Mayoral “Gaffes,” Tiny Houses, Massive Drama

[00:00:09] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice, the only podcast that tells you what's really happening in Seattle politics. I'm David Hyde with Erica C. Barnett of Publicola.com and political consultant Sandeep Kaushik. All right, Erica, we're getting into the social media slime this week. Some pundits have been criticizing Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson for what they're calling gaffes. You've been following this. What are your thoughts?

[00:00:33] Some being Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times, the most inexplicably influential man in Seattle who, you know, gets quoted and cited all the time, including by the host of this podcast, is complaining that basically that, you know, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is refusing to play the game on one hand and that she said something, you know, offhand that was a little dumb, perhaps.

[00:01:03] On the other. So the second one first, she kind of at a Seattle University event a couple weeks ago that Danny says is ricocheting around the world. Took a while for the outrage machine to find it, but they did. She said something dismissive about millionaires leaving the city because of, you know, because of taxes and socialism and whatever.

[00:01:24] The second thing was she has been on a couple of occasions has declined to answer questions that TV news reporters throw at her after press conferences. And we can get into the specifics of one. I know we're going to talk about, but basically, you know, this column in the Seattle Times today, Saturday, as we're recording is about how horrible it is that she isn't playing the game with these press people.

[00:01:52] And, you know, I mean, I think there's a lot of things to get into here. But the one that I will just focus on really quick is I think this is like the biggest example of a double standard that we've seen so far. Bruce Harrell also was quite unpleasant to reporters, and I would say in some cases much more so.

[00:02:14] He once pretended that I was invisible while I stood right in front of him and on election night and, you know, and he would get really mad and say things all the time like, how dare you ask that question? They'd get covered by reporters, but the pundit class didn't care. And and so I think there's just a huge double standard here because people are freaked out that we have a socialist mayor who isn't a seasoned politician who can spout pablum all the time.

[00:02:38] All right, Sandeep, a lot to unpack here. How concerned are you? How concerned should Seattleites be about these so-called gaffes by Mayor Katie Wilson? My interpretation of this is probably unsurprisingly somewhat different than Erica's of what's going on. The first thing I will say is we've got this Danny Westny column about the mayor's alleged pattern of gaffes, right?

[00:03:08] So, yes, it's the it's the sort of dismissive comment about about wealthy people leaving at the Seattle U thing. But it's also the thing she did right after she got elected, where she went to the rally workers rally about of Starbucks workers and sort of, you know, urge people not to drink Starbucks coffee.

[00:03:31] And then I think there's a real question there about how much and whether that fed into the subsequent announcements we've had from Starbucks that they're opening a new headquarters in Nashville and they're going to have 2000 jobs over there. And there's been a lot of coverage and a lot of conversation among insiders about that and what it means. And there's I think another one that Danny cited that I'm spacing on the off the top of my head.

[00:03:58] And so so my I guess my my baseline take is when you add this up with some of the other stuff we've been seeing on social media and some of the reaction from the other reporters, TV reporters that Erica mentioned, it feels like the honeymoon period for the newish, as you say, David Mayer is is coming to a close.

[00:04:22] Erica, I don't know about other media, but certainly on this podcast, we've talked a lot about former Mayor Bruce Harrell's style and his tone. We've talked about former city council president Sarah Nelson's style and her tone. So at least on Seattle Nice, those topics have not been off limits. I think it is a very different thing for us to talk about on this, you know, very sort of policy informed podcast about, you know, sometimes get into Bruce Harrell's demeanor than for, you know, the national outrage machine.

[00:04:51] You know, as reflected on X, Sandeep's favorite website, going crazy about it because Katie Wilson won't answer a question from Chris Daniels Como. I mean, it's just a matter of, you know, an order of magnitude, bigger, you know, outrage cycle. And like, and I think a lot of it is very similar to, you know, with Momdani. People just really want a story about this crazy socialist mayor.

[00:05:15] And when she fails to sort of be like, you know, psychotic or, you know, when she fails to like, I don't outlaw cars and, you know, impose a 50% tax on everybody making over $100,000. I mean, you got to find something to be outraged about. And so here we are reacting to the outrage cycle. I think that, you know, if you want to talk about Bruce Harrell, we can.

[00:05:37] I mean, again, I think his demeanor was, you know, very pleasant to these reporters who are now mad at being sort of not in the inner circle anymore. They've been there for many, many years as we've had centrist mayor after centrist mayor. Now we have a progressive and it's a whole different story. And suddenly it's, you know, this international news that she said this thing to some students at Seattle University that somebody picked up on weeks later. I just think it's, I don't know. I think it's a fake outrage cycle of bullshit.

[00:06:07] We need to untangle. There's like three or four different things that are sort of feeding what Erica is calling the outrage machine now and what I would call a kind of vibe shift that's going on. Right. One of them is what you just said, her kind of blow up over Chris Daniels and the Como thing is all over. And the last question would be related to that, that, you know, I talked to people in that neighborhood who said that. Hold on. It's just one last question.

[00:06:34] People in that community who are concerned that there's been rising gun violence and that there should be more surveillance cameras and that kind of thing. That's obviously been an issue that you weighed in on. Does that change it? Does that does that change your perspective at all? Let's keep it on. Let's keep it on. Yeah, let's keep it on. Does that change your perspective at all on the issue of surveillance cameras based on what you went through on Tuesday? So we. Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate it, but let's keep it on topic. OK, she's about to answer the question, though.

[00:07:04] I mean, it looks worse when you jump in like that. But you're saying I saw something retweeted. I just I I'm not on Twitter and I would recommend everybody get off of it because it gives you a real reality check on life and what people are actually talking about in the real world. Yeah. Well, blue sky is reality, I guess. Right. I don't go around saying, Sandeep. Oh, my God, there's outrage rage on blue sky. It means the whole world is mad about it. You say that about Twitter.

[00:07:30] No, what I will say is that, first of all, there's several different things that have happened here that we should, again, kind of untangle. One is that there was this big announcement from Starbucks recently that they are, again, moving, you know, creating that Nashville and Tennessee is rolling out this red carpet and they're starting what right now they're saying is kind of a second headquarters or second base of operations there with 2000 jobs.

[00:07:59] But which a lot of people are speculating is the beginning of the end of Starbucks is presence in Seattle. And lots of news has come out that as soon as that incident happened with Katie speaking at the rally and saying people shouldn't drink their coffee, they started looking at renting a big office tower in Bellevue, weren't able to do that, and then started the conversation with Tennessee. Right. So there's a question about. Do you really think that's true, Sandeep? You're asserting that.

[00:08:28] Do you think that there is any chance at Starbucks, this, you know, multi-zillion dollar corporation saw Katie speak at a rally confirming everything she said on the campaign trail, that she is pro-labor and pro-worker and believes in living wages? You think that's what did it? I do. And I do because I actually talked to some people at Starbucks who would be in a position to know that. But to your point about this, and it's a fair thing.

[00:08:55] I don't know who your anonymous sources are at Starbucks, so I can't evaluate the veracity of that. But that's not how companies tend to make decisions. No, but it is kind of. That's where I think people get this wrong. Like, I think that was the trigger. But it was the trigger. It was the sort of precipitating trigger after a long line of other stuff that has lots of folks in the business community in Washington state on edge. Right.

[00:09:24] Stuff that has nothing to do, mostly has nothing to do with Katie Wilson, but that were the precursors to then this happened and it became a kind of tipping point moment for them. But and that's like there I talk to people in the business community.

[00:09:39] There is a lot of upset about, I would say, the really deeply troubled relationship that has emerged between progressive elected officials, many of them in Olympia and business leaders and the business community in the state. And then it's exacerbated by the fact that, you know, business is kind of reeling right now in Seattle. Right. We're not building new buildings.

[00:10:08] Landlords are, you know, having trouble, like kind of, you know, make against me. Commercial, you know, vacancies are really high. Tariffs are disrupting trade. You're making a lot of points. What does that have to do with what does that have to do with Katie Wilson being at a Starbucks rally? What I'm saying is there's a legitimate question about was that a gaffe on Katie's part? Like, did that was that a fuck up? Did she fuck up? I do that. Do we care about gaffes that much? I mean, that's this is the thing.

[00:10:33] Like, so going back to Danny West needs column, like he praised your my Zahalai, who is county executive at the same event, just spouting a bunch of fucking pablum. You know, oh, you know, it's a matter of concern. But, you know, but also workers, but also boy business is sure good. And like, I mean, I think that is what the fucking pundit class wants. They like I mean, I'm sorry, I'm swearing like Sunday.

[00:10:58] But I think I think the pundit class wants politicians that play the little games with them and that spout pablum and do their little interviews. And like and I think that they're not getting that from Katie Wilson, because I don't think she is a polished career politician like they want. And I think that they're frustrated by that. They're frustrated by the lack of access and friendliness that they had. You know, they could assume with previous mayors who the fuck cares.

[00:11:25] I think Katie Wilson does care if thousands of jobs go away. I just think, like, does she care or doesn't she care? It's kind of, you know, it's not the right question. I mean, of course she does. She's the mayor of the city. She wants the city to succeed economically. Now, can could Bruce Harrell have prevented jobs going to a place where labor is cheap and protections are low? I don't know, man. Like a lot of jobs are going to the south in all sectors.

[00:11:51] And so I just I don't think that this is something that any mayor of the city can necessarily control. Nor do I think that, you know, the savings that Starbucks is presumably projecting by moving to Nashville is less of a factor than some offhand comment. I just think that, you know, Sandeep, regardless of, you know, whether this was some kind of trigger, as you say, or whether this is actually something that they have planned in order to save money, which seems more likely to me.

[00:12:19] I don't think that the trend of jobs moving to cheaper labor markets with fewer protections in Republican states is going to change because Katie Wilson, you know, says, oh, that's sad and doesn't say let them leave. I mean, I just I just think this is so overblown.

[00:12:36] I understand why we're talking about it, but I just I think that for a podcast that covers like policy and big trends and economics and, you know, and we talk about things like mandatory housing affordability and such detail about how it plays out.

[00:12:53] And all these policy details, I think it is shallow to be putting so much weight on one little comment that she made at a small university event about a tax that she has absolutely no control over as mayor of the city because it's a state tax. Again, we're mixing up two things here about the millionaire's tax and then the comment she made at the rally with the Starbucks, you know, employees. Right. Right. When she first first became what when she was first mayor elect.

[00:13:22] Right. And that fair enough. I mean, I don't think that. Yes. I mean, I don't think that it should surprise anybody that a labor advocate who got elected as a labor advocate is. I know. Right. I actually think that's a fair point. And I will say I said to my friend at Starbucks when it happened, I was like, well, is she actually kind of directly using the powers of the city to actually intervene in the middle of your labor negotiations in some way? You know, and if she's not doing that, then whatever.

[00:13:52] Take to your point, Erica, it's a kind of vibes thing. The socialist mayor goes to a rally and talks to, you know, socialist shit to workers. Right. Like like what do you expect her to do? Right. That's I mean, so that was kind of my initial reaction to it. And I do think that they to the extent it was a trigger, it was an overreaction. I mean, it wasn't like she substantively did anything to like, you know, actually change the change the actual course of their their quite fraught.

[00:14:21] And, you know, battles with unions and labor and whatever that's going on internally with Starbucks and their and their workers. Right. But again, I will say the reason we're aligning these two things is, I think, indicative of the fact that there is a broader problem right now between the progressive elected officials class and their increasingly strained relationship with business community leaders.

[00:14:49] And, you know, to some extent and look, I am a supporter. There's a whole class of them now. There wasn't a class of centrists, but now there's a class of progressives that have all the power. Well, Olympia is increasingly a progressive dominated like, you know, political space. The Democratic caucuses have gotten bluer and bluer as they've gotten bigger. I mean, this millionaire's tax was Jamie Peterson, the most centrist Democrat. I would not call Jamie a centrist these days. But and look, I support the millionaire's tax to be really clear here.

[00:15:19] I'm actually doing some work on it in defense of it. Right. So I am. Yeah. Yeah. I just think you're you're overstating a bit how much the progressives have all the power now. And I think when centrist had all the power that went unnoted. Hey, Seattle. Nice listeners. Seattle politics got you low.

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[00:16:17] That's Ike's.com. I'm not commenting on the, you know, validity of like the arguments. But that relationship is pretty strained over a bunch of like taxation issues and regulatory stuff.

[00:16:36] And that is the context in which Katie's comment has now kind of landed with, you know, the thought of a, you know, a brick hitting, you know, Twitter in the face or whatever the analogy here should be. Right? Yeah. I mean, your example that you sent us was Ari Hoffman. So I don't know about, I mean, again, like I could give a shit about what people are saying on Twitter. I will tell you this.

[00:16:59] This last week, I have been hearing just the buzz and chatter from not just people in the business community, but kind of city hall veterans, people who have been worked at the city for a long time. And I think that this Starbucks thing has broken through with a lot of folks. And there's like there's been a lot of it before Danny's column, before Ari Hoffman. And do you think that Katie Wilson wants Starbucks to leave? Like, this is what you're saying.

[00:17:26] This Starbucks thing is if Katie has said, sorry, the mayor has said that, you know, that she hates Starbucks, wants it to leave. Can't wait to lose those jobs. I mean, that is not what she has said. In fact, she had said the opposite. So I guess I just, again, like the outrage among the chattering class and yes, we are part of it. But the outrage among the sort of majority chattering class that you belong to, Sandeep, I just like, I don't think it is based on what is actually happening. I think it's based on a soundbite.

[00:17:54] And I think that Katie Wilson, you know, like, yeah, maybe she should like get training so she can talk more like you're my and Bruce and, you know, and like Greg Nichols and all the other kind of people have been in politics forever. But, but man, I just think this is, this is overblown because I don't think that she wants Starbucks to leave. And I think that's what, you know, you and all these people are representing. I know she doesn't want Starbucks to leave.

[00:18:21] And she has, she has, in fact, herself said, in fact, I think you might have said it on Seattle Nice, that she has concerns. She has said in other contexts. And I think it was to us that she has concerns about pushing progressive taxation too far to the point that it actually precipitates that we were talking about in the context of Bellevue, right? Of jobs moving to Bellevue, which is something that has been happening. Amazon has been moving a shit ton of jobs to Bellevue, right? Some other companies have as well.

[00:18:49] And Katie's acknowledged that that's something that is part of her calculus as she's kind of thinking through. Now, it's not going to stop her from proposing things like a muni cap gains tax, I don't think. But, but I do think it's a consideration for her as she's sort of weighing the tradeoffs of actually governing Seattle. On the millionaire's tax piece of this, just to be clear, this was at a Seattle University event.

[00:19:13] She gets a question about the new state tax on personal income over a million dollars a year. And in response, Mayor Wilson basically says concerns about people leaving over that new tax policy are overblown, first of all, which has kind of been left out. So that's the larger context. But, you know, she adds for those who do leave, basically don't let the door hit you on the way out. I think the claims that millionaires are going to leave our state are like super overblown.

[00:19:44] And if, you know, the ones that leave, like, bye. So I don't know, I guess she needs to be more careful. But it strikes me that some of the outrage on Twitter is pretty overblown. I saw one popular tweeter tweeting that this is not inclusive to folks who earn more than a million dollars a year.

[00:20:08] You've literally got MAGA folks now using that language of therapeutic inclusivity. But the larger question here is, like, just what's so shocking about a self-described socialist or even a run-of-the-mill Democrat supporting a high earner's income tax and then not having a ton of sympathy for ultra-rich folks who decide they're going to leave rather than chip in, you know, some portion of their ginormous incomes for this. I mean, it's not good for the state if too many of these folks do leave.

[00:20:38] But I do think some of the reaction online was a bit much. No, I agree with her that the capital flight issue around a high earner's millionaire's tax, right, is way overblown. Like, there is a kind of semi-hysteria going on right now on X among these right-wing commentators that, oh, my God, the sky is falling.

[00:21:00] Every rich person who's ever been to Washington state is, like, you know, fleeing as fast as they can to, like, and that is semi-hysterical bullshit, right? Like, sure, there's some minor capital flight going on, but relative to the overall size of Seattle's enormous and, I mean, Washington state's enormous and rapidly growing economy, it's minor.

[00:21:26] And the cost-benefit analysis of a tax like this, I think, weighs strongly to the benefit side, right? So I think Katie's right about that, and I think it's a very fair point to say that we should kind of look at the full context of what she was saying at that moment.

[00:21:45] Nonetheless, like, you know, she's the mayor of Seattle, and this is the kind of stuff that happens if you make a flip comment, which she did as part of that answer. You know, it's going to be – people are going to read tea leaves about it. And she is the self-prescribed socialist mayor, and, you know, there is already this tension. I mean, and we can't judge her on her actual actions. I mean, we've had her on the podcast twice.

[00:22:11] I mean, I would say that her positions are more centrist than people expected and that, you know, you can keep saying, oh, she said she's a socialist, socialist, socialist. Well, how is she acting? I don't think her position – I wouldn't call her position centrist, but I do think they are more nuanced than people – including some people in her base. Including on some issues that you might have wanted, Erica, right, on CCTV and stuff like that, right? Like, she sort of demonstrated more nuance. To her credit.

[00:22:37] Yeah, I don't know that I think of anti-surveillance as a – I think if we had normal Republicans in this state, anti-surveillance would also be a Republican issue. I don't think it's a far left – I mean, it is an issue the far left has picked up, but I think it's actually like a cross-cutting issue. But I just want to go back to where we were under Bruce Harrell with all these exact same reporters and exact same pundits and exact same, you know, right-wingers on Twitter.

[00:22:59] Bruce Harrell had a habit of saying one particular thing on one particular subject, which was whenever you asked about homelessness, you know, are you going to increase sweeps? Does increasing the unified care team mean more sweeps? What are you going to do about this homelessness policy? His answer would always be – not always, but it would frequently be, how dare you ask that question? Like, just in a tone of rage.

[00:23:27] And he would – and I'm not exaggerating, and we've talked about this. I'm quoting. He would say, how dare you ask that question? And then he would pivot to talking about his wife, who was at the United Way, and, you know, and saying, Joanne and I have done more for homelessness than, you know, just about anyone in this city. How dare you? He would not answer the question, and he would get outraged about it. And none of these goddamn pundits gave a shit about that. Why?

[00:23:53] Because they had access to Bruce Harrell, and they basically agreed with his positions. They wanted sweeps. They wanted Bruce Harrell to do a lot of the things that he was doing. They wanted a pro-business climate. And I just think it's such a double standard. I mean, if Katie Wilson stood up there and in a tone of shaking outrage, you know, yelled at a reporter, how dare you ask that question? Can you imagine the outrage cycle we would be seeing right now?

[00:24:19] So I just think it is a wild double standard that, you know, we are falling into the pitfall of by even talking about it. I will say this. There is no question that Bruce Harrell could be very thin-skinned and chest-thumpy in the way that you're talking about. That's absolutely true, right, about Bruce. And I would say we have not been afraid of talking about that stuff here at Seattle Nice, whatever other pundits may have. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure.

[00:24:46] But I'm talking about the – I'm talking about this – these bullshitty little outrage cycles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, well, we're talking forever about this fucking Danny Westny column and a bunch of whiners on X. All right, let's shift now to another hot topic, that damning audit of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority that we've been talking about. There's more big news this week about that on Publicola.com. Erica, what do you got? Yeah, well, this is a story from Monday.

[00:25:13] So I won't – I mean, I think people know the broad outlines of it because we've talked about the situation at the KCRHA. Money they can't account for, bad financial records, no internal controls. We learned about a week ago that it's going to take millions of dollars potentially and many, many months, perhaps years, to fix the problems that a forensic audit identified at KCRHA.

[00:25:36] To me, the interesting thing that happened this week, you know, as sort of politicians behind the scenes are all trying to figure out legislation they can introduce to, you know, to do more analysis, to basically, I would say, create a justification for shutting the agency down and redistributing, you know, the contracts to where they came from, which is basically the city and the county. All that work is going on in the background.

[00:25:58] Meanwhile, Kelly Kennison and her – one of her deputies, William Toey, are putting out these FAQs and saying things that are just completely out of line with that reality. I mean, at the meeting last week, the board meeting, you know, it was a very intense, you know, meeting where everybody was quite concerned, the entire, you know, governing board of the KCRHA about, you know, where the hell do we go from here?

[00:26:25] And Kelly Kennison, the CEO, was basically like, look, most of these problems happened before me, which is not true. I mean, it's maybe the bulk of them, but still going on. And, you know, and it's fixable. We're fixing it. And that is not the reality. And then they also put out an FAQ that took the same kind of tone, also blaming the previous CEO, Mark Dones, for a lot of the problems, you know, between the lines.

[00:26:50] So I just think that the leadership of this agency is living in a different reality than the people that are actually making decisions about it. And I thought that was just an interesting contrast as elected officials work to figure out how to wind the agency down or save it. I mean, it's still possible, but it seems unlikely. Right. I mean, I think that's the question. Are they working to wind it down or are they working to save it?

[00:27:13] And the latest sort of scuttlebutt that I'm picking up about this, I think there's been some news recently that there's a resolution that Rod Dembowski and some other King County council members are putting forward that is going to call for a 90-day, essentially, study period about how do we wind down King County RHA. Let's spend 90 days.

[00:27:37] Let's spend 90 days kind of doing a plan for figuring out how to unwind the agency in a careful and thoughtful way. And I'm hearing word, though I have not confirmed this, that at the Seattle City Council, there's going to be another resolution, I think, coming from Dion Foster and Alexis Mercedes-Rank that will also call for a 90-day planning period.

[00:28:04] What I don't know about the city version of this, is it also kind of explicitly like let's spend 90 days to kind of wind down, figure out how to wind down the agency? Or is it 90 days to figure out how to like decide whether to wind down the agency and maybe to save it, right? And I think there's a nuance there that's important.

[00:28:22] So I think the county version may not be exactly as you described, Sandeep, but I think, you know, I don't think it says winding down, at least not from my sources. But yeah, I mean, but I think it doesn't matter. I mean, I don't think that most likely they're not going to explicitly say, and this is to shut down the agency.

[00:28:45] I think they're going to just look into more of like what would it take, what needs to be done, and like what would happen if we decided to, you know, start pulling some of these contracts back. Because ultimately, I mean, it's easy to forget this is a homelessness agency and they are providing all of the services or they are, you know, paying all the contracts to all the providers that provide all the services to homeless people in the region.

[00:29:10] So it's really important that they do this right if they're going to shut it down so that none of those providers, you know, go without funding to actually help people. So I think that is the carefulness that's happening. And then it has to take at least a year under the agreement that set up the agency. So it's not, this is not something that's going to happen fast. Yeah. And the agreement, by the way, is an ILA. I called it an MOU on our last episode, a memorandum of understanding between city and county.

[00:29:38] It's actually to be technical here, an interlocal agreement, an ILA between the city and the county, right? That calls for the... So stop sending us your outreach emails. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. To the MOU caucus out there, I'm sorry. I, yeah, misused the acronym. Yeah. I mean, I think this is like, first of all, we talked about it on the episode when we talked about this, like unwinding KCRHA is a really, really complex and complicated endeavor.

[00:30:08] And it's going to have to, if it happens, it's going to have to happen with a great deal of caution and care because rebuilding the capacities and structures within the city and county governments to reabsorb the functions that KCRHA was performing, however well or poorly, is going to take some time and a lot of effort and energy. You can't just sort of, you know, unplug from one socket and plug it in elsewhere. Right. And so it's good.

[00:30:37] I think that they're going through some kind of, you know, planning process on this. But I also think the credibility of KCRHA is just gone. Right. It's long gone. And if at the end of this 90 days, they're going to namby-pamby it and like keep it going, which it sounds like may still be, you know, one possible outcome here. I would think that that is, they're setting themselves up for more heartburn and heartbreak and failure down the road.

[00:31:05] I have not heard anybody, by the way, suggest like behind the scenes or on the record that they want to keep it going. I mean, I haven't heard one person say, I want to keep it going. Neither have I. And neither have I. Yeah. And the phrase winding down that I used in my headline is the one that I heard over and over and over again in my conversations. So, I mean, I would say it is almost certain that this is what they're going to do unless some new information comes to light that, you know, that drastically changes that trajectory.

[00:31:34] I don't really get what the risk is here when nobody is being held accountable for any of this. I mean, the risks are that they keep wasting money and that they continue further and further into the negative with taxpayer dollars. Oh, I just think there's going to be more fuck-ups from the agency and they'll wear it because they kept the agency going when they should have been winding it down. Right. But like nobody is being held accountable for these mistakes. You have this damning audit. Nobody is paying any price whatsoever. So, what's the political risk?

[00:32:04] You just keep screwing up. Well, I – yeah. I mean, I hear you on that. That's a great question. The politicians who set this up – and by the way, Rod Dombowski who's saying, oh, we got to shut it down. It's so terrible. We have all these bad decisions that were made. I mean, he's the one that wanted two boards in the first place. They used to have a two-board structure that caused some problems.

[00:32:25] And I would say also, I mean, no one is taking accountability for the decisions that they made as board members and as city council members and county elected officials. I mean, they're ultimately the ones that vote for stuff. They would get the budget from KCRHA every year and rubber stamp it instead of going through a public process.

[00:32:47] And so, like, I really think that there are a lot of elected officials who are trying to sort of not get noticed right now while they shove Kelly Kinison, you know, out in front of the cameras. And, you know, and while they say, oh, this agency, who could have predicted? And it's like, dude, you are the agency. Right. Right. No, I think that's right. Look, I think we have a culture here in Seattle and King County where when things go wrong, you know, we'll pull the plug on stuff.

[00:33:15] But we're much less willing to actually do a kind of, you know, excavation or exegesis of, like, what went wrong and point the finger at blame at the decisions. And there isn't much of an accountability culture here.

[00:33:32] Even this latest thing that the revelations about DCHS, right, at King County about the that we talked about, about the, you know, actual kind of cronyism and fraud allegations that have been emerging where there's an employee who is sort of funneling $800,000 to family members through this anti-racism program that she was overseeing. I mean, is there going to be any accountability there, you know, is there going to be a criminal investigation?

[00:34:02] Probably not. Right. Like we just. I mean, I know that when I've covered stuff like that at the city, it is just been crickets from the city. Like, you know, I covered a city employee who had a tidy little contract on the side making more than other providers to clear up trash from encampments. And, you know, and that contract continued. She, I believe, still works at the city unless she's retired. And, yeah, nobody was ever.

[00:34:31] I mean, nobody even cared. I mean, the city told me, oh, well, that's totally legal. It's fine. Yes. The culture at Seattle and King County, I think, is a little eyebrow raising about some of this stuff. Like government accountability, I think, is really important for government to be effective. It has to have some accountability mechanisms built in. Ineffective government is discrediting for the entire sort of project of left of center of America.

[00:34:58] Like so like it would be it would behoove them to like get their shit together and like actually like. Yeah. I mean, again, like I think you're overstating the case. We're the pro-government side. You know, I'm pro-government like and but I want government to work. Well, I mean, here's the thing. And as I pointed out on Blue Sky and I think on Publicola, too, I mean, this is this is also like a government agency that is kind of an experiment in the same way that the monorail was the experiment.

[00:35:25] And I think there's going to be some reckoning, hopefully, about, you know, do we did we ever need to set this up? And do we need to do government like this in the future? Sure. Now, I think we're going to keep making dumb mistakes and setting up, you know, layers of bureaucracy that we don't need to. But I mean, there's a real question about whether this was ever a good idea in the first place. And it'd be nice if we would learn from things occasionally. I agree. 100 percent agree.

[00:35:52] OK, moving on to another topic, amendments on the city council to Mayor Katie Wilson's shelter plan, including a controversial proposal to add large buffer zones around around these tiny house villages. Erica, what can you tell us? Yeah, I would encourage folks to go to publicola.com just to look at the map that I made that is not 100 percent accurate, but it's sort of representative of what these buffer zones would look like.

[00:36:20] So this would be 750 feet in every direction from any school, any daycare, any playground and any park of over two acres in the entire city. No none of these new larger tiny house village encampments will be allowed. If you think about that, I mean, the number of schools, child care centers and playgrounds and parks in the city of Seattle is pretty substantial.

[00:36:47] It would create a much, much smaller area of the city where shelters are allowed. And that, in turn, would limit basically the land that Katie Wilson's administration can find to actually locate some of these new tiny house villages. But, you know, I mean, what I said on Blue Sky was it's kind of treating people who live in shelters like they're toxic waste that need to be kept away from, you know, normal people. And and I and I think that is the wrong way to treat shelters.

[00:37:16] I don't think that you need to put the solution to homelessness or a solution to homelessness far away where people don't have to see it. And Maritza Rivera said that this was about protecting children. But as I pointed out, too, I mean, there are children who live in tiny house villages and not just in the ones that are reserved exclusively for women and children.

[00:37:37] And so I just I think that there's just a real misunderstanding of who lives in shelter and the impact I think that they have, as opposed to being out on the street and living in unsanctioned encampments. These people will be sheltered and in a secure space. We've all seen tiny house villages, I think.

[00:38:00] So, you know, I think people have a sense of how they work in reality as opposed to this, you know, sort of horrifying fantasy that she was projecting. Yeah, look, I mean, we've talked in the past about how much how difficult and what a political shit show it's going to be to actually cite these expanded shelters just from the get go.

[00:38:21] Like if Katie Wilson, the mayor, wants to have any hope of attaining her goal of doing 4000 new shelter units like tiny home villages and stuff like that by the end of her first term. Like that's going to be that's a very ambitious goal. It's going to be hard enough to do on its own.

[00:38:40] And then if you use what is really a kind of blunt mechanism of, you know, these kind of buffer zones that basically take very large swaths of the city off the table for the possibility of citing any of these things. I think it does start to make it seem like you're never going to be able to get anywhere near close to that 4000 dollar number because you're just cutting off too much of the of the place where you can do it.

[00:39:08] Now, is there some common sense that needs to come into play here where you don't put a massive, you know, low barrier tiny home village right next to an elementary school? I mean, we've kind of seen when encampments have happened next to elementary schools and that's been problematic. They obviously should avoid doing that. But I think at this very kind of one size fits all sort of blunt approach of sort of saying no way, no how, no never. If it's 740 feet away, you can't do it.

[00:39:37] You know, I think really does sort of put the whole plan to get to the goal in jeopardy. It's kind of interesting that you both agree. I'm seeing these amendments, including this one, as efforts to try to make this progressive legislation actually work. So like if we want tiny house villages, we need effective governance. We want to minimize conflict with neighbors.

[00:40:00] So why shouldn't we see amendments like ones, including buffer zones that seem to be an effort to do just that? Doesn't everybody basically just want tiny house village siting that is effective and that works? So we do have tiny house villages already all over the city. I've had two in my neighborhood.

[00:40:21] I had two in my last neighborhood that I lived in and they have not caused the problems that Maritza Rivera was predicting for slightly larger tiny house village encampments. So, you know, right now they can have up to 100 people, not units, and this would allow up to 150. So you're talking, you know, maybe 30 more units. So we have examples all over the city from the last 15 years.

[00:40:46] We've had one that got out of control, I would say, and that was a real problem up in Licton Springs. And I think that the tiny house village provider that was doing that, that ran that encampment really learned from that. Now they're doing one up in a similar area of North Seattle. This is Lehigh. They're doing one with LEAD that's going to have intensive case management, lots of services, no drug use or alcohol on site. You know, all the rules that you, you know, David would probably want to keep things more in control.

[00:41:16] But, I mean, we have examples of this already. And so to say, you know, it can't be near parks. It can't be. I mean, parks alone is such a huge swap of the city. And I don't see any justification for it whatsoever. Like, we don't have that. I mean, these are rules that are very similar to the kind of stuff that caused outrage down in Burien when they did it.

[00:41:37] I mean, we were talking about reverting or going to a system that is much like the one in Burien where they have these massive buffer zones around everything and you can't site anything anywhere. I mean, that's the point of this amendment. Like, it's not a good faith effort, in my opinion, to like – I mean, maybe it is on Maritza Rivera's part. But the point and what it will do is make it virtually impossible to build – to have encampments anywhere in the city. Yeah.

[00:42:02] So to me, it's just – it is not a good faith effort to protect the children so much as it is, like, let's ban encampments almost everywhere so they won't happen. I can give you a direct – And I'm sorry, I keep saying encampments, but these are called transitional encampments in city code, but it refers to micromodular shelters and also sanctioned encampments, which we only have a couple of. And that's not what Mayor Wilson's talking about here.

[00:42:28] I can give you a different example around a kind of buffer proposal that I had to deal with directly some years ago that I think is indicative of why ideas like this, while I think they are well-intentioned – and David, to your point, I think – There is some – I think – not just – yeah. Yeah, and I apologize. I don't mean to impugn motives. I just think this is what's going to happen. And I don't think that – like, I don't think this would be an unwelcome outcome for the people that are promoting this. I think – right.

[00:42:57] That's right. I think it could have the unintended consequence of killing the ability to do the ambitious shelter plan that the mayor has, and I don't want to see that. And I'll – let me give you an example. Back in – I think it was 2016, after marijuana had been legalized in Washington state by ballot initiative, the city had to pass a law about the siting of marijuana businesses.

[00:43:20] And very similarly, the council at that time came forward with a proposal saying, oh, let's do these buffers where – right around playgrounds and schools and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And I believe it was Nick Licata at the time put forward a proposal. It had these buffers, first of all, that made it really difficult to site a business. And then it said you couldn't cluster that – you couldn't have more than one business within 500 feet of each other.

[00:43:47] And as it turned out, if that had gone through as it was, it was going to be like nearly impossible. It was going to be really, really difficult to site a marijuana business in the first place. And then it was also by – the declustering thing made it so that you could – it was creating these mini monopolies. If you could get in there and be the first to grab a license and you basically controlled a whole neighborhood business district and stuff like that. These were unintended negative consequences of it.

[00:44:14] And so I negotiated on behalf of the marijuana retailers to try to get a better rule about how that was going to do. And I think we did get to a better place on it, though. So again, I just think are there legitimate concerns about placing large scale? And I do think they want to go up to 250 people in some of these tiny home villages. In one. One potentially. I guess they dialed it back to one.

[00:44:42] Originally, she was saying one in each district that could go up to 250. But yeah, yeah. Up to one, yeah. But now we're talking about what we're talking about. It's not going in Maritza Rivera's backyard. I mean, like let's be real. It's not going in the rich neighborhoods of northeast Seattle. What I'm saying is they should just have some common sense about where are good locations to site these things and where are others. So the first place they've announced is that place in Inner Bay where, you know, it's by like the Total Wine and the Whole Foods.

[00:45:10] But there's nobody actually living – that's a really good site, I think, to do one. You know, both politically, they're not going to get as much pushback. And, you know, there are lots – there are locations like that that are probably, you know, better suited for a tiny home village than sticking it right next to a school. I think that's true. But I also think this buffer thing is overly onerous and could end up just killing the whole effort entirely. And I would not want to see that happen.

[00:45:36] Well, and I think the buffers on, you know, on weed businesses – I mean, I think that's stupid too. I didn't support that. And I think it's ridiculous that, like, you have to have all these protections around a business that you can't even walk into unless you're 21 and show ID. But it's totally fine for there to be alcohol in every single grocery store and liquor stores, you know, wherever. I mean, you know, a much more addictive and problematic drug.

[00:46:03] So, you know, I just think the moral policing around shit is dumb. And I think the social policing around the segregation of sheltered people from everybody else is not just dumb but reflects a really wrongheaded mindset about people who happen to be homeless and everybody else. Putting them on islands within the city is, you know, maybe that's politically what's going to happen. But I don't think we have to legislate it by creating these huge buffer zones.

[00:46:33] Okay, what about some of these other amendments that are clearly about making tiny homes work, like the ones by Alexis Mercedes' rink? Villages with more than 100 occupants need to have at least two staff on site 24 hours a day. Yeah, I mean, I think that is responding to a couple of things. I mean, I think that, like I said, there have been – like, the Licton Springs encampment during the pandemic was – or maybe it was before the pandemic actually – was problematic.

[00:47:00] But, yeah, I mean, I think it makes sense to put in there that basically agencies can't cut corners by not having people on staff all the time. Particularly, you know, some of these are going to be for really high-acuity people that, you know, that you're just – you need somebody around at all times to kind of make that safe for the people inside the tiny house village themselves. So I think it's a good idea.

[00:47:25] There's also a proposal for, in addition to those people, to have identifiable security stationed at the door. I mean, okay. I don't know. It seems – that seems sort of – turning it into a security state seems kind of unnecessary. I think you can have people performing security duties without, you know, having, you know, Securitas guys or cops, you know, standing at the door. But, yeah, I mean, I think having them be staffed is a good thing.

[00:47:54] Sandeep, if the goal is for these things to succeed, the city needs to have good planning, effective planning. Buffer zones that are too large might be problematic. But siting clearly matters. And staffing these things effectively and well might be expensive, but it seems like that also really needs to happen if we're going to do it. Well, yes. I mean, it raises the broader question. These amendments, I think, are calling a broader question.

[00:48:20] And we don't have a super clear answer yet, I don't think, about what is the services component of – that is going to go into these new kind of tiny home villages and other sort of sort of clustered sheltering arrangements that they're setting up, right?

[00:48:40] So they're definitely – I think there's definitely a strong desire on the part of the council, and I think this is well received, that there really is a kind of robust sort of support and a robust services component on site in these villages. So it's not just sort of like let's just warehouse a bunch of people who have addiction problems in a tiny home village and kind of leave them there to – for whatever happens, happens.

[00:49:05] But we're actually going to try to use these sites to try to make some progress in helping people deal with their underlying conditions. So we're waiting to see all of that, and I think that is what the council is responding to, both about setting up staff, mandating kind of staff on site to try to make sure that that services component is more robust. I do think it's going to make it all more expensive, but I think it's all appropriate. And the details here, do we need uniform security?

[00:49:31] To Erica's point, I don't know, but we do need – there does need to be adequate staffing, and there does need to be some concern about making sure that there isn't negative spillover effects from these things. And that's both politically necessary and I think good policy too. Well, I think inside baseball, because that's what people come to Seattle Knights for, is that there is a concern that the main tiny house village provider, Lehigh, has in the past kind of low-balled estimates.

[00:49:56] And then come back and ask for more money when they need what it actually will cost to run one of these places. So I think that mandating those case management ratios, mandating staff be on site, I think that sort of forces tiny house providers, and Lehigh in particular, to come up with cost estimates that are realistic as opposed to low-balling it.

[00:50:21] And I'm not suggesting anything nefarious, but saying that it's going to cost $20,000 a person when it really is going to cost $30,000 a person, for example. So I think that's also going on behind the scenes when they're trying to codify some of this stuff. I'm interested in this – there's an amendment to designate one of these tiny home villages to be a kind of recovery village. I like that idea. I think they should do that.

[00:50:50] And I think there should be a space for those people who are actually trying to kick drugs and that they can go to an environment where they're not surrounded by other people who are using drugs, which is obviously not going to be conducive to staying straight and clean. And so I like the idea. I would think that there will be demand for that. There's also – they want to do two of these, I think, Erica, for family, kids. And I just don't know whether there'll be adequate demand for that or not.

[00:51:19] But if there is, great. Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah. I mean, and Joy Hollingsworth kept saying women and children. So I don't know if men would be allowed at this so-called family shelter. But, I mean, I do think there probably would be demand. And I say that only because I know that a lot of family shelters – and I'm talking about mostly women and children shelters – are oversubscribed, right? So there's, like, people trying to get in all the time that can't.

[00:51:47] So, I mean, I don't – again, I don't know that it has to be for families only. But, sure, I mean, there's – the problem with homelessness is that there's kind of infinite need. And so anything you build, I mean, it's like whatever the money is coming in for, you know, it's going to help somebody, right? And so if some are families only, that seems fine to me. I don't know that we have to mandate that.

[00:52:15] But the sober shelter also seems like a good idea. There just needs to be, you know, avenues for people who inevitably relapse because that is part of recovery for most people not to just get kicked out on the street. I think that problem can be addressed, but it just has to be, like, considered. And, you know, there has to be a plan for that. Totally agree. Yep. Okay, that's it for another edition of Seattle Nice. She's Erica C. Barnett. He's Sandeep Kaushik. I'm David Hyde.

[00:52:42] Our editor is Quinn Waller, and our supporters are on Patreon.com slash Seattle Nice. Thanks, everybody, so much for stepping up and supporting this podcast. We could not do it without you, literally. And for those who can't afford to support this podcast, hey, thank you so much for listening. And if you feel like it, head over to Apple or wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star review because the way the algorithm works, that helps other folks discover this podcast who may want to listen to it.

[00:53:12] Okay, bye.