Katie Wilson Wants to Be Your Mayor

Katie Wilson, the General Secretary of the Transit Riders Union and long-time local progressive organizer, is running for Seattle mayor. 

This is Wilson’s first run for office, but she’s already well known in Seattle’s political spheres as an organizer and policy advocate, fighting for—and winning—campaigns for raising the minimum wage, affordable transit, and progressive revenue, as well as a regular columnist for The Stranger and The Urbanist. She joins a small field of emerging challengers against our Chamber of Commerce-backed mayor, Bruce Harrell. 

In an in-depth conversation with The Stranger, Wilson described the mayor she hopes to be: a coalition builder who’s able to reach across the aisle to find common goals, without diluting progressive, research-backed policies; and a bold innovator, willing to test new ideas and push forward on issues that have stagnated in this city for a decade. 

Can she be that mayor? She’s untested in elected office, but for voters wondering if she can get it done, she urges them to look at her record as a policy advocate. “I’ve spent the last 14 years of my career organizing, building powerful coalitions that win major victories for working people,” she told The Stranger. “And I’ve done all that from the outside. I would be happy to put my legislative record up against Bruce Harrell’s any day of the week.” 

Wilson’s decision to run for mayor solidified just four weeks ago, after Seattle resoundingly voted to support Proposition 1A and fund a social housing developer. In that vote, she saw a city enthusiastically support a bold, new idea. “There’s going to be a long road ahead to put the pieces together to make social housing work in Seattle,” she says. “And we need leadership that’s going to fight to make that happen.” But when she looked to the person meant to carry out that mandate, it was Mayor Harrell—the literal face of Prop 1A’s opposition. 

For Wilson, that contrast captured just how out-of-step Harrell is with Seattle voters. “That was by no means my only reason for running,” she says, “but that was the moment that tipped my thinking: Seeing Harrell’s face plastered on all those mailers trying to undermine the new social housing developer—a campaign funded by Amazon and the Chamber of Commerce—and seeing the resounding vote of confidence of Seattle voters and the desire to go big and bold on affordable housing.” 

“Seattle voters showed that they want big, bold action,” she said. “And so we need better leadership. That’s why I’m running.”

Her frustration with Harrell didn’t begin with Prop 1A. The city’s entire housing and homelessness crisis encapsulates what she sees as Harrell’s failures as a leader: a term defined by inaction and lack of imagination. “Four years ago, when Harrell was running for mayor, he made some big promises on homelessness. He promised to open 2000 units of emergency housing shelter in his first year; he did not even come close to delivering those numbers.”

Instead, the crisis has deepened on his watch—Seattle now has twice as many unsheltered homeless people as New York City—a failure that Wilson thinks was avoidable. “It’s unacceptable,” she says. “We need to find a way to get the folks who are currently sleeping on the street inside.”

The first step, she says, would be to acknowledge the crisis of unsheltered homelessness and shift the city’s priorities. “There’s been an emphasis here over the past years on building permanent structures, and there are some good reasons for that, but we need to move faster,” she says. “I think we need to be opening Tiny House villages. I think we need to be working more closely with faith communities and other spaces that already exist.” 

She takes inspiration from dynamic programs like Purpose. Dignity. Action.’s JustCARE, which piloted field teams that could take an individualized approach: working on the ground with people in encampments, assessing each individual’s unique mental health history, any criminal background, and cycle of homelessness, before successfully placing them in lodging.  

Homelessness is, at its core, a housing crisis, she says. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This approach allows the city to also address the nexus of unsheltered homelessness, the fentanyl crisis, and mental health. That would mean “rapidly acquiring several buildings, and making sure that people are going to have all the support they need,” she says. “And then we can really focus on especially that very small part of the homeless population that is cycling through the criminal justice system, and that is also often part of the drug-involved population.”

“We need to be offering people the housing and the services that work for them,” she says. “If we’re not both investing more in treatment and making sure that that treatment is integrated with housing and continuing support services, then we’re just going to fail.”

To approach these convergent crises, Wilson says she’s willing to be iterative, to try new ideas, and to invest in the ones that work. She proposes doing this through pilot programs—testing evidence-based approaches on a smaller scale, and making sure the city can put their money behind the programs that work. 

None of this is possible without new revenue—specifically a progressive revenue stream like a capital gains tax that taxes our city’s wealthiest residents, rather than increasing the tax burden on working and middle-class families. Harrell has shown little interest in such a tax, but if elected, Wilson thinks that she can make that a reality. In 2023, Wilson served on the city’s Revenue Stabilization Workgroup, “and we looked into the city’s revenue options. And we have options! Some of them are going to require more work to be shovel ready, but the current administration is not doing that work.”

It’s another place where she says Harrell’s administration is out of step with the city’s residents, pointing to polling that shows a majority of Seattle voters support a capital gains tax. “Obviously, there are going to be some people who don’t want to raise new progressive revenue—Chamber of Commerce, I’m looking at you,” she says. “But I think that more broadly, among both the population and stakeholders, people recognize that need.”

This is where she highlights her experience as a coalition builder—the trait she thinks distinguishes her most from other potential progressive candidates. Just last year, she brought together workers, small business owners, and elected officials to pass a higher minimum wage in Burien. 

She’s critical of Harrell’s history of hiring friends and family into essential government roles, and emphasized that one of her strengths is knowing how to build a team that can get it done—no matter what “it” is. “I’m very willing to learn from people,” she says. “I’m not here to say I have no ego, because I don’t think anyone can say that. But I want to do a good job, and I want to learn from the people who know their stuff. And so I’m not going to surround myself with yes men. … City Hall shouldn’t be an old boys club. We need people who are competent. We need people who are willing to be honest, including to their bosses, when they think things could be working better. And that’s the kind of mayor that I would be.”

She’s the first to acknowledge that she’s been a vocal critic of many of the conservative-leaning council members who would be her colleagues and collaborators if she was elected, though. “I don’t want to disown that at all. At the same time, I think it’s very important for a mayor and council members to work together as far as possible, on as many issues as possible,” she says. 

“There are issues where we want similar, if not exactly the same, things,” she continued. “I think that the council members currently in office all do, in some way or other, genuinely want to do something about homelessness and public safety, for example. So if we can really have a fact-based, evidence-based conversation about what works and about what’s necessary to get there, I think we can make progress. We don’t all have to have the same politics to make progress.”

Before she decided to run for office, she started writing a series here in The Stranger, examining why the progressive left suffered such serious losses in the 2021 city elections, and what we can learn from them. She used it as a form of self-reflection—to figure out how to reclaim a political narrative on the left that captures voters. And while we’ve had some substantial progressive wins in the last year (see Prop 1A and the election of Alexis Mercedes Rinck), Wilson thinks we still have work to do on reclaiming the narrative of this city.  

In a January column, she sparked controversy and disagreement among progressives when she proposed that the left struggled to speak to the average Seattle voter about homelessness. She argued that the left was correct about the root causes and necessary solutions for homelessness and the opioid epidemic. That visible drug use doesn’t equate to crime; that the “root cause of homelessness is a severe shortage of affordable housing, the result of neoliberal underinvestment in subsidized housing and a long history of exclusionary zoning, intensified by Seattle’s tech boom; [That] the solution is to fund housing, shelter, and services at scale; [and] that sweeping people from one place to another is cruel and useless.” But she also argued that the left (herself included) had largely disregarded the reality that many Seattleites observed on the streets—a visible drug and housing crisis that makes some residents feel less safe, whether or not the statistics back that feeling up. 

In her interview with The Stranger yesterday, Wilson stood by that analysis. “We have to get at the root causes and recognize what those root causes are,” she says. “But at the same time, we need to also look at what people are experiencing on the ground when they walk down the street and they feel unsafe because someone’s behaving aggressively and erratically, or doing drugs and dealing drugs. We need to do something in the short term. We can’t just say, ‘Well, we’re gonna get everyone the things that they need. And in a far-off utopia, you’re not gonna have these problems, so just hang tight.’”

To Wilson, that means taking on the very emergency measures she’s proposing—rapid acquisition of shelter, on-site resources, and long-term treatment options. “If we can’t address realities like that, then it’s not just that we’re not politically viable, we’re not fit to govern. And I think that we need to learn to govern if we’re going to make progress—if we’re going to do the visionary things that we want to do and build the world that we want to build. We need to be able to exercise that responsibility. We can’t just be shouting from the sidelines.”

That feels especially pressing now that Trump is in office—putting progressive city and state governments on the defensive. Wilson believes that the right progressive city leadership can defend its residents, while still making progress where it’s most important. “If you look at the record of the work that I’ve done over the years, it’s all been focused on getting results,” she says. “It’s been focused on winning concrete things that put money in people’s pockets and improve their quality of life. That’s the focus that I would want to bring into City Hall. Whatever the national situation is, whatever the local political situation is, let’s figure out the things that we can get done that will make a difference on the ground, and let’s do them.”

“The next few years under Trump, shit is going to be flying at us left and right,” she continued. “And we’re also going to have to batten down the hatches and make sure that we’re protecting people.” Progressive revenue would allow us to be more resilient if the Trump administration targets us for progressive policies, she says, “and, of course, we’re all worried about impacts on immigrant communities, on the LGBTQ community. So it’s inevitable that some of the things that we do are going to be reactive, trying to make sure that things don’t move backward.”

But if elected, she refuses to stay on the defensive for three years. Even under Trump, she says, “we can have vision.” One such vision is a project she’s been building a coalition around for two years already—a model to support local journalism, similar to our democracy voucher program. It would establish a public funding stream for local news outlets, allowing individual residents to allocate that money to their preferred outlet. “We basically are living in a time when there’s no sustainable financial model for much of the journalism industry,” she says. “Here in Seattle, we’re poised to not just defend and react, but to do something creative and forward-looking…I think this is a model that really has potential to strengthen our local news ecosystem, expand accountability reporting, so that we have more eyes on City Hall. We have more eyes on the corporations that exert a lot of—often unaccountable—power in our city.”

“I think that we can be both,” she says. “We can both focus on the basics and focus on defense, and we can think about how we can move forward and do visionary things. I mean, we’re the city that did the $15 an hour minimum wage—the first big city in the country. So I think we can also imagine the city that we want Seattle to be.”

In this year’s election, she’s asking voters to imagine with her—and believe that she can make it happen. “I’m a critic of City Hall, but I also know City Hall,” she says. “I’m not coming into this as a novice in how politics works and how government works and how governing works and I think that’s an important position to fill right now—in a time where the status quo is clearly not working. We need to do things differently, but also we need to do things thoughtfully and from a place of knowledge and experience.”