“That will teach you a lot about how our system works and doesn’t work,” she told attendees at the University of Washington’s (UW) OpenThePaths2026 conference on February 27.

Held by the UW Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, the conference was meant to highlight the state’s first-ever nearly complete map of pedestrian infrastructure, OS-CONNECT, which maps the pedestrian infrastructure across the area where 90% of the state’s population lives.

The map

While AI created that map, humans vetted it — and in opening the second day of conference presentations, Taskar Center researcher Anat Caspi, the host and moderator of the conference, said that humans would be continuously responsible for vetting and maintaining the data shared. She said that the center had envisioned the constantly updated map as a platform to encourage buy-in from the public and center people walking, rolling, and biking. At the same time, the Taskar Center would share the vetted data with different agencies and providers.

“One of the biggest issues that we’re facing with this data, as well as other areas where low information has existed, is that it’s low-resourced,” Caspi explained. “We don’t have a single source to provide us with data just as it has been available for car travel, and so car travel becomes the only mode we know […] about, both in terms of ridership, in terms of who’s there, what are they using, what roads are being used, and how much. But we don’t have this kind of information collected and shared across all the different partners that support active transporters, and so that’s really the vision.”

Caspi acknowledged that many institutional barriers exist preventing policymakers from “really subscribing to that shared vision and open shared data that supports non-drivers.”

Legislative advocacy

Balducci joined a morning panel alongside Seattle City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Rep. Greg Nance (D-23rd, Bainbridge Island), a sponsor of the Mosquito Fleet Act, which seeks to give local jurisdictions more tools to expand foot ferries. The trio, all of whom are pushing for accessible public transit in-office and in advocacy roles, covered a variety of topics, primarily focusing on how to get legislators to perk up, listen, and act on different community needs.

Rinck said that she’s among the 20% of Seattleites who don’t own a car, and who get around using public transit. But when does that 20% — or any percentage — begin to matter in public legislative discourse?

Balducci said that she believes it takes some sort of “forcing function.” She pointed to accessibility requirements as an example. Before ADA regulations, people with disabilities had very limited access to transit. Unfortunately, she said, it wasn’t the result of good intentions so much as a host of lawsuits, regulations and enforcement.

“Collectively, it takes a lot of pressure. I think that we need to maintain the focus on passing good laws. And that doesn’t just mean at the state and federal level, at the local level,” Balducci said. “We need to pass good ordinances that apply to our own jurisdictions that force us to then do the right thing and send the message to the entire organization.”

Rinck pointed out that change is hard in the face of a majority of people who still benefit from the way things are. She later highlighted that while policymakers care about data from the standpoint of funding decisions, that’s not the only thing that gets them to sit up and care.

“I would love if every policymaker looked at data and cared about data, but that’s not the way to do it. I want to emphasize how important it is to understand what drives your decision-making,” Rinck said. “Not everybody cares about data. They care about the re-election. They care about looking good. They care about whether or not they’re embarrassed to leave. Those are tools, too. That’s my very spicy take.”

“Sometimes,” she continued, “the thing that gets the decision-makers to do the thing we need them to do is, for a very silly reason, a silly rationale, but if we’re about really effectuating change, that is … a realistic tool in our toolbox.”

Nance agreed, saying that it’s extra difficult to get transportation bills the proper attention they need, especially with so many spreadsheets and numbers attached. What gets these kinds of pro-transit bills passed, he said, is story — personal stories about individuals, to put faces to those spreadsheets and numbers. It’s also important to personalize that data before getting too far along in the process, to head off any cross-aisle “shouting,” as Nance put it, at public meetings.

Community action

That’s where advocacy leaders like Paulo Nunes-Ueno and Kirk Hovenkotter come into play, which made their panel following the elected leaders well-timed. At the conference, the pair of transportation advocates presented the Megaproject For Safety, a roadway safety initiative that Transportation Choices Coalition (TCC) spearheaded. Hovenkotter is the executive director of TCC, while Nunes-Ueno runs his own transportation consulting firm.

The initiative calls for dedicated state funding to prioritize making the state’s most dangerous roads, many of which are state highways doubling as main streets, safer. The coalition’s webpage states that new money — which a measure like a road usage charge could create — would fund the initiative.

“I also want to use this as a moment to talk about how you can keep and build momentum around an idea like this. We all know there’s great ideas or a dime a dozen, but it’s how you organize and how you put pressure on decision makers and bureaucracies to be able to get them done,” Hovenkotter said, before outlining the project for attendees. “That’s the conversation that I really want to have with Paulo and with you all in the room today.”

2023 was Washington’s deadliest year for traffic deaths, marking a 33-year record high. Of the more than 800 people who died, 160 were pedestrians. 2024’s numbers were nearly as grim, with more than 730 people dying in traffic crashes, 155 of whom were pedestrians.

Every municipality has its known danger roads, Hovenkotter said, and listed a few of them — Aurora Avenue in Seattle, Pacific Avenue in Tacoma, Division Street in Spokane, and U.S. 2 in Monroe. The problem is not just that they persist, but that, as cities and towns overhaul their zoning codes to allow for more middle housing as required by state law, the surrounding streets will get increasingly worse at meeting residents’ needs.

“I can promise you almost 100% of the properties along these roadways are going to be upzoned for new housing,” Hovenkotter said. “And the ask that we have is, ‘If we’re going to add new housing here, how do we make the roads that this housing is going on places we can be proud of, places that are easy to walk and get to these destinations and get to these homes? They’re not the roads that we know they need to be to be the homes for so many more people in our state. But we know that our state can do big things when it puts its mind, money, and might to a problem.”

Hovenkotter pointed out that the state has no problem committing both billions of dollars and decades of time to infrastructure like floating bridges and freight. So why not commit similar resources to pedestrian safety along Washington’s major roadways?

Hovenkotter said that in last year’s legislative session, following former Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) Secretary Roger Millar’s call on the legislature to put $150 million per year towards funding safer main street highways, the coalition asked the legislature of $1.5 billion over the course of 10 years to fund those safer roadways.

“Last year, we were lucky to win $100 million committed towards these roadways in the [2027 – 2029] biennium,” Hovenkotter said. “It was a really exciting win, and this went from an idea at the beginning of session to something that had $100 million committed to it.”

During the question and answer session, Barb Chamberlain, WSDOT’s director of active transportation, offered a slight correction. She pointed out that while Hovenkotter framed it as a win — and she appreciated that “advocates always have to say we had a win” — it was not, as she put it “new money” going towards those efforts, but repurposed funds already going to a similar purpose.

“It is within the preservation budget where we’re supposed to be doing Complete Streets work, so it’s money on specific projects, not on other projects. The real win would be new additive funding. ‘Additive’ is the key word here,” Chamberlain continued. “We want these transformational projects. We need new money to do transformative work, because you still want us to do the basic work — nobody gets across the river if the bridge is closed. No mode moves. So, ask for new money, when you are asking.”

She also highlighted that different agencies operate different roadways, and noted that there is a difference between roadway design and operation decisions and land use decisions.

“‘Wide and fast’ — those are functions of roadway design and operational decisions. … ‘Busy and complex,’ those are land use decisions. That is your city council or your county council,” Chamberlain said, indicating where residents could direct their advocacy energy. “What is the zoning? What is the anti-displacement housing policy? What are they going to do at the city level or the county level that means that the uses alongside the road and the design of the road work together? Because they don’t today. This is definitely not disputing the core premise, which is that we have a lot of car sewers [areas that are dangerous because of cars and car infrastructure]. And they need to be better. But just work all of the policy here, not only the transportation policy and not only the state. I think that’s my big takeaway.”

Another attendee, Jen Mayer, King County Metro’s equity and social justice capital implementation manager, agreed with Chamberlain about the funding, and said that she would love to see more interagency partnerships. While she acknowledged that sometimes these partnerships can mean long processes towards goals — she knows from personal experience — she also said it’s worth it, particularly dollar-wise.

“It would be way cheaper … all the different agencies are doing all sorts of stuff. Any time you dig dirt, I would like to have a model where we have a sidewalk SWAT team that says, ‘Oh, by the way, I saw you’re having a truck lay some ground here. Can you build some sidewalk along the side? Can you do ramps?’” Mayer said. “Can we be more opportunistic in our partnerships? Because it’s a lot of money to mobilize for sidewalks and ramps and crosswalks. But if somebody’s already mobilizing in that area, it’s way cheap to give them a little more money to do the work that we want to see get done. … I’d love to have more partnerships on the smaller scale as well as on the bigger scale.”

But, as conference speakers stressed throughout the morning, nothing changes without the public pushing for it.

Readers looking to get involved with transportation safety on a local level can check out organizations like the Seattle Streets Alliance, Tacoma on the Go, and the Transit Riders Union. Those looking to get involved at a state level can check out organizations like the Transportation Choices Coalition and Cascade Bicycle Club.

The post Advocates Gather at UW, Pushing for Safer, More Accessible Streets first appeared on The Urbanist.

But civil rights, privacy, and LGBTQ+ advocates say the bill doesn’t take the right approach to protecting minors’ mental health and keeping them safe. In encouraging companies to implement age verification systems to gatekeep their platforms, the bill opens a can of worms about the increased risk and difficulty these systems will cause to many marginalized people, as well as raising the more fundamental question of who is allowed to access the internet at all. 

“First, it will ban addictive algorithms for minors so they don’t get so easily hooked. And second, it will prohibit push notifications during school hours and late at night,” Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown said in an Instagram video explaining the bill. “And I know as a parent of two kids that those are the most susceptible times to some of the online behavior.”

Brown’s office specifically requested that the legislature advance HB 1834, which has been dubbed “Protecting Washington Children Online.”

“We have a plethora of documents that have been surfaced from our online services that are engaging with constant feeds and constant scrolling opportunities, including ads and other content, including ones that talk about causing reward deficit disorder, dopamine hits in teens that are undeniable, biological and psychological and the top down directives that drive all towards making sure people are coming back for more,” Callan said.

Maya Morales, founder of Washington People’s Privacy, said laws like these are extremely troubling for democracy. 

“The stated intention of these laws when they were originally pushed federally and across states was to remove the last bastions and shreds of the massive democratizing effect a free and open internet has had on our world,” Washington People’s Privacy wrote in a statement. “It’s undeniable that access to a free and open internet has empowered people’s movements, people’s speech rights, climate justice, LGBTQ+ visibility and rights, people’s education efforts, people’s ability to connect and communicate privately and securely, and even the ability of people to orchestrate uprisings and protest under authoritarian rule.”

In addition to civil rights advocates, tech lobbyists oppose the bill, as do some parental rights advocates and smaller tech companies who might not be able to afford to implement an age verification system sufficient to avoid litigation.

Opponents of the bill agree that children should be protected while online, but not through requiring age verification, or even incentivizing age verification. This distinction is crucial for understanding the arguments for and against HB 1834.

Advocates also have concerns that disallowing an algorithmic feed for minors, as HB 1834 does, will impede young people’s ability to discover relevant content on social media platforms.

The concerns around age verification for internet usage

Advocates have many concerns around the possible implementation of age verification requirements for using the internet. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote that age-verification systems are “at their core, surveillance systems.” Among the myriad of problems and risks of age verification systems, the EFF lists: 

• Loss of anonymity, ranging from journalistic sources to whistleblowers to domestic violence survivors.
• Loss of access to the internet for anyone without a legal ID, credit cards, or mortgage information, which disproportionately affects people of color, immigrants, unhoused people, and poor people.
• Higher error rates for age inference facial recognition for people of color, people with disabilities, and transgender people.
• Young people’s, and especially young LGBTQ+ young people’s, loss of access to vital information and affinity communities. 
• Increased privacy risks around sensitive data such as ID photos and biometric data that could be obtained through data breaches or sold to data brokers and marketers.
• Loss of access to, and the chilling of, freedom of speech.

There is a particularly increased risk to transgender people being forced to engage with these systems in order to use the internet. An estimated 43% of voting-eligible transgender Americans don’t possess IDs that correctly reflect their name and gender. 

The Greater Seattle Business Association (GBSA) wrote a letter opposing HB 1834 because it “would have unintended consequences for LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable young people who rely on social media for critical community support, a sense of belonging, and lifesaving educational resources.”

Proponents of HB 1834 argue that the bill won’t cause these harms because it doesn’t legally require age verification. The legislation states that tech companies must “reasonably determine” a user isn’t a minor instead of having the “actual knowledge” that would mandate measures like ID or biometric checks. 

“Our bill does not require age verification,” said Mike Faulk, the deputy communications officer at the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. “These companies can ‘reasonably determine’ age using the copious amounts of data they already collect from people. The bill does not ask, nor do we want, the companies to collect any additional data. We are bringing an amendment to strengthen data protection elements in the bill and are open to more.”

However, the EFF wrote a letter to the Federal Trade Commission about a federal bill with similar language, stating their fear that this language would nevertheless lead to age verification gates. 

“Litigation-averse companies are likely to implement some kind of age-verification process to avoid running afoul of the law,” the EFF wrote. 

Tee Sannon, the ACLU of Washington’s Technology Policy Program Director, said that HB 1834 would lead to the implementation of age-verification systems. 

“We all share the goal of protecting minors online, but age verification online is not the right solution,” Sannon told The Urbanist. “By requiring platforms to ‘reasonably determine’ whether users are minors, HB1834 will drive increased data collection and create new privacy risks for everyone.”

Sannon also warned that age-verification systems often involve third-party vendors that add another layer of vulnerability when considering data security risks. 

Gabriel Neuman, director of policy & advocacy at GBSA, also warned that not all requirements stipulated in bills are actually verified or enforced. One example is mandating that tech companies not retain any age verification data they collect.

“Many pieces of legislation contain requirements that corporations not hold onto verification data, but there is no way to ensure they actually do that, and they have been caught keeping that data in the past,” Neuman told The Urbanist. 

The legislature was considering another bill this session – HB 2112 – that explicitly required age verification. Brought forward by Rep. Mari Leavitt (D-28, Tacoma), the bill was meant to protect minors from sexual material that is harmful to them. 

Aside from the clear data privacy risks, a bill like HB 2112 would allow lawmakers to define exactly what material is deemed “harmful,” which could be so broad as to include all LGTBQ+ content, sexual education content, and information about reproductive care. A similar power of determination has led to the recent escalation in book banning across the country. 

 “LGBTQ youth already face high rates of depression and isolation for many, especially in rural areas and in unsupportive homes,” Danielle Skeany, the executive director of Gender Justice League said during testimony. “Online communities are their lifeline, and this bill would cut off that lifeline.”

HB 2112 didn’t make it through the policy committee cut-off date, meaning it’s dead for the session. But the fact that it was brought forward at all, and might be revived during a future year, troubles some advocates.

“We talked to national experts doing this work, and they were surprised that 2112 was even put forward and given a hearing in Washington state,” said Oliver Miska, the government relations specialist for Lavender Rights Project. “They were even more surprised that it was supported by Democrats.”

Adding further grist to the mill is the possibility that age verification systems might not even work as designed. Although more research is needed, a March 2025 pre-print suggests that when faced with these systems, many users pivot, either by using a virtual private network (VPN) to mask their location in order to bypass relevant laws or by using websites that aren’t compliant with the laws. 

Recent trends in age verification

The last few years have seen a push towards age verification on the internet, not only in the United States but also in Europe and Australia. That being said, it is difficult to compare age verification laws in other countries to those in the U.S. since many countries have much stricter privacy laws.

Similar age verification laws in other states have faced legal challenges. HB 1834 is modeled after a California law that survived the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals but is still facing legal action from big tech companies Meta, Google, and TikTok. 

This week, popular online communications app Discord announced a default teen-friendly space rolling out in March, with an age verification process for users who want to retain full site functionality. Some adults will have their age automatically estimated through Discord’s age inference model, while other users will be asked to submit either a video or a form of identification. 

One of Discord’s third-party customer service providers suffered a data breach just last fall that compromised age verification data, including images of government-issued IDs. 

Age verification laws in Ohio, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming restrict social media service Blueksky users from accessing their direct messages unless they engage in an age verification process that could involve official ID, credit card verification, or social security number checks. A similar law in Mississippi caused Bluesky to cease operations entirely in the state for several months last year before reopening at the end of the year.

On Tuesday, the State of New Mexico brought Meta to trial for allegedly failing to protect children on its platform from sexual exploitation. New Mexico’s Attorney General wrote that he wants Meta to start using age verification. 

Some privacy and LGBTQ+ advocates see this recent push for age verification as an example of a moral panic. 

“Personally, I think this is an extension of the purity culture that is gaining popularity in the United States – age verification requirements are a way for legislators to keep kids away from content they deem inappropriate. It can also be a way for them to implement their version of morality,” Gabriel Neuman, director of policy & advocacy at GBSA, told The Urbanist. “‘Protecting kids’ is a dog whistle that has been used against the LGBTQ+ community for generations.” 

During the hearing for HB 2112, Miska drew a direct parallel between laws requiring age verification and the MAGA agenda. 

“We don’t have a clear and safe way to do age verification software. We just don’t,” Miska testified. “Unfortunately, this bill is a page from Project 2025. It’s reminiscent of 19th century obscenity laws that would use vague definitions to target LGBT community and culture.”

Project 2025 implies that all LGBTQ+ content, and specifically any transgender content, should be classified as pornography, which should be outlawed, including imprisonment for its creators and distributors. 

Washington People’s Privacy links these age verification laws to the movement to undermine democracy. 

“The Heritage Foundation and other ultra-to-moderate right wing groups realized that the key to seizing authoritarian power and tight global control of all our earth’s resources was to begin by decimating any possibility of anonymity and privacy online,” Washington People’s Privacy wrote in their statement. 

The timing of the introduction of HB 1834 and other age verification-related bills in the state legislature cannot be divorced from the concurrent attacks on LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights, the media, higher education, and the U.S. Constitution.

The larger political context may encourage lawmakers to think creatively while developing other options for keeping kids, as well as adults, safe from the addictive algorithms used in social media. 

“There are better approaches, such as extending strong privacy and safety protections to all users without forcing age determination,” Sannon said. “We can protect minors online without expanding surveillance or undermining anonymity.” 

Washington People’s Privacy offered several ideas for legislation they said would be more effective, including “a people-first universal data privacy law,” bans on the collection of sensitive personal data, data minimization regulations, a law that would prohibit state and local law enforcement from buying sensitive data from data brokers without a warrant (modeled after the federal Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act), and tech education classes for kids and their families.  

Legislators have recently added two amendments to HB 1834 for consideration, but advocates say neither sufficiently addresses their concerns. 

HB 1834 could be pulled for a House floor vote at any time. Should that vote succeed, the legislation would go to the Senate to reconcile any differences between HB 1834 and the bill the Senate passed last year. 

Correction: this story has been updated with a statement from the Washington Attorney General’s Office that was not included in its initial version due to an editing error.

The post Washington Legislature Toys with Age Verification for Big Tech first appeared on The Urbanist.

Seattle’s total narrowly edged out New York City, which produced 14,240 affordable apartments in the same time period from 2020 to 2024, and Austin, Texas, which produced 13,342. Minnesota’s Twin Cities metro came in fourth with 10,722 apartments produced, followed by Atlanta, Denver, Los Angeles, and the “Bay Area.”

Note: San Francisco (along with the North Bay) was broken out a separate category from the East and South Bay Area in this study. Combined, the two Bay Area listings accounted for 16,301 affordable apartments, a total which would have led the list.

RentCafe’s analysis included only apartments in 100% affordable buildings, which does leave out a small subset of the data from mixed-income buildings. The study only counted apartments, not affordable homeownership projects, which also represents a small fraction of overall production.

With the growth in production, affordable apartments are a growing share of overall apartment production. “Affordable housing for renters accounted for one-quarter of the [Seattle] metro’s total of 59,000 new apartment buildings during this time,” RentCafe’s Florin Petrut noted.

Affordable housing composed 31.7% of overall apartments in New York over the past five years, since the region produced fewer apartments than Seattle. New York’s share trailed only San Francisco, where over a third of apartments were affordable since 2020. San Francisco produced fewer total apartment units than any other top 20 city, while Seattle outpaced the vastly larger New York market by nearly one-third.

For some regions the uptick in affordable housing was dramatic, but less so for Seattle, where the five-year time period was up nearly 40% over the previous five years — one of the smallest increases in the dataset. That means Seattle’s affordable housing sector was also the leader over the entire decade, not just the last five years. Metro Seattle produced more than 24,000 affordable apartments over the decade.

Most metros have momentum in affordable sector

On the other hand, if trendlines continue for fast-building metros, Seattle could get its title stolen in the decade ahead. For example, San Antonio’s affordable housing production was up 222%, Phoenix’s was up 206%, and New York City was up 185%. Although, in Phoenix’s case, that still amounted to just 4,626 affordable apartments, which shows how anemic affordable construction had been previously.

“Notably, affordable housing is starting to make up a larger portion of all new apartment construction,” Petrut noted. “In 2024, nearly 14% of all new apartments were income-restricted — up from just under 9% ten years earlier — indicating a growing emphasis on affordability in new development.”

A few regions bucked that trend, and continue to emphasize market-rate apartment development to a large degree. For example, just 5% of the more than 107,000 apartments produced in the Dallas metro from 2020 to 2024 were income-restricted affordable units. The Chicagoland area also produced just over 107,000 apartments, and just 6.6% were affordable. Houston did not even crack the top 20, despite being the sixth-most populous metro in the country.

Nationwide, 2024 was a banner year, delivering 91,000 affordable units, the highest total in decades. “Nearly 310,000 affordable apartments have been built nationwide since 2020, accounting for 12.6% of all new apartment buildings,” Petrut wrote. “Affordable housing construction rose 73% compared to 2015–2019, outpacing overall apartment building growth.”

Part of the credit for the affordable housing surge goes to the pandemic response strategy engineered under President Joe Biden: “The American Rescue Plan has helped move things forward by directing billions of dollars into housing through State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds,” Petrut wrote. “On top of that, many states introduced or expanded their own tax credit programs. These efforts helped developers cover rising costs and move projects across the finish line faster while simultaneously keeping rents affordable for the long term.”

How Seattle invests in affordable housing

Seattle goes beyond many other American cities in directly funding affordable housing production. The City of Seattle is spending nearly $350 million per year on affordable housing, which comes from a variety of revenue sources.

Since the 1980s, the Seattle Housing Levy has augmented affordable housing creation. The 2023 renewal tripled the size of the levy to a $970 million seven-year package, and it passed by a wide margin. At its new level, the levy provides $139 million in annual funding.

In 2020, Seattle also passed the “JumpStart” payroll tax on the largest companies in the city. Initially the revenue stream provided Covid relief, but over the longer-term the tax was intended to focus a majority of investments on affordable housing — at least when mayors and councils aren’t raiding it to plug budget holes and fund pet projects. The payroll tax pulled in $360 million in 2024, but only $142 million of that ended up going to the Office of Housing, a figure which was further cut in 2025.

Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability or MHA program — an inclusionary zoning regime that traded upzones allowing larger apartment buildings for new affordability requirements — also raises affordable housing funds via in-lieu payments from builders who opt out of providing income-restricted homes on-site. As a developer fee, MHA revenue is volatile and varies with the pace of construction activity, which has been slowing recently in Seattle, especially in the office sector. MHA topped out at $74 million in collections in 2021, but has declined since, settling out around $22 million in 2025 and in 2026 projections.

In 2025, Seattle voters approved another dedicated revenue source, this time focused on social housing. An “excess compensation” tax hitting high earners who make more than $1 million per year is expected to raise more than $50 million annually for the recently launched Seattle Social Housing Developer, which is pursuing a mixed-income model popularized in cities like Vienna.

Other jurisdictions in the region lag far behind Seattle in affordable housing investments, but most are taking strides to boost production. The Washington State Legislature has also steadily grown the size of the state Housing Trusting Fund, setting a new record with $400 million allocated in 2024, which has also helped get more affordable housing projects off the ground.

King County has flirted with a billion-dollar bond for workforce housing — although it’s not clear how soon such an initiative could materialize after a study found the County would need to back the bonds with a dedicated funding source or risk its general fund.

The region’s largest employers — including Amazon and Microsoft — have also made large pledges of housing grants and low-interest loans to aid nonprofit builders. Two top executives at Microsoft and Amazon shared a Seattle Times op-ed byline this week arguing the state “must make it easier to build our way out of the housing crisis” — and touting that “together, our two companies have committed $1.6 billion to preserve and build more than 26,000 affordable homes.”

Growth in affordable housing production has also brought its own problems. By 2025, vacancy rates at affordable apartments in King County had climbed above 10%, which is reportedly threatening to bankrupt some buildings and providers and has already led to bailouts. While demand remains high for low income housing, overproduction in the higher income segments (e.g., around 60% of area median income) has emerged an issue, at least in some parts of the region.

Still not enough

Leading the nation in affordable housing production is a feather in Seattle’s cap, but local housing advocates would be the first to admit it’s far from enough. In 2018, King County’s Affordable Housing Task Force projected that the county would need to add 244,000 net new affordable homes by 2040.

“According to our estimates, we need 156,000 more affordable homes today and another 88,000 affordable homes by 2040 to ensure that no low-income or working households are cost burdened,” the task force wrote. “That means we need to build, preserve or subsidize a total of 244,000 net new homes by 2040 if we are to ensure that all low-income families in King County have a safe and healthy home that costs less than 30 percent of their income.”

To meet the goal would have required a 11,000 affordable homes per year pace, which the region has not met thus far, even with its nation-leading production. To make up for its slow start out of the gates, King County would need to average 15,000 net new affordable homes annually from 2026 through 2040 to meet its target.

And state leaders are projecting that solving the housing crisis will also take robust market-rate production, setting a target of 1 million additional housing units over the next 20 years, or 50,000 per year. 

More work remains to hit housing targets, and simply outproducing peer cities may not be enough, if Seattle wants to solve its affordability crisis.

The post Seattle Leads Nation in Affordable Apartment Production first appeared on The Urbanist.

The idea goes, in part, that investors, banks, government, and other powerful actors are intentionally leaving homes vacant to inflate prices, and that those units could be put to use nearly right away if we wanted to solve homelessness and affordability challenges. Ray Delahanty of CityNerd, however, debunks this popular conspiracy with data, explaining why America doesn’t have anywhere close to 15 million homes readily available to fill the national housing shortage.

The post Sunday Video: The 15 Million Home Vacancy Conspiracy Theory Debunked first appeared on The Urbanist.

Conversely, Central Washington’s Tri-Cities of Pasco, Richland and Kennewick are statistically very safe for human-powered travelers, as are Sammamish and Shoreline. Seattle is the 7th most dangerous city to bike, per capita, and ranks 14th for people walking. 

All this according to data from the Washington State Patrol’s Collision Analysis Tool (CAT), which tallies “collision data submitted by law enforcement officers.” This article quantifies the locations of car-on-bike or pedestrian collisions which are recorded by local police, sheriff or State Patrol as ‘seriously injury’ or ‘fatal’, between the dates January 1, 2021 and July 31, 2025. 

Other key findings: 

• Five Washington cities rate among the 10 most dangerous for both walking and biking: Puyallup, Lynnwood, Olympia, Bremerton and Spokane.
• Solo car commuting correlates strongly with deadly and serious crashes. Rush hour is the most deadly time and the more drivers, the worse for safety.
• Crashes on state highways are by far the most likely to result in serious injury or death. Crashes on city streets – though much more frequent – are much less deadly on average. County roads are in between.
• Several of the most dangerous cities are major employment centers, with car commuters flooding the streets, including Olympia, Bremerton and Seattle.

Dangerous cities for people walking

Lynnwood and Puyallup are the most dangerous places to walk in Washington State by a wide margin, with Everett and Olympia close behind. Pedestrians are almost never maimed or killed in Sammamish, perhaps because people rarely walk there. Several east-of-Seattle suburbs have very low pedestrian carnage rates, including Bothell, Kirkland, Redmond and Bellevue. Seattle is close to the median for the 30 cities studied. Click here for an interactive map of WA’ Cities, ranked by walking danger.

Dangerous cities for people riding bikes

Washington’s capital city of Olympia suffers a very high rate of bike carnage, along with Puyallup and Lynwood. Bellingham and Bremerton round out the Top 5 of Shame. Seattle is 7th worst. The top 5 safest are Burien, Sammamish, Edmonds, Auburn and Shoreline. As with pedestrians, the Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco kill and maim far fewer cyclists than average. Click here for an interactive map of WA’ Cities, ranked by biking danger.

Pedestrian and bike carnage vs how people get to work 

Cities where fewer commuters drive alone are safer for people walking and biking. This result is intuitive; the more cars on the road, the more likely they are to hit someone walking or biking. The correlation for car-on-pedestrian crashes (R = 0.43) is stronger than for car-on-bike ones (R = 0.26). Commuter data is from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 2023. 

Work-from-home vs road carnage has an even stronger correlation. Cities with a high percentage of work-from-home have a lower rate of car-on-pedestrian (R = –0.53) and car-on-bike (R = -0.36). Again the correlation is intuitive, people who don’t leave their houses during rush hour are less likely to get hurt by a driver. Sammamish’s very low rate of crashes seems strongly correlated to its extremely high rate of people who work from home and thus very low rate of drivers out causing crashes.

What type of streets kill and maim the most people?

Although the vast majority of car-on-human crashes occur on city streets, state highways are much more likely to kill or seriously injure a pedestrian or cyclist, likely because of high speeds and design flaws, as The Urbanist has reported. Proportionally, more cyclists than pedestrians are killed or maimed on county roads, likely because cyclists choose county roads for commuting and cycling, while walking is rare in remote areas.

But state highways are very, very dangerous for people outside of cars. A car-on-human collision on a state highway is 2.5 times more likely to kill or seriously injure a pedestrian than a collision on a city street. A county road is 1.3 times more likely to kill or maim a cyclist. A car-on-pedestrian crash is much more likely to be fatal or serious than a car-on-bike crash.

It’s not getting better

If you’re looking for good news in this report, there’s very little. But here’s one improving trend: there are fewer collisions between cyclists and pedestrians now, than before the pandemic. But the number of car-on-human crashes is returning to pre-pandemic highs, and the rate at which vulnerable road users are being killed and maimed is staying high.

Unfortunately, those collisions are getting more dangerous – a single collision is significantly more likely to cause a fatal or serious injury.  In 2018 and 2019, about 1 out of 5 (19%) of car-on-pedestrians and 1 out of 11 (9%) of car-on-cyclist crashes caused a death or serious injury. Starting in 2020, those rates of fatal/serious injuries surged, to 1 in 4 pedestrians (25%)  and 15% (1 in 7). That means even while there are fewer total crashes, any given car-on-human crash is much more likely to cause severe injury or death.

About the data:

Anytime data is presented, it can be warped or manipulated to bias the information. Below is an explanation of choices I made with the data. All these data are public available at https://fortress.wa.gov/wsp/collisionanalysistool/. You’re more than welcome to check or expand upon my work. 

Why focus on Jan 2021-Aug 2025

I attempted to look at the entire post-pandemic era at one time. 2020 was a very strange year, with traffic significantly reduced as people sheltered in place, worked from home and skipped vacations, so 2020 is excluded from most data shown here. Comparing 2018 & 2019 as a pre-pandemic baseline allows for comparisons with post-pandemic times.

Why combine fatal and serious injury data?

Most crash analyses, like the Washington Traffic Safety Commission’s data, focus exclusively on fatalities. But traffic deaths are relatively rare, there were only 13 bike deaths in 2024, smaller cities may go years between a bike death. By adding in the 171 serious bike injuries, we get a fuller picture of where and how bad cycling danger is. Besides, the difference between a very serious car-on-human injury and a deadly crash is often a matter of luck. If a car crushes your leg, not your head, you live. Lucky you.

How are injury severities tabulated?

Injury severity is reported by police agencies

How are city or street locations tabulated?

By police agencies. It is likely that crashes labeled in a city, actually occurred just outside of city limits, in unincorporated areas. I made no attempt to correct for that. Sorry.

Is WSP CAT data easy to work with?

No it is not. The data has duplicates which need to be eliminated. Errors on my part are possible in that process. Furthermore, the data is gathered by police officers who may make mistakes filing reports. The WSP data is cleaned up by data experts at the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, which releases an official, annual report. But those data don’t include data on non-fatal crashes. There are discrepancies – WTSC counted 168 traffic fatalities in 2024, my report tallies 170. Presumably their number is more accurate. Sorry.

Is it fair to treat all cities equally?

Probably not. The per capita ‘denominator’ only takes into account the city’s population, not others who visit the city. Seattle hosts huge events, sees tons of tourists and has popular bike/scooter share, all of which pushes up the number of people killed or maimed in the city, making it seem more dangerous in the stats. Smaller cities with large employment bases – like Olympia, Bremerton and Everett – probably suffer similar effects from inbound workers. A different ‘denominator’ would be the count of all car crashes, which would give a baseline of street danger, as separate from danger bikes/peds face.

The post Op-Ed: Ranking Deadliest Cities for Pedestrians and Cyclists in Washington State first appeared on The Urbanist.

Gene Balk broke down the data in his most recent “FYI Guy” column in the Seattle Times. “Census data shows the number of vehicles in the city has been effectively unchanged for years, even as the number of households has grown,” Balk wrote. “Because the number of cars has basically plateaued while the number of households has grown, the rate of car ownership has declined.”

In fact, the rate of car ownership appears to be down about 10% in just six years time, and the share of households that are carless grew 25%, reaching 20% of all Seattle households, according to Census data. Renter households are driving this trend: “Around 9 out of 10 carless homes were rental units in 2023,” Balk noted.

The jump in car-free households a pattern that Balk has heralded since 2019. Although, Balk noted the trend was not as apparent before 2017, up until when Seattle was still adding a significant amount of cars as it added population.

Here are some other interesting nuggets from Balk’s analysis of the latest data:

• “In 2023, which is the latest available census data, there were 127 vehicles for every 100 city households, which is down from about 140 vehicles for every 100 households in 2017.”
• “In 2023, there were a record 74,100 carless households, representing 20% of all Seattle households. That’s up from 53,200, or 16% of households, in 2017.”
• “From 2017 to 2023, the number of cars in Seattle remained effectively unchanged at just over 460,000. In 2023, the estimate was around 463,300.”
• “2017 to 2023, the number of households in the city increased by 35,000, or 11%. There were 364,600 households in Seattle in 2023.”
• “[A]mong homeowners, there were about 177 vehicles for every 100 households in 2023. Among renters, there were only around 87 vehicles for every 100 households.”

State estimates put Seattle’s population at 779,200 residents as of April 2023 — and that figure continued to grow steadily, reaching 816,600 by April 2025. Meanwhile, 2017 is the year that Seattle crossed the mark of 700,000 residents. In other words, Seattle added about 80,000 residents while adding just 3,300 cars.

SDOT still dwelling on car infrastructure

This break from car dependency is not a trend that Seattle policymakers have not fully internalized or factored into their infrastructure decisions. Traffic engineers continue to project that traffic will trend upwards endlessly on City roads, leading to suboptimal plans that continue to focus on adding car capacity or avoiding repurposing car lanes to other uses.

One prime example is the City’s Ballard Bridge replacement plan, which includes supercharging a highway interchange at the south end of the bridge. The City says it must replace the bridge due to its advanced age, but overbuilding the bridge and interchange for cars will make it worse for people walking, rolling, biking, and living near the facility. And it’s completely unsupported by traffic models that actually tied to reality.

Traffic engineering is such a pseudoscience. The Ballard Bridge traffic study just assumed traffic would exceed capacity by 20% in 2040, which they call "crunch flow," and then worked backwards to a 1.2% annual increase.

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— Qagggy! (@qagggy.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 10:58 AM

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) also recently sought to rule out expanding bus lanes on Denny Way due to fears of huge delays to car traffic, tied to their faith in nearly bottomless demand for car travel, even if alternatives are greatly improved. Seattle has managed to cut car ownership rates and grow carless households even with most streets remaining car-centric. Imagine what would be possible with a more balanced approach with more focus on alternatives.

Seattle outpaces suburbs

The high degree of carless household formation appears to be a unique characteristic about how Seattle is growing as compared to other cities in the state.

For example, Bellevue’s drive alone rate (53.6%) is about 40% higher than Seattle’s, and its transit mode share is about half of Seattle’s (7% vs 14% for Seattle) as is its walking commute rate (4.5% vs 8.5% for Seattle). Even at a modest 2.7%, Seattle’s bike rate is nearly seven times Bellevue’s. Just 6.6% of Bellevue workers reported lacking access to a car, less than half of Seattle’s rate.

Seattle isn't perfect, but it is one of the best places to live car-free and car-light in the U.S. We need to build on this momentum.

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— The Urbanist (@theurbanist.org) September 4, 2025 at 12:56 PM

Cities like Tacoma and Everett see even more car-centric travel patterns than Bellevue. The drive alone rate is 66% in Tacoma, and 72% in Everett, with transit accounting for less than 4% of commutes, according to the 2023 American Community Survey.

The proven ability to grow rapidly without needing to add cars makes Seattle a particularly ripe market for transit ridership and one that transit agencies will need to serve in order to keep this momentum up. This dynamic is important to factor in as Sound Transit weighs revising its timelines and plans due to growing financial pressures, which could jeopardize two light rail corridors in Seattle, serving West Seattle and Ballard while adding a second tunnel through downtown.

Some suburban boardmembers have pushed to table or downsize Seattle projects in order to get light rail to Tacoma and Everett faster.

Meanwhile, Seattle officials have pushed back and cast doubt on whether cutting or deprioritizing Seattle projects move would support future population and job growth and encourage high ridership in the Link network. Does the transit demand exist at the edges of the network to ensure Link meets its ridership goals?

Boosters for Everett and Tacoma would argue that their transit mode share remains low because the regional Link light rail network has not reached them yet (and won’t until mid-2030s at best). Light rail should help encourage transit usage, but both cities already have Sounder commuter rail and express buses that already provide faster service to Downtown Seattle (the region’s primary center for jobs and large events) than light rail ever will — due to the high number of stops in-between. Light rail will not single-handedly turn those cities into transit markets rivaling Seattle, nor grant them the same ability to add car-free households as readily.

Urbanists have long been making that case that growth in Seattle is the most climate-friendly and easiest to support with transit and infrastructure. The data on carless household formation continues to build that case. Adding residents without an influx of cars is a key ingredient in green urbanism and high quality of life (unless you enjoy traffic congestion and pollution). Seattle appears to have the recipe figured out.

The post While Seattle Population Spikes, Car Population Stalls Out first appeared on The Urbanist.

The headline race for Seattle Mayor was the biggest upset of the night: progressive challenger Katie Wilson will comfortably win the Primary over incumbent centrist Bruce Harrell (48% to 44%). Fellow Stranger-endorsed progressives Girmay Zahilay (42% to 30%), Erika Evans (53% to 36%), Dionne Foster (55% to 38%), Alexis Mercedes Rinck (77% to 14%), and Eddie Lin (46% to 30%) all beat their moderate, Seattle Times-endorsed opponents.

Why did Seattle progressives dominate after collapsing the last four years? Here are a few theories. One, crime — a key contributor to recent progressive losses — has fallen after a nationwide spike during Covid. Two, Seattleites may veer left when Trump occupies the White House. Three, Seattleites are unhappy with the city’s direction and its current leadership, so they want change: progressives offer change, incumbent centrists are the status quo.

Progressives also performed well, but comparatively less strong, in first-ring suburbs like Burien, Kent, SeaTac, and Renton. King County Council Districts 5 (Kent, Renton, SeaTac) and 7 (Federal Way, Auburn) favored centrist candidates for County Council, but more progressive candidates of color performed well in municipal seats.

Historic data shows progressives fare better in the Primary, but are still favored this November

Conventional political wisdom holds that moderates do better in the Primary because Primary voters are older, whiter, and richer than General Election voters. While Primary voters are indeed older, whiter, and richer, in Seattle they’re also more college-educated, politically-engaged, and consequently, more progressive. 

Analyzing Seattle municipal election data between 2019-2023, progressives earned six-point higher voteshares in the Primary than the General, on average, after tallying up candidates’ votes into two (oversimplified) ideological buckets. 

One of the most memorable examples of a General moderate surge was Bruce Harrell’s last election where he trounced progressive Lorena Gonzalez 58.6% to 41% after a two-point Primary win — a net 15% swing. Wilson, currently leading Harrell by 4%, would lose the General with that same Primary-to-General swing.

So while moderate second-place Primary finishers could still win the General (as centrists City Attorney Ann Davison and Councilmember Sara Nelson did in 2021), it’s rare: only 9% did between 2012-2023. And most of those 9% were either razor-thing Primary wins or consequences of vote-splitting (ex: one Republican beating each of several Democrats splitting the Democratic Primary voteshare, then going on to lose in the General against a coalesced Democratic voter bloc). Now losing by nearly 20% instead of a couple points, Nelson and Davison are unlikely to repeat their 2021 comebacks.

By Friday’s drop, Wilson gained enough to clear the 50% threshold. It’s been at least a decade since a municipal candidate broke 50% in the Primary and didn’t win the General.

In the unfolding General between Zahilay and Bellevue-area Councilmember Claudia Balducci for King County Executive, Republican voters will play a crucial role. While solidly blue, still 30% of King County is Republican; and 30% of King County Primary voters did not vote for either Democratic frontrunner. Where those unaccounted votes land in November could be enough to erode Zahilay’s 12-point cushion over Balducci.

Conventional wisdom suggests Republican voters will opt for the more moderate Eastsider backed by the Seattle Times over the Seattle progressive backed by The Stranger, but the exact opposite happened four years ago: progressive Joe Nguyen’s strongest regions against incumbent Democrat Dow Constantine were in exurban Southeastern King County towns that voted for Donald Trump. 

But that might be the exception rather than the rule: those same Republican voters opposed progressive Hamdi Mohamed and Toshiko Hasegawa’s 2021 challenges to less-known incumbent Democratic Seattle Port Commissioners. Constantine was well-known, and well-hated, amongst Republican voters for years; it’s unlikely Zahilay can rely on Balducci being the shared enemy Constantine was for Nguyen to win over Republican voters.

That said, Zahilay, at 42% in the Primary, will be tough to topple for two main reasons. Firstly, he won the Primary (by a lot), and 91% of Primary winners win the General. Secondly, a large fraction of King County Republicans historically choose neither when forced to pick between Democrats; Balducci appears to need Republican votes to win, Zahilay does not. 

The Seattle Times and The Stranger dominate Seattle Primaries

Seattleites trust its local editorial boards — or at least, two of them. In every contest I checked (which is not all), every candidate endorsed by either The Stranger or The Seattle Times advanced to the General — except one. 

Over 90% of votes went to a Stranger or Times endorsee in Seattle races where both papers endorsed. After the Times stayed out of Seattle City Council Position 8, nearly 80% of the vote went to Stranger-endorsee Rinck. This is not a new trend in Seattle, nor is it commonplace in other U.S. cities (see: NYC voters elected the exact person the NY Times Editorial Board instructed them to oppose).

It’s not like other candidates didn’t run respectable campaigns: Jamie Fackler earned heavy-weight endorsements from the Democratic Party, labor unions, and the last-elected councilmember in that seat, but ended with just 10% of the vote. Joe Mallahan, Rory O’Sullivan, Nathan Rouse, Jeannie Chunn, and Ry Armstrong all fundraised respectable six-figure sums, but ended with single-digit voteshares — save Chunn’s 13%.

Functionally, the present and foreseeable future of Seattle municipal Primary campaigns boils down to winning over a dozen Times or Stranger Editorial Board members.

Outside Seattle proper, the papers have less influence: moderate SeaTac Councilmember Peter Kwon won (28%) the King County Council District 5 Primary without either endorsement and Stranger-endorsee Kim-Khanh Van finds herself in a close 3rd place behind Times-endorsee Steffanie Fain (25% to 22%).

Blue wins, but no wave in state legislative special elections

One of the bigger surprises for me tonight was the lack of Democratic overperformance in key state legislative special elections. From Iowa to Florida, state legislative Democratic candidates have overperformed Kamala Harris’ 2024 benchmarks by 10, 20, sometimes 50 percentage points in special elections. While still leading Republicans, Democrats Sen. Deb Krishnadasan (LD26 – Gig Harbor, Bremerton) and Rep Victoria Hunt (LD5 – Southeast King) are underperforming Harris’s 2024 wins — by a margin of 8% and 12% less, respectively.

Turnout predictably matches historic trends

In King County, turnout is comparable to recent odd-year Primaries: 33.7% and counting versus 30.7% in 2023 and 35.0% in 2021. Voters over 65 years old were a slightly smaller fraction of the electorate compared to 2023 (35% versus 37% in 2023); voters under 35 comprised 1% more of the electorate than two years ago (16% vs 15%). Waterfront Seattle and Eastside precincts (older, wealthier, whiter areas) continue to have higher turnout; poorer, racially diverse, and South King precincts had lower turnout.

The post Progressives Win Seattle Primaries, Data Points Them as Favorites in General first appeared on The Urbanist.

As of April 2024, OFM estimated Seattle’s population was 797,700. The new estimates would indicate that Seattle added 18,900 residents in one year, growing 2.4% over the previous year. Over half of King County’s overall annual population increase of 33,600 new residents was in the city of Seattle. King County’s population surpassed 2.4 million, a new record.

Suburban growth leaders

Other Puget Sound cities added population as well, though generally at a slower rate than Seattle, with a few exceptions. Bellevue went from 155,000 to 158,000 residents, a 1.9% growth rate. Tacoma grew from 225,100 residents to 228,400, a 1.5% growth rate. Lynnwood’s population expanded from 74,390 to 75,640, a 1.7% gain.

Some recent light rail recipients grew at a particularly robust rate. Redmond swelled from 80,040 residents to 82,380, a 2.9% gain. Shoreline jumped from 61,910 residents to 63,740, a gain of nearly 3%. Sound Transit’s 2 Line reached the edge of Redmond in spring 2024 and extended into Downtown Redmond in May, and the Lynnwood Link extension brought 1 Line service to Shoreline in fall 2024.

Another set of cities in the region lost residents in the OFM estimate or were nearly flat. Everett shrank from 114,800 residents to 114,700. Kent shrank from 140,400 to 140,100, losing 300 residents.

The Urbanist has highlighted the trend of Seattle taking the lion’s share of the region’s growth over the last decade, including when the city first crossed the 700,000 mark in 2017. Given the American penchant for suburban sprawl, Seattle is a bit of an outlier for continuing to lead its metropolitan area in growth.

Not only did Seattle again take the majority of King County’s population growth, it also grew more than Pierce County and Snohomish County combined.

Seattle growth plans up in air

Seattle’s growth has not been evenly distributed. In fact, some of the city’s single-family zones have seen negative population growth over the last three decades. Single family zones have long consumed about two-thirds of Seattle’s residential land, while housing growth has been heavily focused in limited areas designated as urban centers, where apartments are legal to build. Legalizing apartments is a particularly good idea when you are running a growing city.

However, the pending major update to Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan could start to distribute that growth a bit more broadly. Despite his own planning department nudging him to go further in an earlier draft, Mayor Bruce Harrell’s growth plan has largely hewed to the same “Urban Village Strategy” that hyper-focused multifamily growth in limited areas. Nonetheless, the mayor’s proposal would add 29 new neighborhood growth centers (a petite version of an urban center) and more some modest multifamily housing allowances within a block of frequent transit corridors.

Overall, the City says the Mayor’s One Seattle Plan would double Seattle’s housing capacity, pushing the upper ceiling to 330,000 new units. Some of the capacity was state-mandated, as state lawmakers passed a middle housing requirement in 2023 that is going into effect at the end of June for Puget Sound cities like Seattle. Capacity elsewhere is tied up in large lots along corridors like Aurora Avenue N that are far from certain to be redeveloped.

Housing advocates have pushed City leaders to go bigger. The Complete Communities Coalition, a broad alliance that includes The Urbanist, has urged the city to add eight more neighborhood growth centers and expand bonuses for stacked flats and affordable housing. The Urbanist has put together a letter-writing tool that makes reaching your city councilmembers easy, with just a few clicks. Sign the letter if you’d like to see Seattle create even more housing opportunities.

Officially, Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan update was due at the end of 2024. However, a series of Harrell Administration delays and outside legal challenges has put the plan very behind schedule. The City has said the bulk of the plan’s new housing capacity will not be approved until 2026, as part of a second phase of the plan, though the votes taken this September will determine the boundaries where that denser housing will be allowed.

The delays mean new housing opportunities continue to be punted down the road. While Seattle produced a record number of homes in 2024, the permit pipeline is rapidly drying up, with anemic rate of new housing applications coming in the door over the past couple of years.

The silver lining of delays is that housing will very much be on the ballot in the fall, with Seattle voters having the opportunities to install stridently pro-housing councilmembers who could support a more robust plan. The Urbanist Elections Committee will issue endorsements next month that will point toward which candidates would lead the city in that direction.

The post Seattle’s Population Blows Past 800,000 in Latest State Estimates first appeared on The Urbanist.

Consisting of cameras that can either be affixed in stationary locations or in vehicles such as police patrol cars, ALPRs record the license plate numbers, color, and brand of vehicles within their view range. The retention period for this data can be set by each individual agency, although the standard recommendation by Flock Safety is 30 days. 

In recent weeks, 404 Media found that data collected by these Flock ALPRs has been shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In May, authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 ALPR cameras for a woman who had self-administered an abortion. Almost all abortions are illegal in Texas.

New data from a public records request shared with The Urbanist shows that the King County Housing Authority (KCHA) has been among those agencies sharing Flock license plate reader data with law enforcement agencies across the country. An internal network audit that lists which agencies have searched KCHA’s data shows that it was used in the Texas authorities’ May search for the woman who had an abortion. The audit also suggests the data has been used to assist ICE and DHS. 

The King County Housing Authority

The KCHA is a public housing agency that provides rental housing or rent assistance to more than 50,000 people in King County and owns more than 155 properties. The agency is funded through the rents it collects and federal investment, and it is governed by a volunteer Board of Commissioners. 

In KCHA’s October 2024 newsletter, it announced that it was installing Flock ALPRs at several of its housing locations: Riverton Terrace, Pacific Court, Birch Creek, Valli Kee, and Burndale Homes. In its 2024 annual report, the authority stated it had installed 13 ALPRs on these five properties.

“The license plate readers will help solve and prevent crime by alerting law enforcement if stolen vehicles, wanted suspects, or vehicles associated with missing persons are detected,” the newsletter read.

The median KCHA household income in 2024 was $14,491. In January of 2022, the KCHA reported that 39% of its residents were Black in a county in which only 7% of the total population is Black. KCHA’s Flock cameras are surveilling some of King County’s most vulnerable communities. 

Unstated by the KCHA is the possibility that the lookup data provided by their ALPRs could endanger residents or their friends and families who are trying to avoid immigration enforcement or who have had an abortion. Abortion is now illegal in almost half of U.S. states.

Meanwhile, immigrants and their allies are in increasing danger across the country. Last week. The Handbasket reported that all ICE employees received an email making clear that “agents are no longer constrained by the need to justify their warrantless arrests.” President Donald Trump announced an ICE special response team would be operating in Seattle. And on Saturday, two immigrants who were not undocumented were detained at a DHS building in Tukwila.

ICE’s actions continued to escalate on Tuesday, when New York City Comptroller (and current mayoral candidate) Brad Lander was forcibly detained at immigration court by masked federal agents, including ICE agents. Lander had been protesting the detainment of an immigrant who had just had their case dismissed, demanding agents show a warrant and a badge, when the agents decided to detain him as well. 

The Washington State Attorney General’s Office (AGO) told The Urbanist that local housing agencies are not covered by the Keep Washington Working Act. 

“However, public housing agencies are covered by other state laws that would prohibit practices that target or impact individuals based on protected characteristics like race, national origin, and immigration or citizenship status,” said AGO Communications Specialist Josh Manning. 

In 2020, the state legislature expanded the Washington Law Against Discrimination to cover discrimination on the basis of citizenship or immigration status.

As first reported in The Burner, the abortion search calls into question Washington’s 2023 “shield law” aimed at protecting people traveling to Washington from other states to obtain reproductive and gender-affirming care. 

The KCHA hadn’t responded to The Urbanist’s request for comment at the time of publication.

What shows up in KCHA’s audits

Law enforcement agencies across the country performed thousands of searches of the KCHA’s ALPR data between February 1 and June 6 of this year. 

The Flock Safety ALPR data available via the audit function has a required “reason” field. 

The Johnson County, Texas Sheriff’s Office accessed the KCHA’s license plate data on May 9, with the recorded reason being “had an abortion, search for female.”

While there were hundreds of searches with the reason “ICE” recorded, many records were more specific. Some of the recorded reasons related to immigration enforcement include “ICE ERO” (enforcement removal operations) three times; “ICE Fugitive” or “ICE FUGOPS” 21 times; “ICE op” or “ICE operation” 27 times; “ICE pick up” 42 times; “ICE+ERO” 14 times; “illegal immigration” four times, and “immigration+” 17 times.

In addition, 128 searches involved reasons involving one of the following phrases: “immigration,” “immigration warrant,” “immigration violations,” “immigration status,” “immigration overstay,” “immigration investigation,” and “immigration enforcement.”

Other reasons listed in the audit included “immigration drugs,” “USBP” (United States Border Patrol), “USBP immigration investigation,” and “CIC” (US Army Counterintelligence Corps).

There were also at least 1,279 searches with reasons involving “Homeland Security” or “HSI.”  However, HSI has a criminal investigation mandate beyond immigration enforcement. 

This news comes hard on the heels of CalMatters reporting that law enforcement agencies across southern California violated state law more than a thousand times by sharing ALPR information with federal agents. A state law prohibiting law enforcement agencies from sharing such information with out-of-state public entities and federal entities passed 10 years ago.

Police searching the above Riverside data often used the reason “HSI” when logging their searches.

Recent ALPR expansion in Washington state cities

In the last three years, Flock Safety has been expanding its network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) in cities across Washington State. At a recent Mountlake Terrace meeting discussing the possible acquisition of the technology, Councilmember Rick Ryan said that Washington has 80 cities, six counties, and three tribes currently using Flock ALPRs. 

Washington municipalities that now have Flock ALPRs include Edmonds, Lynnwood, Monroe, Mill Creek, Everett, Arlington, Redmond, Mount Vernon, Sedro Wooley, Normandy Park, Puyallup, Kent, Olympia, Auburn, Anacortes, Des Moines, the Federal Way HOA, Medina, Sumner, Bonney Lake, Renton, and Tukwila, among many others.

The King County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) doesn’t use Flock ALPRs in unincorporated areas of the county, but three of their contract cities – SeaTac, Covington, and Newcastle – use them.

Both Seattle and Tacoma use ALPRs from Flock’s main competitor, Axon — the security giant known for its controversial taser technology. Privacy advocates have highlighted similar data privacy concerns around the use of Axon’s technology. 

“The increasing use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by cities poses serious threats to people’s privacy and civil liberties. ALPRs collect vast amounts of data, allowing law enforcement agencies to track and make inferences about people’s activities, associations, and behaviors,” said Tee Sannon, the ACLU of Washington’s Technology Policy Program Director. “When cities contract with private surveillance vendors like Flock Safety, they’re not just installing cameras — they’re contributing to a nationwide surveillance network.”  

Flock Safety says it serves more than 5,000 cities spread across at least 45 states. 

In 2022, the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights published an article warning of the threat posed by ALPR systems to immigrant and reproductive rights in Washington and reporting that many Washington law enforcement agencies using ALPR technology had a low hit rate on wanted vehicles. The article reported on the increasing trend of Washington state agencies adopting the technology, saying that Flock salesperson Mack Larkin “cited the connection of Washington’s Flock customers to some 1,800 law enforcement agencies nationwide as a selling point.”

Similarly, in an op-ed in The Chicago Tribune last year, Ed Vogel said that access to a massive trove of nationwide data is core to the sales pitch for license plate reader companies: “Once collected, all of this [ALPR] data is shared widely with few restrictions. This is part of the marketing pitch from the companies and the appeal to police. The vast data-sharing infrastructure allows police to search plate numbers and identify where the car has been.”

Indeed, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that ALPR data “can paint an intimate portrait of a driver’s life and even chill First Amendment protected activity.”

“Flock collects and stores license plate data from jurisdictions across the country, creating a centralized database that federal and state law enforcement agencies can tap into — regardless of where the data was collected,” Sannon said. “This risks undermining state-level protections like Washington’s Keep Washington Working Act, which limits local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Out-of-state agencies may also be able to circumvent these legal protections by directly approaching the third-party vendor. This raises serious risks for immigrants, as well as people seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, who could be tracked and targeted across state lines.”

The audit data from the KCHA appears to be a case in point of the vulnerabilities of Flock’s database system. 

Enumclaw and Gig Habor say no, Mountlake Terrace says yes

Two Washington cities, Enumclaw and Gig Harbor, recently voted down proposals for their law enforcement agencies to contract with Flock for ALPRs. In doing so, Gig Harbor gave up a $33,000 grant from the Washington Auto Theft Prevention Authority. 

But at the beginning of June, Mountlake Terrace’s city council voted in favor of the license plate readers.

Arguments in favor of the ALPRs sounded much the same in all three cities. Proponents touted its help solving crimes, the fact that many of their neighboring cities already had ALPRs, and worry that not jumping on the bandwagon of heavier surveillance would draw more crime to their specific neighborhoods. 

“I am in support of the cameras, I will tell you right now, because first and foremost, as a councilmember, my priority is to keep our communities safe and our well being,” said Mountlake Terrace Councilmember Laura Sonmore. “How am I going to protect each and every one of you when you leave this room? I have no other option to give you than these cameras. […] I believe that we need to at least have another tool in our toolbox to help our police catch people.”

Opponents spoke of privacy and civil rights concerns, including potential misuse of data.

“I think we’ve heard a lot of concerns from our community in a lot of spaces, but particularly concerns about things that are happening at a federal level, and the potential for data collected here in Mountlake Terrace to be misused,” said Mountlake Terrace Councilmember Erin Murray.

The conversation at the Mountlake Terrace city council meeting took place after the recent investigative reporting from 404 Media. When asked about it, Mountlake Police Department Commander Scott King portrayed Washington’s Flock data as insulated from ICE searches. 

“There were agencies around the country who do work with ICE, and they ran vehicles through the Flock system for ICE,” King said. “The reason they used in their search was ICE. We don’t do that here in Washington State.”

However, the original audit discussed in the 404 Media story was from the Danville, Illinois Police Department. Illinois has a state law banning the use of ALPR data for immigration enforcement, and yet the Danville Police Department’s data was being accessed from agencies from other states for that purpose. Some of these out-of-state agencies told 404 Media their searches on behalf of federal agencies were “informal” or regarding a specific investigation.

“We have had significant pushback from our community — significant,” said Murray. “Honestly, the amount of pushback we’ve had tonight probably is more than the entire public comment I’ve received in five and a half years on the council. That says something.”

Still, the Mountlake Terrace city council chose to obtain Flock ALPRs in a five-to-two vote, bringing the number of Washington State cities using this technology to 81. 

The post License Plate Readers Proliferate in Washington, Bringing Concerns over ICE Overreach first appeared on The Urbanist.

Harrell’s favorability ratings also continue to be underwater, with 42% of respondents expressing an unfavorable opinion of the mayor, 32% expressing a favorable opinion, and 27% neutral on his job performance.

Wilson’s campaign was quick to seize on the positive news in a press release, underscoring the momentum they’ve seen since she jumped in the race on March 12.

“In just two short months, our grassroots movement has surged ahead and taken the lead over an incumbent who once looked invincible,” Wilson said. “This poll confirms what so many of you have been telling me when we’re out tabling, at events, and in our neighborhoods: Seattle is ready for change. Only 37% of voters approve of the job Bruce Harrell is doing — and when people who are undecided hear about our vision, they move our way more than twice as often as they move toward him. That’s powerful.”

For prognosticators who had predicted Mayor Harrell would be a safe bet for reelection, the poll may have come as a jarring result. The mayor is effectively in a statistical tie despite winning his last election by a 17-point margin and consolidating some support among organized labor, including a recent MLK Labor Council endorsement.

The longtime leader of the Transit Riders Union, Wilson has been the architect of many high-profile initiatives, which run the gambit from expanding renter protections, making corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share amidst budget crunches, and raising the minimum wage in multiple cities. Wilson has also contributed articles for The Urbanist along the way.

While she has not held elected office before, Wilson’s resume that provides a sharp contrast with Harrell, who has generally worked from within the system as a moderate over his mayoral term and a 12-year run as a city councilmember.

Former Seattle City Council President Lorena González had also been a big name in 2021, but her bid came up well short. However, three and a half years of Harrell might be tempering voter enthusiasm, and his opponents have argued he has left a trail of broken campaign promises on key issues like housing, homelessness, and public safety in his wake.

An October 2021 poll by NPI showed Harrell resoundingly in the lead over González — albeit after months of ad spending, something that hasn’t yet hit the 2025 race.

“Our campaign is resonating because we’re talking about the real issues: skyrocketing rents, unaffordable child care, long commutes, and the urgent need to get people housed,” Wilson said. “Bruce Harrell has been in City Hall since 2008, and people just aren’t seeing results. It’s time for a mayor who puts everyday Seattleites first.”

Wilson granted that early polling can be faulty and the high number of undecided voters underscored much work remained for her campaign. Wilson invited Seattleites to a rally seeking to keep the campaign momentum going.

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“But momentum isn’t enough — a poll this early in the race, with so many voters undecided, doesn’t actually mean much. We’ve got to keep building our movement to reach people all across Seattle, especially the one in two Seattleites who won’t vote in this off-year election unless they hear from us,” she wrote. “That’s why I’m inviting you to a major rally on Saturday, May 31 at 11AM at El Centro de la Raza’s Centilia Cultural Center.“

NPI founder and executive director Andrew Villeneuve noted that undecided voters appeared to shift toward Wilson after learning about her campaign. Pollsters shared unaltered snippets from each candidate’s website if they weren’t yet familiar.

“Our latest Civic Heartbeat survey of Seattle voters finds a competitive race for mayor among the two candidates who’ve raised the most money and demonstrated the most support thus far,” Villeneuve said in a statement. “Incumbent Bruce Harrell and challenger Katie Wilson are the clear frontrunners at this juncture, so we chose to simulate a general election ballot with the two of them as the finalists. Initially, Harrell led, then Wilson picked up support with undecided voters when we followed up with them and asked them to make a choice.”

Villeneuve noted that age demographics is a major factor cleaving the race as well. “In the aggregate, the candidates were very close to each other, with younger voters preferring Wilson and older voters preferring Harrell,” he added. “This race looks like it could go in multiple directions right now and could be one of the most exciting of this local election cycle.”

NPI’s survey consisted of 522 interviews with likely general election voters in Seattle; it fielded from May 10 to 14. The modeled margin of error is 4.4%.

The Urbanist Elections Committee will release its endorsements in July ahead of the August 5 primary.

The post Wilson Leads Harrell in Seattle Mayor Poll first appeared on The Urbanist.