Wilson’s office framed the “Neighbor by Neighbor Initiative” as a “citywide, all-hands-on-deck effort to rapidly expand shelter across Seattle and start bringing people inside.” Wilson has set a goal of standing up 4,000 additional units of emergency housing or shelter in her first term, with 1,000 of those in her first year.

The first piece of legislation empowers the Director of Finance & Administrative Services to directly sign lease agreements with property owners for new emergency housing, such as tiny house villages or RV safe lots. This would eliminate a significant bureaucratic hurdle in standing up such facilities.

“We’re moving faster than ever before, but I want to see the ground start breaking, the hammers start swinging, and fewer people left to sleep in doorways and tents,” Wilson said. “That’s why I have transmitted legislation to city council that will help us deliver on the goal of opening 1,000 new units of shelter with supportive services across the city this year. Now I need your help to get sites ready, to support our front-line service provides, and to be good neighbors with the shelters we need to open around the city.” 

Sites for potential RV encampments and tiny home villages were identified within weeks of Wilson’s inauguration, with a state-owned parcel on W Marginal Way SW in West Seattle selected as the first to move forward. Glassyard Commons will be operated by the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) and will include space for 72 RVs and 20 tiny homes.

Wilson’s second bill would increase the limit on shelter size, allowing tiny house villages to grow as large as 250 people in a few select cases. That’s more that twice as large as today’s cap. Only one tiny home village that large would be allowed in each council district, with villages capped at 150 after that one gets stood up.

“The second piece of legislation will allow successful shelters to serve more people,” Wilson said. “Even the most successful shelters that do the best work and have the best relationships in their communities are currently limited to serve just 100 people. This is a very low limit, which is out of step with national best practices and what cities like LA, Tampa, and Austin are doing now, and it just doesn’t make sense when we have so many people sleeping outside with nowhere to go. My proposal would increase this limit to 150 people per site on an interim basis, provide support to address any potential public safety impacts, and additionally allow one location in each city district to serve up to 250 people in cases where it makes sense.”

It’s unclear how many village operators would take the City up on this new ability, should it be granted. Some operators, such as Chief Seattle Club executive director Derrick Belgarde, have expressed a preference for lower capacity sites so that they are more manageable and less prone to issues. The largest tiny house village site that the Low Income Housing Institute currently operates has 73 units, but most are in the 40-to-50 unit range.

The third piece of legislation reallocates $4.8 million in funding to get emergency housing creation started sooner.

“My team has identified $4.8 million from existing, underutilized City fund sources, which can be used to fund shelter and wraparound services,” Wilson said. “$3.3 million was derived from an underutilized revolving loan program that was difficult to deploy and not previously appropriated. An additional $1.5 million will be appropriated from the Downtown Health and Human Service Fund, which is a program from the 1990s that has not been used for a decade.”

Mayoral spokesperson Sage Wilson indicated that, while the one-time funds would be a boost, it would be hard to find such large sums lying around in future budgets. Former Mayor Bruce Harrell and the Seattle City Council left Wilson with a bleak budget outlook for 2027, with many one-time programs sucking up scarce city dollars as the city’s revenue forecasts look stagnant at best.

As in other public appearances, Wilson underscored that addressing the homelessness crisis was her highest priority.

“Seattle’s homelessness crisis is an emergency, and in fact, our city declared a civil state of emergency on homelessness more than 10 years ago in November of 2015,” Wilson said. “But for many years and through multiple federal administrations, we have not treated this crisis with the urgency that it demands. That pattern ends here with all of us.”

She admitted that many obstacles remained to meeting that goal, but she contended the city was increasingly aligned at putting in the work to get there.

“Let’s be clear about the challenges: Our rates of unsheltered homelessness are off the charts, even in comparison with our peer cities,” Wilson said. “We have a big hill to climb, and if the solutions were easy, it would have happened already. To address this crisis at scale, we are going to need to do hard things. But I’m also confident that we can do this, because homelessness is not only the number one priority for me and my administration, I know that it’s also the number one priority for the residents of this city, for businesses and many other stakeholders across the city.”

Wilson had not identified which councilmembers will carry each piece of legislation. That said, District 1 Councilmember Rob Saka did speak at the event and broadly offer his support.

“Seattle urgently needs more shelter capacity to meet the scale of our homelessness crisis, which has gone on for too long without meaningful progress,” Saka said. “After touring Sound Foundations’ Hope Factory in my district, I saw firsthand how tiny homes can be built efficiently at scale. Expanding tiny home villages and RV safe lots is an effective, compassionate way to move people indoors and connect them to services. I commend Mayor Wilson for addressing this crisis with the urgency it demands and partnering so closely with my office to get it done.”

Additionally, District 7 Councilmember Bob Kettle did offer a supportive statement for the mayor’s press release.

“Today’s announcement of creating potentially 1,000 new units of shelter is welcome news for it builds capacity,” Kettle said. “I appreciate Mayor Wilson’s focus on this issue. My office will continue to support ways in which the city can assist our most vulnerable populations and create that safe base for all.”

Housing committee chair Dionne Foster and land use committee chair Eddie Lin are also both broadly aligned with Wilson’s agenda around making progress on homelessness, but did not release statements following Wednesday’s announcement.

Although Wilson herself did not stick around for the second half of the speaking program or to take questions from reporters afterward, a long list of providers spoke, including those focused on substance use disorder treatment and wraparound services. Beyond Wilson and Saka, the program included:

• Steve Roberts, Hope Factory / Sound Foundations NW
• Sharon Lee, Executive Director of Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) 
• Fé LopezGaetke, Co-Executive Director, Purpose. Dignity. Action 
• Grace Stiller, West Seattle resident and neighbor of Camp Second Chance 
• Ann Haruki-Pinedo, Central District resident and neighbor of True Hope Village 
• Chloe Gale, REACH Program, Evergreen Treatment Services 
• Jilma Meneses, President and CEO, Catholic Community Services 
• Derrick Belgarde, Executive Director, Chief Seattle Club 
• Brandon Ashford-Whitfield, frontline service provider and OPEIU 8 member 

Wilson is far from the first mayor to pledge bold action on homelessness. In fact, her predecessor Bruce Harrell pledged 1,000 units of emergency housing in first six months and 2,000 units in his first year, and came up well short on both fronts, which Wilson noted on the campaign trail.

Actions by the Trump administration shredding the social safety net and risking an economic crash are likely to exacerbate the homelessness crisis. That puts even more pressure on local leaders to queue up effective programs and try innovative solutions.

As an organizer at heart, Wilson also appears to be taking the strategy that a broader coalition is needed to tackle the problem, from big institutional players to everyday residents. The mayor launched a citywide call to volunteer to show support and be part of the solution. More information on options to get involved in support is available on the mayor’s blog. 

“We need to choose to come together as a city, because we can’t keep looking away from this problem,” Wilson said. “We can’t keep pushing people from place to place without bringing more people inside. And we can’t keep forcing our busses, our parks, our libraries, to function as social service providers. Neighbor by neighbor, we can do this together.”

The post Wilson Rolls Out Bills Expediting Emergency Housing for Homeless Residents first appeared on The Urbanist.

Last week, the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) celebrated the grand opening of its most recent building, Clover Place, which is located on Aurora Avenue just south of Woodland Park. 

Clover Place consists of 95 studio apartments that will house single adults who have severe mental health conditions and have been chronically homeless, what DESC’s Senior Director of Housing Programs Noah Fay called “the highest needs people in our community.”

In addition to housing, Clover Place will provide wraparound services, including behavioral health treatment, substance use disorder treatment, and connection to other services. Its community space will be used to host community-building activities and events for residents and their guests. The wraparound services at Clover Place help residents maintain their housing, manage their health needs, and build a sense of community all of which make Clover Place, what providers call, “permanent supportive housing” or PSH, a key ingredient in solving the homelessness crisis.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony and spoke to its importance, especially in light of her pledge to ramp up the supply of emergency housing for homeless people over the course of her term.

“In a moment when it often feels like we are playing defense and spending all of our time and energy and passion just trying to hold the line and not lose what we have, it’s really remarkable and heartening to be able to gather to celebrate progress, to celebrate opening new space for our neighbors and for our community,” Wilson said.

DESC executive director Daniel Malone said his organization is in a unique position to provide this kind of program, due to its expertise in both supportive housing and behavioral health. 

“Supportive housing has become an essential but under-recognized part of a quality behavioral health system,” Malone said at the grand opening event. “Everybody – all of us – need a place to live, after all, and people with serious mental illness and years of traumatic experiences often need a place that is arranged to provide them the support they need to heal and to have a successful tenancy. If supportive housing didn’t exist to do all of those things, the behavioral health system would be even more overwhelmed, with thousands of people with profound health conditions unable to get better as their lives continue in chaos.”

Clover Place will be run somewhat differently than DESC’s previous PSH buildings. When a behavioral service team member is working with a resident, they won’t limit their service offerings to only those that can be billed. This change means each resident will receive the benefit of the full range of available services.

State and local money, including from the City of Seattle’s Office of Housing, paid for much of the acquisition and construction of Clover Place. Money from Seattle’s JumpStart payroll expense tax, as well as from the state, will be used to help fund its operating costs.

Malone called out Mayor Katie Wilson’s key involvement in making the JumpStart tax a reality, leading to the availability of some of those operating costs. 

“DESC, as we know, is a national model for supporting people facing the most complex barriers: chronic homelessness, behavioral health needs, and long term instability,” Wilson said. “Their work shows what is possible when we meet people with dignity, evidence-based services, and consistency.” 

Clover Place is DESC’s 19th PSH building. Its 20th building, Birch Grove in Lake City, is slated to open this summer, at which point DESC is planning a pause before starting any new projects in light of federal funding uncertainty.

DESC’s legacy continues

Clover Place is named after the organization’s first nursing supervisor, Christina Clover. Sommer Inman remembered her former colleague as a tenacious, witty, and trusted nurse.

“Christina didn’t just live DESC’s core values, but really personified them,” Inman said. “Meeting Christina helped to restore my hope that an agency could really want to live their mission statement.”

Clover was also remembered as occasionally being irritable, which Fay spoke of as a strength.

“I think that is kind of the beauty of this approach and this work, is that it’s based in principle and doing what’s right and being practical about it, and getting it done, and serving people the way we know how, and being pretty impatient with barriers that stand in our way,” Fay said.

Clover Place was specifically designed as PSH, with several safeguards to protect residents and limit DESC’s liability. For example, each kitchen has its oven’s burners set on a timer that automatically shuts them off after 30 minutes. There is an automatic water shut-off triggered after a certain number of gallons of water are used, and each bathroom is equipped with a drain in the floor in case of overflow from the shower. Each apartment unit also has an intercom, which means residents can easily communicate with the building’s staff.

Five units are also ADA compliant and intended to serve people with disabilities. 

At the grand opening, staff members shared a video of two clients served by SAGE, DESC’s outpatient mental health program. 

“Once I was housed, everything changed, because I wasn’t living with the stress of everyday survival like that,” one participant shared in the video. “I had a place I could go and lock the door […] and just be left alone.”

DESC’s supportive housing is available to people who are dealing with substance use challenges, and DESC does not require its tenants to stay sober in order to keep their housing. DESC’s harm reduction approach attempts to mitigate the risks associated with drug use, while making substance use treatment readily available when a person feels ready to try making a change. 

Data doesn’t support the use of involuntary drug treatment, which results in an increased risk of overdose and often relapse. 

Critics, however, point out that this policy can make things difficult for those tenants who have become sober and might not want to be living near active drug use. 

Malone stressed that people need different options based on their individual needs. In addition to supportive housing like Clover Place, DESC operates scattered sites, which support people living in regular apartment buildings with access to services. DESC tries to help people find the environment that is going to work best for them. 

“An environment like this, where the residents of the apartment building all come from places of trauma and great difficulty, has real benefits and some drawbacks. And some of the drawbacks include things like people saying, you know, I’m trying to make these changes, and others aren’t. And so we’re not in the same place,” Malone said. “Some of the advantages of this kind of setup are that a lot of people express that they find a certain level of comfort and support by being around other people with similar experiences.”

Federal threats to ‘Housing First’ approaches

The future of permanent supportive housing in the region, and across the country, is threatened by the stance of the Trump administration. 

King County receives significant federal funding for permanent housing through the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Continuum of Care grants. Last November, HUD announced major changes to the rules for these grants that would have gutted funding for permanent supportive housing in the region. After a lot of confusion and a lawsuit brought against HUD by a coalition of states, including Washington, a federal judge ordered HUD to halt the changes to the grant program.  

In January, HUD told providers they were reinstating grant applications submitted under the former rules. However, depending on how the lawsuit is resolved, funding for 2027 may still be in jeopardy.

Work on Clover Place began in 2021, well before any federal funding threats. 

Advocates for ‘Housing First’ emphasize that the approach is not only about providing housing. Rather, it’s acknowledging the reality that people often need a stable place to live before they can focus on getting better – whether that’s accessing psychiatric treatment, stopping the use of substances, or getting more involved with their communities. That’s why Clover Place offers its tenants both a place to live and the services they’ll need to stabilize. 

Malone spoke to The Urbanist about the importance of the ‘Housing First’ model and supportive housing. 

“Generally, supportive housing is far and away the [intervention] that is most effective at getting people out of homelessness and keeping them out of homelessness,” Malone said. “The real problem with all this stuff is that for every person who is out of homelessness and remains out, […] at the same time, there is actually more than one person falling into homelessness along the way.”

Malone said it’s important to pair homelessness interventions like supportive housing with strategies to stop people from becoming homeless in the first place. 

Unfortunately, between potential cuts to Continuum of Care contracts that fund interventions like supportive housing, and cuts to federal services such as Medicaid and SNAP food assistance that help people meet their basic needs and remain housed, the problem of homelessness is likely to increase in scale in the United States, and the Puget Sound area, going forward.

Cuts to Medicaid laid out in the country’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” H.R.1, will impact operation costs at Clover Place and DESC’s work in general. 

“We won’t be able to serve people as many people or as deeply as we currently do,” Malone said.

Elected officials in King County have continued to express vocal support for supportive housing in the region. 

“I want to acknowledge that as Housing First particularly is under ever more threats, and safety nets for the most vulnerable members of our community are eroding at the federal level at a rate that we’ve never seen in our community, I feel deeply privileged and honored to live and work in a community that is rooted in values about supporting the most vulnerable among us,” Fay said. “That includes community members. That includes our elected officials, who, in the face of difficult times, have doubled down on the investment on what works and have not shied away from programs that are evidence-based and supporting people in a way we know that will help people recover over the long haul.” 

In 2024, Seattle’s Office of Housing estimated the city alone will need 28,572 new supportive housing units by 2044. 

In addition to DESC’s two new buildings opening this year, King County’s Health Through Housing initiative opened Booker House, an 86-unit supportive housing building, in late January and plans to open the 100-unit Sheila Stanton Place in Kirkland later this year. 

In spite of future threats, the atmosphere at the grand opening of Clover Place was celebratory, with new tenants expected to start moving in on Monday, February 9.

The post Supportive Housing Building Opens Near Seattle’s Woodland Park first appeared on The Urbanist.

For Pierce County, Pierce Transit, and the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, it’s a new year, a new budget — but the same problems. All of these entities face serious financial hurdles, leading to layoffs, lagging service levels, and reduced program offerings.

Despite a balanced budget this biennium, Pierce County officials are facing the very real possibility of long-term struggles that could severely impact the County’s main focus areas, including public safety and affordable housing. Officials are worried that the federal government will slash local funding, and the County’s limited options for raising revenue could make dealing with a fiscal crisis particularly difficult.

Pierce Transit, on the other hand, is dealing with financial woes that began nearly 15 years ago. Its budget is only a fraction of what’s needed to meet demand for transit and offer service at comparable frequencies to its peer agencies.

The health department, also an independent entity, has this year faced a major budgeting setback largely driven by total loss of Covid-19 funding, less overall grant funding, and a decrease in Foundational Public Health Services funding. As a result, it had to cut 22 staff jobs, some of which came from program divisions. 

Pierce County

Let’s start with the overall county budget. Pierce County budgets for bienniums, or two-year intervals. This means that the budget the county council passed in late November represents the County’s funding plans through 2027. In 2027, it will prepare to pass another two-year budget.

This year, the County passed a $3.5 billion budget. That budget, said County spokesperson Connor Davis, “reflects both optimism and realism—optimism about investments that will make the County safer, healthier, and more connected, and realism about the long-term fiscal challenges we must solve.”

He noted that the County budgeted a modest 2% over last biennium’s budget, and prioritized minimizing risk while fulfilling the County’s essential obligations, keeping vulnerable individuals safe, and progressing on strategic priorities.

Priorities

At the top of the County’s priority list is public safety, Davis said. Nearly 80% of the General Fund went towards services like the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, the prosecutor’s office, and Superior Court. 

More than half of that funding went towards the sheriff’s department. The council has also planned to match the sheriff’s department’s funding requests, after Mello concludes contract negotiations with the Pierce County Deputy Sheriff’s Guild, the guild that represents management staff.

These negotiations have been ongoing for more than a year, and have entered into interest arbitration.

Davis also said the County is prioritizing affordable housing, as well as investing in behavioral health services and creating safer transportation infrastructure.

Long-term Projections and New Revenue

The law limits what the County can use as a revenue source. Its primary sources of revenue are property taxes and sales taxes, and for the next three years, the County’s financial reserves are projected to remain in the black. But that could swiftly change, particularly given the combination of threats of funding cuts coming from Washington, D.C., existing state and federal cuts, and the fact that revenue coming from these taxes just isn’t keeping pace with the rising cost of County employees’ salaries and benefits, and core County services.

“This imbalance, combined with state and federal budget cuts, has created a structural deficit for Pierce County,” Davis explained. “Projections show [County] reserves falling below recommended levels in later years. The County maintains lean staffing compared to our peers and we have implemented cost-cutting measures, including a hiring freeze for positions supported by the General Fund. Without new, stable funding sources, the County will face difficult tradeoffs in the future.”

One of the new revenue sources the County is considering is imposing a 0.1% local sales tax to fund public safety, as authorized in House Bill 2015, which the legislature passed last year. In Pierce County, Davis said, this tax would generate more than $27 million for public safety over time, increasing overall public safety funding by 4%.

Last autumn, the County convened a Public Safety Work Group to figure out a plan for this tax, if the Pierce County Council approves it. The group consisted of Mello, the Department of Assigned Council, the District Court, the Juvenile Court, the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and the Superior Court.

The group’s submission of the ordinance has been delayed, Davis said, and the Pierce County Council has not yet set a date to discuss it.

Transportation

Unlike in King County, Pierce Transit — the main transit agency in Pierce County — isn’t under County control. Even so, the County does have the ability to create transportation-related projects, funded through a mix of County, state, and federal money.

This biennial budget’s focus on public safety also extends to transport, Davis said, particularly as it relates to making the area safer for drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists.

Davis highlighted a few projects, including the recently adopted Vision Zero Action Plan. The plan is meant to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries on County roadways by 2035. The County also partnered with local school districts in unincorporated Pierce County on its Safe Routes to School initiative, which focuses on creating safer walking routes to school by prioritizing sidewalk improvements in specific areas.

He also pointed to the ongoing Blue Zones Parkland-Spanaway project, which is supposed to create healthier communities through a number of community-based improvements, including improving transportation infrastructure between Parkland and Spanaway.

The County recently updated its Transportation Improvement Program to include tags specifying when work relates to any of these three initiatives.

Pierce Transit

Pierce Transit has historically lagged behind its peer agencies in the amount of service it can provide. The number one reason for this, said Pierce Transit spokesperson Rebecca Japhet, is lower funding levels. (Japhet retired from Pierce Transit shortly after speaking with The Urbanist.) More than three-quarters of the agency’s budget comes from a 0.6% local sales tax. That’s the lowest sales tax percentage collected amongst Pierce Transit’s peer agencies, and it hasn’t changed for the last 23 years.

Moreover, Pierce Transit is a standalone Public Transportation Benefit Area (PTBA). It’s not part of Pierce County. Putting aside the fact that King County Metro is part of King County, when Pierce Transit stands in comparison to King County Metro’s budget, it’s no contest: King County Metro has an annual budget of about $2 billion to serve its 2.4 million residents, while Pierce Transit has just north of $224 million to serve about 950,000 residents. 

In other words, King County spends 3.5 times as much on local transit per capita as Pierce Transit.

King County also has its RapidRide enhanced bus network and plans to add new lines. In contrast, Pierce Transit has just one frequent route that runs every 20 minutes or less.

But the agency would like that to change, and plans to make changes as soon as funding allows. Japhet said that Pierce Transit spent 2024 and 2025 gathering community feedback about what they want from local transit — more service on weekends, more frequent trips, and trips earlier and later in the day. From that, Pierce Transit developed an updated Long Range Plan.

Now, the agency is creating a framework to provide more service, in line with that plan, should funding become available. While it did not commit to a higher level of sales tax, Japhet said that more funding “could” come from a higher sales tax that voters would have to approve. The agency is also looking at other revenue sources, such as grants.

Pierce Transit spokesperson Penny Grellier said grant revenue could fund bus shelters, transit centers, and maintenance facilities, as well as bus replacements. She added that operating grants are available for services like Paratransit or the Pierce Transit Runner, though these are usually one-time grants or represent limited funding.

Pierce Transit’s 2026 budget includes funding for a few additional services inside its service boundaries. These new services will start in March, and will include an extended Stream Community Line to Commerce Street Station in downtown Tacoma. It will also increase service on two different routes, Route 1 and Route 3, so that a bus arrives every 15 minutes between 6 a.m. — 7 p.m. on weekdays.

Route 1 runs on a 30-minute schedule starting at 4 a.m., and changes to a 15-minute schedule just before 9 a.m. It returns to a 30-minute schedule just before 6 p.m., and stops service at 11:30 p.m.

Route 3 runs similarly, on a 30-minute schedule at the start of service at 5:30 a.m. until 10 a.m., after which it switches to a 15-minute schedule until 6:30 p.m. After that, it changes back to a 30-minute schedule, until the end of service at 10:30 p.m. 

Japhet highlighted, too, that the challenges that Pierce Transit faces are not entirely new. The agency has a limited range, and some parts of the county are located outside its current service area. This includes places like the Key Peninsula, a largely unincorporated area located just to the west of Tacoma across Puget Sound that is home to two state parks.

This limited service stems from past financial troubles. In 2011, following declining revenues, the agency’s board of commissioners convened a Public Transportation Improvement Conference to address the issue through revisions to the PTBA boundaries. One official from each jurisdiction in Pierce County had the authority to decide whether their jurisdiction would withdraw from the PTBA.

In 2012, the cities of Bonney Lake, Buckley, DuPont, Orting, and Sumner chose to leave the transportation benefit area. Pierce County also voted to remove a large portion of unincorporated Pierce County, including the Key Peninsula.

Today, Pierce Transit services 70% of Pierce County. Japhet said that Pierce Transit is aware of the challenges facing particular areas, and is “always open to providing contracted service, should another organization provide funding to do so, and Pierce Transit has the resources (drivers, vehicles, etc.) available. This would require an organization paying for 100% of the service costs, since it would be outside Pierce Transit’s service area.”

She also noted that rural areas have lower ridership, which makes service to those areas more expensive to operate. Because routes are evaluated on their efficiency, it’s hard to justify serving rural locations that are further apart, since the low ridership means that the agency is spending more to move fewer people from place to place.

As far as the Key Peninsula goes, she said, the agency “continues to engage with elected officials and community leaders about how we can support transportation solutions for Key Peninsula. For example, we have coordinated with those planning the new pilot service to ensure riders can make easy connections to Pierce Transit service, once they are into our service area.”

Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department 

It’s not just Pierce County and Pierce Transit that are feeling the squeeze. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department (TPCHD) — which currently faces a biennial budget reduction of a whopping $24 million — recently made headlines after cutting 22 staffers.

TPCHD spokesperson Kenny Via told The Urbanist that the staffing cuts were lower than what was originally on the table. At first, he said, the board presented a budget in July 2025 that would have meant 40 people lost their jobs. But between then and budget deadline time, the agency was able to secure enough funding to save 18 of those jobs by both finding new funding sources and deferring hiring for open positions. He also said that the department put a voluntary retirement incentive in place.

Of the 22 positions cut, 12 were from the department’s administrative division. Those staffers originally supported program staff.

When asked how those 12 individuals’ work would be distributed, Via said that they came from “a wide range of support duties, including communications, finance, human resources, information technology, office administration, and records management,” and that the department is in the process of adjusting work in those programs and redistributing some duties, while ending others.

Of the remaining 10 who lost their jobs, six were from the agency’s Disease Prevention and Management Division. These staffers focused on STI/HIV programs, as well as the department’s Chronic Disease Prevention and Management and Immunizations and Provider Engagement programs.

Two more were in the TPCHD’s Strengthening Families Division. These staff members worked in the agency’s Parent, Child & Family Health program and Behavioral & Emotional Health program.

The last two came from the department’s Environmental Health Division, and worked in its Social, Economic & Environmental Conditions for Health program.

“We prioritized keeping positions that work to bring services directly to Pierce County residents,” Via said. “Because of this, we don’t expect the public to see any immediate impact on the services we provide.”

He noted that the agency has five open positions, three of which it is currently looking to fill.

Overall, the agency’s 2026-2027 biennial budget is $102.9 million, which represents a decrease of more than $24 million from its current budget. That decrease reflects a combination of changes to federal and state funding, Via explained, including decreased funding to Foundational Public Health Services, less grant funding, and a complete loss of Covid response funding.

The agency has a variety of revenue sources, but most of the TPCHD’s revenue comes first from permits and fees (39%), and then from the state (30%). It receives further funding from the County, federal government, private, local and miscellaneous funding, and the City of Tacoma.

Via noted that though the TPCHD had planned a certain budget, and that the county council had approved that budget, “things often shift over time. That will certainly be the case here as well. We usually amend our budget twice every year, in the spring and fall, with the most up to date information.”

The post Pierce County’s Tight Budget Forces Tough Choices first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Governor also claimed to be leading the resistance: “I have good news, despite the challenges we’re facing in the country. No state in the country is doing more to stand up to this administration and this autocrat than Washington State.”

Besides attending protests, what is Ferguson doing while the Republican Congress refuses to fund food stamps for almost one million Washington residents and while Trump has cut Head Start funding for 4,000 children in our state? Thousands of federal employees in our state are either working without pay or laid off. 

Food banks have already started to limit services and food for people in need as convicted felon Trump has cut $500 million in deliveries of U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks.

The federal government is cutting an ever increasing amount of human services for Washingtonians, education funding for Washington students, clean and renewable energy development, Affordable Care Act subsidies and Apple Health coverage, mental health grants, and disaster mitigation funds. And that is just a start.

Standing up to Trump includes standing up to the corporations who put him in office and adulate him at every chance. Standing up to Trump includes standing up to his billionaire friends — Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft and president Brad Smith and CEO Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates, and T-Mobile and former CEO John Stanton.  

But how could the Governor stand up to Trump and his corporate minions? In this climate of killing public services, Governor Ferguson, State Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins should immediately call a special session of the legislature to put in place progressive taxation, taxing the very people who are benefitting from Trump’s tax cuts to the already wealthy, and using those revenues to fund the services which the federal government has cut.

We have to build our own commonwealth, separate from and, indeed, seceding from the fascism of the Trump administration. 

We can tax the wealthy and realize immediate revenues. A statewide excess compensation tax, like that which Seattle voters passed last February, would generate over $2 billion a year. The beauty of this tax is that it has already withstood a legal challenge, the Department of Revenue knows what corporations to tax for excess compensation for which employees, and the revenue could be forthcoming within a couple of months — if it was passed in a special session.  

If the Governor got a little more creative, we could extend this tax to corporations that have a nexus to our state – like Tesla. We could tax excess compensation proportionately to sales in Washington as compared to global sales. That way, when Elon Musk gets his $1 trillion in compensation, Washington state would receive $2 billion in revenue.

What could the Legislature and Governor do with these new revenues?  

• Make up for all gaps in food stamp funding.  
• Restore child care for toddlers which they repealed a few months ago. 
• Expand child care for working class and middle class families, something they said they were intent on doing but instead denied state-supported child care for these families.  
• Fund universal school lunches, which they have said for years they wanted to provide but just couldn’t find the funds.  
• Take over the tax credits for working class families who get their health coverage through the health benefit exchange, the tax credits which the Trump administration has repealed.  
• Boost the housing trust fund and expand it to housing which is available for low income, working class, and middle income Washingtonians.  
• Fund the state law for child care workers compensation, which they passed in 2005 and ran away from in 2014.   

Another revenue source should be the workforce education investment tax. Amazon and Microsoft boast about this tax, and how it funds higher education and apprenticeships. What they don’t say is that they are excused from paying hundreds of millions of dollars in proportional taxation. Instead, they made sure that the law has a ceiling in place for those companies with more than $25 billion in global revenue.   

If this ceiling was removed, so that Amazon and Microsoft would pay proportionally the same amount as all other knowledge-based companies, the state would realize $800 million more a year. 

With this revenue, the legislature could decrease college tuition and enable students from middle class families to gain the College Grant to pay for their tuition. This could be an immediate benefit, as Representative Julia Reed (D-Ballard, 36th Legislative District) has already drafted a bill to close this loophole for these oligarchic corporations which are literally paying fealty to Trump.   

These new progressive revenues would come from Amazon and Microsoft, which are realizing record stock gains while laying off thousands of workers in our state. These are the elite corporate oligarchs, those who stood with convicted felon Trump at his inauguration, who gained billions of dollars in the Trump tax cuts, and who are financing the destruction of the East Wing of the White House for a Trumpian ball room.

Unfortunately, Ferguson fought tax-the-rich efforts during the last legislative session and is renewing his opposition. “I’m skeptical of additional revenue at this time,” he recently told the Washington State Standard.

We should be fighting with everything we have to block the pathway to fascism. Now is the time for Governor Ferguson and Democratic legislative leadership to realize true patriotism and stand up and tax the oligarchs who are destroying our democracy and our public services. That would go a lot further than just announcing that the Governor participated in a No Kings rally.

The post Op-Ed: Ferguson Must Back ‘Stand Up to Trump’ Rhetoric with Funding first appeared on The Urbanist.

The DPD report used almost two years of publicly available data to analyze the impacts of this new law, and what they found validated criticism of the ordinance when it was being passed. During the reviewed period, only six prosecutions out of 215, or 2.79%, resulted in someone either completing treatment or receiving a court order directing them to seek treatment.

Simple drug possession or public use was the only offense in 76% of the cases found, but 42% of the people charged solely with one of these offenses were still booked into jail. 71% of the cases involved a very small amount of drugs (a gram or less).

The report revealed that the new ordinance is disproportionately criminalizing and harming Black people. 25% of the people charged with public drug use or misdemeanor drug possession have been Black, meaning a Black person is 4.1 times more likely to be charged with the new drug ordinance than a White person. 

 “The harmful impact is mirroring what we used to see in terms of the disproportionate impact on communities of color, particularly Black men,” said Matt Sanders, the Director of DPD. “It is very concerning for us because it’s starting to look more like a return to the war on drugs, something that we’ve moved away from.”

Promise to prioritize diversion

Seattle’s 2023 drug ordinance created new gross misdemeanors for public drug use and simple drug possession in the wake of the state Supreme Court’s Blake decision in 2021. The law reflected the actions of the state legislature earlier in the year, who adopted the same drug laws. The state went that route in spite of its own Substance Use Recovery Services Advisory Committee (SURSAC) voting to recommend the decriminalization of simple drug possession in Washington State.

The state ordinance identified pre-filing or pre-trial diversion as a preferred strategy, and Seattle’s ordinance followed suit, stating both an encouragement of and preference for law enforcement assisted diversion programs, specifically naming the Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD) program. 

Seattle’s ordinance was strongly backed by Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison and Mayor Bruce Harrell.

“Our ordinance will talk about how we deal, what we’re required to do for that person who just needs help,” Harrell said at the time. “It’s not a war on drugs. It’s a war on health. We want everyone to be healthy.” 

The city council voted narrowly (4-5) against the first version of the ordinance in June 2023, with then-Councilmember Andrew Lewis seeming to change his mind about his vote on the dais. 

“I came out here on the dais today fully prepared to vote for this measure… but this discussion deserves more than this,” Lewis said right before the vote.

However, Lewis brought a new–and largely similar–version of the ordinance before the council in September 2023, which passed by a 6-3 vote. Lewis said at the time that the new ordinance emphasized services and diversion.

The City didn’t increase its investments in treatment and diversion at the time of the ordinance’s passage. 

Prosecutions increasing this year

The DPD analysis of the drug ordinance found that related prosecutions have increased in 2025. This year through the end of July 2025, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (CAO) filed nearly double the number of cases related to violations of the drug ordinance compared to the entire previous year. In 2025 the office also increased the pace on prosecuting older cases from 2024. 

The report states that these new trends mark “a clear shift in enforcement strategy from SPD and CAO that contradicts the ordinance’s stated preference to avoid criminal legal system involvement and incarceration for people struggling with substance use in public.”

CAO has also ramped up the use of Stay Out of Drug Areas (SODA) orders. According to data from the Seattle Municipal Court, only one SODA order was issued in 2024. As of October 16, 60 SODA orders have been issued thus far in 2025.

Part of the increase in SODA orders may be caused by the CAO’s recent Drug Prosecution Alternative program, announced in May and launched in August. The program offers defendants charged with drug use or possession the chance to have their drug charge dismissed if they engage in evaluation for treatment. 

Seattle CAO spokesperson Tim Robinson, told The Urbanist most people said they would take the deal if offered. “In the past six weeks, that offer has been extended 25 times and 17 have opted in. Only one person has rejected that offer so far,” Robinson said.

Unlike with diversion, the required evaluation for this program can sometimes take place months after the original incident resulting in the charge took place. 

“With someone in crisis or someone with addiction, months can be the difference of someone you know overdosing or life or death,” Erika Evans, the current frontrunning candidate in the City Attorney race, told The Urbanist. “It’s unacceptable. It’s a continued pattern and practice of [Davison’s] leadership of delays, delays, delays, and not actually having any evidence-based approaches to what the office is doing, especially on the criminal side.”

If the incident occurred in one of Seattle’s many SODA zones, the Drug Prosecution Alternative agreement also requires defendants to join the CAO’s request for entry of a pre-trial SODA order. This new requirement is likely to increase the total number of SODA orders issued.

“Courts are very reluctant to impose these SODAs for a number of reasons,” said Sanders. “And so if you’re trying to show that these sort of orders are being issued, one of the ways you can try to do that is to coerce a person into agreeing to one in order to get their case dismissed.”

Other criticisms

Evans was strong in her condemnation of the CAO’s new approach to the drug ordinance, citing the ordinance’s original intention to prioritize diversion and services.

“These are the 215 cases that the City Attorney has made basically a war on drugs,” Evans said. “When 215 folks that are under her discretion, 97% of them are not getting treatment, that is a failure, and seeing that Black people are represented 4.1 times more than White people in this group, that is very frustrating and disappointing to see.”

Evans criticized Davison’s Drug Prosecution Program, saying it’s a method for getting rid of cases instead of helping people get connected to services and treatment. Evans would prefer to see cases similar to these 215 referred to LEAD. Evans suggested, and Lisa Daugaard, the co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (PDA), confirmed that LEAD is willing and able to take cases like these. 

Studies show that the risk of an overdose greatly increases after someone is released from jail, calling into the question the increasing jail time associated with simple drug charges. 

Meanwhile, more than half of the 215 cases in the DPD report stalled out after a bench warrant was issued, meaning that the person didn’t appear in court at the specified time an their whereabouts are now unknown. These people don’t receive any services or addiction treatment, while their lives might become further destabilized by having a pending criminal charge.  

The CAO’s new direction of increased filing and jail time also carries a hefty price tag. The City of Seattle entered into a new interlocal agreement with King County to use the King County Jail, with the negotiated price to house someone in the jail in 2025 being $386.36 per day. The City also pays a booking fee of $296.46 every time a person is booked. Therefore, the minimum amount the City pays every time someone is put into the jail is $682.82, an amount that can quickly balloon for longer stays. 

Using the Drug Prosecution Program instead of pre-filing diversion entails additional prosecuting and public defense attorney costs as well as court costs, all of which are paid for by taxpayers. 

“It has cost cascading effects because it hurts the individual who is now being criminally prosecuted, is not getting any services, and is subjected to potential jail time, and costly to the taxpayers who now have to pay for the infrastructure to support this machine with lawyers and judges and court time,” Sanders said. “And there isn’t any corresponding benefit to the public or public safety.”

“To be making us pay for something that is clearly ineffective, clearly a failure, clearly racially disproportionate […] of who it’s applying to, and it’s not solving what we’re seeing on our streets, what’s happening is bad stewardship of public dollars and of public safety,” Evans added.

Harrell and Davison double down

Both the Mayor’s Office and the CAO contend that the DPD’s report is misleading, with Robinson saying the report presents incomplete data. Unfortunately, some relevant data, particularly that related to Seattle’s diversion efforts, is not easily available to the public. 

Both the Mayor’s Office and the CAO also said that the report ignores the diversion to LEAD that has been happening. Callie Craighead, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office, provided a joint statement with LEAD arguing for the program’s success.

“During that time frame, while 215 individuals’ cases were referred for prosecution, SPD referred three times as many people directly to recovery services and case management through the LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) framework,” the Mayor’s Office and LEAD said. “75% of those encountered by SPD were diverted prior to jail booking or prosecution. The City has kept its promise.”

The joint statement emphasized that the ordinance doesn’t legislate in the area of prosecution, seemingly passing the buck onto the CAO: “The aspects of implementation of the possession/public use ordinance that are under the Mayor’s control (police implementation and LEAD funding) have played out exactly as promised.” 

LEAD’s 2025 Quarter 2 report tells a different story, saying, “Seattle LEAD has faced significant budget reductions in 2025. In Q2, Seattle LEAD downsized its workforce, which puts all of the above projects at serious risk of failure.”

Harrell has proposed a $5 million investment in LEAD in the 2026 budget, to be funded by the new 0.1% public safety sales tax that the city council just passed. Much of this investment is replacing the funding LEAD has lost over the last two years. 

Robinson shared different diversion numbers, covering the timeframe from October 2023 to the present. He said 222 people had completed a LEAD intake, which means they weren’t booked into jail or charged, while 236 people were charged with a crime. These numbers show a diversion rate of 48%. 

“Without a law to make drug use or possession unlawful, officers could not make arrest-referrals to LEAD or the City Attorney’s Office,” Robinson said.

Sanders is not convinced by these arguments, saying the ordinance isn’t necessary for the police to make referrals to LEAD.

“Why are all these people, hundreds of people over the last two years, still getting prosecuted for just drug possession?” Sanders said. “Why are you four times more likely to get a drug prosecution charge if you’re a person of color?”

“There’s nothing in the legislation for the intent of the bill to say only three quarters of people should benefit from treatment programs, pre-diversion,” Sanders continued. “It seems like an arbitrary line to measure success. The goal is to divert as many possible cases, and the goal is also not to have a disproportionately harmful impact on communities of color.” 

The post Seattle Drug Ordinance Fails to Meet Treatment Promises, Report Says first appeared on The Urbanist.

The sales tax bump would provide funding to double the number of CARE responders currently engaged in crisis response, allowing the program to grow from 24 to 48 responders. CARE would be able to extend its coverage hours to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Right now, CARE responders are available from 12pm to 10pm.

The increased investment would include more 911 dispatchers and other staff. The public safety sales tax would also provide some ongoing funding for the CARE department, freeing up money in the General Fund (the City’s most flexible pot of money) that would otherwise go to this purpose. 

The idea of establishing a robust alternative response system has been enthusiastically discussed in Seattle since 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. 

While alternative response options have gained popularity across the nation, Seattle has fallen behind many comparable cities, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico and Durham, North Carolina. As of September, Albuquerque’s alternative response had answered more than 120,000 calls for service As of July, Durham had responded to over 32,000 calls. By contrast, Seattle’s CARE team had a late start and has responded to fewer than 7,000 calls thus far.

CARE responders expanded to citywide service earlier this year, funded by a federal grant. CARE teams are divided between three zones that roughly correspond to police precincts: one in North Seattle, one in central Seattle, and one in South and West Seattle. 

Labor negotiation issues

Amy Barden, the chief of the CARE department, has a vision in which she could dispatch a variety of teams to respond to the proper 911 calls. Right now Barden can dispatch both fire and police responses. CARE responders are required, per the City’s contract with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG), to be dual dispatch, meaning they are sent with officers from the Seattle Police Department (SPD). While officers are allowed to give CARE teams permission to respond without them, this doesn’t always happen in practice. 

Barden told the city council that when CARE teams are dispatched to “priority 3” person down and welfare check calls (the two call types allowed by the SPOG contract), they have to wait an average of 173 minutes for police officers to show up. 

Barden said an analysis of 911 calls performed last year showed seven call types, representing more than 47,000 calls last year, almost never result in any kind of law enforcement action. However, the CARE teams are only allowed to respond to two of these seven call types.

“We wasted at minimum 100 police hours a day dispatching police to those calls that could have been better handled by another unit,” Barden said. “And if we want a safe city, this simply has to change.”

Barden told The Urbanist that she was originally told she’d be able to solo dispatch the CARE teams by the end of 2024. The fact that the City still hasn’t negotiated an updated Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with SPOG to allow for solo dispatch and response to an increased number of call types has been a disappointment to advocates for alternative response. 

“The optimist in me believes we’re going to get the MOU, we’re going to be able to solo dispatch CARE, and they will continue to arrive within 10 to 14 minutes as they are now, expanding the team,” Barden told the city council. 

Barden told The Urbanist that she had recently met with Mike Solan, SPOG’s President, who expressed support of the CARE team. 

As a result of the dual dispatch design, the CARE team has struggled with being underutilized, an issue that was identified in an independent evaluation of the program conducted by Seattle University, led by Jacqueline B. Helfgott, PhD, who also leads SPD’s annual ‘Public Safety Survey.’

A sudden and precipitous drop in SPD/CARE co-response took place after October 8, 2024. The evaluation reported that SPD request for CARE attendance at calls after that date dropped from 85.1% of calls logged to 21.9%. 

“My reaction to that drop in requests was to make sure the CARE responders understood they should be proactively going out to the areas where we know the crisis calls are coming in […] and to try to get out ahead of the calls,” Barden said.

At around the same time, on October 4, 2024, SPD officers received incorrect paychecks from the City due to implementation issues around a new Workday payroll system that resulted in a class action wage theft lawsuit in February of this year. Solan told Seattle Red that SPD was telling the City ahead of time that the new payroll system wasn’t going to work. 

A few days after the incorrect paychecks had gone out, SPD officers suddenly requested CARE attendance at calls 63.2% less often than they had previously. 

SPOG never publicly made an ultimatum that the slowdown of CARE referrals was due to their payroll frustrations, and the Mayor’s Office denies any relationship between the two factors, saying there is no evidence to support such a claim.

“In October, in order to expand effectiveness and to better support our community, the City expanded CARE’s ability to interact with folks in need by proactively doing premise checks,” said Callie Craighead, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office. 

Should the City fail to negotiate an appropriate MOU with SPOG, Barden’s plan B is to integrate the CARE team into response for the 988 crisis line. Design-wise, Barden believes using 988 as primary dispatch in place of 911 isn’t optimal because it would lead to a loss of records integration, but it would be a way to allow the CARE teams to respond to more people in need if labor issues stand in the way.

The CARE department has entered into a new partnership with the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office to provide CARE team support to people being released back into the community from the King County Jail. This communication will allow the CARE team to proactively respond to people who are more likely to be in crisis.

“If we take services to people, and if we basically provide the right treatment on demand and make it really easy, people will elect into it,” Barden told The Urbanist. 

Barden also likes the idea of a direct line for businesses and nonprofits who often need to make crisis calls.

Barden’s ultimate goal is to expand the CARE first responders to 96, which would allow robust 24/7 coverage. Albuquerque’s alternative response began to see a real impact on the ground at this size, she said.

Barden is also ready to begin the program coordination role outlined in the city ordinance that created the CARE department. The ordinance calls for the department to unify and align “Seattle’s community-focused, non-police public safety investments” as well as create a new initiative to integrate the City’s violence intervention programs. 

“I am deeply uncomfortable that I’m not doing a significant portion of the job that I was hired to do, and I have recommended that the city and the council change the ordinance if you don’t believe in it, but it just doesn’t feel right,” Barden told The Urbanist. “I’m legally obliged to do that thing. And now, at this point, professionally, I am seeing what works in the cities around the country, and it is exactly that. It’s flattening and de-siloing the work.” 

Harrell recently announced a $14.7 million investment in gun violence intervention, school safety, and support services. Organizations are able to apply for the funding through the Human Services Department (HSD). Harrell made this structural decision in spite of a recent recommendation from the City Auditor’s Office to have the CARE department coordinate the City’s gun violence prevention efforts. 

Barden told The Urbanist that to date, she has not been part of the conversations about the above gun violence intervention investments. Instead, she has focused on creating strong partnerships with county leaders.  

Public safety sales tax

The CARE expansion, along with the new 911 dispatchers and other staff and ongoing funding, will be supported by the 0.1% public safety sales tax proposed by Harrell.

The state doesn’t require this new sales tax to solely fund new investments; rather, the funds, estimated to be $39 million annually, can be used to pay for existing expenses. Harrell’s proposal uses 38% of the tax to pay for already existing CARE department expenses, whereas 62% will go to the following new spending priorities:

• $9.5 million to expand the CARE team and hire more 911 dispatchers
• $1.5 million to expand the Seattle Fire Department’s Health 99 Post Overdose Team to provide service 7 days a week
• $1.2 million to the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) to expand their outreach division for people with opioid use disorders
• $2.84 million for a combination of detox and inpatient treatment beds in 2026
• $1.8 million for the reopening of the Seattle Indian Health Board’s Thunderbird Treatment Center
• $5 million to the LEAD criminal diversion program, most of which is replacing other funding that is ending
• $2.1 million to hire 20 more firefighter recruits

Public Safety Chair Bob Kettle spoke in favor of the new investments. “We cannot succeed in public safety if we don’t also succeed in public health,” Kettle said. 

Councilmember Martiza Rivera expressed skepticism at the investment in the LEAD diversion program after being told that the City plans to invest around $20 million total in the LEAD diversion and CoLEAD temporary housing and case management programs.

“$20 million is a lot for a program,” Rivera said. “Obviously, we have departments–for instance, the Department of Arts, the Office of Arts and Culture, is a $23 million overall department,” Rivera said. “So just to give a comparison, that 20 million can fund an actual department.”

Tom Mikesell of the council’s Central Staff highlighted that the sales tax is a regressive tax.

“The impact of the taxes is felt more acutely by those with lower incomes,” Mikesell said. “The current economic environment indicates that high inflation will continue, the full impact from tariffs still uncertain. And so this tax increase and other tax increases that are before you will be impacting consumers within the context of those inflationary increases as well.”

Mikesell also stressed that when the council faces the $140 million budget deficit projected for 2027, they will have two fewer tools for bridging the gap, since they’ll already be deploying the public safety sales tax increase and the Business and Occupation (B&O) tax overhaul for the 2026 budget.

Budget Chair Dan Strauss shared that he expects the October revenue forecast to get worse, not better. 

In spite of the difficulties, most council members appeared to be in support of the CARE department expansion. 

“It’s lovely to see that this department will start expanding the hours of operation and scope of service,” Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said. 

“I believe that we will save the budget and start to heal our city when we support people in permanently breaking the cycles and rebuilding their lives,” Barden told the council. “The reason for the investment is not economic, it is moral. We have failed our most vulnerable neighbors for generations.”

The post Sales Tax Hike Would Fund Civilian Responder Expansion, Barring SPOG Obstruction first appeared on The Urbanist.

In the next two months, Kroger will close multiple Fred Meyer stores across Western Washington, including those in Lake City (Seattle), Redmond, Everett, and Kent. The company blames a “steady rise in theft” and a “challenging regulatory environment,” and promises to reassign workers elsewhere. UFCW 3000, the grocery workers’ union, reports that more than 700 employees will be affected. 

Does crime alone explain these closures? 

Retail theft has risen in some places since 2019, but the story is not so simple. Even the industry’s own reports are debated, and locally, shoplifting was down at several of the stores now being shuttered. Profitability pressures, real estate costs, and broader corporate strategy clearly play a role. Theft may be part of the story, but it is not the whole story. 

The hunger link: food prices and theft 

What Kroger does not mention is just as important. Food prices have surged, more than 20% in Washington since 2020, with basics like eggs, milk, and produce climbing fastest. Pandemic-era SNAP boosts expired, leaving families with less buying power. 

When theft rises, part of it is hunger in action. When it comes to Kroger, people aren’t typically stealing flat-screen TVs; they’re stealing bread, cereal, and produce. In that sense, the grocery store is telling on itself. Its own price hikes fuel the desperation. And Kroger’s response is not to find a solution and maybe ease the burden, but to close doors, punishing entire neighborhoods in the process. 

How closures deepen food deserts and scarcity 

When a full-service grocer leaves a neighborhood, it doesn’t just take away a shopping option; it reshapes the local food landscape. Competition shrinks, which means prices rise and choices narrow. Families end up paying more whether they stay local or spend extra time and money traveling farther. 

For seniors, disabled residents, and families without cars, the impact is sharper: a grocery trip becomes a logistical barrier instead of a routine errand. In places like Lake City and Tacoma’s South End, where alternatives are already limited, the loss of Fred Meyer pushes these neighborhoods closer to becoming food deserts. 

And it’s not just about groceries. Fred Meyer closures also erase access to pharmacies, affordable household goods, and everyday essentials. What remains is scarcity: fewer fresh options, higher costs, and a community forced to stretch already thin resources even further. 

“Food banks can cover it” is a myth

Some claim food banks can make up the difference. But in 2024, food pantries in Washington logged 13.4 million visits, a 70% increase since 2021. One in four residents has turned to hunger relief. Food banks provide emergency support, not daily sustenance. They cannot fill the massive gap left by the closure of anchor grocers; they are already stretched to the breaking point. 

So why these locations? 

Look at the map: multicultural, working-class corridors (Tacoma South End, Kent, Everett, Lake City renters and seniors) plus a high-cost, tech-adjacent city (Redmond) where the building is expensive to maintain. Selecting these sites externalizes costs onto those communities, transportation time, delivery fees, and lost pharmacy access, while Kroger’s balance sheet improves, at least in the short-term, apparently. 

What helps in the short term 

There are steps that ease the strain. Diversion programs can ensure hunger-driven shoplifting is met with compassion while enforcement focuses on violent crime and organized theft. Safer store design, adequate staffing, and union guarantees of relocation can protect workers and shoppers. Transit support and waived delivery fees for SNAP users can bridge the gap until new anchors are secured. 

Local governments can also help fund co-op groceries or nonprofit takeovers of vacated sites. These “feel-good” fixes matter. They cushion families and buy time. But they don’t shift the underlying power imbalance between one corporation and entire communities. 

True transformation requires confronting the outsized influence corporations hold over essential necessities like food access. Communities cannot be left at the mercy of decisions made by shareholders thousands of miles away. Cities like Detroit and Minneapolis have demonstrated how co-op groceries, supported by public investment, can stabilize access when large chains withdraw. Stronger antitrust enforcement, such as recent federal actions against monopolistic pricing in agriculture, also demonstrates that corporate power can be checked when governments act with resolve.

And when local governments seed food infrastructure, whether through land trusts, nonprofit takeovers, or zero-interest loans for community grocers, they help build models of shared ownership and resilience. When families can shape, own, and govern the places where they shop, they are no longer at the mercy of corporate exit strategies. Only then do we move from patchwork relief to lasting food justice.

Changing Kroger’s calculus 

To truly put neighborhoods first, tougher measures are required. Kroger must be made to see staying as the better option. Right now, it calculates that abandoning working-class neighborhoods is cheaper than serving them. That math must change. 

Public subsidies and incentives should come with strings attached. Kroger benefits from tax breaks, zoning allowances, and fast-track permits when it builds or expands. Public subsidy databases show Fred Meyer (Kroger) received Washington state tax credits/rebates in 2014–2016, with details not publicly disclosed, illustrating how large chains can leverage incentives that smaller grocers rarely access. If it abandons underserved communities, public dollars should trigger automatic clawbacks, mandatory reinvestment into replacement food access, or funding set aside for community-owned alternatives. Public dollars cannot fund corporate abandonment.

Governments also have legal tools. Antitrust oversight exists to protect consumers when competition collapses, which is exactly what happens when anchor grocers leave. Local officials can also slow or block future projects, expansions, zoning changes, and permits until Kroger commits to equity in its existing stores.

Mergers are another pressure point, with Kroger hoping to expand into greater profitability. Kroger and Albertsons recently sought to merge, but the deal fell apart in the face of regulatory hurdles. In the future, regulators could require binding community benefit agreements as a condition of approval, ensuring that Kroger cannot grow while cutting off access to the very neighborhoods that sustain it. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration is very unlikely to go this route.

Collectively, consumers have leverage, and a reputational hit could hurt Kroger at the local stores that remain open. Kroger sells trust along with groceries. Broad media coverage of rising hunger alongside Kroger’s profits could raise the political cost of abandonment and make closure reputationally toxic. 

Finally, communities themselves can shift the landscape by building alternatives. Co-op conversions, nonprofit grocery takeovers, and municipally run “community groceries” show that neighborhoods don’t have to beg corporations for food access. The more real those alternatives become, the more pressure Kroger feels to stay engaged.

But alternatives can’t grow in isolation. They need supportive policy scaffolding, grants, low-interest financing, zoning preferences, and public procurement partnerships that provide community grocers with the same advantages as big chains. Just as important, workers and shoppers must be at the center of governance, ensuring that decisions reflect community well-being rather than quarterly returns. By leveling the playing field, governments can turn co-ops and nonprofits from fragile experiments into durable institutions that Kroger and other chains must now reckon with as real competition.

Closures are not inevitable. They are a choice Kroger makes because it believes the consequences are manageable. It is the responsibility of government and communities to raise the stakes, to make the political, reputational, and economic costs of abandoning entire communities higher than the costs of staying and doing business as if nothing happened. That is how Kroger’s mind can be changed.

Correction: The original version of op-ed has been updated at 1:48pm Tuesday to clarify that the Kroger-Albertsons merger appears dead.

The post Op-Ed: How to Confront Fred Meyer Closures and Guarantee Food Access first appeared on The Urbanist.

The new clinic is located at 515 Third Avenue, across from the King County Courthouse and just a block from the Pioneer Square light rail stop. It is set to open for service today (September 2).

The outpatient behavioral health clinic will provide services previously available at DESC’s old space, including psychiatric assessment, substance use disorder treatment, medication prescribing, nursing services, case management, and peer-led support services. DESC’s street outreach program will also be primarily based from the space. Other services provided that help the clinic develop a rapport with its clients include showers, laundry, snacks, and various group activities. 

“We will use this space to provide our array of outpatient behavioral health services to people with complicated and long standing psychiatric conditions, to people with hard-to-treat substance use disorder, and people whose lives have been beset by challenges, traumas, and setbacks too numerous to count,” said DESC Executive Director Daniel Malone at the clinic’s grand opening event. “One pithy phrase that captures the spirit of this work is: we meet people where they are, but we don’t leave them there.”

The ORCA Center will provide a new component to DESC’s services, with 24/7 post-overdose stabilization for up to eight people and walk-in opioid use disorder treatment available daily from 9am to 11pm. 

“It’s going to really enhance our capabilities in treating opioid use disorder, because we will be available 24/7, not just during the daytime, and able to receive people really in the immediate aftermath of having had an overdose event,” Malone told The Urbanist.

Services will be focused on medically stabilizing people who have just survived an overdose event, including keeping them physically comfortable as they start to experience withdrawal symptoms. Many people may not wish to go to the emergency room after an overdose but might be willing to come to the ORCA Center, a place specifically designed for them and their needs while offering a shorter wait time. 

The idea of a post-overdose stabilization center originated with Dr. Caleb Banta-Green, a research professor at the University of Washington Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute (ADAI). Banta-Green told The Urbanist that the idea came through conversations with Dr. Michael Sayre, the medical director of Seattle Fire Department’s (SFD) Medic One. They wanted to meet the need for people who had survived overdoses but didn’t want to go to the emergency department. 

The ADAI helped to design the new ORCA Center and will be conducting evaluations.

SFDs Mobile Integrated Health Program Manager Jon Ehrenfeld expressed his support for the new ORCA Center, saying his team already makes near-daily use of the DESC Crisis Solutions Center in the Chinatown International District. 

“[Crisis centers] are absolutely essential resources for us and unquestionably provide comprehensive, trauma-informed, wraparound crisis services,” Ehrenfeld said. “In a similar vein they are also extremely important tools for diverting our clients away from unneeded hospital stays, thereby helping reserve emergency departments for critical patients.”

Continuing opioid crisis

According to data from Public Health–Seattle & King County (PHSKC), overdose deaths spiked in 2023 before beginning to recede in 2024 and then more or less plateauing. Death numbers remain elevated compared to 2020 and earlier. The majority of the recorded overdose deaths from 2021-2024 were due to fentanyl. 

“We don’t know all the factors that may be driving the fluctuations, but it’s clear that we need to continue to advance public health approaches to preventing overdose across our communities,” said Sharon Bogan, a spokesperson for PHSKC. 

In addition to supporting efforts like the new ORCA center and the new crisis care centers, King County has begun a 24/7 buprenorphine prescribing hotline in partnership with UW Department of Emergency Medicine and opened vending machines that have supplies such as naloxone and fentanyl test strips.

“We don’t fully understand all the factors at play in recent overdose trends,” Bogan said. She said that supply-side factors may play a role, and future changes in the drug supply could drive the number of fatal overdoses back up. 

In 2024, SFD launched a pilot program allowing its paramedics to administer buprenorphine, the first such program in the country. A single dose of buprenorphine protects patients from an opioid overdose for one to two days. SFD recently announced its 100th use of buprenorphine in the field.

At the ORCA Center, patients will also be offered medication treatment for opioid use disorder, with a choice between buprenorphine and methadone. Methadone must be administered daily but can be more comfortable for some patients, whereas after the initial course of treatment, buprenorphine is a monthly injection.

DESC has recently pioneered a new protocol for treatment with buprenorphine that minimizes the discomfort of the process. They use a three-day ramp-up, gradually increasing the injection dose each day, until giving the full monthly dose on the third day. 

A study of the new protocol published in mid-August in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that 75% of individuals completed the three-day course of treatment, and 64% then received a second monthly dose. There are much more favorable results compared to a study on a different protocol using oral doses of buprenorphine, which showed only 35% of individuals completing the protocol and 22% of individuals still engaged after 28 days.

Part of the reason for the success of this new method is that it is often much less painful than the more traditional course of buprenorphine treatment.

That being said, people will only be able to stay at the ORCA Center for up to 24 hours, so in order to complete the initial 3-day protocol, they will have to return for the second and third injections. Malone emphasized how important it will be to find housing for people who want to engage in this treatment.

“We are extremely interested in increasing the opportunities to be able to refer people to places and get them in very quickly,” Malone said.

Local and national obstacles to care

“We take victories where we can,” said Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell at the grand opening event. “The fact of the matter is that even without this facility, overdose deaths were down 20% last year in the county. This is some great work. Now, imagine the magic we can do now with this facility.”

However, budget pressures are already becoming a reality for the facility. With federal Medicaid cuts looming, DESC could find itself short on funding, as many of the outpatient behavioral health services offered by the clinic are Medicaid dependent. In addition to individuals losing their Medicaid due to new work and other requirements, the Medicaid cuts will place increased stress on the healthcare system as a whole, including hospitals, clinics, and behavioral health services currently provided by King County. 

Operations for the ORCA Center in particular are currently being funded with a combination of funds from the state, the City of Seattle, and Medicaid. In addition to the Medicaid cuts coming later in 2026, Washington State was projected to face a $15 billion budget deficit over the next four years, and the City of Seattle is currently facing deficits in 2026 and beyond. 

Malone told The Urbanist that Medicaid is also the main source of funding for the medicine DESC uses for addiction treatment. Buprenorphine injections are particularly expensive, even while they are easier for folks to tolerate as they’re getting started with treatment. Cuts to Medicaid could make it harder to pay for DESC’s new successful treatment protocol, leading to fewer opportunities for people seeking treatment. 

Due to state and city budget difficulties, Malone said that right now, DESC is focused on making sure essential services will be able to continue. 

One possible additional funding source could be the 0.1% public safety tax approved by the legislature this year. Council President Sara Nelson sponsored a resolution earlier this summer that expresses support for spending up to 25% of such a tax on addiction treatment services. Whether this tax will be proposed in Seattle during this fall’s budget season has yet to be determined.

If the Seattle Shield Initiative, the City’s business and occupation (B&O) tax restructure championed by Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, were to pass this November, it could also potentially fill some gaps in DESC’s funding.

“It’s worth celebrating that we are investing in this critical stage of overdose care, but it’s also not an endpoint,” Katie Wilson, the frontrunner in Seattle’s mayoral race, told The Urbanist. “We need to deepen investments in opioid treatment and recovery housing to support long-term recovery, which evidence shows requires investments in basic needs like housing alongside ongoing wraparound services.”

Challenging Harrell from the left, Wilson led the incumbent by nearly 10 points in the August primary, suggesting she’s the clear favorite heading into a general election rematch. Since his disappointing result, Harrell has been campaigning hard, scheduling plenty of ribbon cuttings, and leaning heavily on City departments to raise his visibility on social media.

When it comes to his response to rising homelessness, Harrell has been under fire for promising 2,000 new shelter beds in his first year in office, a promise he failed to meet. Instead, Seattle currently has 128 fewer beds than when Harrell took office in 2022. 

Last year, Harrell also proposed transferring $287 million of JumpStart tax funds, much of which was meant to pay for affordable housing, to plug Seattle’s budget deficit and fund $100 million of his new priorities, which included more money to expand the Unified Care Team so it could perform homeless sweeps on weekends. 

This winter Harrell agreed to be the face of the campaign against the initiative to provide a funding source for Seattle’s new social housing developer, which ultimately passed at the ballot box with 63% of the vote.

Harrell’s campaign woes aside, the opening of DESC’s new behavioral health clinic and post-overdose treatment center shows the power of local action, even in the face of federal threats. 

“This ORCA Center, a larger sobering center, King County’s first crisis care center, a new residential treatment facility, and the STAR Center all opened within the past 12 months,” said King County Executive Shannon Braddock. “So despite the grim federal landscape that we are seeing, locally we have been able to make headway and, quite literally, open doors.”

Correction: At 12:12pm Wednesday, September 3, we rectified a transcribing error in the first Daniel Malone quote, which incorrectly said lead instead of leave. “One pithy phrase that captures the spirit of this work is: we meet people where they are, but we don’t leave them there.” We regret the error.

The post New Seattle Clinic to Provide Post-Overdose Stabilization Services first appeared on The Urbanist.

Following the county’s selection of that specific site, considerable pushback emerged from nearby business owners wary about concentrating additional human service facilities in their vicinity.

“We will join with you in supporting a new facility in Seattle once it can be opened and operated safely without negative impact on the surrounding community,” Harrell concluded his letter.

Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck has been a strong proponent of the crisis care center, urging the City to approve the site. In early July, she attended a townhall event hosted by Rep. Shaun Scott (D-43rd, Seattle) in support of the site and educating residents about the proposal. A Capitol Hill resident herself, Rinck argued that expanding care infrastructure was the right thing to do, especially in the face of the Trump Administration gutting the social safety net.

“This is a frightening moment in American history,” Rinck said during the townhall. “I don’t know what a Washington without Medicaid looks like. I don’t know what a Seattle looks like with thousands of people that lose their SNAP benefits, and I don’t know what America looks like without any meaningful social safety net. But what I do know is that when the federal government is abandoning their responsibility to take care of people, Seattle and King County is stepping up. We’re going the other direction, because we know our communities are safer when we are all healthy and housed.”

While Rinck’s stance was clear, it wasn’t clear where the mayor stood until last week, when he charted a path to open the facility — albeit with some major hurdles along the way.

Incidentally, a primary election occurred between the townhall and Harrell’s conditional letter of support. Rinck dominated challengers with 78% of the vote, and Harrell struggled to fend off a progressive challenge from Seattle Transit Riders Union leader Katie Wilson, who took a nearly 10-point lead over the incumbent. It’s hard not to read Harrell’s prepared statement as a bit defensive of existing efforts.

“As we continue our work to support those in need, create community safety, and revitalize the health and vitality of this neighborhood and our entire city, ensuring this location is a success will require the comprehensive approach we have advocated for,” Harrell said. “This is an important next step in the City’s public health effort — building on the monumental gains we’ve made through the CARE Department’s behavioral health alternative response, SFD’s Health 99 team, and record investments in substance use treatment and post-overdose care.”

Seattle’s civilianized Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department expanded in 2024, but it remains capped at 24 responders and locked into a dual responder model, where police must either accompany CARE staff or sign off before they can respond to a call alone. These conditions are due to terms in the police contract that Harrell negotiated with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG). As a result of these limitations, the vast majority of emergency calls continue to go to SPD rather than CARE.

King County voters approved the Crisis Care Centers Initiative in 2023 to create five centers across the region “where anyone can walk in for behavioral health and substance use care.” Siting the crisis centers is no easy political task. The County’s first center opened in Kirkland, scaling up an existing Kirkland Connections facility, which lessened the siting battle hurdle. Along with four centers serving specific geographic regions of the county, the plan also includes a specific center for youth experiencing crisis.

“From the start, King County has worked hand-in-hand with communities across the region, including Seattle, to increase access to behavioral health treatment and services,” King County Executive Shannon Braddock said in a statement. “The City of Seattle’s partnership is a strong example of how local governments can come together to make care accessible. By engaging residents, first responders, local organizations, and businesses, we’ve heard loud and clear the urgent need for immediate care. We know treatment works — we just need more of it.”

County officials favor the site since it utilizes an existing clinic building of sufficient size, which could be retrofitted quickly and offers close proximity to hospital emergency departments in First Hill and major transportation corridors. Building a facility from scratch would take longer and zoning policies strictly prescribe where clinic facilities can go.

From receipt of the August 13 letter of support, the King County Council has 30 days to act on the purchase and sale agreement. If approved, the purchase would close by the end of December 2025, with the center expected to open by the end of 2027, the County said — assuming the City’s conditions are met by then.

Officials have pledged that the Crisis Care Centers Initiative website will offer upcoming community engagement opportunities and updates on the project. Executive Braddock expressed intent to move forward, submitting a proposal to the King County Council to open the second Crisis Care Center in the region.

In his letter, Harrell said that the City of Seattle’s support to site a crisis care center at this location is contingent on King County’s commitment to and implementation of four main requirements, intended to avoid “negative impact on the surrounding community.”

1. Implement recommendations from a security assessment completed in partnership with the Seattle Police Department.
2. Develop ongoing safe operations plan that includes “daily exterior cleaning and removal of trash from both the building’s property and the immediately adjacent sidewalks,” 24/7 private security, and regular communication with neighboring businesses, residents, and community groups.
3. Execute a Good Neighbor Agreement with the City before the Crisis Care Center can open.
4. Conduct a broad outreach and education effort within a half-mile radius of the site, which must be completed at least 60 days prior to the opening of the Center. Following this outreach, the County must work with a six-person community advisory group that the City will appoint. The City encourages the County to explain its decision and lay out what other sites were considered and how they were ruled out.

The mayor noted that the “requirements are similar to efforts taken by the city and county when DESC successfully opened the STAR Center downtown,” a similar 24/7 behavioral health facility.

“We have heard many of the concerns of residents, small business owners, and health advocates who have questioned the decision to site the center in an area that has seen a rise in illicit drug activity and associated violence, and we are encouraging greater transparency and engagement with the community in the County’s decision-making, including providing the reasoning and record of what other sites were considered and why they were or were not appropriate,” the Mayor wrote.

In its announcement, King County noted it has already taken significant outreach steps: “Over the past four months, King County has held over 40 presentations and community conversations with First Hill and Capitol Hill residents, organizations, businesses, hospitals and first responders.”

The conditions that mayor outlined in full are below:

1. “King County and the selected operator will partner with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) to complete an internal and external security assessment based on Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) principles and implement the resulting recommendations to help prevent crime and disorder. The City must review and agree that the recommendations have been successfully implemented.
2. King County and the selected operator will implement a strong launch, and ongoing safe operations plan for the building and the surrounding exterior spaces, including public sidewalks and other publicly accessible spaces. This plan should include a definition of roles and responsibilities for building security, provider staff, clients, and visitors. It should include early and consistent activation of the building’s publicly accessible spaces and adjacent public spaces, including parking lots, a schedule of daily exterior cleaning and removal of trash from both the building’s property and the immediately adjacent sidewalks and curb spaces, a cadence for scheduled communications with adjacent businesses, residents, and community groups, and what levels of private security staffing will be provided on a 24-hour, seven days-a-week basis. The City must review and approve this plan before implementation and be given the ability to review the effectiveness of the plan in maintaining a safe and disorder-free area adjacent to the building on a quarterly basis following the opening of the Clinic.
3. King County and the provider must enter into a Good Neighbor Agreement with the City that details roles and responsibilities, includes as part of the Agreement the above safety assessment and the launch and ongoing safe operations plan, obligates the provider to meet certain safety and disorder standards to be negotiated with the provider, and provides the name and contact details of a provider staff member who will be the primary contact for community members who have complaints or concerns about safety and disorder issues. The agreement will set forth the protocols and process to proactively manage relationships with the adjacent community, ensuring the safety of everyone in the neighborhood. The City, King County, and the provider must execute this Good Neighbor Agreement before the Crisis Care Center can open.
4. King County and the provider shall engage in community outreach and education within a one half mile radius of the building to explain the mission of the Crisis Care Center and detail the safety and disorder measures that will be implemented. City representatives must be invited to participate in this outreach and education effort. Following this outreach and education effort, which must be completed at least 60 days prior to the opening of the Center, the City will appoint a six-person community advisory group to work with King County, the provider, and the City during the first year of the Center’s operation. The advisory group will represent the interests of the surrounding community, work to alleviate safety and disorder concerns, and help the Center to achieve its mission.”

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, August 13 letter to King County Executive

Officials from neighboring hospitals issued statements of support, noting the crisis center fills a gap in care and aids overstretched hospitals.

“This new Crisis Care Center will be a lifeline to our neighborhood and surrounding communities and give people the behavioral health care they need, when they need it,” said Amy Dodgion, Senior Manager of Behavioral Health in Acute Care with Providence Swedish. “This is how we get folks on a path to recovery and help alleviate hospitals that are often stretched thin.”

“As a physician and interim president of Virginia Mason Medical Center, I see the lasting impacts of patients coming to us in crisis,” said David Tupponce, M.D. “We remain committed to providing the highest quality of care to all we serve and we also know there are limits to what we can provide here in the hospital and in our emergency department. The Crisis Care Center will fill a critical gap in our community and ensure support is available to those who need it most.”

While the mayor’s conditional letter of support was the most immediate hurdle for the County to clear to advance a crisis care center in Seattle, meeting all the City’s conditions in time for the planned 2027 opening could be a challenge as well. That work now begins in earnest.

Correction: The initial draft incorrectly identified Rinck as the host of the townhall. Rep. Shaun Scott’s office put on the event. This was corrected at 2:30pm, shortly after publication.

The post Harrell Issues Conditional Support Letter for County’s Capitol Hill Crisis Center first appeared on The Urbanist.

“This is the most regressive tax bill in half a century of federal policy,” Seattle Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said to open her recent Committee on Federal Administration and Policy Changes meeting. “The effects will be devastating and felt by the majority of Americans. Also the ultra wealthy can get another colossal tax break. So we must demand better nationally and act locally.”

Medicaid and SNAP changes

The changes to Medicaid eligibility – known as Apple Health in Washington state – will begin immediately and continue to roll out for the next few years. 

“The estimates that we have seen are that somewhere between 200,000 and 320,000 Washington residents will eventually lose their Medicaid coverage,” Dwight Dively, King County’s Performance, Strategy and Budget Director, told the King County Council on Tuesday. “And public health estimates that within King County that 75,000 to 100,000 people who are currently on Medicaid will no longer be on Medicaid within two or three years, and that would essentially double our uninsured population.”

The estimates of people likely to lose their health coverage over the next few years includes people who will no longer be eligible, but it also includes a large drop-off due to the increasing requirements to qualify, which some people will find too stringent to complete, and increasing co-pays, which not everyone will be able to afford. 

The Medicaid changes will also adversely affect the hospital system. As a March 2025 report from US Senator Maria Cantwell’s office states: “Medicaid funded 22.6% of inpatient care and 18.1% of outpatient care at hospitals in Western Washington in 2023. Western Washington hospitals saw 623,549 Medicaid patients in 2023.”

Over 50% of patients at Seattle Children’s Hospital are also covered by Medicaid.

The CEO of Harborview, Sommer Kleweno Walley, told the King County Council that more direct impacts to the hospital will become visible in 2026. Harborview has been able to utilize the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion to reduce their uninsured patient percentage from 12% to between 2-4%, but we can expect to see that number begin to rise. 

Walley said that every 1% of the population that loses their Medicaid equates to about $8.4 million worth of funding for Harborview. Meanwhile, the demand for Harborview’s services will grow since they won’t turn anyone away from their emergency room.

Local community health centers will also struggle under this new burden. Right now these clinics receive anywhere from 31% to 77% of their revenue from Medicaid reimbursements. Marissa Perez, the executive director of the Seattle Human Services Coalition, told the city council that 18% of Seattle’s population relies on community health centers for primary and preventative care.

“Losing Medicaid coverage will not decrease the number of patients seeking help,” Perez said. “It will instead put extreme financial pressure on this critical safety net, resulting in worse outcomes, more medical debt, and increased medical costs across the board. While the changes are not scheduled to take place until 2026, we are already seeing changes being made to individual plans that are impacting access to care.” 

As patients lose their Medicaid coverage, they will receive less preventative care and be forced to get more of their healthcare needs met at local ERs and clinics. They’ll also lose access to Medicaid-adjacent services like transportation to important medical appointments.

Trump’s proposed 2026 budget could make matters worse, with large cuts planned to health and human services and housing and urban development, including specific targets on funding for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). 

“These cuts will undermine vital human service programs and lead to more homelessness, food insecurity, and pressure on local providers,” Perez said. She added that as Seattleites lose access to federal government assistance, they will turn to local human services agencies, who will also be struggling from funding cuts.

Anne Maher, the federal affairs director at the city’s Office of Intergovernmental Relations, said that Washington State will have to shoulder an additional $90 million for SNAP every year. SNAP-Ed, which provides education about how to make the most of SNAP benefits, is being eliminated as of October of this year. Maher said the cuts could also impact meals in schools. 

“So just generally want to note that this will cause a strain on the system if people are not receiving food vouchers and then, along with health insurance, could see issues across utilities and across the board,” Maher said.

Once the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) weighs in, several changes to SNAP will take effect immediately, including increasing work requirements through age 64, eliminating exemptions for homeless people, veterans, and foster youth, and excluding refugees, asylees, and victims of human trafficking. Next year, states will be expected to shoulder significantly more of SNAP’s expenses.

Food banks are trying to prepare to face increased strain, but they have already been meeting an increased demand, with the University District Food Bank being 80% busier in households served and 130% busier in individuals served since 2023. Food has also become more expensive in the last several years due to inflation.

“For every one meal provided by food banks, SNAP provides nine,” said Joe Gruber, executive director of the University District Food Bank. “Hunger is a symptom of economic insecurity and insufficiency so families trying to survive in Seattle on $30,000 a year are left with a Sisyphean task as the safety net is willfully destroyed by the administration.”

A possible strategy to mitigate Medicaid cuts

One possible strategy for keeping as many people on Medicaid as possible in spite of federal rule changes involves more aggressive investment in long-term case management, which would be potentially cheaper for local governments than trying to outright backfill Medicaid cuts. Case managers, especially those who work within noncongregate shelter facilities, are able to find their clients relatively quickly to make sure they don’t miss deadlines and stay up-to-date with certification requirements to stay enrolled in health benefits.  

“We would hope to see high-performing, long-term case management teams strengthened, scaled, and given the marching orders that this is a high priority over the next several years, and to train up on that,” said Lisa Daugaard, the co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (PDA). “What we shouldn’t do is defund those teams because we’re worried about backfilling Medicaid cuts. Instead, we should lean into these kinds of connections, which really have a protective ability to keep people enrolled.”

LEAD, a pre-booking diversion program, has lost about $3 million in permanent funding from the City over the last two years. Daugaard suggests the city make sure to maintain the current level of service and start to scale up the program by allocating an additional $5 million in the 2026 budget.

Daugaard also suggested that local governments use capital budget funds to acquire buildings, including tiny homes and motels, to increase housing stock, while saving other funds for case management and operating budgets. Proceeds from both the Seattle Shield Initiative and the public safety sales tax increase recently passed by King County and being considered by Seattle would be eligible for use in scaling up case management services.

In addition to the benefit to individuals of being able to continue to receive healthcare, Daugaard emphasized the greater benefit to the community at large. 

“Let’s maintain and grow our Medicaid enrollment, even though that’s not what is projected, so that we can maintain a healthy and peaceful streetscape, positive environment for small business, and a general sense that Blue cities and Blue states can govern themselves,” Daugaard said.

Decreased Medicaid enrollment rates have been linked to higher crime rates, while increased enrollment rates have been linked to lower crime rates.

Seattle’s Nelson and King County Councilmember De’Sean Quinn both voiced interest in this approach in recent respective council meetings.

How Seattle and King County are responding

In the face of the federal reconciliation bill, as well as the specter of more potential federal cuts, Seattle and King County leaders are struggling to develop a plan while dealing with their own upcoming budget deficits.

Rinck, along with Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, has introduced the Seattle Shield Initiative to restructure the city’s B&O tax, which would decrease taxes on 90% of the city’s businesses while raising an additional $90 million per year. Part of this money would be used to backfill certain general fund investments, given the city’s projected $150 million 2026 deficit. Additionally, $30 million of the proceeds could be spent addressing federal funding cuts. 

The proposal has received heated criticism from the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, who says the city should pass only the B&O exemption without also raising the rates on businesses with higher gross revenues. To pay for this exemption, the chamber suggests the city “fund it with the city’s accumulating cash balance in the Payroll Expense Tax fund, or through the normal budgeting process.” 

Much of the balance in the Payroll Expense Tax fund, otherwise known as JumpStart, has already been allocated to affordable housing projects, which tend to take a long time to complete.

The chamber adamantly opposed the JumpStart tax and initiated a lawsuit against it after its passage in 2020. After losing their appeal, Chamber President and CEO Rachel Smith said the Chamber would be seeking “a city budget that aligns with priorities and delivers action on public safety, affordability, and homelessness.”

It is unclear how this statement aligns with the Chamber’s current desire to repurpose money intended for affordable housing.

“The same people who tried to kill JumpStart when it passed — and who still argue against progressive revenue for the city today — are now first in line to use the money it raises to close a general fund gap that exists largely because they refuse to ask the wealthiest among us to pay what they owe,” said Rian Watt, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (and board vice president at The Urbanist). “We need more general fund revenue, absolutely. But JumpStart was passed with specific community needs in mind — and those needs should still take priority.”

While the Chamber thinks the Seattle Shield Initiative is a bad idea, Rinck emphasized at a recent budget meeting how regressive the state’s tax code is, saying, “The only other state in the United States that has a more business-friendly tax code than ours is the state of Florida.”

At the same meeting, Councilmember Maritza Rivera echoed the Chamber by suggested taking housing dollars that “we’re not utilizing currently” to backfill the budget deficit. Deputy Mayor Greg Wong clarified that they’ve begun collecting some housing levy money that has been promised to affordable housing projects. Voters approved the housing levy in November of 2023 to create new affordable homes and prevent homelessness through rent assistance and housing stability services – not, as Rivera was suggesting, to backfill the city’s general fund.

“I do know, though, things aren’t getting built, and this money is going to continue to come in,” Rivera said. “So if it’s not being used today, we know money is continuing to come in. We can make good down the line. […] But we have needs today, and we have money sitting somewhere today.”

While the city council considers sending the Seattle Shield Initiative to the voters this fall, and a new public safety sales tax increase might be on the horizon, Councilmember Mark Solomon called for more action on a state level in response to the federal budget bill. 

“I still believe we need to find our own money to protect our people from this cruelty,” Solomon said.  “We need an income tax as opposed to the regressive tax structure that we currently have that puts the burden on property owners, which then puts the burden on renters, and then puts the burden on people who buy stuff, who are adversely, in fact, affected.”

King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda also recently called for the state to give the county additional revenue tools, suggesting a payroll tax or a mansion tax. 

“I think that’s yet another way for us to ensure that people, our most vulnerable residents, have the services that they need, but also doesn’t necessarily rely on the legislature raising revenue themselves, instead giving us the tools to do so in the largest county in the state,” Mosqueda said.

In her proposed budget, King County Executive Shannon Braddock will be creating a reserve fund in both the general fund and in the Mental Illness and Drug Dependency Behavioral Health (MIDD) Sales Tax Fund so the county can respond to future federal cuts, which the county anticipates hitting public health and behavioral health particularly hard. The council could also decide to put aside more money to temporarily backfill cuts to key local nonprofits that lose federal funding.

Both the Seattle and King County councils will have to decide how best to coordinate between themselves, the state, and key stakeholders when it comes to responding to more complicated issues like cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, emergency management, and housing. 

While Councilmember Claudia Balducci wants to consider how to coordinate the most effectively, she delivered a message of hope to King County residents on Tuesday.

“I do think that we should work together as a council and with our leadership […] to think about the ways in which we can contribute to providing some political leadership in this moment, to get ready […] to be able to do what we can do, knowing that we can’t do everything, but that we can do a lot,” Balducci said. 

Meanwhile, the Seattle City Council only has a few remaining weeks to act in order to get the Seattle Shield Initiative on this November’s ballots. 

The post Seattle, King County Brace for Impact of Coming Federal Funding Earthquake first appeared on The Urbanist.