Is Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson Still an Urbanist?

[00:00:09] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice, the only podcast, Erica, that tells you what's really happening in Seattle politics. I'm David Hyde, welcoming in Erica C. Barnett of Publicola.com to this special emergency edition of the podcast. Hello. Wow. You sound like you're correcting me there. Like I was praising some other podcasts, but we are the only one. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Also with us, your friend and mine, political consultant Sandeep Kaushik.

[00:00:37] Hey, David. Erica, are you betraying the podcast? What have you done? You know, you go on CityCast one time and you never hear the end of it. Yeah. The enemy, just consorting with the enemy. Oh, no, no, no. Go on whatever that podcast is every week. So I want to start off by just saying there have been a lot of questionable calls this week. World Cup game here in Seattle, foul called against Senegal that basically left them out of the tournament.

[00:01:06] Another questionable call against the U.S.'s star striker. And that means the U.S. is not going to have him for their next match coming to Seattle this coming Monday. And speaking of questionable calls, that mandatory housing authority holiday that we've been talking about intended to spur more development and density may not happen. More on that in just a minute. But first, big, big news, right, Erica, about the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, the KCRH.

[00:01:34] This is for folks who haven't been paying attention for the last several years. The entity created to coordinate a regional approach to homelessness. It's been struggling to deliver and even do basic accounting. So this week, Erica, some major changes were announced by the city and the county, right? Yeah. The city and county announced this week that they are going to be pulling back all the contracts that were previously at the city and county.

[00:02:02] They're going to take them back over. And these are the contracts that are with homeless service providers, the sort of nonprofit homelessness system in the region. And so that means that around $160 million worth of contracts are going to be split up between the city and county. So this is the main thing that the KCRHA does, far from being the regional approach to homelessness and coordinating the system, which was the plan originally.

[00:02:32] It really is mostly an administrative body that administers these contracts. And, you know, as we've discussed a bunch, there is a really bad forensic audit that found there are all kinds of problems, including $8 million they can't, could not, and still at this point can't account for. And all kinds of, you know, finance problems, budgeting problems, accounting errors, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, this is, I would say, the beginning of the end for KCRHA.

[00:03:00] They're keeping a few things that they kind of legally need to keep for now, like the point in time count and federal funding. But I think this is a big step in the direction of disbanding it and replacing it with something else. Or, you know, we can talk about this too, maybe having it just be sort of a rump that administers federal contracts like All Home used to do.

[00:03:24] According to Erica's reporting, Sandeep, Mayor Katie Wilson and Gurman Zahile at the county both said moving all the homeless contracts back to the city and the county does not mean KCRHA is, quote, a failure as an agency. Yeah. Yeah, I would put that in the category of total bullshit. Like this sort of extends beyond just normal spin into the realm of sort of super spin.

[00:03:50] I mean, they're obviously trying to put a better face on a stark reality. I think Erica's absolutely right. I mean, what it really – I mean, they're basically – I tweeted this out on the morning that we heard that they were going to make this announcement at this point that they're propping up a corpse, right? You know, it's Weekend at Bernie's or whatever that movie was.

[00:04:14] To be fair to them, there are some very good reasons for them to do the dissolution of KCRHA in this sort of piecemeal and incremental fashion.

[00:04:25] Particularly, as Erica mentioned, maintaining the federal contracts at KCRHA as they're doing right now has been deemed to be really important because all of this federal HUD money is already at risk and under threat because of changes made by the Trump administration related to how much housing first programming they want to fund.

[00:04:50] There was just, as we talked about in a previous episode, this alarming situation in Los Angeles where the Trump administration pulled back all the federal money to the Los Angeles agencies. That's the equivalent of KCRHA again because citing questions of incompetence and mismanagement and et cetera.

[00:05:11] So I think the perception has been that if they just kind of stuck a fork entirely in KCRHA right now, that that federal money might well go away. It's about $60 million I think. So it's not chump change. So it makes sense for them to maintain KCRHA and at least this kind of federal and state funding piece of it if that gives us a better chance of preserving that money. But we're clearly in a wind-down situation here.

[00:05:40] I mean I don't think that there's like – and to claim that KCRHA wasn't a failure or something, you know, it's just – I mean again, that's just total bullshit. Erica, you're right. You had all this stuff in your story about this as an effort to try to make the region more competitive when it comes to federal grants. Yeah. I mean I think that the – that's a little bit of wishful thinking in the sense that like – I mean A, the federal government is not unaware of Seattle.

[00:06:08] And I don't think that they're unaware of the problems that have been happening here. You know, I mean even in the notice of funding opportunity that they put out, which is basically, you know, their request for bids for this money. It's about $4 billion nationwide. You know, they mentioned Seattle a couple times as this like abject failure of housing-first policies, blah, blah, blah.

[00:06:32] So, you know, I mean the idea that we're going to somehow escape their notice and this audit has escaped their notice is I think quite fanciful. I saw that some of the reporting was like, yeah, we got to hold on to the $67 million in funding that we get. But, I mean, even if Seattle gets a significant amount of funding through this latest federal process, which I think is a huge if, it's going to be completely different organizations.

[00:06:59] And if not organizations, at least, you know, types of programs because the federal funding – I mean, and I've written about this quite a bit as well. It's, you know, it's very much geared toward abstinence-only programs towards transitional housing rather than permanent supportive housing. So, I mean, there's a lawsuit going on right now that could potentially change some of that. But, you know, I mean, we're not going to be competitive for that funding anyway.

[00:07:27] But, of course, you can't just sort of decide midstream or it's not a good idea to decide midstream that you're going to designate a different continuum of care, which is what this technically would be if they moved it somewhere else. There's no entity to do that right now. So, it makes sense. I don't really understand why – one of the things that KCRJ is keeping is the severe weather contracts or the severe weather shelters, rather. And I don't really know why that's happening.

[00:07:54] I've heard mixed things about their administration of those shelters. The city used to do it. So, I don't know what's up with that. On the question of whether it's a failure, I thought this was really interesting that, you know, as you mentioned, David, both the mayor and county executives said it wasn't.

[00:08:11] You know who said it was is CEO Kelly Kennison of KCRHA, who runs the organization and has been really, I think, kind of insisting that things are fine and under control. But reporters asked her, you know, do you think this agency is a failure? And she said, yes, as it's been constituted, it did fail. So, that was an interesting comment from her.

[00:08:36] So, for folks who haven't been tracking the story as closely as the two of you, how did we get here? Well, yeah. The failures were both structural and cultural, right? And there's been a lot of attention paid to the structural deficiencies of KCRHA as it was initially constituted. It had this absurdly Byzantine and bifurcated government structure with two boards. They had two boards. That wasn't that big a deal. Like, I don't think that contributed that much.

[00:09:06] Well, it was a pretty big deal because they didn't really under, you know, there was not clarity about who ran one. You didn't like the lived experience aspect of it, Sandeep. I mean, that's what you've criticized. I don't think the boards were Byzantine. There were two of them. Well, the reason there were two of them was because it wasn't just me that didn't trust the lived experience part of it. It was the elected officials at the city and county who forced the second board where they got to have a say in it.

[00:09:33] But again, but the whole original premise was that we were going to have experts decide homelessness policy regionally through this expert board that then turned into this kind of lived experience dominated board. The elected officials across the county balked at it, so they created this second board that then, like, overrode the other board. You know, I mean, so anyway, leave aside the board and governing structure.

[00:09:57] It also, as we've talked about, did not have its own independent sorts of funding, was entirely dependent on city and county money, which very naturally gave city and county elected officials the feeling that they should have some say in how their dollars got spent. Right. And then they created all sorts of conflicts when KCRHA said, we don't like tiny homes. And City of Seattle council members said, we want tiny homes like that became a big issue. Right. Among one among many.

[00:10:24] We don't like encampment sweeps, the head of KCRHA say. Well, you know, the mayor in Seattle wanted KCRHA to be involved in encampment sweeps. Right. And those were the sorts of conflicts that got created about the lack of independence and funding structure. So anyway, a bunch of structural problems, but they also had a cultural problem. Like, they really did in their initial formulation go super, I'm just going to say, wokeety-woke on how they were going to run themselves. And it blew up in their faces. And again, this lived experience.

[00:10:53] I'd love to respond to any of these ten points. The lived experience thing was just one, the most glaring manifestation of that. Let me ask Erica then to respond just to this claim you're making about this kind of anti-intellectual mistrust of expertise or whatever it is in favor of lived experience. How much did that play a role? And then more generally, you know, how did we get here? Well, I mean, I think that Sadeep is correct that the like the way it was structured. I mean, the two boards was they were there from the beginning.

[00:11:22] It wasn't like they, you know, did, you know, an about face and decided that they needed more power for elected officials. But, you know, I mean, I think that lived experience was definitely prioritized. I think part of the issue initially when Mark Doans, the former CEO, was in charge is that there was just sort of not an acknowledgement. Well, first of all, there was a group called the Lived Experience Coalition that was written into a lot of the documents.

[00:11:51] So it was as if they were saying this one organization, you know, like let's say it was DESC on the, you know, on the provider side. It was like saying DESC will get priority for determining homelessness policy, except it was a lived experience coalition. That's a problem. You should not do that with your homelessness agency, you know, giving priority to one particular organization with a particular point of view. I don't, I have a different take on this.

[00:12:20] Hadeep does on this elected officials naturally wanted to have some control. I mean, yeah, the KCRHA was set up in large part to divert any sort of responsibility from elected officials. You know, you have this other entity that is the separate, you know, sort of quasi-governmental agency that you can say, well, they're the ones doing it.

[00:12:44] And I think that was always part of it for setting up, part of the reason for setting up the KCRHA for, you know, Jenny Durkin, for, yeah, county officials, Dow Constantine. So then when they realized that it was like being dictated, you know, policy priorities, you know, not spending, but the sort of priorities they were setting out were being dictated by people with lived experience of homelessness. Yeah, they did balk. And they said, we want power and we want control.

[00:13:13] And that is the problem. I mean, because when you say city, you get control over your money and county, you get control over your money and the KCRHA has no right to determine anything about policy or, you know, what works or anything like that. Then, you know, it's no different than the city and county just running it. And with elected officials, they change all the time. The governing board now, which they got rid of the implementation board that had people with lived experience on it.

[00:13:42] And now elected officials run everything and they change. And so the board changes and priorities change. And so you just have the exact same problem that you had before the KCRHA was formed. So I think that is a big reason that it failed is that, you know, it's it just was sort of a shell game where, you know, the city and county move their money over. And, you know, and they and they bear a lot of the responsibility and they're not taking it.

[00:14:08] And and so I, you know, so I think that's a big part of the story, too, that isn't really being told. But who takes responsibility? I mean, the folks that originally set it up, Sandeep's friends, they're no longer in office. Well, look, I will weigh in on this because the mayor, Katie Wilson, said at this presser that they had the other day where they announced all this stuff. She pointed out, yeah, we we created the structure where we created this entity. But the city and county still had control.

[00:14:35] But as we've said on this podcast, both Eric and I think in the past, it was actually even less accountable. Right. Because you had this new structure where supposedly it was independent. It was less directly responsive to, you know, the voters and the public.

[00:14:51] And so when Katie at this press conference said by taking back these contracts, we're actually restoring greater, you know, public accountability now because we're going to be directly once again, the city and county are going to be directly running these contracts. And therefore, we're much more, you know, responsive and accountable to the public. Right. Because we're elected officials. OK. I mean, maybe that that's right.

[00:15:18] But I don't see how that doesn't then say that. Yes, everything that happened before was, in fact, a pretty spectacular failure. The other thing I wasted five years. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:15:31] And the other thing I will say about this, that bringing it back to the present here, one of the big, you know, one of the impetus for creating RHA, one of the big factors in that was that the contracting process that was divvied up between the city and the county was very siloed. And they had different protocols and criteria for their own contracts at HST or at DCHS or the city and the county.

[00:15:58] And so the thought was we can create a more unified structure for these contracts and there would be more uniformity of what expectations were, what the procedures were going to be, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So now in there, clawing them back. As far as I can tell with this announcement, they're going right back to the old structure that was deemed five years ago to be deeply flawed and siloed.

[00:16:24] And what I'm not hearing is what are the reforms and improvements that we're going to put in place so that we don't just replicate the problems that existed pre-KCRHA. You mean on the part of the city and the county now as opposed to the continuum of care piece that KCRHA will continue to administer? Yes. Yes. I mean on the city and county contract side. Yes. Not the federal grants.

[00:16:50] Yeah. They claim that they're going to be spending the rest of the year working on, you know, a new and better way to administer those contracts. But, I mean, I agree with you, Sandeep. I think it's going to go back essentially to the way it was before. And, you know, I mean, I just think like it is, you know, as I kind of interjected there, it is just really pretty sad that we spent five years or so doing, you know, building and creating this alternative kind of system.

[00:17:18] But it never did the thing it was supposed to do, which is to create, you know, one uniform-ish, you know, with regional, sub-regional variations, you know, approach to homelessness. I don't know if that's ever, you know, going to be possible since cities all have different approaches and politics and philosophies.

[00:17:37] But, you know, two, it was just – it was supposed to have like a five-year plan that said this is what's going to work to start getting us toward net zero homelessness, meaning, you know, the same number of people are entering homelessness as are getting out of it. And, you know, they – that plan kind of never materialized. I mean they adopted a plan, but it wasn't that. And it – you know, and they just got bogged down, I think.

[00:18:04] You know, Kelly Kennison and William Toey, her deputy, talk a lot about how the problems are all in the past. They're all from Mark Dones' era. And once, you know, Kennison came in, she started fixing everything and it's all on a path to, you know, continuous improvement, blah, blah, blah. There's been bad leadership at that agency from the beginning and after Mark Dones. And, you know, Bruce Harrell was part of the problem.

[00:18:29] He, you know, installed one of his football buddies from high school in as the CEO for a while and that was a disaster for various reasons, you know, mostly HR related. And it's just they haven't really had permanent leadership. Kelly Kennison came from the federal government but, you know, I think didn't understand the sort of scene – the political scene locally.

[00:18:54] But also I just think wasn't up to the task of running this agency that's like so incredibly politicized and also very complex. I mean, you know, just as an example, she fired the – or laid off rather the general counsel for the agency, its lawyer, and its chief financial officer last October and never replaced them. And instead just hired a bunch of expensive consultants. I mean, just like bad financial decisions, bad political decisions.

[00:19:24] And it's been that way since the beginning of this agency. It is sad, but as a voter, like I just didn't like the idea of creating an unaccountable entity to be responsible for the regions or one of the region's biggest problems in the first place. Sandeep and Erica kind of reminds me of the Washington State Convention Center where the head of that board is like a hotel industry consultant. He wasn't elected. Who knows even who this guy is?

[00:19:50] And he's responsible for, you know, spending or misspending lots and lots and lots of money as the head of that board. So, you know, it's a similar problem. I just don't like these kinds of unelected folks running things. I think a better comparison even would be the Sound Transit Board. I mean all these folks to be clear are – I was about to speak the same – Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. All of these folks on both the Sound Transit Board and the governing board pretty much are elected officials.

[00:20:17] But, you know, we can't vote out the Sound Transit Board except by voting out the elected officials that are on the board. And, you know, nobody is a single-issue voter to that extent. So, yeah, I mean it's pretty unaccountable. Hey, Seattle nice listeners. Seattle politics got you low. Well, get high with Uncle Ikes. Pissed at the mayor?

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[00:21:19] Right. You know who else didn't like the accountability structure too? And this was a part of the structural problems from the get-go is the suburbs, right? None of the suburban cities initially bought into KCRHA. None of them funded it. They eventually got like some incredibly minuscule token payment from a handful of the northern suburban cities. It was like $250,000. It was some kind of like symbolic thing. But basically the suburbs said, fuck you. No.

[00:21:50] Like we don't want to – I mean they basically were deeply suspicious from the get-go. And Mark Doans probably did not help in this front where they saw KCRHA as essentially the Seattleization of the regional homelessness response. And they didn't trust Seattle or didn't like its homelessness policies. And therefore they were not on board, right? And so again – and they sat on some of these governing boards.

[00:22:15] You add like the mayor of Auburn like on the elected officials board and stuff. But they were never really bought in and they were really on that board to like keep it from actually doing anything that they didn't want it to do, right? And so it was fucked from the get-go. I mean in my opinion. And the only person who voted against it? Lorena Gonzalez. Yeah. Give her credit. She gets credit on that one.

[00:22:42] She was a city council member who lost to Bruce Harrell in the mayoral election in 2021 for those who weren't around then. That's true. Lorena gets a gold star for that vote. Good on you, Lorena. She was right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's switch gears now and talk about the MHA. It's the Mandatory Housing Affordability Program that was set up to try to create more affordable housing.

[00:23:12] It hasn't been working always as intended. And so there was an effort to try to create – it's a weird name, a holiday for this program. And now that holiday is being called into question or is going to die. Where are we, Erica? See, Barnett. Yeah. So just to explain the program very briefly, it's essentially – the principle is that development should pay for affordable housing.

[00:23:40] So when developers build, they have to pay into this fund. They have to either build affordable housing on site, but most of them pay into a fund that builds affordable housing elsewhere. So it's kind of a fee or penalty, however you choose to look at it, for building housing. This is – for building market rate housing. And so – Though one quick point just on that, and at the time it got put into place, the bargain was that they would get greater height, right?

[00:24:07] Like the developers got to build bigger, but they had to pay into a fund. Right. So this program worked really well when it was first introduced, when housing development was cheaper than it is now and also just when we were in a housing boom. And so the city got a lot of money for affordable housing and developers paid a fee that they could afford. Development has gotten a lot more expensive, particularly since the pandemic.

[00:24:35] And, you know, and so we've also seen kind of a fall-off in housing. And in the last couple of years, it's been really dramatic. And right now I think there's only like 1,100 units citywide that are in the housing pipeline. So housing development has fallen, which has made these – the revenue from these fees collapse. And so the city doesn't really get very much money from them anymore.

[00:24:59] And what the developers were proposing was essentially – and there's a group called the Housing Roundtable. They were proposing a holiday, meaning they would get a big break on this tax for a few years and then come back and maybe have an alternative or revamp the program, which hasn't been changed at all since it was first passed under Ed Murray's administration. So that was in the works.

[00:25:25] The Housing Development Consortium, which represents affordable housing developers, had come to a deal with the private market developers and it was all moving forward. They were going to introduce it, I've been told, on Monday. But it fell apart over the last couple of days.

[00:25:41] And there was a letter yesterday, as we're recording this on Friday, that from the Housing Development Consortium's director saying that they were no longer supporting the deal and that the mayor, Katie Wilson, has agreed to pull it and replace it with a stakeholdering process, which is code for let it die.

[00:26:03] And developers say that this is going to lead to a lot of folks pulling out, pulling their development applications and a further collapse in housing production in Seattle. Yeah. I mean it's interesting to unpack what's been going on here behind closed doors. I've been kind of tracking the negotiations on this pretty closely.

[00:26:25] And what's really happened here is over the last couple, three months as this behind closed doors negotiation was going on at City Hall to get this holiday and where they really had the broad outlines of an agreement in place. And it was going to be a two-year holiday of 80 percent of the fees. Right. The mayor was on board with that.

[00:26:46] And the reason they said it at that level was they thought that that would spur enough new housing construction, as many as 30 or more projects that were currently hanging on the brink and not moving forward. The developers were saying these multifamily housing projects are now going to go forward. And even at 20 percent, that new construction is going to generate all these fees that wouldn't have happened before.

[00:27:11] And you'll actually keep the affordable housing side funding side of this, you know, at par. Right. You're not going to actually lose any affordable housing money by giving this 80 percent holiday because all of this new construction will happen. And it's now not going to happen, presumably. So so that was the deal that was in place.

[00:27:30] But what's happened over the last couple of months is a fight erupted within Seattle's left between the old guard left, which is a very focused on things like anti displacement is rooted basically in anti capitalist ideas and which is very suspicious of private sector development. Sees it as essentially an engine of gentrification and displacement and not helpful to poor and minority communities.

[00:27:58] And they began to weigh in saying they did not like this deal at all, whereas the other kind of newer, maybe younger urbanists left. Right. Of which Erica, I think, is it would affiliate herself has been saying, no, that's just terrible. That's the wrong way to think about housing policy. We should be building a lot more housing. It's a basic supply and demand problem. We should be harnessing the market to build a shit ton of housing. That's the way we're going to lower housing costs and deal with our housing crisis.

[00:28:26] That's the fight that was happening behind the scenes. And apparently the mayor has now sided with the anti displacement. And really, I would say anti private housing development left on this. So I don't know that the left was in the room behind the scenes in the way that you're sort of describing it. I mean, I think that the battle was between the housing development consortium in part.

[00:28:53] And then there are some state legislators who are, you know, on the left, some Seattle area state legislators who were weighing in, as well as some development groups in the CID, the Chinatown International District. And so I don't think that like the movement left was like sitting in at the negotiating table.

[00:29:13] I think it was private developers in large part versus nonprofit developers and state legislators that as you to your point, Sandy, do have a different ideology and do have a different belief about what what spurs affordable housing and whether private development needs any kind of assistance right now when it's not when they're not actually building any housing.

[00:29:36] I mean, the idea for the folks on the more traditional anti displacement side of this debate is that, you know, developers need to pay something for for building housing. That is what they would call, quote unquote, luxury housing, meaning it's new, basically. And the idea on the more pro housing side, which you're right.

[00:30:03] I mean, that's obviously what I would identify with more is, you know, any percent of no housing is still zero dollars. So, I mean, they can say, oh, it's unfair that you're going to get a holiday from the fees. But if there's no fees because there's no housing, it doesn't really benefit them in any way. It doesn't benefit affordable housing for the private market to not be building anything. So I just and there's there are advantages to building private market housing.

[00:30:30] I mean, if you look at the housing boom that happened over the last several years before this latest collapse, I mean, rents actually did stabilize instead of just going up, up, up, up, up for a little while. And I think they're going to start going up, up, up, up again, because, you know, when you're not building and people are moving here, there's more demand than supply. And, you know, we we we know very well what happens. Yeah. And look, I look at a city like Austin. Right. They build a shit ton of housing in the last few years and their rents went down. Right.

[00:30:57] I mean, you know, basic sort of supply and demand question. And the pipeline has run dry in Seattle for building new housing. And rather than jumpstarting the process, as these development community folks were suggesting they could do. And again, they're saying there would be no law to Erica, to your point, there would be no loss of actual MHA affordable housing money from this. They say even at the 20 percent rate, by cutting the tax, these 30 plus projects will go forward and generate fees.

[00:31:26] Right. To more than make up for, you know, the holiday itself, the reduction in the in the rate itself. And so I don't know why we aren't doing that. Right. I mean, I mean, we should just get rid of MHA.

[00:31:41] I mean, in my opinion, like it is this idea that we need to to charge a fee or penalize developers because they're like a uniquely greedy and bad kind of business as opposed to all other profit driven businesses in, you know, on the planet. They're bad. Development is bad. Let's charge money for it because it's bad.

[00:32:02] You know, I just I think there are other better ways to fund affordable housing than than to to say, oh, private market development is luxury housing and therefore evil. I mean, we all live in housing. People who own houses live in things built by developers. So, you know, I just like look, capitalism is the system we have. It's bad. It sucks in a lot of ways.

[00:32:29] But it's it's also true that, you know, developers are just as greedy and no more so than any other private business. So I don't know. Our philosophy. I mean, it's the same thing as development fees. It's the same thing is I mean, it's just, you know, we we're penalizing tax things that we don't want more of. And I think we do want more housing.

[00:32:53] And so penalizing and taxing it is probably not the most productive way to go about getting more of it. Another nauseating instance of rare agreement for all of us. I think I'm even more pro-capitalist than I am. I know, I know, I know, I know. Yeah. Sandeep, you know, the mayor is playing a role here. What are we learning about her leadership in this instance, do you think? Well, yeah, she's playing a central role here.

[00:33:22] She's the decider really about and she's the one who's just decided not to transmit this legislation. As Erica said, it was supposed to get transmitted this coming week to the council. And the developers, to be clear, the pro-private sector development community have been saying there's a real sense of urgency here because a lot of these projects are kind of hanging by a thread.

[00:33:44] Instead, if they don't see some movement where the cost structure for these projects changes in a favorable way really quickly, the capital that was devoted to funding those projects is going to flow elsewhere to other cities and other places where, you know, this is private sector money. They're going to look for returns on that money. And if they don't can't get it in Seattle, they'll take it to other places. And and that and it's that's on the verge of happening. And so they've been saying we've got to move on this. If you're going to do this holiday, you can't dick around, do the holiday.

[00:34:14] So these projects that are already in process actually happen rather than falling apart. And that now seems to, you know, it seems to fall apart. And it's falling apart because the mayor has decided to Erica, as I said, to back off transmitting this legislation. And I will just go back to it was in I think it was in late November, beginning of December last year, right after the mayor had won the election. She was mayor elect and she came on Seattle Nice.

[00:34:43] And we asked her, you're the socialist mayor of Seattle, but are you also the urbanist mayor? And she made a very strong statement to us. I am. Yes, I am the urbanist mayor of Seattle. And I think this this backroom negotiation and debate that started happening was a test case for her of are you really the urbanist mayor?

[00:35:06] Are you going to go forward with an urbanist policy, even though there are certain elements of your base on the left that are not, you know, that are arguing you shouldn't do this. And it's a giveaway to private developers or what have you. And she blinked, you know, and I think it's hard for her to sustain the case that she's still the urbanist mayor if she won't do something this basic. This reminds me of a conversation we had last week about who Katie Wilson is.

[00:35:32] Isn't it possible that she is a pro social housing, anti-capitalist urbanist here? So she's somebody who is siding with the anti-growth left in this instance. I get that it seems contradictory as somebody who in theory supports like smart growth and development and everything else. But maybe this is just kind of how she's emerging, whether you all like it or not. What do you think, Erica? I mean, no, I think she's being inconsistent.

[00:36:02] You know, I think she, you know, after we interviewed her earlier this year, she came out with this, you know, taller, faster, bigger, denser. I can never remember the exact three words, but I mean, she said, you know, we need to spur development in the city and came out with this proposal and, you know, and said, I'm the urbanist mayor. I want more housing. I want more development. I want it taller. I want it faster. I want it denser. And of course, you know, part of that is a comprehensive plan that's now stalled.

[00:36:31] But but she was pretty clear on that point. I think what we've seen on a lot of issues with this mayor, I mean, not just, you know, this housing issue is that she has taken positions that are not in step with what she campaigned on, whether you're talking about whether we're talking about surveillance with the cameras that are turned on right now for the World Cup, whether you're talking about, you know, the fact that she considered reopening the just cause eviction ordinance to take away some tenant protections that are in that ordinance.

[00:37:01] Which her predecessor, Bruce Harrell, didn't do. I mean, that that ordinance has not been reopened in a very, very long time. And, you know, and I think that's super out of keeping with what she campaigned on, which is, you know, renters rights. And and so I think this is another example of the mayor taking positions that are not in line with what she campaigned on or at least what people believe she was that she was campaigning on and what she represented. So I don't know.

[00:37:30] I mean, I don't I don't think that this is like, you know, galaxy brain, anti-capitalist social housing thinking. I just think that she was convinced in this case that she has been in other cases to kind of moderate her positions. And I think in this case, it's it's you know, it's a bad thing. And I think we'll find that out when we see development fall off even more than it already has.

[00:37:53] But it's just it's just one decision where she's acting more anti-capitalist light here in her brand of urbanism, where you could have a faster, bigger, denser ideology. And then in this case, maybe make a bad decision. But I don't necessarily read it as inconsistent. It seems like, you know, she's she's playing she's trying to take a position that appeals to some of her allies on the left, essentially. Not Erica, not Sandeep. But anyway, what do you think?

[00:38:22] Yeah, well, I can give you another recent decision she made that also fits in that that that magnifies this. And so, as we all know, and I'm directly involved in this, I should say, because I work for the I consult for the public stadium authorities. Right. But there was another debate around housing that we've been having for a long time here in Seattle is whether to do some threshold level of housing in the immediate vicinity of the stadiums.

[00:38:48] Right. And there was not to rehash the whole convoluted political battles that happened around that. But very recently, as part of the comp plan, the mayor's office and the and the executive side proposed what I would say is really extraordinary language in the sub area plan for that area.

[00:39:08] That not only says we're not going to build housing in the vicinity of the stadium district now, but but sought to, like, write this ironclad language that said we will never be able to reopen this and build housing down there. And that's why, again, not to rehash this, but my folks are have filed an appeal of that language. And that's holding up the comp plan right now. But we felt like we had to do that because there was not a willingness to even compromise on that language.

[00:39:37] In that case, it was a sop, I would say, to the port and the longshore union, which were demanding. That's ironclad language. And rather than go with the pro housing side, they went with the port and the longshoremen on it. So that's another example of a high profile, relatively high profile issue around are we going to build the housing or not build the housing? And they've said we're not going to build the housing. Yeah.

[00:40:04] And I think you can't build taller, faster, denser in a way that is anti development. I mean, development. I mean, it just it doesn't make sense to take an anti development position and then say that you are in favor of more development. I mean, it is a contradiction. Now, maybe this is one specific example where, you know, the mayor just felt that the anti displacement arguments were more convincing. But, you know, I don't know.

[00:40:33] I mean, I think that the housing development consortium, this group that sent out the letter, they have a perplexing amount of sort of influence and authority right now.

[00:40:46] And particularly with this mayor, I mean, they're the ones that almost convinced her to get rid of or reduce the threshold for tenants to be evicted with three days notice and get rid of the law that allows people to have roommates that without signing a whole new lease. And and now appear to have convinced her similarly on this, you know, on this MHA stuff.

[00:41:12] So I don't entirely understand why they have so much sway there. You know, they're an advocacy group like many. But maybe somebody, maybe you have some insight. I don't know. But but they just seem like inexplicably super powerful in this administration. Well, they're the voice of the they're seen at City Hall as the definitive voice of the affordable housing community. Right. And and they they are a consortium. They are a big coalition.

[00:41:39] And part of the frustrating problem that HTC and people have been complaining about HTC on this stuff all the time is that in these complicated negotiations on housing policy, they often switch as they just did or move the goalposts in the negotiations. Because HTC itself is internally riven with conflicts. Right. And you'll have a bunch of people within HTC.

[00:42:04] You know, the people at Lehigh are saying we've got to fix these tenant laws because we can't get any rent out of our tenants anymore. And we're having to sell off our projects. And other people are like more, you know, kind of the more traditional lefty types or, you know, the the Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless. You know, those folks are like, oh, no, no, no, no, you can't change the rental laws. And so HTC becomes this kind of schizophrenic zigzagging all over the map kind of organization, which is kind of what happened in these negotiations around MHA.

[00:42:33] And it's deeply frustrating to people. Erica, you're right that they are seen as like indispensable to these deals. But they themselves have a seem to have a very hard time coalescing around a position and then sticking to it. Right. And that just makes it much, much harder to get anything done. Yeah. Yeah. It's yeah, it's it's it's frustrating.

[00:42:58] I mean, it's as frustrating as, you know, I don't know, Uber and Lyft having so much power to determine policy under the last administration. Just to name a completely random example that would be news to them. Let me just put it to you this way. I'm no longer consulting for Lyft, but the last I've lived at any juice at City Hall is ancient, ancient memory. But yes. OK. I just want to needle you a little bit.

[00:43:27] Don't we have the highest Uber prices in the entire world, basically, in Seattle right now? Yeah. It's cheaper to fucking like drive your car to the airport and park it, you know, at Doug Fox or whatever than it is to take an Uber there and back. We're just doing what we did in 1991 again. But it's much higher here than anywhere else in the world. Yes. There's a reason for that. And it's a sign that they do not have any juice into the hall. Fair point. Fair point. Well, I don't know.

[00:43:54] Anyway, I tried to make the best case for Katie Wilson, but I think I'm equally sort of mystified and disappointed by this. MHA, you know, as I said in the first time we talked about this recently, I think the idea in the beginning was questionable in a lot of ways, to be honest. If you want more development, you shouldn't tax it. I mean, it's just kind of a dumb idea to begin with, Sandeep. I'm sorry you're such a lefty compared to me on this one.

[00:44:18] But I was skeptical that it wouldn't end up fucking up the housing market, which is what ended up happening, is all I'll say. So, like, as usual, like, you know, there we go. When you and I have debates, like, I always end up being right. Yeah. Okay. Well, and, you know, the frustrating thing about this is that what we're not talking about, maybe we should get rid of MHA, maybe not, right? I mean, that's a bigger argument to be had. That's not even what we're talking about here.

[00:44:44] We're talking about a temporary two-year partial pause on these fees where the developers have made a series of big commitments publicly. All these projects are going to go forward. You're not going to lose any affordable housing money by giving us a solid. You'll get the same amount of affordable – and why don't you put that to the test, okay, private sector developers? Well, either you're a capitalist reformer who actually wants our system to work for people, including and especially poor people, or you're a revolutionary like Shama Salant.

[00:45:14] I really don't see what this kind of mushy anti-capitalist left is arguing in this instance at all. Like, what's it going to lead to? What's the positive result? I just don't get it. But – I don't think it's really anti-capitalist. I think it's anti-developer. I think that people just think developers are uniquely evil in the world of capitalism. And so when they – even if they are fine with other aspects of capitalism, they are not fine with developers, which I find bizarre. Well, agreement there. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice.

[00:45:43] One thing that we should mention is that we've been wanting to do more video, right, folks? And to do that, our expenses are actually going up a lot. They go up by – I think it's two and a half times our current rate to try to get to video or more. And so to sustain that, we put out one video recently. We want to be putting out more. But we are hoping that folks will hear the clarion call because Seattle is not dying.

[00:46:11] But apparently audio listening to podcasts is dying, right, Erica? Everyone is doing video. It's mystifying to me because I'm not really a YouTube watcher. People like both. I don't really understand. I don't have the patience to actually like look at a video while I am listening to people talking. But that's my ADHD error. I listen while I'm doing other shit. It's like I'm doing the dishes. I'm cooking. I'm listening to a podcast. That's the whole point. I don't want to be looking at YouTube. You do want to see our beautiful faces. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. No.

[00:46:40] I'm all over TikTok, man. No, I'm kidding. I'm an old man too. But yes, video is the future. So that's what Mark Zuckerberg told us. This is our long-winded way of saying that you should give us money on Patreon. I think that David is going to be doing it. Please go to patreon.com slash Seattle Nice if you want this podcast to be strong and continue, really, because we can't compete with all these other podcasts that are going all video without your support.

[00:47:09] We appreciate everybody who is supporting this podcast. We're getting about one in ten listeners are actually supporting this podcast, which is amazing. That's similar to what public radio does. And so it kind of makes sense, I think, because this really is a public service podcast. And if it's important to you – and the alternative is we stop making it as free as it is. And every other podcast is paywalled, which is what a lot of people do. We don't want to do that. Erica especially doesn't want to do that. But we're going to have to start paywalling more podcasts. I'm anti-capitalist. If folks can't step up.

[00:47:39] Yeah, exactly. So thank you for support. She's Eric-Esteen Barnett. I'm David Hyde. He's Sandeep Kashuk. And thanks, everybody, so much for listening.