There is an old and probably apocryphal story from the French revolution that goes like this: A bourgeois leader of the revolution is seated comfortably at a café by the side of the road in the 12th arrondissement, sipping wine and enjoying the company of a friend. Suddenly, a mob rushes by, carrying torches and pitchforks and shouting revolutionary slogans. “There go my people,” remarks the revolutionary. “I must find out where they’re going so I can lead them there.”
I’ve been thinking about this story a lot over the last few months as I’ve watched the Harrell administration struggle to respond to the growing challenge posed by Katie Wilson’s upstart mayoral campaign. As things stand, Wilson is almost exactly tied in fundraising, way ahead in Democracy Vouchers, quite possibly leading the polls, and is now endorsed by The Stranger.
Here’s the problem for Harrell: He needs to be progressive enough to ward off the threat of Wilson without being so progressive that he burns bridges with his big business funders. That’s not easy to achieve! Consider his painfully awkward defense of partnering with Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck to update Seattle’s Business & Occupation tax code:
We are not trying to run business out of Seattle, we are open for business,” Harrell, newly anointed fan of progressive revenue (or just a man worried about being another one-term mayor) continued. “So as we look at dealing with a $250 million deficit … the fact is that the state legislature only gives us so many tools, and this is a tool we think along the lines of progressive revenue that is a smart policy to adopt.
Inspiring stuff.
To the Mayor’s credit, signing onto the Rinck proposal did earn him some predictably wide-eyed apoplexy from his usual friends at the Downtown Seattle Association. (Perhaps they missed the part of the proposal where 90 percent of businesses will see lower taxes?) Harrell has also shown a willingness to sign on to, and publicly champion, good housing, transportation, and education levies (though after working to size them down behind the scenes). And his comprehensive plan proposal is a fairly decent start (though it still falls far short of what’s needed).
But in a political moment that demands ambition and moral courage from our local and national leaders, Seattle deserves better than a Mayor who needs to be backed into a corner to champion good ideas. We deserve a leader.
Happily, Katie Wilson has never needed a poll to tell her what to do—and she’s already with the majority of Seattle voters on essentially every issue that matters. She wants tons more housing. She’ll take practical steps to build more shelter while investing in long-term solutions to homelessness. She wants to protect our city’s finances from the threat of the Trump administration, she’s for transit and transit riders, and she wants to make the richest people in our city pay what they truly owe. She is for the working class because she is from the working class.
You’ve already felt Wilson’s impact if you or your kid have zipped around the city with a subsidized Orca card. Her organizing with the Transit Rider’s Union made that happen. If you’ve had your move-in or late fees capped for your rental apartment, you’ve also benefited from her work. And if you’re working a minimum wage job that actually pays you what you need to survive, you can thank her too. Those aren’t empty promises from a do-little Mayor, those are actual results from a private citizen without even a fraction of his power. Imagine her in his office.
Irritatingly, many of Seattle’s elected progressives have been slow to admit—thanks to Harrell endorsements locked in before he faced a serious challenge in Wilson—that what they love in Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City is available right here in Seattle. Tenemos Katie Wilson en casa, folks! For upwardly mobile electeds, I can understand the temptation to avoid nettling a still-powerful and famously petty Mayor. But this is not a time for cynicism. It’s a time in which to deepen our commitment to our most cherished values and fight like hell to defend them.
Harrell hasn’t been a terrible follower. But he’s hardly been a leader. He’s a guy whose MO is to negotiate with advocacy groups in private and take credit for their advocacy after the deal is struck. This style of backroom maneuvering, quiet phone calls, collared advocates, in-groups, and out-groups produces largely inadequate results and leaves precious little room for genuine, ambitious leadership in times that dearly demand them.
One reaction to the threats our city faces now, from Trump, from the consequences of our own policy choices, might be to fold into a defense crouch and fall back into our old ways: cutting up and watering down proposals until they do nothing that might upset anyone in power.
Another approach might be to marry genuine ambition for, and pride in, what’s possible in our city with an organizer’s capacity to deliver—to set a clear standard, articulate clear values, and then do the hard and thankless work of building the coalition around an idea so that that idea can actually work. That’s Katie Wilson’s style, and it’s not a hypothetical. She’s already done it. There’s a word for it, too: Leadership.
Rian Watt is a local housing advocate.
The article’s subtitle makes a claim that the article does not substantiate.
I am SUPER jazzed to finally have a candidate I am happy to vote for! I am exhausted from pinching my nose, casting votes for “at least they aren’t as bad as the other guy” in Seattle. Yay us!!! Let’s gooooooo…..
“You’ve already felt Wilson’s impact if you or your kid have zipped around the city with a subsidized Orca card. Her organizing with the Transit Rider’s Union made that happen. If you’ve had your move-in or late fees capped for your rental apartment, you’ve also benefited from her work. And if you’re working a minimum wage job that actually pays you what you need to survive, you can thank her too. Those aren’t empty promises from a do-little Mayor, those are actual results from a private citizen without even a fraction of his power. Imagine her in his office.”
There is a small flaw with this statement. The mayor doesn’t have the power to enact any of these things. Only the city council can do that and then mayor can sign off on it. She can not pass new taxes nor can she issue a bunch of executive orders on day 1 anymore than the socialist in NYC will be able to do should he actually win. What Wilson can do that is demonize the business community and encourage them to slow/stop job growth in the city, create even more risk for home builders and landlords to slow housing growth and undermine the public safety organizations in the city to again allow crime and decay to fester. Those are the real risks that come with a Wilson administration. Harrell isn’t perfect by any stretch but he isn’t going to take us backwards like Wison will inevitably do. The only silver lining of a Wilson term would be voters will once again become so disillusioned with progressive “leadership” that the backlash will be even bigger than it was in the 2021/2023 elections.
lEaDeRShiP
What the fuck is a “local housing advocate? Is that like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny?
“She wants tons more housing”.
Everybody says that. Where is this housing going to go? Are we going to continue the absolutely idiotic condoizing of the previously single-family neighborhoods, which has done nothing for “affordability”, and is in many instances of very poor quality? When Mr. Vel-DuRay and I purchased our home, there were eight houses on the block. Eight homeowners. Now there are nineteen, with the addition of a really nice five unit development with parking and a trashy six unit development with no parking (and everyone one of those new homeowners has a car, btw). Not one of those units went for less than $700k, and some of them are investment properties with out-of-state ownership. If we were serious about housing and had zoning that allowed large apartment buildings, a prospective developer would have to talk to nineteen property owners instead of the previous eight. We have locked in the SFR mentality for the next fifty years or so.
Also, we lack the infrastructure for this. Sewer and water mains were not designed for density. Electricity is more flexible, but the electrification requirement now means that developers have to find space in the right-of-way or on the lot to install an electrical vault, which is a pricey proposition that drives housing prices up.
We like to talk about affordability, but the only real affordability is in the far suburbs. We could sell our house and make a ridiculous profit off of it, but we’d be spending all of that on another house like the one we’re in (and our house is no prize, believe me), and I’d rather swim in a river of poo than be subject to some HOA, so a condo or one of these townhomes is a non-starter.
I think the only solution is massive upzoning in the “urban villages” (which will bring the NIMBY’s out with torches and pitchforks) or we just accept the fact that we have a small geographic footprint, and a growth management requirement, and accept the fact that not everyone is going to be able to afford Seattle. We certainly couldn’t, if we were just starting out. We got very, very, lucky.
Concentrate instead on quality of life issues – everyone’s life, including the homeless. Find appropriate housing, based on a person’s mental and physical state, and if they don’t want to be housed, do not allow them to live on our streets.
I’m pretty sure the upper middle class white lady is the bourgeois one.
@5: “Also, we lack the infrastructure for this.”
I’ll defer to you on water issues, but the main reason Seattle should not ‘densify’ (grrr…) the SFH neighborhoods comes from the lack of transportation infrastructure. Starting at least as far back as rejection of Virgil Bogue’s Plan, Seattle has repeatedly failed to build adequate grade-separated mass transit of any reach, and has totally failed even to propose any grade-separated mass transit that could reach into SFH neighborhoods. Whether the redeveloper builds parking into the structure or not, a sufficient increase in density will overload the local streets, which will then overload the adjacent arterials. Higher density in Seattle’s SFH neighborhoods is a recipe for gridlock on a city-wide scale, and the refusal of such density’s advocates to admit this should remove from serious consideration anything else they might say about urban policy, too.
What is Wilson’s plan to address homeless encampments and street-level crime while we are waiting for her proposed long-term solutions to homelessness to materialize? Is there any plan for what to do when an unhoused individual refuses to accept an offer of shelter and instead chooses to continue living in a tent across the street from an elementary school? Is Wilson’s plan to return the city to a posture of not prosecuting crimes, working in tandem with whatever progressive prosecutor will (theoretically) replace Ann Davison?
All I need to hear is an actual, Day One policy position that isn’t “you’re a bad person for asking those questions” and I’ll vote for her.
@7 In talking to Urbanists around here they don’t deny this issue but feel that it will only be achieved by first causing the necessary pain to create urgency. They have two goals. Stuff the neighborhoods so full that people have no choice but to get out of their cars (the save the planet goal) and then when they do the cry will be so loud for mass transit that they will be willing to fork over all their money to pay for it. Many of them also have an unstated goal of undermining SFH in general because they think its elitist and racist but that starts to delve into equity politics. I think these view points are seriously flawed and unrealistic which is why I push back against urbanism in general (at least the way it is practiced in the NW).
There’s no way the City of Seattle or “the urbanists” can overcome a century of time, and billions of dollars spent telling Americans that cars = freedom, and that the car you drive is a reflection of your identity. And there’s no way the citizens of an unaffordable city are going to clamor for more bus service.
Oh dear…. That last sentence should be “And there’s no way the Wealthy citizens of a city that is unaffordable to working-class people are going to clamor for more bus service.”
Mrs. Vel-DuRay regrets the error.
Such stupid arguments in the comment section. Allowing more housing reduces the cost of housing. That is so fucking obvious it doesn’t need a study but yes, there are studies that prove it. https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf.
Cheaper housing leads to less homelessness. Again, fucking obvious but here you go: https://homelessnesshousingproblem.com/. Now connect the dots. Restrictive zoning (and similar regulations) not only lead to higher housing costs but more homelessness.
More density means a stronger city. A lot of the costs of maintaining a city have more to do with the area being maintained and not the number of people in it. Thus the more people you have for that area the less it costs (per resident) to manage it. For example, consider fire hydrants. Imagine the city just doubled in physical size. You would probable need about twice as many hydrants. Now imagine that the number of people with the city double. You don’t need to do anything. The same is true for various public amenities. Roads, police and especially transit scale in a positive way as you increase density. Yes, at some point you need to transition from a city where everyone is expected to drive everywhere to a city where they are expected to take transit. We have long since passed that point. The problem is we don’t have the money to add all the bus lanes (that SDOT wants). With more people we can get that.
Yes, the mayor has to deal with the council. But as we’ve seen, the mayor has a huge influence on the council. The council may also change over time. Some of them are complete bozos. Say what you will about Harrell, but he was never a bozo.
The article was solid. Harrell is not a bad mayor. He knows what he is doing. In a different era he would probably be fine. He is a conservative in the classic sense (while many on the council are reactionaries). He wants to move to the left, just slowly. The problem is that we have big problems that we have failed to address for a very long time. We need to progress faster.
Well, it’s nice to be a true believer, Ross dear. Maybe if you save up enough you can buy one of those $750,000 “townhomes”. Just make sure you have enough to pay your HOA’s and understand water submetering.
As an add-on to previous comments, I know a couple who sold their 18Ave E home (Capitol Hill) about 6 years ago for over $1million.
Now it’s 4 $850K units. I’m sure the developer and the homeowners are happy. The couple waited for real estate prices to go DOWN before buying another house.
You guessed it-the couple has been renting in the suburbs the last 6 years.
The people who can afford lower tier housing are renting small apartments or low income rentals, if they are lucky enough to get one. But they are still renting, not owning. What will make housing more affordable in Seattle?
100,000 new units magically appearing, or a massive 1970’s recession. Neither of these are desirable or likely.
Pat dear, here’s the thing about a “massive 70’s recession” – it makes a lot of fortunes.
I have an elderly friend who worked at the Hormel plant in the 1970’s. He had a high school friend who was selling suits at Frederick & Nelson. They started buying real estate, first residential, then commercial. They now own a couple of buildings in the West Seattle Junction and downtown Burien. They were able to do that because they had steady jobs, and real estate was dirt cheap, pretty much through the early 80’s. There’s a lot of old people in Seattle like that. They were in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, that’s made some of them think they are fiscal geniuses, but that’s another story.
@12: In referring to Mrs. Vel-DuRay’s comment on increasing density in SFH neighborhoods, I did not address increasing density on any other land in Seattle. My comment addressed only SFH neighborhoods, and why increasing density there is a long-term mistake. Of course increasing density overall is good urban policy, but only in places where the infrastructure supports it. This includes transportation infrastructure, which in a good urban dense neighborhood consists primarily of wide sidewalks for the residents’ feet. (I moved back to Belltown when doing so helped make it into the most densely populated neighborhood in the entire state, giving it a ‘walk score’ of 100, and my quality of life there was simply astounding.) If you densify SFH neighborhoods without grade-separated mass transportation which reaches INTO those neighborhoods — NOT just along their edges — then you will create automobile catastrophe there.
If you lack such mass transit INTO the SFH neighborhoods, then you’re limited to mass transit to the urban villages at the cores or edges of those neighborhoods. And that’s great, too, but you must build the mass transit to those urban villages, and those urban villages also must have the infrastructure to support both the residents there, and the residents who will use automobiles as transport from the further reaches of those neighborhoods to the urban villages.
@11: There were more buses going downtown before the light rail. Now there are fewer. Arrogant urbanist planners thought that commuters would be glad to finish their commute in light rail and not mind the transfer. For example route 67 from Northgate now stops in the UW light rail station, and before it would conveniently go down Eastlake to South Lake Union.
If you work downtown and were happy with your bus commute that’s probably no longer the case. We need those bus routes back.
@14: I know. I hope to sell someday and be able to move into a double-wide in the Mississippi delta.
And in my @14 example (beating the horse to death) the property assessed value for that parcel went from $1.1 million to $3.4 million. Great news for the Seattle assessor. And yet Seattle has a chronic budget deficit?
@12 perfectly represents the urbanist viewpoint in the Seattle area. You can scoff at him as a true believer but he represents the mainstream viewpoint of urbanists. Like the socialists their polices do not fail because they are unworkable and unpopular, they only fail because we did not go far enough. Going back to Wilson she embodies this view herself which is why electing her mayor would create even more dysfunction than we have now.
Ross, we certainly have a housing issue but we have more of is a addiction and mental health issue and building more housing isn’t going to solve that. Just ask Portland
https://www.wweek.com/news/2023/06/07/a-28-million-low-income-apartment-complex-descends-into-chaos-in-just-two-and-a-half-years/
Dooneese Wilson
https://decider.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/snl-dooneese.jpg?quality=75&strip=all&w=646&h=431&crop=1
There are plenty of places to build affordable housing. Half the stuff in Seattle is shut down. Tear it down and build apartments. Yes it will require infrastructure. No it won’t be convenient or easy. Hell.. turn Pacific Place into affordable housing. It’s literally got like three stores in it. Keep the movie theater and redo it. Cheesecake Factory. Nike Town. All the Best Buys and stores like that are gonna close eventually. What else can go there?
tbass1981 dear, while I dispute your assertion that “half the stuff in Seattle is shut down” (you really need to get out more) empty commercial spaces, especially big box buildings, generally have all of the infrastructure needed, at least on the electrical side of things. And pretty much anything in downtown Seattle has a pretty robust infrastructure.
I would like for all the qualifications of Stranger Guest Rant authors to be specifically detailed. Anyone can shill for a cause. That is typical behavior in our society.
However, given the socio-political-economic motives of The Stranger’s owners; I would like to see more bona fides listed. I never hired anyone without a resume and I always checked their resume and references. Do you believe everything that anyone tells you?
Listing an author of an editorial as ‘ Rian Watt is a local housing advocate’ is inadequate. Tell me why I should care about his opinion.