The Seattle Times editorial board, citing “election watchers,” argues that Tammy Morales and other incumbent council members are in trouble, but they don’t have the numbers to back it up.
By Erica C. Barnett
In a recent editorial arguing that city council incumbents face uphill battles against their business-backed challengers in November, the Seattle Times confidently asserted that “only one barely broke 50% in counts as of Wednesday suggesting voters are open to making a change.” That sentence, which according to the piece’s byline was not written by AI, is a reference to Dan Strauss, the District 6 incumbent who currently has just under 52 percent—23 points more than his Times-backed challenger, Pete Hanning.
The editorial continues: “Experienced election watchers say any final result under 55% bodes ominously for incumbents. Challengers now must press their case.”
Unsure which “experienced election watchers” the Times is talking to, I decided to look at the numbers myself, going back to 2009 in our quest to find incumbents who came in close to, but failed to top, 55 percent and went on to lose.
Actually, it turned out to a pretty easy task, because there weren’t any examples.
Since the Times set 55 percent rather than 50 percent as their metric, we started by looking only people who got between 50 and 55 percent in the primary and went on to lose in the general—eliminating people like former mayor Greg Nickels, who got knocked out in the 2009 primary with 25 percent; former mayor Mike McGinn, whose 27 percent primary showing in 2013 translated to a four-point loss to Ed Murray; and former council member Jean Godden, who failed to top 20 percent and got bumped in the 2015 primary. That yielded no results—no one, in other words, who started out close to but under 55 percent and didn’t win reelection.
Unsure which “experienced election watchers” the Times is talking to, I decided to look at the numbers myself, going back to 2009 in our quest to find incumbents who came in close to, but failed to top, 55 percent and went on to lose. Actually, it turned out to a pretty easy task, because there weren’t any examples.
In fact, the only election that came close to meeting the Times’ sweeping claim was former council member Richard Conlin’s reelection bid in 2013, when he went on to lose in a citywide election to challenger Kshama Sawant by a 1.7 percent margin. Since the Times is arguing that the city is clamoring for leaders who will “provide comfort to [Seattle residents” while enforcing basic rules to ensure peace, security and prosperity for everyone,” the election of a firebrand socialist over a traditional Seattle centrist is probably not the example they’re looking for.
Contrary to the Times’ “experienced election watchers” (many of whom, we suspect, may sit on the Seattle Times editorial board), there are many examples of candidates who won less than 55 percent of the primary-election vote—in some cases, far less than 55 percent—and went on to win the general election by margins of 12 to 22 percent. They include Sawant and Tim Burgess in 2015, as well as Lisa Herbold, Tammy Morales, and Debora Juarez in 2019.
Obviously, this election, like any election, could end up with the ouster of one or more incumbents—Andrew Lewis, in District 7, is currently looking the weakest with around 44 percent, about him around where Burgess and Juarez were before they bounced back to win reelection by large margins. The Times has been doing a victory lap since election night, claiming their endorsements “matter a lot” when it comes to anointing the right-lane candidates in every race. In that context, it’s hard not to read the Times’ unsourced declaration as wishful thinking on behalf of the “outstanding” candidates they endorsed to take down the council incumbents—candidates who currently have between 29 and 43 percent of the vote.
How sweet: Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat supports ghettos. In a flawless example of peak Seattle—i.e., a middle-aged white guy explaining how great Seattle was back in the Dan Evans 1970s and ’80s—Westneat wrote: “Go ahead, Republican Governors Association. Send us your buses. Previous migrants started Little Saigon in Seattle; maybe these will start Little Caracas or Little Kabul. Both the question and the answer repeat through history: Do you want these people? Yes, we do.”
Do we? Maybe we should answer another question first: Where do we want “Little Kabul” or “Little Caracas” to be located? Can it be built in Seattle’s segregated single-family areas, which make up about 75% of the city?
This defining fact about our city—which studies show drive up housing prices, and which I’ve been grousing about since 2004—is what makes Westneat’s column so unconvincing. It’s the editorial embodiment of one of those “in this house” signs that claim to be all about inclusion, but dot yards in exclusive neighborhoods that don’t allow multi-family housing.
Westneat was writing about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ recent gross political stunt; DeSantis chartered two planes—from Texas, weirdly—to fly about fifty undocumented migrants to that metonym for liberal elitism, Martha’s Vineyard. Westneat makes the case that Seattle would proudly accept migrants. I guess, judging from the 1970s scenario he lovingly conjures, we’d show that evil Ron DeSantis by cordoning these migrants into tiny quadrants of Seattle that, among other things, lack parks and good schools. Confined to arterial streets, multi-family housing zones in Seattle also expose their residents to more pollution.
Tell you what. I’ll second Westneat’s idea, but on one condition: We upzone neighborhoods such as Blue Ridge, Madrona, and Laurelhurst for multifamily housing and build “Little Kabuls” throughout our leafy city. Seattle actually tried to upzone its single-family zones (now called “neighborhood residential” zones)—back in 2015, but we inelegantly backed off when Seattle’s core NIMBY values rose up, and, championed by the anti-upzone Seattle Times editorial board, stopped the idea in its tracks. It was, in fact, a Westneat column— alerting the public to the fact that a task force was poised to recommend upzoning Seattle’s residential zones—that unleashed public animosity against adding density to our sacred neighborhoods.
I’ll second Westneat’s “Little Kabul” idea, but on one condition: We upzone neighborhoods such as Blue Ridge, Madrona, and Laurelhurst for multifamily housing and build “Little Kabuls” throughout our leafy city.
Indeed, the problem with Westneat’s liberal posturing is that existing Seattle housing policy won’t back it up. In short, his “Little Kabul” column reads more like white virtue signaling than like a workable idea.
For the last two legislative sessions in Olympia, a promising new alliance of pro-development and social justice legislators and advocates have proposed reforms to land use police policy that would make Seattle actually embrace the mantra of inclusion. The YIMBY legislation would allow multifamily housing deep inside neighborhoods near transit stops, not just at the edges—a vision of transit-oriented development that goes beyond the timid status quo, which only allows density immediately next to transit hubs. Facing opposition from old-fashioned liberals like longtime local government committee chair, Seattle’s own Rep. Gerry Pollet (D-46, N. Seattle), and lacking a champion in the mayor’s office (former mayor Jenny Durkan and current Mayor Bruce Harrell are standard, Lesser-Seattle politicians), the legislation hasn’t been a priority for Seattle.
Thankfully, the diverse and progressive Seattle Planning Commission has an ambitious pro-housing blueprint cued up for the pending Seattle Comprehensive Plan update, coming in 2024. Their agenda, backed by progressive council members like at-large Council member Teresa Mosqueda, includes “expanding and adding more urban villages.” I say, put Blue Ridge and Madrona and Laurelhurst on the list. And add Magnolia and Phinney Ridge while we’re at it.
Earlier this week, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat wrote that the Seattle Police Department was recently forced to adopt a new policy to keep track of all the calls they’re no longer able to respond to. “It’s called the ‘Z protocol,'” Westneat claimed. “I don’t know why they picked the letter ‘Z.’ Maybe because it’s the last stop, the end of the road?”
Westneat’s characterization of the new police policy—as an acknowledgment that police are no longer able to do their jobs— was wrong. In reality, the new “z disposition” (not “protocol,” although that does sound more dystopian) means that more people will have eyes on low-priority calls before the police department decides not to show up. That’s because it replaces an older policy, known as “priority call handling,” that was in place for most days during each of the past three years.
Under that policy, most low-priority calls would never even get to the police department; instead, 911 responders would tell callers to report the incident online or call back later. Now, these low-priority calls get dispatched and screened by a police supervisor, who decides whether they merit a police response and what kind of response is appropriate. For people, like Westneat, who blame slow call response times at least partly on what Westneat calls a “political class hostile to the idea of policing,” this greater police involvement ought to be something to celebrate.
If it’s outrageous that the cops won’t show up to protect someone’s property right to his iPhone, then it stands to reason that police should really be everywhere, showing up to investigate every concern, including people in crisis, arguments between parents and children, and complaints about “suspicious” people who “don’t belong” in a neighborhood.
Prioritizing calls by urgency isn’t some new phenomenon brought on by staffing shortages; it’s a basic part of policing in every city in America. In Seattle, the police have long deprioritized calls that fall into the “Priority 3” and “Priority 4” categories, largely because many of them don’t require an immediate police response.
Priority 4 calls are non-emergency calls that may not require any written report. Priority 3 calls include complaints about illegal parking, fireworks illegal bonfires, and off-leash dogs. Many Priority 3 calls are the kind of situations that tend to resolve themselves; others are crimes that don’t require an immediate response, like package theft and car break-ins. Overall, police response times for these kind of calls have been slow for many years, because the police have more important things to do—like responding to Priority 1 (risk to life or serious injury or crimes in progress) and Priority 2 (altercations or situations that could escalate) calls.
The two examples of “Z-Protocol territory” Westneat describes in his column are good examples of Priority 3 calls—calls the police have always responded to more slowly than higher-priority emergencies. Both involve iPhones whose owners (Westneat and “a guy I know,” respectively) decided to chase down the thieves using the “find my iPhone” function, and were annoyed to learn that police don’t drop whatever they’re doing to rush to the scene of a petty theft.
“Now, with police ranks depleted, and at least a portion of Seattle’s political class hostile to the idea of policing, they seem to be instituting white-flag waving as a regular part of the system,” Westneat complained.
This privileged view of what police are for (“What has this city come to when the cops won’t even show up to arrest a perp I’ve tracked and collared myself?”) is easy to dismiss as a macho version of the Karen complex—the idea that the city should fund cops so lavishly that every low-level complaint would get an instant, in-person response.
But demands to have police respond in person to every emergency and nonemergency also serve as a counternarrative to the idea that not every situation requires or benefits from the presence of uniformed officers with guns. If it’s outrageous that the cops won’t show up to protect someone’s property right to their iPhone, then it stands to reason that police should really be everywhere, showing up to investigate every concern, including people in crisis, arguments between parents and children, and complaints about “suspicious” people who “don’t belong” in a neighborhood.
This has been amply debated. I would argue that the debate has even been settled—there is now broad consensus on the basic principle that not every call requires a police response. “Defund the police”—which never happened—was always about how to fill the gaps, by setting up and funding alternative systems for responding to situations that should never have fallen to police in the first place, like mental health crises.
Westneat called “z disposition” a “white flag” to criminals. In reality, it’s an acknowledgement that police resources, which will always be limited, have to be prioritized. Not everything is an emergency. The police, and political leaders, could do a better job of making this fact clear, by communicating transparently that the police will not show up for every kind of call, and by providing and promoting alternative options for resolving issues that aren’t actual emergencies. In the long run, many calls should be shifted away from police, and handed off to more appropriate responders at the point of dispatch.
Let’s keep Z disposition, though—and reserve it for people who treat 911 like their personal complaint line.
Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat has long been a hero to the NIMBY crowd. His columns about density and gentrification have created heroes and villains in Seattle’s growth wars: Little old ladies versus greedy developers; “unfettered growth” versus homeowners calling for a little restraint; “some of the biggest zoning changes in our lifetimes” versus bungalows.
In 2015, a Westneat column warned darkly about secret plans to “do away with single-family zoning — which for a hundred-plus years has been the defining feature of Seattle’s strong neighborhood feel.” The column galvanized a rebellion among the city’s slow-growthers that gutted then-mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, reducing new density to a tiny slice of land on the edges of existing urban villages and ensuring that Seattle’s single-family areas will remain unaffordable enclaves for the foreseeable future.
According to King County records, the Westneats bought the property in 2005 for $267,750 and tore down the house that was there around 2016; the current value of the property, according to the county tax assessor, is just under $3 million.
So I was surprised to learn recently that while Westneat preaches the gospel of slow growth and “concurrency”—a buzz word for anti-density groups that argue the city shouldn’t accommodate new people until it has built sidewalks, roads, and other infrastructure “concurrent” with population growth—he and his wife own a development company that bulldozed a bungalow in Seattle’s historically Black south end and replaced it with a 13-unit apartment complex. Westneat’s wife developed the property.
Rents at the Rail House apartments, located about a block from the Columbia City light rail station, start at around $1,400 for a studio and go up from there; prospective renters must have three references from previous landlords and a minimum credit score of 650 (until recently 660). Activists for racial equality have called credit requirements a form of modern-day redlining that has no relationship to tenant quality. Westneat said the credit and reference requirements were a response to a city law requiring landlords to accept the first applicant who qualifies; that law was designed to prevent discrimination by landlords.
According to King County records, the Westneats bought the property in 2005 for $267,750 and tore down the house that was there around 2016; the current value of the property, according to the county tax assessor, is just under $3 million.
Contacted about this seeming contradiction between the views he expresses in his columns and his family’s business, Westneat responded that he’s never had a problem with transit-oriented development; his issue is with places “where growth is overwhelming the infrastructure.”
“I think all transit corridors and the light rail corridors in particular are no-brainers for higher-density development, Westneat told me in an email. “I do have issues with the way Seattle has gentrified so quickly (but who doesn’t?).” Rail House, he continued, “is a classic transit-oriented development, 13 units with no parking. It works because it is right next to Columbia City light rail station, but it might not be appropriate in parts of the city that lack robust transit.”
What’s insidious about Westneat’s columns isn’t that they make a moderate case—it costs homeowners nothing to say that density is acceptable where they don’t live—but that they are an argument against the kind of density Seattle actually needs.
You won’t get any argument from me that transit-oriented development is a no-brainer. But even the most dyed-in-the-wool slow-growther would probably agree with this view today, now that battles over transit and development near transit stops have been mostly settled. (Of course, both Westneat and I have been around long enough to recall when transit itself was considered not just a gentrifying factor but one that would promote out-of-control growth in historically single-family areas like Columbia City!)
As an example of his support for appropriate density, Westneat said that he was all for Mike O’Brien’s 2016 legislation that would have “upzoned most of the city to three units.” (In reality, the city projected that the plan would result in fewer than 4,000 new units across the entire city over 20 years).
“I don’t have a longstanding editorial opposition to density or upzoning,” Westneat told me.
I’d say that’s debatable—the cumulative effect of column after column condemning specific examples of density is an editorial opposition to density, even if those columns are tempered by general statements supporting the idea of density where “appropriate.” By opposing specific examples of density again and again, Westneat’s columns have poured gasoline on the movement against density of all kinds, including modest density (such as row houses and triplexes) in single-family areas.
This week, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat wrote a piece arguing that the solution to homelessness in Seattle is simple: Build 1,000 “huts” in tiny house villages and move homeless people through them into permanent housing, then sweep the streets of all their human and physical detritus.
Five years ago, Westneat writes, he made this same proposal to “spread the huts across the city in camps located in all seven council districts. …In return, the city would begin enforcing the no-camping law and start cleaning up the garbage-strewn sites around freeways and greenbelts.”
The solution, he concludes, is just as clear today. “Five years in to this intractable emergency, I’d like to propose, again, that building a thousand tiny homes is still it.”
Here are some reasons that, contrary to Westneat’s tidy argument, building 1,000 tiny house villages is not, in fact, “it.”
First, Westneat’s argument rests on a single statistic: “Last year, 34% of the people who went into tiny houses eventually moved to permanent housing, versus 23% for enhanced shelters and only 6% for basic shelters.”
Citing the low rate of exits from basic shelter is like complaining that hand-washing stations don’t move people into housing. It’s completely beside the point.
Westneat doesn’t define permanent housing, so his readers might be left believing that this means people have this housing permanently. In reality, the term “permanent” is used by officials and advocates to distinguish housing meant to be occupied on a long-term basis from impermanent living situations like shelter, transitional housing, and tiny houses. All the apartments in Washington state from which people are at risk of being evicted once the COVID-19 eviction ban is lifted, for example, are “permanent housing.”
Moreover, he gets both the percentage of exits to permanent housing from basic shelter (actually 3 percent, not the 6 percent he cites) and, more importantly, the purpose of basic shelter, wrong. The point of basic shelter isn’t to move people into permanent housing. It’s to give people a place to stay on a nightly or emergency basis. Citing the low rate of exits from basic shelter is like complaining that hand-washing stations don’t transition people into housing. It’s completely beside the point.
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This omission almost has to be deliberate, because this fact is right next to the stats Westneat (inaccurately) cites: “The primary focus of basic shelter is not moving people from homelessness to housing because it lacks the necessary services and amenities to support stabilization.”
Westneat goes on, citing a 34 percent success rate for tiny house villages at moving people into permanent supportive housing, compared to 23 percent for enhanced shelter—which, unlike basic shelter, is aimed at getting people housed. But, again, he omits several extremely relevant details about this impressive-seeming stat—details that disprove his argument that 1,000 tiny houses will solve (or even make a dent in) homelessness on their own.
All these facts, again, are in the report Westneat cites and links.
First, the total number of exits from tiny house villages is extremely small compared to other solutions—108 (duplicated) households moved on from 275 tiny houses in 2019, compared to 1,563 for enhanced shelter. That’s pretty important when you’re claiming that a single solution can meaningfully make a dent in an immense, region-wide crisis.
None of this is a knock on tiny house villages, which are an important part of Seattle’s approach to addressing homelessness. It’s a knock on influential people like Westneat who use their massive platforms to make arguments that suggest there’s a simple solution to homelessness.
Second, people tend to stay in tiny house villages for an extremely long time—almost a year, on average—which is contrary to the city’s goal of making homelessness brief and one of the reasons the number of exits is so low. On average, people stayed in tiny house villages 317 days, compared to 75 for enhanced shelter. That’s more than three times longer than the minimum performance standard of 90 days for tiny house villages adopted by the city’s Human Services Department when it began performance-based contracting in 2017. Continue reading “The C Is for Crank: No, Danny Westneat, Building 1,000 Tiny Houses Won’t Solve Homelessness”→
1. Tuesday night’s election was a major blow to cities like Seattle and transit agencies like King County Metro and Sound Transit, which will have to drastically cut back on long-planned capital projects and eliminate bus service if the statewide Initiative 976, which eliminated funding for transportation projects across the state, hold up in court.
The Puget Sound’s regional transit agency, Sound Transit, stands to lose up to $20 billion in future funding for light rail and other projects through 2041, forcing the agency to dramatically scale back its plans to extend light rail to West Seattle, Ballard, Tacoma and Everett.
So where was Sound Transit’s director, Peter Rogoff, as the election results rolled in?
On vacation in Provence, then at a conference on global health in Rwanda, which his wife, Washington Global Health Alliance CEO Dena Morris, is attending.
Rogoff posted on social media about his trip, which began while votes were being cast in late October and is still ongoing (Rogoff will return to work on Monday).
Screen shots from Rogoff’s Facebook page. On the right: The Sound Transit CEO displays Washington Nationals regalia in Provence.
Geoff Patrick, a spokesman for Sound Transit, said Rogoff took the trip to France because “he has not vacationed for a while,” and said the agency was in the “very capable” hands of deputy CEO Kimberly Farley. As for the women in health conference in Rwanda, Patrick said, “this is a conference that he wanted to attend with his wife and it’s an important conference,” adding that Rogoff was “attending the conference with every confidence that the agency is being well run” in his absence.
Asked what Farley, the deputy CEO, has done to reassure Sound Transit employees about the future of the agency in light of an election that could gut its funding, eliminating many jobs, Patrick said Farley emailed everyone on staff and told them to keep focusing on their work. “There’s no impact whatsoever [from Rogoff’s absence] to the agency’s operations,” Patrick said.
Rob Gannon, the general manager of King County Metro, reportedly visited all of Metro’s work sites in person to answer employee questions; I have a call out to Metro to confirm this.
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The C Is for Crank is supported entirely by generous contributions from readers like you. If you enjoy the breaking news, commentary, and deep dives on issues that matter to you, please support this work by donating a few bucks a month to keep this reader-supported, ad-free site going. Your $5, $10, and $20 monthly donations allow me to do this work as my full-time job, so please become a sustaining supporter now. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for keeping The C Is for Crank going and growing. I’m truly grateful for your support.
In the late 19th century, Washington state was still largely untapped wilderness and the area surrounding Lake Union was modest and sparsely populated. Immigrants from Scandinavia, Greece and Russia, as well as East Coast Americans, traveled west to live in humble workers cottages as they sought their fortunes in coal, the new railway system, and a mill.
Amazon’s characterization of Washington as “largely untapped wilderness” waiting to be civilized by immigrants from Europe is jarring in 2019, when tribal-land acknowledgements are customary at public meetings and when most people living in Seattle are at least dimly aware that the West wasn’t actually vacant when “settlers” moved in.
I have reached out to Amazon and the Seattle Times and will update this post if I get more information about who wrote the sponsored piece.
For those who want to learn more about the past and present of the tribes that existed in what is now Washington state when Europeans arrived in the mid-19th century and are still here, here are a couple of helpful articles. One is from HistoryLink. The other is from the Seattle Times.
3. Council member Mike O’Brien, who raised his hand to co-sponsor council president Bruce Harrell’s proposal to fund an app-based homeless donation system created by a for-profit company called Samaritan, now says he’s “almost certain that [a $75,000 add to fund the company] will not be in the final budget.”
Amazon’s characterization of Washington as “largely untapped wilderness” waiting to be civilized by immigrants from Europe is jarring in 2019, when tribal-land acknowledgements are customary at public meetings and when most people living in Seattle are at least dimly aware that the West wasn’t actually vacant when “settlers” moved in.
The app equips people experiencing homelessness with Bluetooth-equipped “beacons” that send out a signal notifying people with the app where the person is. An app user can then read the person’s story—along with details of their mandatory visits with caseworkers, which may include medical and other personal information—and decide whether to “invest in” the person by adding funds to an account that can be used at a list of approved businesses. People can get “needed nutrition and goods” (tech-speak for groceries, apparently) at Grocery Outlet, for example, or “coffee and treats” at the Chocolati Cafe in the downtown library. Continue reading “Sound Transit CEO Takes Election Vacation, Amazon’s Revisionist History, Stranger May Lease from ICE Landlord, and More”→
In keeping with how quickly news piles up the moment after Labor Day ends, here are a few quick-hit items—in two parts!—from City Hall and beyond.
Round 2, non-City Hall edition:
1. An overnight sobering center, which was supposed to relocate from downtown Seattle to the Georgetown neighborhood this summer, will not open as planned. Neighborhood residents filed a lawsuit to stop the center in June, alleging that the city had filed to do an environmental review of the site or consider impacts on the small neighborhood before approving a permit for Community Psychiatric Clinic to purchase the site. (CPC planned to run the center through a contract with King County).
“Aspects of the Georgetown Neighborhood that make it especially unsuitable for the new facility include lack of supportive services and public transportation, a burgeoning homeless and RV population, pollution, and a proliferation of bars and entertainment venue,” the lawsuit said.
Since then, CPC has merged with Sound, another local mental health-care provider, and withdrawn plans to build the sobering center on the site. Currently, King County has not identified a new location for the center, which was designed to take pressure off local emergency rooms and serve as a place for people experiencing homelessness to sober up under supervision in case any medical emergencies do arise.
2. Sound Transit’s social media manager blew up local Twitter today when the agency’s official account responded to a tweet by local activist and teacher Jesse Hagopian about fare enforcement officers hassling students on the first day of school.
On the #FirstDayOfSchool, the light rail fare enforcement is out in force busting high school students—before they get to school & get their ORCA cards that will allow them to travel to school for free.
Sound Transit responded in probably the worst way possible, by responding that if the kids in the photo are “like my kids,” the fare enforcement officers probably “gave them a one-day paper ORCA card that covers today. It’s good to remind folks how the system works. And officers have discretion to issue warnings instead of fines.”
This tone-deaf response set off a firestorm of criticism that had Sound Transit listed as the top trending topic on local Twitter for most of the day. Among other things, people pointed out that the author’s kids probably aren’t “like” the kids in the photo, in that they’re probably white kids who are far less likely (statistically speaking) to be hassled by fare enforcement officers. An audit last year found that King County Metro’s fare enforcement policies disproportionately impacted low-income people and people of color, and that most people who failed to pay fare did so because they couldn’t afford the fare.
At the time, Sound Transit board members raised concerns about Sound Transit’s more punitive approach, which can result in a criminal record, but the agency defended the practice. Board member Claudia Balducci, who represents Bellevue on the King County Council, says, “I really think kids riding our trains and taking our buses are the future riders of the system, and we should be doing everything possible to make them into future riders. .. What the audit says is that we should focus on making it possible for people to ride… and that’s not what’s happening.”
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3. Marcus Harrison Green, the founder of the South Seattle Emerald who was hired as a South King County reporter for the Seattle Times last year, has left the Times. He is the third African American writer (along with former homelessness reporter Vernal Coleman, who left for a job in Boston, and former columnist Tyrone Beeson, who took a position in LA) to leave the Times editorial department in the last year. The Times has historically had trouble retaining African American writers (and people of color in general—two other staffers of color, Mohammed Kloub and Jennifer Luxton, also left this year).
Earlier this year, white columnist Nicole Brodeur was demoted to general-assignment reporter after asking a black woman who was interviewing her for a school assignment if she could touch her hair; the incident came after Broduer wrote several racially insensitive columns, including one suggesting that African American parents should stop letting their kids “run[…] wild” and another saying Columbia City had been a dangerous “pass-through” zone until white businesses moved in.
Mike Rosenberg, the Seattle Times real estate reporter who was suspended last month after sending unsolicited sexually explicit messages to a New York-based writer named Talia Jane, has resigned, The C Is for Crank has learned. (Update at 11:20am: The Times has confirmed Rosenberg’s resignation; statement below). The news went out to Times staffers in an email yesterday, which reportedly included no additional details such as whether Rosenberg had been asked to leave or information about an investigation the Times said it was undertaking back in May.
On May 5, Jane posted a thread about Rosenberg’s messages, which began as banal encouragement and career advice and escalated into a series of increasingly inappropriate come-ons (3:10am: “Anyway you’re so beautiful”; 3:13am: “Anyway you are hilarious”), culminating in a message at 3:55am that read, “there is so much cum on your face.” (Jane apparently stopped responding around 2:56 am, with a message about the media environment in New York.) After Jane said she was going to take the messages public, Rosenberg responded, further screen shots show, by claiming that the DMs weren’t intended for Jane, then offering to donate to the National Organization for Women in exchange for her silence.
“Being a woman is totally normal and very cool,” Jane wrote.
Contacted for comment on Rosenberg’s resignation, Jane said, “Every freelancer, new voice and marginalized body has experienced instances where power imbalances are abused [t]o the extent that someone saying ‘This isn’t appropriate or acceptable’ comes as a shock. Calling out inappropriate behavior shouldn’t be shocking. It should be standard. As the dust settles, I hope what is remembered of this situation is the importance of identifying inappropriate behavior and not laughing it off or pretending you didn’t see it, but rejecting it point blank. I hope Mike’s decision to resign leads him toward a happier, healthier future, however that may manifest.”
The Times has been very tight-lipped about the Rosenberg situation, limiting its comments to a brief statement: “The Seattle Times has been made aware of allegations of sexual harassment earlier today against a newsroom employee. We take these kinds of allegations very seriously and have suspended the employee pending an investigation by our human resources group.” In a break with the longstanding newspaper tradition of the media reporting on its own scandals, the Times did not assign anyone to report on the Rosenberg story.
Lindsay Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Times, confirmed that Rosenberg has resigned. ” As referenced in our previous comment, we did initiate and complete an investigation into this matter. We are not disclosing details of those findings as it is a personnel matter handled directly by our human resources group,” Taylor said. “As to our efforts regarding sexual harassment in the workplace, we are, as we have always been, committed to fostering a respectful workplace. The behavior of one individual among our more than 600 employees is not reflective of our culture. We have continued to invest in training and elevate awareness of our employee assistance program for counseling consultations as needed. We will continue to be responsive to employee needs around this issue.”
1. One wrinkle in the news, which I reported yesterday, that Showbox building owner Roger Forbes has terminated the venue’s lease: Anschutz Entertainment Group, which operates the Showbox, doesn’t own the rights to the name “The Showbox”—Forbes does. (Through an LLC that he controls, Forbes registered the trademark in 2008, and renewed it again last year). That means that Forbes retains the ultimate authority over who gets to use the Showbox name, which is also associated with both the Showbox SoDo (a larger venue on First Ave. South, owned by Lyle Snyder of Mercer Island) and “Showbox Presents,” which promotes shows at other venues, such as McMenamins Crystal Ballroom in Portland.
If Forbes develops the Showbox property before the end of AEG’s lease, in January 2024, the trademark will reportedly revert to AEG. If Forbes retains the trademark and the venue at 1426 First Avenue continues to operate after 2024, it could always revert to one of its previous names, such as the Kerns Music & Jewelry Company; the Talmud Torah Hebrew Academy Bingo Hall; the Happening Teenage Nite Club; or, perhaps its original name: The Show Box.
Anschutz Entertainment Group, which operates the Showbox, doesn’t own the rights to the name “The Showbox”—the building’s owner, Roger Forbes, does.
2. Andres Mantilla, the director of the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, says the city is not—contrary to what some council members and public commenters suggested yesterday—considering the addition of more properties along First Avenue to the proposed expansion of the Pike Place Market Historical District. Rather, Mantilla says, DON’s consultants (engineering firm AECOM and PR firm Stephenson & Associates) are studying other properties inside the boundaries of the original proposed expansion (which would have also “saved” a strip club, two parking lots, a new hotel, and a Starbucks) “for context.”
“What’s currently on the table is the study of the Showbox,” Mantilla says. “Any expansion on the table right now would be limited to that. There’s overlap with [the] properties” in the original proposed expansion area, but “the analysis is not meant for any sort of particular inclusion of those properties” in the historical district, he says.
That’s news to the Friends of the Market, who assumed the city’s consultants would be looking at other potentially historic properties along First Avenue for possible inclusion in the historic district. Friends of the Market president Kate Krafft, who testified in favor of landmarking the Showbox building at a meeting of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Board last night, told me she had expected the city’s consultants to contact the Market to discuss other buildings that might be appropriate for including in the historical district, but hadn’t heard from anyone at the city. (The landmarks board voted unanimously to nominate the structure for landmark status, a process that is separate from the legislation expanding the Market to include the Showbox property. Read all my tweets from the meeting here.)
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“I was under the impression that they were going to have a cultural resource specialist and that they would look at the rationale” for expanding the Market based on the historical properties of each property, Krafft said in an interview yesterday. The Friends of the Market oppose the current zoning on First Avenue, which allows buildings of up to 44 stories, like the one originally planned for the Showbox site. Krafft says historic designation wouldn’t preclude new development—it would just preclude new development that doesn’t fit in with the Market.
“Historic districts evolve,” she said. “Seven new buildings have been built in the district since 1971 and they’re in character with the district.” As for parcels included in the original proposed boundary expansion area that aren’t historic—like the two surface parking lots, or the modern, glass-walled Thompson Hotel on First and Virginia, or the Deja Vu Showgirls strip club—Krafft says they could be considered “non-contributing” properties and grandfathered in. But to do that, she says, “we need a thorough study”—and one does not appear to currently be forthcoming from the city.
3. In the wake of a widely publicized incident in which she asked to touch (and then apparently did touch) the hair of a young African American artist, the Seattle Times’ longtime metro columnist Nicole Brodeur has lost her weekly column and been reassigned to a new role covering “newsmakers” as a general assignment reporter. Lindsay Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Times, confirms that Brodeur is now a GA reporter and that her column has been “retired.”
Crosscut and the South Seattle Emerald reported on the hair-touching incident, which the artist, Alexis Taylor, wove into an installation called “Black Among Other Things,” in May. Taylor, Crosscut reported, was “assigned to write a profile on a local journalist for a journalism class” at Seattle University. “She reached out to Brodeur more than a year ago, after the columnist apologized for writing a story about Columbia City that was called racist.” In that column, Brodeur opined that Columbia City had been a dangerous “pass-through” zone until white-owned places like Molly Moon’s, Rudy’s, and Pagliacci moved in. (In a followup column that began, “Sometimes being called a racist is just the jolt you need,” Brodeur interviewed several people of color who are quoted in a way that implies they praised her just for trying to improve).
The Columbia City columns weren’t even the only times Brodeur wrote pieces that could be considered racially insensitive. After a 2010 incident in which security officers stood by and did nothing while an African American girl was beaten in the downtown transit tunnel, Brodeur wrote a column titled “Parents, Get Ahold of Your Kids, lecturing parents of color (“there’s a racial element here that I think needs to be acknowledged”) to “set some rules for decency and public behavior” for their kids and keep them from “running wild.”
On another occasion, she wrote an uncritical single-source column about a pair of First Hill pizza shop owners, the Calozzis, who claimed to have been victimized repeatedly by deranged, heroin-addled patients at a nearby methodone clinic. Some facts Brodeur failed to mention included the pizza shop owner’s long, colorful, and sometimesviolenthistory of conflicts with neighbors, business rivals, and just random people that included a number of shocking racial incidents. A Vietnamese America neighbor who sued the Calozzis for damaging his property said Jennifer Calozzi called him a “gook,” and the mother of a student who attended school with the Calozzis’ son accused Jennifer Calozzi of going on an N-word-laced “tirade the likes of which I have never seen nor heard before in my life.”
Times spokeswoman Taylor did not respond directly to a question about whether Brodeur had been demoted due to the hair-touching incident. “It is not uncommon for us to assess the best use of our resources and change focus of the staff,” she said.
This post originally appeared at Seattle Magazine.
Local politics Twitter blew up late Tuesday night over the news, buried in a piece about the King County Sheriff’s election by Seattle Times reporters Steve Miletich and Mike Carter, that incumbent Sheriff John Urquhart had directed Miletich to a nonexistent election party, presumably in retaliation for the Times’ coverage of sexual harassment and assault allegations against the sheriff.
The Times reported that Urquhart “sent its reporter to a non-existent campaign party across town from where the sheriff showed up Tuesday night at Shaun O’Donnell’s American Grill and Irish Pub in the Smith Tower. When the reporter tracked him down, Urquhart said he had sent the reporter to the wrong place as a ‘joke.’”
Contacted by phone, Urquhart campaign manager Juliana da Cruz said she thought Urquhart’s misdirection “might have just been a misunderstanding.”
“I personally didn’t know about our election night plans until the very last minute,” she added.
Another Urquhart staffer, who did not want to speak on the record, suggested that what Urquhart called a “joke” was just that—an obvious goof between Urquhart and a reporter, Miletich, with whom he had a good relationship. The location where Urquhart said he was having his party, according to the staffer, closed several years ago, a fact Urquhart reportedly highlighted by sending Miletich a Seattle Times story on the closure. The Urquhart campaign posted the actual location of the sheriff’s election-night party on Facebook on November 6.
Both Miletich and Carter declined to comment on Urquhart’s “joke” or confirm that Urquhart had sent an email pointing to the Times’ story about the closure of the fake party location.
Whether he intended to send Miletich astray as a “joke” or whether his prank was more malicious, there’s a history of bad blood between Urquhart and the Times. Last year the paper began reporting on sexual misconduct allegations against the sheriff. As criticism of Urquhart’s handling of the allegations resurfaced last week, Patch Seattle reported that Urquhart’s attorney sent a strongly-worded letter to the Times discouraging the paper from running a story about a $160,000 settlement to a former King County deputy sheriff who claimed that Urquhart had touched him inappropriately and attempted to keep him from exposing wrongdoing within the department.
Late Wednesday morning, Times reporter Mike Rosenberg tweeted a list of “some of the stories that upset the sheriff,” suggesting that Urquhart’s “joke” was retaliation for coverage he perceived as negative. Among those stories: A piece about advocacy groups who accused the sheriff of mistreating deputies who had accused him of sexual assault, and a story about a finding by the King County ombudsman’s office that Urquhart had mishandled the sexual assault allegations against him. Times reporter Mike Baker also responded to Urquhart on Twitter.
Urquhart did not return a call to his office seeking comment.
Results in the King County sheriff’s race remain inconclusive, but were trending strongly toward Johanknecht. As of the latest count Wednesday afternoon, Johanknecht led Urquhart 52.61 percent to 47.69 percent—a margin of 15,778 votes.
The editorial continues: “Experienced election watchers say any final result under 55% bodes ominously for incumbents. Challengers now must press their case.”
By Erica C. Barnett 
“Now, with police ranks depleted, and at least a portion of Seattle’s political class hostile to the idea of policing, they seem to be instituting white-flag waving as a regular part of the system,” Westneat complained.
In 2015, a Westneat 
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