Tag: Seattle Nice

City Council, Density, homelessness, podcasts, Police

Seattle Councilmember Eddie Lin: “Go As Big As We Can” On Growth in Comp Plan
Image via Seattle.gov

By Erica C. Barnett

This week on Seattle Nice, we talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin, who’s serving his first term representing Southeast Seattle’s District 2. He’s the third council member to represent this district since 2025, when Tammy Morales resigned just one year into her second term; she was replaced by Mark Solomon, a crime prevention coordinator for SPD who served until Lin was elected in November.

As head of the council’s land use and comprehensive plan committees, Lin will oversee the work of updating the plan that guides the city’s growth and density for the next 10 years, as well as zoning and land use decisions like whether to grant developers a temporary break from the Mandatory Housing Affordability program that allowed taller, denser housing in some areas in exchange for fees that fund affordable housing.

We talked to Lin about those fees and whether they’re working as designed. While MHA has brought in tens of millions a year for affordable housing, developers argue it has increasingly squelched development, by adding significant costs at a time when market-rate housing developments barely pencil out. Lin talked (favorably but cautiously) about a different concept called Planned Inclusionary Zoning, which requires developers to build affordable housing but offers them tax breaks, rather than charging a fee, to make it more feasible for them to build.

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“We absolutely want to go as big as we can” in the remaining parts of the comp plan, Lin said, by expanding the areas where housing is allowed (as The Urbanist pointed out recently, the city’s planning department actually reduced density along several arterials in wealthy neighborhoods). Lin said “we need to be going deeper into the neighborhoods” with density, as well as restoring the neighborhood centers former mayor Bruce Harrell removed from the plan, nodes of density where modest apartment buildings will be allowed.

We also asked Lin about the new dynamics on the council, Mayor Wilson’s new plan to build tiny house villages all over the city, and police surveillance cameras, a program Wilson once opposed and now seems likely to expand.

After pointing out that many people want cameras in their neighborhoods, including people who live in the Chinatown-International District, Lin said he’s still not happy that the cameras were expanded without any analysis of whether the “pilot” program launched last year (and immediately expanded) was effective and protected people’s privacy. His outstanding concerns, Lin added, have to do with the potential for the footage to end up in the hands of the Trump Administration, which could use it for immigration enforcement or to target people seeking gender-affirming or reproductive care. That’s the focus of an audit Wilson has commissioned, but hardly the only reason to question mass surveillance by local police.

Mayor Wilson, podcasts, Police

Seattle Nice: Does Mayor Wilson Really Believe Police Surveillance Enhances Safety?

By Erica C. Barnett

Was Mayor Katie Wilson’s decision to audit the safety and security of police surveillance cameras a classic “split-the-baby” compromise, a pro forma move with a foregone conclusion, or a thoughtful approach to ensure public safety for Seattle residents? That’s our topic of discussion on Seattle Nice this week.

As I reported last week, Wilson announced she would leave all the existing cameras up and recording while the Policing Project, out of New York University, does a “privacy and data governance audit” to determine whether outside entities, such as federal immigration authorities, could access camera footage and use it to target people caught on camera in Seattle. (There’s no such thing as privacy in public places, but until lthe cameras were installed last year, Seattle residents were not under routine camera surveillance by police.) Assuming the report says the cameras are reasonably safe from outside access, Wilson said, her administration will work to strengthen city laws restricting access to the footage.

Wilson also said the city would hold off on installing new cameras in the Central District and Capitol Hill, but will install dozens of new cameras around the stadiums south of downtown, where six World Cup games will take place in June. For now, these new cameras will only be turned on if there is a “credible threat.”

In justifying her decision to keep existing cameras rolling and install new ones, Wilson said she trusts SPD to use the cameras wisely to solve crimes. “I know that cameras can be, have been, and will be useful tools to solve crime in Seattle and in countless other cities across the world,” she said. (Indeed, police cameras cover every in across the UK and China, but the United States has its own traditions and values that, at their best, have prioritized individual rights like privacy).

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“There’s no doubt that these cameras make it easier to solve some crimes, including serious ones like homicides, but also, cameras are not the one key to making our neighborhoods safe,” Wilson said. “And on the other hand, there are legitimate concerns about privacy over surveillance and potential misuse of surveillance technologies. But also, these cameras are not the primary threat to immigrants, trans people or people seeking reproductive health care in our country right now.”

At Wilson’s press conference last week, I asked a question about how her values were guiding her decision on whether to expand the police department’s ability to surveil Seattle residents. Say the audit comes back golden, and she says, “Great, let’s expand the program.” That’s not just an endorsement of a particular camera system’s safety; it’s a statement of Wilson’s values, and one where her position has flipped since the campaign, when many voters were excited to support a candidate who didn’t want to give SPD even greater powers.

Maybe Wilson’s values have shifted. Maybe SPD has convinced her that crimes really will go unsolved without 24/7 video surveillance, despite the fact that the cameras have only existed for nine months. Or maybe the camera supporters she’s talking to in neighborhoods with high crime rates have convinced her that surveillance is a form of safety and social justice, as the mayor has often suggested. In any case, my guess is that more police surveillance cameras are coming, and that Wilson will expand them again in the future. Once you’ve decided that it’s simply unsafe not to have surveillance in some places, it’s very hard to justify not providing the same level of “safety” to other neighborhoods, and eventually the whole city.

Development, podcasts, Police, Transit

Downtown Seattle Association Leader Discusses Density, Return-to-Office Mandates, and Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when he came on Seattle Nice late last week—most of it surprisingly positive.

Yes, the DSA is still focused on filling up vacant office space with people who may prefer working from home, a goal that seems at odds with the group’s stated commitment to reducing climate change. (The most recent Commute Seattle survey found that drive-alone commutes into downtown grew at twice the rate of trips by transit.) According to the State of Downtown economic report, 32 percent of the office vacancies in the central business district remains vacant six years after the start of the pandemic, suggesting a long-term trend.

And yes, Scholes had plenty to say about how taxes are supposedly driving companies out of Seattle and into Bellevue, where employment has grown 12 percent.

But there were parts of our conversation that may surprise some listeners—starting with Scholes’ apparent optimism that at least some existing office buildings could still be converted into housing . “I think there’s great public good to be gained from more of us living more closely together,” Scholes said.”And if we care about climate change and protecting the environment and driving down carbon emission, we need to live more closely together, and we need to live close to transit, and we need to live where we’re maximizing the investment we’ve already made in utilities and sidewalks and parks.”

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Scholes isn’t wide-eyed about the potential for new housing downtown, however. In fact, I was amused to hear the skepticism in Scholes’ voice when we talked about former county executive Dow Constantine’s big plan to create a whole new office and residential district centered around Sound Transit’s future light rail station two blocks west of the King County Courthouse. (Current County Executive Girmay Zahilay briefly mentioned the plan in his remarks at the DSA’s State of Downtown event last week).

“The reality,” Scholes said, is that despite decades of robust development downtown, “we somehow still have a hole in the ground” across the street from City Hall and the county courthouse. “But I commend the executive for continuing to advance it and to figure out what is possible, what can be phased, what might be more incremental. It’s the right thing to do.”

We were wrapping things up when Scholes told us we were being too polite, and asked if we were going to talk about the city’s police surveillance cameras—an issue Mayor Katie Wilson has hedged on after expressing strong opposition during her campaign. Unless Wilson reverses course, the city will install many more cameras in the downtown stadium district for the World Cup games in June.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Go Big on Shelter. Will She Succeed—and If She Does, What Then?

By Erica C. Barnett

This week’s episode of Seattle Nice was all about shelter—specifically, Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house villages, spend $5 million up front funding them, and—boring but potentially most significant—put the city itself in charge of leasing land for new tiny house villages, RV safe lots, and sanctioned encampments. Currently, any organization that gets city approval to set up a village or sanctioned encampment still has to get permits and approvals from a long list of city departments, which can add as much as a year of delay.

With the city itself in charge of stuff like approving and connecting utilities, signing leases with property owners, and making sure tiny house village locations are up to code, Wilson is betting the city can dramatically cut the timeline from a shelter proposal to opeming day.

Wilson, as we discussed this week, vowed during her campaign to add at least 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year, with a goal of 4,000 new beds by the end of her term. This ambitious goal marks a philosophical shift away from strict housing-first principles (the idea that people need permanent housing before they can tackle their behavioral health issues) toward a shelter-first approach that emphasizes mandatory case management and individualized services to stabilize people after they leave the streets.

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Listening back to our conversation, I was struck by how familiar much of the conversation sounded—not to our usual Seattle Nice bickering over whether Seattle NIMBYs treat homelessness as an aesthetic problem (but—last word—they totally do), but to the last 15 years of debate over how to fix homelessness. Over time, the political pendulum has swung back and forth between a focus on new housing for almost everyone (which costs millions and often takes years), housing vouchers for almost everyone (the concept behind the short-lived Partnership for Zero) and shelter for almost everyone (as a “front door” to housing). The pendulum currently rests on shelter, this time with mandatory case management and bespoke services that will, the Wilson administration hopes, be a more successful approach than past shelter efforts.

Wilson will probably propose a local capital gains tax, or some other kind of progressive revenue, to supplement $5 million her team found in two underutilized city funds. (Note/clarification: This post, and my comments on the podcast, were both a bit flip about the funding source. Around $3.3 million comes from two funds in the Office of Housing that were being underutilized. Both are revolving loan funds paid for by Community Development Block Grants.) And she seems likely to propose using unspent Office of Housing funds to pay for shelter, a prospect that could mean less money for permanent housing in the future, money being fungible. But actually solving homelessness—no one talks anymore about ending it, but making it “brief, one-time, and rare”—has eluded every mayor since Ed Murray declared an official state of emergency on homelessness in 2015.

My biggest concern is that Team Wilson will address unsheltered homelessness by getting thousands of people in shelter, and people for whom homelessness is primary an aesthetic problem—we have to clear those tents near my house, it isn’t compassionate to let them live that way!—will oppose efforts to fund housing for all those people in shelter because they consider the problem solved. My modest hope is that she’ll find a way to build all the shelter she wants and create more pathways to permanent housing, because no matter how warm or colorful, a 100-square-foot shelter is not a home.

Mayor Wilson, Seattle Nice

Seattle Nice: Are These Three Local Controversies All About Union Power?

By Erica C. Barnett

This week’s podcast, as I promised last week, featured just me, Sandeep, and David, and guys: It got LIVELY.

First, we talked about some behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt that the Seattle Times missed in its coverage of local union backlash to Mayor Katie Wilson’s ouster of Dawn Lindell as the CEO of Seattle City Light. Thousands of IBEW77 union members signed a petition demanding Wilson rehire Lindell in what the Times described as widespread employee “concern by her decision to fire the utility’s previous CEO and her initial pick for her replacement.” Meanwhile, the MLK Labor Council, a union of unions, passed a resolution demanding more transparency into the process of hiring Lindell’s replacement.

But there’s more to the story—according to multiple sources in the city, an IBEW (and former MLK Labor Council) leader lobbied Wilson hard to oust Lindell and appoint her as Lindelll’s replacement; after that didn’t happen, according to internal city sources, the unions started their full-court press against Wilson. Both IBEW77 and the MLK Labor Council endorsed former mayor Bruce Harrell.

In another city union-related story, SPOG—the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild—negotiated a ludicrously generous police contract last year that also happens to restrict the CARE Team of unarmed first responders from actually doing first response. This week, CARE Department Chief Amy Barden was extremely candid about the limitations the police contract imposes on her team of social workers, which she said SPOG has interpreted to include any area from which a person could be trespassed, such as parking lots or even sidewalks adjacent to a private business.

I’ve been reporting since last October about the explicit restrictions, which prohibit CARE from responding on their own to calls if there is drug paraphernalia in the area, if the person is inside a car or building, if there is evidence that any crime has taken place, or if a minor is present. (Yes, Seattle is so committed to alternative response that they signed a contract saying police, not social workers, are best suited to help vulnerable young people.)

The additional restrictions SPOG is claiming now make it clear that the police guild, at least, doesn’t want CARE to succeed. And as Police Chief Shon Barnes confirmed at the committee meeting last week (when he said, among other things, that he doesn’t want cops “relegated” to doing cop stuff), there’s no internal pressure at SPD for the union to renegotiate the agreement so CARE can actually do their jobs.

We also discussed my story about Seattle Office for Civil Rights Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith, whose employees have accused him of discrimination and retaliation. Through their union, PROTEC17, some staffers asked Wilson to remove him before she started her term, saying his behavior rose to the level of “just cause” that’s required from removing the SOCR director.

Business, podcasts

Seattle Nice Interviews Progressive Legislator-Turned-Chamber Leader Joe Nguyen

By Erica C. Barnett

Our guest on Seattle Nice this week isn’t a politician—he’s a former politician-turned-Seattle Chamber leader, and he says he sees no contradiction between his past as an pro-tax progressive legislator and his present job as the head of the city’s anti-tax business lobby group.

Joe Nguyen, the former state senator from West Seattle, defeated his opponent Shannon Braddock in 2019 by emphasizing his progressive bona fides, exemplified by a commitment to take no corporate contributions. Elected on that anti-corporate agenda, Nguyen went on to propose or support a payroll expense tax on big businesses, an excise fee on businesses that pay executives more than $1 million a year, and the statewide capital gains tax. “Tax the rich,” he wrote in the Stranger, which lauded him (pretty excessively, even at the time) as the “AOC of Washington state.”

 

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As head of the Chamber, Nguyen leads an institution historically opposed to business and capital gains taxes, and he talks like it, too—telling Seattle Nice that while he thinks “we need to have a more equitable tax structure in the United States, in Washington State, I worry that we’re putting all of our eggs in one basket” by taxing big tech businesses over and over. Already, Nguyen said, businesses have started to move jobs from Seattle to Bellevue because of the JumpStart tax, a payroll tax on Seattle’s biggest companies that the city now relies on to backfill its annual general fund shortfalls.

“Politically, it is very popular to say, ‘Tax the rich.’ Politically is very popular to say, ‘Go after the large companies.’ But the hard part that we’re going to put ourselves in is: If you want to tax the rich, you got to have rich people to tax,” Nguyen said.

“I was the architect and then sponsor of a lot of these policies,” Nguyen continued. “However, you’re concentrating a lot of that [taxation] into one specific area. And when you start to get some of this volatility, like you mentioned in your in your post [about social housing revenues] the other day, that’s the worry that I have.”

Listen to a preview of our conversation‚ in which David and I rant about the money pit that is the new downtown Convention Center, and subscribe to Seattle Nice to hear the full episode.

Editor’s note: During our interview, I said the Chamber has supported moving oversight of some parts of the homelessness system to the city’s Human Services Department. The Chamber has not taken a position on this issue.