Tag: Seattle Nice

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Taxes, Transit

Seattle Nice: Taxing for Transit, Nude Beach Ruling, and Mayor Wilson’s Frugal Flights
File:Blick aus dem Flugzeug.jpg
Only losers think this view is cool, apparently. Lully, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

Unlike the Seattle City Council, we sped through several local topics on Seattle Nice this week, discussing the Seattle Transit Measure that passed a key council committee yesterday, along with a proposal that would upend Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to start funding universal school lunches next year using a local levy that pays for education.

During our discussion of the transit tax, Sandeep argued that there needs to be a point when Seattle stops routinely raising taxes, particularly regressive sales taxes (the transit measure renewal would impose a 0.3 percent sales tax, up from the current 0.15 percent). I agree, especially about sales taxes—if it’s gonna get challenged anyway, the legislature should just pass a true progressive income tax—but I also buy the argument that affordable, accessible transit saves low-income riders more money than the tax will cost.

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Worth noting: The incremental sales tax increase will cost the median Seattle household, with an income of $124,000 a year, an additional $29 a  year. Although Bob Kettle and Maritza Rivera expressed concern for, as Rivera put it, “our low-income folks,” low-income Seattle residents will pay significantly less than that median burden—more like an extra buck a month. That isn’t to say the sales tax isn’t regressive (meaning it falls disproportionately on poor people, who spend more of their income on purchases), but it’s important to put the actual cost in perspective. If people are able to take fewer trips in their cars, or get rid of their cars entirely, thanks to better transit service, that dollar a month is well worth it.

 

We also talked about a local judge’s ruling that will allow people who visit the beach at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ-friendly nude beach, to taking their clothes off. The city still has to take unspecified actions to abate the “public nuisance” of “lewd” behavior, a term King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung used 35 times in his 14-page ruling.

Also, I made two apparently necessary clarifications on my story about Katie Wilson traveling in coach, which blew up on Bluesky while I wasn’t looking.

1. My headline did not mean Wilson LITERALLY PURCHASES SEAT 23F every time she travels. I thought this was super obvious, but some people did not and they have very strong feelings about it.

2. Window seats are great, it is normal to want to look out, and a ton of y’all have very weird (passionate!) feelings about the type of people who do or do not prefer window seats and those who do or do not pull the shade down, blocking off the view. (Apparently people who like to look at clouds are babies.)

3. Presumably anyone who reads PubliCola already knows this, but to those admonishing me WHY ARE YOU COVERING THIS INSTEAD OF NEWS, I post news stories that are not about the mayor’s flying habits all week, every week, right here on this very wonky, very in-depth local news site (which you can support right here!)

 

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, Police

Seattle Nice Discusses Mayor Katie Wilson’s Track Record at Six Months

By Erica C. Barnett

On Seattle Nice this week, Sandeep, David, and I discussed the mayor’s track record at six months in, starting with her approach to encampment sweeps, which have continued at a steady clip through the new mayor’s tenure.

Some Wilson never promised to “stop the sweeps”—before she ran for mayor, we had her on the podcast to talk about a piece she wrote for the Stranger titled “Where the Left Went Wrong on Homelessness”—but she did say she would moderate the aggressive sweeps of the Harrell administration. Wilson also set an aspirational goal for new shelters (specifically, tiny house village units): 500 by the World Cup, 1,000 by the end of this year.

So far, the Wilson administration has fallen far short of that goal, and sweeps have continued apace. (Wilson has also embraced Purpose Dignity Action’s approach to encampment resolution, which involves longer-term outreach and shelter or housing options that are actually tailored to people’s needs, but that sort of solution is limited by funding and political will).

In an interview published in two parts on PubliCola last week, Wilson said it was important to keep “high-priority” areas like parks and sidewalks clear. Discussing her comments on the podcast, I said sounded an awful lot like the way her predecessor Bruce Harrell justified accelerating sweeps, saying it was important to keep parks and sidewalks open for their intended use.

Sandeep argued that Wilson is “charting a new path for the left” by reversing the “stop the sweeps” attitude that led the city to stop removing encampments during the pandemic. As I repeatedly interjected, the business-backed mayor at the time, Jenny Durkan, actually stopped sweeping encampments in response to guidance from the CDC during Trump’s first term, and the sweeps were quickly resumed once the immediate emergency was over. At no time was “the left” in control of the city’s sweeps team during those years.

Wilson has also faced headwinds that Harrell didn’t, including conflicts with the council—some self-inflicted, others a matter of ideological differences.

As we discussed, one of the items Wilson ticked off in her list of achievements—securing funding in the Families, Education, Preschool and Promise (FEPP) levy plan for universal school meals—was undermined the very day of our interview, when Council President Joy Hollingsworth and Councilmember proposed using the school-meal money to pay for vouchers for weekend and holiday lunches for low-income kids. The debate over whether children’s access to food at school should be means-tested or universal is still ongoing.

The upcoming budget will also be a test of both mayor-council relations and Wilson’s ability to get her priorities through the legislative process. We discussed the challenges the mayor will face while navigating likely spending cuts (Harrell, who was running for reelection when he drafted his final head-in-the-sand budget, knowingly left Wilson with a starting deficit of $140 million, which has risen to around $175 million), including council members who oppose any slowdown in SPD hiring.

During our interview, Wilson said she’s retaining Police Chief Shon Barnes. But I heard an unspoken “for now.” Sandeep, citing unnamed sources “in her orbit,” says I’m wrong. Who’s right? I’m sure we’ll talk about that more on a future episode!

Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Wilson, neighborhoods, public safety

KCRHA Spins the News that Homelessness Is Growing
Nearly half of all homeless families are unsheltered, according to the latest count.

We discuss the latest estimate of the region’s homeless population and the latest “new approach” to drug use and crime in Little Saigon on this week’s Seattle Nice.

By Erica C. Barnett

After releasing a high-level summary of the latest “point in time count” report on King County’s homeless population last week, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority tried to put a positive spin on the results at a meeting of the agency’s governing board last week. The new numbers showed a 9 percent increase in overall homelessness—from an estimated 16,868 to 18,365—between 2024 and 2026.

On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we dug into all these numbers—and the KCRHA’s take on what they mean.

At a presentation to the governing board on Friday, the KCRHA’s associate director for strategy, William Towey, said “one of the key takeaways from the Point In Time count is that the system is doing amazing work. It’s moving a lot of people through, we’re housing a lot of people, a lot of people are coming in and successfully exiting, but the inflow just continues to grow.”

Every year, according to KCRHA, about 17,000 people stop using homeless services (a widely used proxy for no longer being homeless), while about 18,000 enter or re-enter the system. As long as the rate of people entering the system exceeds the number of people exiting, overall homelessness will continue to grow.

The KCRHA has focused heavily on the fact that although both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness continue to increase, the rate of increase in overall homelessness has declined—from 21 percent between 2022 and 2024 to 9 percent over the last two years. At the governing board meeting, Towey argued that the “declination in the rate of increase” represented a specific number of people who would be homeless but are not. “That translates to over 2,500 individuals or households who aren’t homeless because of that decrease in the rate of increase,” Towey said.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson pointed to a troubling aspect of the numbers Towey didn’t mention, but which we highlighted in our coverage of the count last week—unsheltered homelessness, which is both more visible and more dangerous for people living outdoors than living in shelter, has spiked by 21 percent even as sheltered homelessness has grown more slowly. That’s more than 2,000 additional people living unsheltered compared to the count released in 2024.

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“I’m very, very concerned by the really significant increase in the rate of unsheltered homelessness,” Wilson said. “We were already a national outlier in having over 50 percent of our homeless population unsheltered, and now when it’s up to over two thirds, that’s pretty shocking.”

Towey attributed the increase to the closure of 689 shelter beds, including an unspecified number of family shelter beds, which Towey called the “primary driver” of the shelter losses. Family homelessness, according to the report, has declined slightly over the past two years, but the percentage of  families who are unsheltered increased almost 40 percent, to nearly half of all households with minor children. In the 2024 count, about 35 percent of people living in family households were unsheltered.

Also on this week’s show, we discussed the latest  “new approach” to address the crowded drug and stolen goods market around 12th and Jackson in Little Saigon, which consists of expanding the hours service providers are on site, directing existing LEAD diversion services to the area, and, as ever, flooding the zone with cops, who are supposed to send some people to LEAD instead of arresting them.

Personally, I’m tired of hearing elected officials (and certain podcast cohosts) argue that hot spot policing, plus a nominal new investment in services, will improve conditions this time despite the many previous times the same basic approach has failed. Sandeep thinks there’s something truly new this time. I’m far less optimistic.

housing, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Is Seattle’s Housing Market In Trouble?

By Erica C. Barnett

On the latest episode of Seattle Nice, we talked to Redfin’s chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, about the recent slowdown of Seattle’s housing market and what it means for the future of our economy.

When we talk about a “decline” in the housing market, that refers to a slowdown or reversal of housing price increases because more people are selling than buying—in other words, it’s bad news for people who already own houses that they are trying to sell, but potential good news for those trying to buy or rent here.

That’s an important distinction I tried to keep in focus as we talked about what a “slowdown” means for the city. Renters, who make up more than half of Seattle residents, bear the brunt of an increasingly expensive housing market; although buying a home in Seattle has become much more expensive than renting, anyone who does manage to buy a house has their monthly housing costs more or less locked in place, apart from annual tax increases, while rent generally increases unpredictably every year.

For those who already own houses, it’s true that the equity they gain through monthly mortgage payments only comes to fruition when they sell, which may not make sense if they plan to stay in Seattle, since they would have to buy a new place in the same expensive market. However, longer-term Seattle house owners whose mortgage is, say, $3,000 a month are exponentially better off than renters who would have to pay thousands more for the same house, since rent goes up so much faster than property taxes.

All of which is to say: If the pace of job growth continues to stall, as Fairweather predicts it will, affordability will improve somewhat. But, Fairweather noted, “we’ve already gotten to this place where affordability has gotten so bad that I don’t know if people will really feel like things are getting better for them” even if housing prices decline a bit. For renters, “if you’re going from $2,000 a month rent to $3,000 a month rent, and then I’m telling you, ‘Oh, but next month or next year it’s going to be $2,995, it doesn’t really feel like things are getting meaningfully better,” Fairweather said.

Fairweather also threw some cold water on David’s belief that AI could be a tool to meaningfully lower the cost of housing. Both she and David are more techno-optimistic than I am, but Fairweather noted that most of the factors that have increased the cost of housing development have nothing to do with brainstorming or permit times (two things David and Fairweather said AI might help with) but construction materials and human physical labor, which can’t be digitized.

Sandeep also brought up his “heretical view” that the region should expand its growth boundaries to allow much more housing outside current growth limits, which already allow significant amounts of suburban sprawl. The argument against sprawl isn’t so much an anti-housing argument, in my view; it’s that sprawl is energy-intensive and destroys natural resources (in our region, forests) and farmland while requiring huge investments in infrastructure that contributes to climate change, like the freeways and feeder roads to move people from the suburbs to their jobs in Seattle by car.

In addition, Fairweather said, moving the urban growth boundary outward “results in longer commute times … and if they’re paying for gas on top of their mortgage, then maybe they’re not actually doing any better, or maybe their quality of life isn’t any better” than it would be if they paid for a more expensive house closer to the city.

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Transit

Seattle Nice: How Badly Did Sound Transit Screw Seattle Over?

By Erica C. Barnett

On this week’s episode of the Seattle Nice podcast, we did a deep dive on the Sound Transit board’s decision last week to indefinitely defer the voter-approved light rail extension to Ballard, a stretch that boasts by far the highest projected ridership of any line in the Sound Transit 3 package voters approved ten years ago.

Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss, who represents Ballard, has been beating the drum on this issue for months, arguing it would be irresponsible to renege on such a significant commitment to Seattle voters. The new plan preserves the “spine” to Everett and Tacoma, along with a second light rail tunnel through downtown Seattle, leaving Ballard in limbo unless Sound Transit can come up with cost savings and unless someone, most likely Seattle voters, can provide the funds to build the expansion.

The board adopted a couple of amendments last week that will move planning for a potential Ballard line forward and that commit to looking for ways to make the plan more affordable. But they rejected a proposal from Strauss that would have switched up ST3’s sequencing to build a “starter” line between Westlake and Ballard before adding a second transit tunnel.

Suburban Sound Transit board members said last week that prioritizing Ballard would doom the rest of the system. As a result, Sandeep noted, the suburbs got everything they asked for,  leaving Seattle without any leverage to get additional funds for its projects in the future. Indeed, several board members made that explicit, saying Seattle would need to find its own money if it wants to build to Ballard and complete the West Seattle line in the future; there will be no regional Sound Transit 4, they said.

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One suburban Sound Transit board member and longtime light rail proponent who voted (along with Strauss) against the entire proposal, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, told me last week she thought it was time to take a serious look at Sound Transit’s governance. Currently, the agency is run by an 18-member board of elected officials who represent every “subarea” of the region—an ever-changing cast of characters with no specific transit expertise. This structure, Balducci suggested, has made it difficult to anticipate and forestall cost overruns like the $34.5 billion hole Sound Transit is currently attempting to fill.

David, Sandeep, and I also discussed some of the potential reasons for Sound Transit’s persistent overruns—excessive process, changes in response to neighborhood complaints, and engineering decisions that add millions to even relatively simple projects, like the long-deferred Graham Street Station, which the latest plan at least moves into the “funded” column.

Finally, we had to spend a few minutes on the latest shakeup in Mayor Katie Wilson’s office—the departure of housing and homelessness advisor Jon Grant, who was at the center of the mayor’s plan to add thousands of new tiny house-style shelters around the city. Grant, along with Wilson’s former chief of staff Kate Kreuzer, reportedly clashed with council members and staff while the council was working to pass emergency legislation to expedite Wilson’s shelter proposal.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor-Council Conflict and a Data Center Moratorium

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we discussed tensions between Mayor Katie Wilson’s office and members of the City Council, whose frustration with a lack of collaboration between the second and seventh floors of city hall erupted last week when a Wilson staffer asked the council to hold off on passing a bill to implement the final part of Wilson’s shelter surge plan.

As I reported, Wilson was apparently unhappy with some of the amendments councilmembers proposed and wanted the council to change them.  The council—already irritated that Wilson sent them the shelter bills without first securing a council sponsor and trying to elicit support—was not pleased that the mayor seemed to be ordering them around, and after a reportedly heated meeting between countil members and three Wilson staffers, the council passed the legislation, which Wilson had asked to be expedited as an “emergency” bill, with the (relatively minor) amendments intact.

The tension, Sandeep pointed out, has been brewing since well before the latest conflict; when Wilson fired former City Light director Dawn Lindell, some councilmembers were sensitive to union complaints and excoriated the mayor for what they called a rash decision. Just yesterday, Councilmember Bob Kettle took up that torch again during a discussion about a proposed one-year moratorium on data centers, saying, “We had top notch leadership with Seattle City Light, and this is a failure of our city right now.”

And speaking of data centers, our second segment is all about whether saying no to companies that want to build massive data centers to power AI is a good idea.

Sandeep argued that if Seattle doesn’t embrace the AI future, we may fall behind economically and turn into a hollowed-out shell of a city, like Rust Belt cities did in the 1980s. David some economists claim AI could help solve the affordable housing crisis and doesn’t want to dismiss possibilities like that out of hand. And I, as the resident Luddite, argued that we shouldn’t hitch our entire economy (and the future of our climate) to technology most people don’t like or want.

FYI: Seattle Nice Patreon donors got an early preview of our show this week. Supporting Seattle Nice gets you access to some of our episodes a day before they go out on the regular feed, along with occasional Patreon-only exclusives and the knowledge that your contributions go directly toward making Seattle Nice for you every week, including paying our editor, Quinn Waller.