure out what what that might look like,” but had no immediate plans to get rid of cars in the Market, a change pedestrian advocates have been demanding for decades.

 

Beyond those concrete legislative proposals, the plan consists mostly of expanded pilot projects (doubling the number of businesses participating in Seattle Restored, a pop-up project that fills empty storefronts), initiatives that are already underway (reopening City Hall Park, “more murals” downtown), and ideas that are still very much in the whiteboard stages. It also incorporates many aspirational ideas that would require significant additional funding, such as completing the downtown streetcar, putting a lid over I-5, and creating a new “arts district” from South Lake Union to Pioneer Square.

Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks to a group of Stop the Sweeps protesters at Westlake Park.
Mayor Bruce Harrell briefly spoke to protesters before returning to his press event.

And, of course, it assumes a heavier police presence downtown—a mostly unspoken, but bedrock, element of the proposal. “Make Downtown Safe and Welcoming” is actually number one on the plan’s list of seven priorities, starting with arrests of people “distributing and selling illegal drugs” (and, presumably, using them—Harrell mentioned that a bill criminalizing drug possession and public use will likely pass in July). The safety plan also includes a number of initiatives to address addiction that Harrell announced in April, along with a plan to help private property owners remove graffiti—a particular burr under Harrell’s saddle.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the police from arresting people for tagging or graffiti, finding that Seattle’s broadly worded law “likely…violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by being both vague and overbroad.” On Wednesday, I asked Harrell—who had just expounded on the difference, as he sees it, between “art” and “graffiti” (“One word: It’s unwanted”)—what he would do if the judge overturned the law.

“We have to have the ability to arrest people for unwanted graffiti, so if there’s precise language in the law that is unconstitutional, that is vague, that’s ambiguous, we have to fix it,” Harrell said. “If we lose the lawsuit, we go back to the drawing board and figure out what the deficiencies are in the law, and we fix it or remedy it.”

“This graffiti stuff just drives me nuts,” Harrell added.