Katie Wilson for Mayor
...344 days to go...
Voting for mayor is probably the most consequential decision most of us will make affecting Seattle’s homeless population, and it appears that decision will come down to two candidates this year: incumbent Bruce Harrell and Katie Wilson, currently the executive director of the Transit Riders Union.
Today, I voted for Katie Wilson.
I’ve had a chance to see both candidates speak, and done a lot of research into their backgrounds and platforms. Everything I‘ve learned suggests that Wilson will do more to help Seattle’s homeless population. Polling suggests that 27% of us are still undecided, and understandably so with a blitz of national news crowding out our collective capacity to consider local politics. In the hope it helps, please allow me to share my thoughts below, and if you haven’t had a chance to cast your ballot yet, please do.
Some context for those of you who may not be local political junkies. August 5th is the final day to cast your ballot in Seattle’s primary election. There are eight candidates on the ballot, and the two highest vote-getters will advance to the general election on November 4th. So voting in both elections is important.
Our incumbent, Bruce Harrell, is a polished speaker and talks often and eloquently about the importance of resolving homelessness. On the campaign trail back in 2021, Harrell promised to add 2,000 units of emergency supportive housing by the end of 2022. There are now 5,288 such beds in King County so this would have been a big increase.
Harrell claims he achieved this objective, but unfortunately closer inspection shows his claim is deeply insincere. Late in 2022, Harrell released a homelessness dashboard taking credit for 1,912 such units. But a Publicola analysis showed that only 288 of these units were announced in 2022, after Harrell took office. The rest were projects begun during the tenure of Harrell’s predecessor, Jenny Durkan.
New housing units are expensive - around $285K each according to an analysis by the Third Door Coalition - so bringing 2,000 new units online in a single year is a tall order for anyone. Yet throughout his tenure, Harrell has had a ready-made source of funding which he has elected not to fully utilize. In July, 2020, voters passed JumpStart Seattle, a payroll tax on large businesses. The JumpStart spending plan called for 62% of the revenue from this tax to be directed toward affordable and low-income housing. Unfortunately, Harrell has elected to use some of these funds to plug gaps in Seattle’s general fund instead, and only $145M of an anticipated $520M will be allocated to affordable and low-income housing in 2025, or roughly 28%. Harrell has likewise redirected this funding stream away from shelter and low income housing in each of his four years in office.
One area related to homelessness in which Harrell has been quite effective is in reducing the number of tents and encampments in the city. He says the number of tents is down more than 80% from when he took office in 2022, the result of more than 5,000 removals during his term - far more than pre-pandemic levels. While these removals may improve the appearance of our city, homeless people say they are avoiding these sweeps by hiding deeper in the woods or giving up on setting up a tent altogether, leaving them more vulnerable to the elements. Is this how we want to deal with our homelessness crisis? By devoting our resources to sweeping it out of sight so the more fortunate among us can avoid the trauma of having to walk by it?
I saw Mayor Harrell’s priorities in a personal way when I visited an open house in June at Tent City 4, a village with space for about 100 residents, in Lake City. Their one-year lease at the Seattle Mennonite Church had recently wrapped up. Their organizer, SHARE/WHEEL, had identified a new location, unneeded by the city for the next year, outside the former Lake City Community Center. While the Mayor’s office had initially supported the new lease, it reversed its position as the move date approached and ended up only begrudgingly granting a six-month lease at the new location.
Leaders of the church told me how the residents of TC4 were nothing but helpful and respectful neighbors, and the residents themselves described how they just wanted to stay in the same neighborhood and continue to send their children to the same schools. While the Mayor’s office didn’t provide a reason for denying TC4 the longer lease other than wanting to move them “to a more appropriate location”, Harrell was clearly siding with some of our wealthier neighbors voicing back-channel objections to the new site, over the needs of our homeless population.
In contrast, Katie Wilson is committed to a strategy of both raising the money needed for meaningful direct investments in housing the homeless, and for creative low-budget solutions when the money runs out.
Wilson was integral in passing the JumpStart tax in 2020, and wrote an op-ed about how the tax would be a progressive option in a highly tax-regressive state. The tax has turned out to be even more lucrative than forecasted, even if many of the funds have been redirected away from affordable housing.
Her homelessness plan calls for opening 4,000 new units of emergency housing and shelter in four years. Because permanent housing units are so expensive, Wilson is calling for the deployment of a range of strategies, including Tiny House Villages. Tiny Homes can be constructed for a mere $4,500 each (I’ve already completed my first shift for Sound Foundations NW, which builds them - more to come on this in a future post). However, these villages can only be deployed if we have a mayor willing to grant leases for the use of land that isn’t needed for other purposes, like the Lake City location I visited. Otherwise, they will continue to languish in the Sound Foundations lot.
But what drew me to Wilson most was her column in The Stranger. While Wilson is a self-acknowledged member of “the left,” her writing strikes me as pragmatic and willing to acknowledge where more conservative voices have a point to make. For instance, while she supports the notion that Homelessness is a Housing Problem, she also recognizes that, in at least some cases, mentally ill and drug addicted homeless people may refuse offers of shelter because they don’t want to go through withdrawal, or have disruptive behaviors that get them kicked out - reasons that are hard for some of our neighbors to sympathize with. She understands that, while this group may be a minority of homeless individuals, they are disproportionately visible in our city, and citizens do have a right to walk our downtown streets with their children without worrying about being cursed at or assaulted. Thus, she is prepared to countenance more heavy-handed solutions like involuntary commitment when it is the only way to bring these people off our streets.
Mayor Harrell has made progress during his term. But the progress he has demonstrated has focused more on pushing homelessness out of the most visible areas of our city and less on actually resolving it. I believe Wilson will make more progress on providing the tools and supports our homeless population actually needs to begin lifting themselves out of homelessness once and for all.
Do I have it right? Where do you disagree? Please share your thoughts in the comments. Above all, please CAST YOUR VOTE this week!