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.

*Editor’s note: Seattle Public Library leadership have published a rebuttal to this article on their blog, disputing several of the claims. Some of the disputes of fact that leadership had with the three library workers and one security officer interviewed boiled down to differences of interpretation, but in other cases staff accounts conveyed factual errors or incomplete information we have since sought to rectify with corrections and clarifications now contained in the piece and noted at the bottom.

The revisions are the culmination of a long journey that began in 2018, when an article in the South Seattle Emerald revealed that the library imposed an unusually high number of bans, or “exclusions,” on its patrons, disproportionately Black and brown youth as well as the homeless and mentally ill. Well before the rollout, rank-and-file library staff were softening the enforcement of existing rules and working to change the culture in anticipation of the new codes, now called the Community Use Agreement, or “CUA.” 

Some library workers were shocked when Walton, a former Port Orchard police officer, took over and began issuing guidance that felt to them eerily similar to the old rules of conduct the library spent the better part of a decade overhauling. 

“We were thinking everything should be nicer with this new policy,” said a library worker, who requested anonymity. “I feel like we’re actually excluding people more.” 

One of Walton’s first acts on the job was to retrain library security. Library staff had been working with security to develop a more compassionate approach to homeless people sleeping in or outside of branches. Security was encouraged to do wellness checks instead of asking them to leave.

When Walton came on, she had security start sweeping the areas around the Central Library nightly, staff say. Library spokesperson Laura Gentry said the homeless encampment removals were not initiated by Walton.

“Ms. Walton never directed Security Officers to conduct nightly sweeps around the Central Library,” Gentry wrote. “In response to documented incidents of damage to Library property after hours and complaints by nearby residents that there was illegal and dangerous activity occurring around the Central Library after hours, Administrative Services director Rob Gannon asked Library Security Officers to conduct emphasis patrols at night for a few weeks in September 2025 to observe and gather data. They did not observe any dangerous activities. Security Officers stopped those patrols in late September 2025.”

Walton reportedly proposed adding floodlights and hostile architecture to prevent homeless people from sleeping outside the branch — though this proposal never came to fruition. Library staff also contend that Walton is pushing security officers to document minor infractions to justify longer suspensions, riling some librarians, who have generally shifted to imposing shorter bans. Gentry disputed that claim.

In one case, a suspended patron used a library computer under a fake name and left without incident. The man was originally suspended for rolling over a security guard’s foot with his wheelchair after being told not to smoke near a library entrance. Walton logged it in the system as “other crime: identity theft” and extended his suspension by a month. Library workers say that using an alias to skirt a ban isn’t serious, much less criminal, and that they originally logged it under an existing violation category called “Return under active suspension,” but Walton escalated it.

After publication of this article, Gentry said that this patron has repeatedly assaulted two security staff and injured one, earning them a two-year suspension, and that violating the suspension was a serious safety concern in this case.

Library staff says Walton is imposing suspensions of several months on people who act out nonviolently while in a behavioral crisis. They’re calling these bans unnecessarily harsh, arguing that long suspensions exclude people living on the streets from one of the few public spaces available to them.

“For some of our patrons, a month or two or three is a very long time,” a library worker said. “Most of these people don’t mean us harm. They are ill and may not know what they are saying. There has to be another way.”

Some library staff say they also feel pressured to call 911 more often. In a January Q&A about updates to the library’s 911 guidelines, a staff member said that the new guidelines seemed to be a reversal of course. When the staffer started, they were told that the library was moving away from calling the police, and emphasized their concerns, particularly for communities in South Seattle who have had negative experiences with the police. 

Walton likened library staffers’ reluctance to call the police to a “domestic violence mentality,” where library workers “feel responsible to protect [their] perpetrator because they had a bad childhood.” During the Q&A, library staff said she told them that security and other staff did not call 911 because their coworkers “didn’t like police.”

Another library worker, who also requested anonymity, said their reticence stemmed from real-world experience, citing an incident a few years ago where security called the police about a man who threw a metal can. Officers arrived and tackled him in the middle of the library.

“The minute we call, we surrender any sense of control and de-escalation,” the library worker said. “They didn’t listen to anyone.”

Moreover, calling 911 can mean a steep penalty for the patron: a one-year suspension. A security guard said that Walton added a new category to the library’s incident-reporting system titled “Police called for assistance.” If library staff call 911 on a patron, they can be barred from all Seattle libraries for a year if police for a year, with the decision out of library staff’s hands at that point.

Gentry explained that a one-year suspension occurs automatically if police apply trespass charges, but in other cases the library team would have the discretion to log the incident as they deem appropriate in accordance with the CUA.

“When Library staff call 911 for SPD assistance to resolve an incident with a patron, SPD typically issues the patron a one-year trespass and it then becomes a crime for the patron to return to the Library during that one-year period,” library leadership wrote on their blog, following publication of this article. “When SPD issues a one-year trespass, the Library issues a corresponding one-year suspension. This was a recent adjustment made to reduce confusion between trespass vs. suspension lengths, which were previously out of alignment.”

The security guard gave an hypothetical example where a situation with a patron is escalated and they are asked to leave for the day, but they refuse, so the library staff call 911. Ultimately, the person leaves before police arrive, the call is canceled, and the incident is resolved peacefully. That person could still be banned for a full year, the guard said.

In a written statement, Rob Gannon, the library’s director of administrative services, denied that the new guidelines would result in more 911 calls, pointing out that the criteria for calling the police are stricter than in the 2023 update. He also cited language added to the document less than two weeks after the call, giving staff discretion to call 911. It now states: “The Library trusts staff to determine when calling 911 is appropriate. The vast majority of Community Use Agreement violations can be appropriately handled by Library staff and Security Officers without calling 911.”

But library staff say it’s not so much what’s in the CUA or the 911 guidelines, but rather that they’re being made to feel like calling 911 is their best or only option in many cases. They contend that the CUA wasn’t rolled out with adequate training. One library worker said they were given an online training lasting 30 minutes, while managers were trained for three to four hours on the new policies.

“We also don’t get routine de-escalation training, so we aren’t investing in any strategies that would help prevent having to call the cops,” they said, adding that de-escalation training is only available on request and not mandatory.

While the freshly updated 911 guidelines state that the library “trusts” staff to make the call, library workers are hearing mixed messages. The language in the guidelines was also updated to say that staff are “required to” call in specific circumstances and to “err on the side of caution.” Library staff said they couldn’t get a straight answer from Walton on whether this would mean they would face discipline if they didn’t. 

A SPL spokesperson said the department overhauled its incident reporting system shortly after hiring Walton, noting a 2024 ransomware attack that shut down the system, leading to skewed 911 call data for 2024 and early 2025. In 2023, SPL logged 215 calls, compared to 127 for 2025. However, the number of calls recorded from August to December was greater in 2025 than in 2023, which seems to indicate an upward trend after the enforcement surge that coincided with the Walton hire — or at least a more concerted effort to document the calls.

Library spokesperson Laura Gentry said the uptick in calls in late 2025 stemmed from a change in reporting procedures that logs patron calls, not just staff calls: “We did a deep dive analysis of the Q4 2025 incident reports involving 911, and the uptick appears to be related to additional data gathering of 911 calls made by patrons themselves for various reasons, something we did not capture in 2023.”

Some library staff question the selection of Walton, an outside hire and former police officer, over the other finalist, who has worked at the library for nearly two decades and supports the direction that the CUA represents. They wonder if she’s the right fit for the library’s culture. Despite transitioning to civilian life, Walton appears to have had a hard time shedding her identity as a cop. Library workers bristle at her use of words like “perp” to describe patrons in behavioral crisis. Once, when referring to police responses, she reportedly said: “We’re on the call. We’re here to win.”

Gannon declined to comment on why Walton was chosen, but wrote that she is a “compassionate, diligent, conscientious, human-centered leader, with a deep commitment to the values that are the foundation of the Community Use Agreement and of the Library’s mission.” 

Similarly, a library spokesperson defended Walton’s conduct and said she was acting in accordance with policy and with the full confidence of departmental leaders.

Another potential red flag is Walton’s presence on the Kitsap County Brady List, a list of officers who have potential credibility issues that must be disclosed to defense attorneys during a trial if they give testimony. Gannon called these allegations “unsubstantiated,” but the Kitsap County prosecutor’s office provided The Urbanist with a 2019 disciplinary report, showing that Walton was found to have lied to her supervisor.

“[Walton] is the 100% wrong person to be at any position [in the library],” a library worker said. “It just shows how privatized, bureaucratic, and undemocratic the organization has become.”

Corrections and clarifications: The original version incorrectly stated that all 911 calls would result in a one-year suspension. This is only true in cases where the Seattle Police Department applies a “trespass” charge, which library spokespeople say is only applied in certain circumstances, such as when patrons are causing safety issues or violating suspensions. Additionally, we clarified that Seattle Public Libraries applied new reporting procedures in late 2025 that may have been responsible for the spike in the 911 calls in the data and emphasized that the ransomware outage appears to be responsible for the low baseline for suspensions in 2024. We also clarified that Gentry said Walton did not initiate encampment sweeps outside Central Library and that the identity theft suspension case had involved a patron who the library says injured a security officer in an assault. We regret the errors and omissions.

The post Seattle Library Workers Raise Alarm About Security Crackdown Hitting Homeless People first appeared on The Urbanist.

The speech took place at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute in the heart of the Central District, historically a Black neighborhood and cultural center. Wilson used the speech to lay out what Seattle would do to counter Trump attacks on immigrants, communities of color, and the rule of law. In a tumultuous and divisive time, Wilson sought to raise the banner of hope, community-building, and collective resistance.

“We all know that we are in a moment when our rights are under attack from so many directions, when it feels like at a national level, we are moving backwards when it can feel impossible to believe that our country will ever emerge from the storm clouds,” Wilson said. “And in these moments, it is so important to look to history and to recognize that we have stood at similar junctures many times before, and to remember how much has been achieved through social movements that emerged in the toughest times, brought people together, and won transformative change.”

Before getting into the affordability agenda, Wilson addressed gun violence concerns. She noted she and her team had grieved with the families of two Rainier Beach High School students tragically shot dead at a bus stop last month. The mayor pledged to redouble the city’s efforts to deploy an effective gun violence prevention policy.

“My office is working to develop a robust and multi-pronged gun violence strategy that will involve collaboration across City departments, County partners and community experts, including those who have lost loved ones to gun violence, Chief Barnes and other SPD leaders bring extensive experience in gun violence reduction that will be invaluable in this effort,” Wilson said. “And in the coming days, my office will convene a panel of local and national experts who will develop and launch a strategy that is grounded in a clear understanding of Seattle’s gun violence problem and is tailored to the needs of our neighborhoods and our communities.”

Housing and homelessness

As on the campaign trail, Wilson emphasized the issue of homelessness and clarified that her goal was for the City to produce at least 1,000 units of emergency housing in her first year — which would be the pace necessary to keep on track with her broader goal to produce 4,000 emergency housing units in her first term.

Wilson described how she intended to shift policy on homeless encampment removals (commonly called sweeps), which spiked under former Mayor Bruce Harrell. While she said the removals would continue to preserve community access to public spaces, she placed a greater emphasis on outreach, administering services, and offering viable shelter options ahead of removals.

“With well over 4,000 people sleeping unsheltered in Seattle as of last year’s Point in Time Count,” Wilson said, “I know that we have a big hill to climb, and dramatic changes will not happen overnight, but I am determined to add 1,000 new units this year with services matched to people’s needs, and we are on our way to reach this goal.”

The City has already started moving forward with siting a tiny house village/RV encampment on a piece of state-owned land in West Seattle, which would be able to accommodate 72 RVs and 20 tiny houses. That parcel had been eyed for similar types of encampments under previous administrations, but this one wasted no time in advancing it forward.

The mayor pledged “much bigger and bolder policy” to allow more housing to be built across the city, which her planning department has scoped out in phases.

“Seattle is a great city, and people and businesses want to come here and be part of it,” Wilson said. “That’s why we also need to build more housing of all shapes and sizes so more people can afford to live here. After last year’s Comprehensive Plan update, I am committed to advancing additional legislation to allow more construction of more housing in more areas.”

Wilson plugged her Renter Survey which she said has seen thousands of responses and is still open thru Feb 20. It will inform solutions for tenants. forms.office.com/pages/respon…

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— Doug Trumm (@metropolitanglide.bsky.social) February 17, 2026 at 12:15 PM

Wilson gave a plug for her renter survey, which is open through February 20 and available in 16 languages. With 6,000 responses already in, she said the survey will inform policymaking and clarify which issues are most pressing for tenants.

“We have heard about people forced to move every year because the rent just keeps going up so much faster than their income,” Wilson said. “We’ve heard about junk fees on everything from package delivery to mandatory concierge garbage service, and so much more. So this survey actually closes this Friday. So if you’re a renter and you haven’t filled out the survey yet, you still have a few days. Check it out at wilson.seattle.gov. I will be working closely with the City Council on policy in the months ahead. With their partnership, I hope to quickly provide renters some relief by reining in some of the most deceptive and abusive practices.”

Before she took office, the Seattle City Council already passed one idea that Wilson had pushed, banning algorithmic price-setting software that allow landlords to collude to raise prices. Wilson also gave social housing a shoutout, noting the windfall for the city’s new Seattle Social Housing Developer thanks to the high earners tax passed in a February 2025 ballot measure.

“I am thrilled to say that last week, our city council adopted the interlocal agreement, which will allow approximately $115 million to begin flowing to the social housing developer this spring. That is more than twice the revenue that was initially projected,” Wilson said. “We all know there’s a lot of wealth in this city, and it is very gratifying to know that we’re going to be able to use a very little bit of that wealth and put it to work building housing. It’s taken years to get here, and social housing, I think, really shows what sustained community led organizing looks like, and what it can achieve.”

Affordable Childcare

Wilson acknowledged the childcare cost crisis that the city a facing — an issue which her opponent sought to turn against her on the campaign trail by criticizing her decision to accept help from her parents to pay for childcare during the mayoral campaign.

“Thanks to the incredible work of the Department of Education and Early Learning and their award-winning Seattle preschool program and our child care assistance program, Seattle is actually already a national leader in this area,” Wilson said. “Now that’s really encouraging, but it’s also a little unnerving that we’re seen as leading, because any parent would tell you that there is still so much to be done. And I think it really just underscores how far the United States lags behind many other countries in our support for families.”

The mayor pledged to expand the pre-K and summer programs, while ensuring childcare worker earn living wages. She also pointed to the need for expanding the supply of family-sized housing.

“We need to bring down the cost of childcare, expand our pre-K program and summer enrichment opportunities, and also make sure that the people who are doing this work are paid enough to raise a family themselves,” Wilson said. “We also need to make it easier to site, start, and run childcare facilities in Seattle. Public space and housing are big parts of this too. We need to build more family-sized apartments and homes, expand offerings at our community centers and create more welcoming places for families to go and enjoy themselves without necessarily having to spend money. There’s a lot of pieces to this. But in the in the end, my job is to make Seattle a great place to live, work and raise a family, and part of that is making the whole arc of childhood an area of public concern.”

Food access

Wilson gave a nod to growing concerns over food deserts following Kroger’s decision to close of a number of grocery stories across the region, including a Fred Meyer in Lake City that a large swath of the city relied on. Wilson noted the history of Pike Place Market as a place for local formers to bring their produce directly to market, cutting out price-gouging middlemen, and hinted that kind of approach is needed again.

“One important step in that direction that long predates my administration is the Fresh Bucks program, which helps low-income Seattle residents afford fruits and vegetables at participating farmers markets, independent grocers and supermarkets,” Wilson said. “As of this year, we have increased monthly benefits and cleared the wait list, and Fresh Bucks is now supporting more than 17,000 households.”

The mayor stopped short of singling out a particular approach to expanding food access, but she did underscore that a new model may be needed and they’re working on it. The region’s largest union, UFCW 3000, represents grocery workers and has backed a Fresh Food for All campaign that included public option grocery stores. Wilson also backed the idea during her run — which helped earn her the union’s endorsement after the primary.

“We are also looking at new and alternative grocery models that better fit different community needs,” Wilson said. “Everyone deserves reliable, affordable access to fresh food in their own neighborhood, and we’ll be working to make that vision a reality.”

Business pitch

In a move consistent with her pledge to be a coalition-builder, Wilson spoke on the importance of business innovation and economic growth — and she even did some sports trash talking following Seattle’s victory in the NFL’s Superbowl. That made this segment of the speech almost sound like it could have been left over in a desk drawer from the Harrell years.

“So my message to Seattle’s employer community is that we want you at the table,” Wilson said. “We value your ideas, your investment, your partnership, and your willingness to stay engaged with us, as many of you are already doing, even if the work can be difficult, because Seattle has always been a city of builders. We build companies that change the world. We build research institutions that save lives. We build neighborhoods that reflect our values, and we build partnerships that make progress possible. And together, we can build a city that is more affordable and safer, where City Hall is known for good governance and delivering results that everyone can see and feel, a world class city that we can all be proud of.”

Wilson’s selection for Deputy Mayor, Brian Surratt, was also seen an olive branch to the business community, given his previous work as the City’s economic development director and CEO of Greater Seattle Partners, a “private/public partnership focused on attracting new business, promoting international trade, and growing our major industries for the region.”

On the other hand, Wilson did acknowledge business leaders were not likely to see eye to eye on every issue, with taxation often where the rubber meets the road.

Bus lanes and safe streets

While transportation was not framed as part of the mayor’s four-pronged affordability agenda, she did sketch out some plans to boost road safety, noting the continued failure to meet the City’s 2030 Vision Zero goal to end traffic deaths and serious injury collisions.

“I’m going to go off script for a moment here to say that a pedestrian, a young woman, was hit and killed last night in Capitol Hill, my neighborhood,” Wilson said. “We have to do better. We have to do better. We’re not on track for our Vision Zero goals, and we have to make it safe for vulnerable road users or people walking or people biking or people rolling to get around the city.”

Wilson mentioned she was excited for the crosslake opening of Sound Transit’s 2 Line — the light rail extension is scheduled for March 28. Plus, she reiterated plans to extend bus lanes to speed up Route 8 and noted Route 60 improvements and an overall boost to bus frequency are also in the works, to recover from pandemic losses.

“We are going to partner with the Seattle Department of Transportation to finally paint that bus lane on Denny Way,” Wilson said. “We’re going to speed up the crosstown Route 60, and advance a transformative Seattle transportation measure that gets us on track to restore and surpass the levels of transit service we had reached before the pandemic.”

The post Wilson Sketches Affordability Agenda in State of City Speech 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.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson rolled out two executive orders on Thursday morning, seeking to get two major initiatives rolling, two weeks into her term: expanding emergency housing to get homeless residents indoors and bus lanes to speed up the Route 8 bus.

“Seattle deserves world class public transit. Seattle voters have told us again and again that they want fast, frequent, reliable bus service. We cannot let one of our highest ridership routes consistently languish in traffic,” Wilson said. “That is not a good use of our transit tax dollars, and it’s not a good use of our time.”

For Wilson, this issue is personal. Route 8 is one of the transit routes she relies on, and she participated in the Race The L8 event this summer, in which more than 100 advocates successfully raced a Route 8 bus on foot, some of them juggling, dancing, or hop-scotching along the way.

“As a transit rider and as a rider of Route 8, I know the feeling of waiting at the stop for the bus to come, and it’s 30 minutes late or 40 minutes late. I know the feeling of sitting on the bus knowing that you could be walking up that hill faster than that bus is going. So it is time that as a city, we take seriously what it takes to deliver excellent public transit for our residents, for our workers.”

In the press scrum, Wilson said she wanted bus lanes in the most congested section of Denny Way, from Dexter to Stewart Avenue, where advocates outraced a Route 8 bus on foot this summer. www.theurbanist.org/2025/07/22/b…

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— Doug Trumm (@metropolitanglide.bsky.social) January 15, 2026 at 10:43 AM

Route 8 is one of King County Metro’s most delayed and unreliable buses. Nonetheless, ridership remains high, since transit users have few alternatives to connect east-west between Uptown, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill, and the Central District. Despite its speed and reliability issues, Route 8 averaged more than 6,000 daily riders in 2025.

Wilson’s executive order gives the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) three months to put an implementation plan together. She cited concerns about impacts to other bus routes (which include other high-ridership workhorses like the Route 62, Route 40, and Route 70) that intersect Denny Way as a factor behind conducting due diligence before slapping down red paint for bus lanes immediately.

“The bottom line for me is I want as much transit priority as possible, and I want it to work,” Wilson said. “We also need to figure out, with the other bus routes in that area, to make sure that we are improving the experience for all the riders in our system. We’re directing SDOT to return to the Mayor’s Office with a timeline, budget and implementation plan by April 17, along with recommendations for additional corridors where transit priority investments can deliver high impact benefits for riders and the city as a whole.”

In other words, the Wilson administration will be looking to replicate the “red carpet” treatment for other bus routes, hoping to improve service for riders in other parts of the city.

While the exact Denny Way plan is still to be determined, Wilson said an eastbound bus lane between 5th Avenue N and Fairview Avenue would be the “minimum” expectation, since that section is the “worst problem” for bus delays. Through that section, drivers attempting to get onto the I-5 ramps at Yale Avenue can back up traffic for blocks.

Jason Li and Nick Sattele from the Fix The L8 campaign were on hand for the announcement, and commended the mayor for taking action. The duo co-leads the group which advocates for Denny Way bus lanes and organized the “Race The L8” event this past summer.

We are beyond honored to have joined Mayor Wilson this morning to announce an executive order for bus lanes on Denny Way. We can't wait to finally Fix the L8 and see what she has in store for the next 4 years of Seattle's transit

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— Fix the L8 (@fixthel8.bsky.social) January 15, 2026 at 10:17 AM

The Harrell administration had sought to rule out the key stretch of bus lanes that advocates were pushing for, citing a traffic worries and a dubious traffic study with some questionable assumptions that Li and other advocates criticized. Wilson has already swapped out the SDOT Director who made that decision, Adiam Emery, for another interim director, with a national search planned for this year to find a permanent leader for the department.

“The previous administration, we had met with them, and the previous SDOT director was very clear that while bus lanes were definitely warranted for transit riders, it would be too difficult to do from a traffic point of view,” Sattele told The Urbanist. “[This decision] meant that bus riders would have to continue to sit in traffic, which obviously we were not happy about.”

Potential for ridership growth appears high with a faster, more reliable bus.

“There are more people walking and taking the bus than driving on Denny, despite the fact that the bus sucks,” Sattele said. “We know that there’s a lot of demand for this, and it’s in spite of the fact that the bus is so unreliable.”

Transit advocates, including Fix The L8, have launched a broader campaign called Better Bus Lanes that is seeking to roll out bus lanes citywide. Denny Way, Rainier Avenue, and Aurora Avenue were identified as three top-priority corridors to improve for riders. Li argued success on Denny Way could propel further interventions.

“This will be a really good litmus test,” Li said. “If this works, then there’s pretty much no road in the city where this won’t work… If this turns out really well, any argument people have for, ‘oh, we can’t do this on Broadway. We can’t do this on 15th [Avenue NW]. We can’t do this on more parts of Rainier [Avenue].’ All that falls apart because we can just point to Denny: ‘Hey, it worked here.'”

Wilson focuses the city’s homelessness response on bringing people inside

Wilson is also seeking to accelerate “efforts to rapidly bring people inside by expediting the expansion of shelter and affordable housing.” Her executive order convenes some stakeholders and resources toward that goal.

“Yesterday morning, I went to visit an encampment in Ballard that was scheduled for removal, and we’ve delayed that removal to determine whether we can find a better outcome for the folks who are staying there,” Wilson said. “The conversations that I had on site with folks who are living at that spot and community advocates and our Unified Care Team here at the City really underscored for me the message that I was delivering all of last year during the campaign, which is that we do not have enough shelter, enough housing, enough services. And the vast majority of our neighbors who are sleeping unsheltered on our streets, they want help.”

Her executive order lays out a number of efforts to boost shelter and housing production:

• Immediately launching an interdepartmental team to identify options for incentives, permitting changes, and other policy changes that can speed up the process of opening new shelter and housing in Seattle.
• Identifying and prioritizing city owned public land and working with other agencies and levels of government to identify other public lands which could be used to temporarily or permanently site new emergency shelter and housing.
• Coordinating with our regional partners to identify shelter programs that have the capacity to add units to existing programs, and
• Working with organizations with expertise in behavioral health to support substance use disorder treatment and mental health counseling for housing and shelter programs.

“We’re going to be moving aggressively, and this is the beginning, not the end,” Wilson added.

The mayor gave her remarks at the “mid-point meeting” of her 60-person transition team, which is conducting outreach and planning to guide her administration’s early moves. Wilson indicated she would be leaning on the leaders in the room to keep making progress on affordability and housing issues, across income levels.

“This is a continuum, and we need everything: We need more affordable housing. We need more market-rate housing. We need more shelter,” Wilson said. “Over the coming weeks and months, we’re going to be taking a lot more actions to get there, and we’re going to be relying on all of you for your expertise and your organizing to help us make that happen.”

While the City seeks to expand its available shelter and supportive housing, Wilson signaled intent to do modify policy around encampment removals, using that tool less often than her predecessor. Under Mayor Bruce Harrell, Seattle greatly ramped up camp removals, conducting a record amount of sweeps.

“I heard this all last year during the campaign, where there’s an intense level of frustration with an approach that moves people around without actually getting inside,” Wilson told reporters. “And I really think that business owners and residents understand that. They understand that we need real solutions, and not just moving people around.”

Some news outlets appeared focused on the encampment removal side of the proposal, and how it could enflame homeowners and business owners. That said, the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA) greeted the news with a fairly supportive statement.

“Mayor Wilson’s executive order is an important and welcome step toward breaking down the barriers that slow the delivery of affordable housing and new shelter in Seattle,” said Dennis Sills, DSA’s Vice President of Advocacy and Economic Development in a press release. “Creating a dedicated, interdepartmental team to cut red tape, reduce costs and speed up permitting sends a clear signal that the city is serious about addressing urgency with action. It’s important Seattle move from a bias for rules to a bias for housing, and Mayor Wilson’s announcement is a great first step towards this paradigm change. 

The Downtown Seattle Association is looking for additional housing reforms, and has recently emphasized more housing downtown as part of its plans for economic recovery and activation.

“This announcement should be seen as a strong start, and we look forward to more reforms ahead that will speed up the production of all housing types across Seattle, while encouraging future housing financing and investment which is crucial component of developing more units,” Sills said. “Increasing housing supply at every level is essential to affordability, economic recovery and a more vibrant, inclusive downtown and city overall.” 

Update: This article was updated with the statement from the Downtown Seattle Association at 10:15am Friday.

The post Katie Wilson Orders Denny Bus Lane to Help Route 8 Riders first appeared on The Urbanist.

A kitten, 10 weeks old, under two pounds, sleeps; my toe a pillow for her head. With her eyes closed, I can see her as a newborn, still blind. Her chest rises and falls, the smallest bellows stoking a fire that would be snuffed without my care and my warmth. Michelle, my girlfriend and I adopted Ellie, this kitten, recently.

When we arrived at the shelter that day, a man who looked dirty, distressed, and desperate stood outside, kept away from the door by a crowd of shelter staff. The one security guard, twice the man’s size, did most of the physical blocking. The man’s shouts were responded to with soft, understanding condescensions from the rest.

He wanted his dog back, something he turned to us and said while we were being ushered past to our scheduled appointment. “Careful about adopting from here, they’re gonna steal back your dog and give it away to someone else.”

“His neighbor, well, not really neighbor, they live on houseboats, complained to us a third time,” we overheard a shelter staffer – whose job seemed to be looking over other people’s shoulders and gossiping on the phone  – say while we waited for our turn at the solo-staffed adoption processing desk.

Most of the other staff seemed to be taking shifts blocking the man from entering and reclaiming his dog. “It was a complete sty when they got there; I’m just glad the dog’ll be going to a good home soon.” 

And so, after this inconvenient delay, Michelle and I, employed and clean, walked in and back out with a cat.

—

This contrast in our experiences – our ease in gaining a pet; the man’s hardship in losing a pet – is but one example of the many ways that the poor, the underhoused, and the homeless are systematically denied a key part of living in Seattle, or just living at all: pet ownership. 

Ellie is in fact our second cat. Our first cat, Paprika, is a large and beautiful “buff” orange cat. She’s highly emotionally intelligent and very social, often chatty. Her presence has always been a blessing. Ellie’s new life breathes energy and possibility into our home as well. Seeing Paprika come and lie next to this baby embodies our hopes for a harmonious household.

I mention all of these soft joys and comforts to say that without them, I do not believe I am able to live fully. The companionship of a pet is as necessary to many people’s lives and happiness as having a human partner. And Seattleites agree on the importance of pets, especially dogs. There have been more dogs in the city than children since at least 1997. And this pro-dog stance is officially endorsed. The ferries allow leashed dogs everywhere except for the food galleys, and Sound Transit recently announced that new rules were coming to allow leashed dogs on the light rail. All these to enable the connection between humans and their furry companions – so long as you are clean, employed and housed.

But the need for companionship is more important to many people than having shelter. A study of Los Angeles’ homeless population found that 22% of homeless people say that they avoid shelters because they know they won’t be able to keep their pet – 48% of pet-owning homeless people say they have been turned away from shelters because of their pets. 

Why can’t homeless people have pets with them in shelters? Most homeless shelters aren’t equipped to house pets. They don’t have the space, the facilities, or the resources to care for and keep pets safe. In Seattle, few shelters offer the ability for a person and their pet to stay together – and those spaces are limited.

It’s even harder for unsheltered people to get pet food. Very few food banks provide it, and the ones that do provide pet food one or two days a month and require advance registration to guarantee available supplies. Otherwise, a pet owner could end up standing in line for hours only to be turned away after the two-hour pet food giveaway window. The closest always-stocked pet food banks to Seattle in Kent and Shoreline.

Veterinary care is also expensive, and much like human health, prevention is much cheaper than treatment – especially when it comes to neutering and spaying pets. Seattle Veterinary Outreach is a nonprofit organization that offers free pop-up vet clinics eight times a month. Hosted from 10 a.m.-2 p.m. across the city, there are no locations between Phinney Ridge and SoDo. People who don’t line up before 9 a.m. do not get seen. If you are homeless and seeking the bare minimum of a life with dignity and companionship, be prepared to travel far and wait long. 

How do we fix this? With the targeted spend of state funds. California started the Pet Assistance and Support program in 2019, allocating $5 million for retrofitting homeless shelters with pet accommodations. The state awarded funds to 30 shelters. In 2023, it renewed funding with an additional $10 million to expand the program to new shelters and continue support of participating shelters with repairs, pet food and veterinary services.

Washington should implement a similar program. Seattle, King County, and the state continue to throw money at patchwork attempts to get people off the streets and into shelter. . Part of the problem is offering people shelter and services that do not meet their needs. If 22% of the unhoused population refuses to accept shelter because their pet will not be cared for or, worse, separated from them permanently – like the man we saw at the shelter screaming and crying in front of a crowd of well-meaning civil servants – how can our government continue operating  a system that could be shutting out a fifth of the people they claim to serve?

Maybe this man was a bad owner. Maybe his home was unsafe. Maybe he wasn’t able to afford to take care of an animal. All I know is that his neighbors complained and people from the shelter, upon seeing the mess of his home, agreed that the dog should be removed from the owner, who was unwilling. 

What if there had been more help and resources available to this man? Free dog food and vet care to keep his dog healthy, to remove any financial burden, and the certainty that should things get tough, he’d be able to remain with his pet? I don’t know. But I do know that in the face of claims of being a “bad owner,” he cared for his dog, and he was not allowed to have it.

Make Seattle a dog city. For everyone.

The post Op-Ed: Make Seattle a Dog City for Everyone first appeared on The Urbanist.

The Seattle region should add another complementary approach that we can put into practice quickly to fill in the gaps in our continuum of care for unhoused neighbors. Managed mobile villages featuring clusters of tiny homes, RV spaces, or modular pods with shared amenities that can rotate between eligible locations is just the thing.

This isn’t fantasy. We already possess legal framework and the operators. 

Back in 2020, the Seattle City Council expanded “transitional encampments” citywide by removing most zoning controls, allowing renewals in perpetuity, and authorizing up to 40 sanctioned sites. That gives Seattle unusual flexibility to test well-governed, time-limited villages that move as building timelines, school-year requirements, or neighborhood planning shift.

We already have proof that non-congregate shelters with on-site services function well. In 2024, 46% of people exiting City-funded tiny house programs ended up in permanent housing, according to the City, and just 4% returned to homelessness in six months well above the national average shelter program placement rate.

That’s not a magic bullet; it’s an on-ramp that can be measured out of street homelessness when PSH is lined up. And the City is doubling down on it: this fall, more than 100 additional small houses will open in two new LIHI villages funded in the 2025 budget. Sharon Lee, Executive Director of the Low Income Housing Institute, told The Urbanist that their mission goes beyond shelter. 

“These two new tiny house villages will serve hundreds of people in the years to come,” Lee said. “We are thrilled to find vacant land and aim to establish these villages as quickly as possible. Our goal is to help vulnerable individuals transition from cold, wet tents into heated tiny houses this winter.”

But any proposal will have to deal with the politics.

Local not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) backlash has scuttled sites even recently, when a village of small houses was postponed after some neighbors pushed back. And even inside the system, not everyone believes in the tiny home model: the County’s Lived Experience Coalition and former King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) CEO Marc Dones have been opponents of tiny house villages as destinations for long-term stays, citing the risk of warehousing people rather than uplifting them and meeting their long-term needs.

Those criticisms have some merit. Done poorly, tiny home villages run the risk of turning shoddy temporary housing into a permanent fixture lowering expectations for living conditions. The guardrail is design and management: strict service standards, resident decision-making, strong standards for habitability, and an expectation (not a firm limit) that stays are intentional and time-limited, with clear, supported pathways that help residents transition into permanent housing, not just stay sheltered.

So what does a Seattle “village on wheels” look like? Think tiny ensembles of heated, secure cabins or modular pods combined with a small number of RV pads, all staffed 24/7, with hygiene, storage, laundry, mail, and case management.

The “mobile” element is not random shuffling of people; it’s pre-screened rotation among a compact group of screened city parcels, faith-held parcels, and empty lots so providers can stand up shelter near service nodes, transit, and building jobs without adding long-term land strife.

Portland’s Safe Rest Villages create a working model for dignified, managed outdoor shelter with services; its Multnomah site runs 100 units of on-site case management and behavioral health. Commissioner Dan Ryan, who helped launch the program, explained the deeper goal behind it. 

“Taking someone who has been chronically houseless,” Ryan said, “we really need to build trust on the streets and help them build that resilience so that when they are permanently housed, they’ll have a much higher success rate.” 

Eugene’s Opportunity Village illustrates how resident self-governance and micro-units can stabilize people and speed up transitions. Seattle can implement both, using its own operators and data standards.

Why make tiny homes mobile?

Mobile tiny home villages bring three distinct advantages.

First off, velocity. Mobile tiny home villages can open villages in months, not years. PSH is still the goal, but too frequently it comes at the cost of high per-door capital and lengthy delivery; by comparison, City analyses (and even KCRHA memos) note that small houses have some of the lowest initial costs on the order of tens of thousands per unit for the building and site work precisely because they’re simple, code-compliant shelters in a service-dense village.

Secondly, it’s a good fit for vehicle residents. A growing proportion of unsheltered Seattle’s population is living in cars or RVs; rotating sites with RV lots and safe-parking strategies enable us to get people into the service system without making them surrender the only item of ownership they possess. Federal guidance and West Coast pilots show that these programs work when they are well-implemented and linked with housing navigation.

Third, the temporary model helps defuse local pushback. Neighbors must have a sense of what’s next, and the temporary location model helps set expectations: 9–18 months with a plan for up-close review neighbors and businesses observe a transparent playbook (security, sanitation, trash removal, good-neighbor agreements) and a brief time horizon. That could reduce political backlash that have made tiny house villages a delay and litigation magnet.

Costs and tradeoffs

Seattle and King County must keep expanding PSH, including Health Through Housing conversions of hotels. But we need to be truthful about timelines and unit economics. County reporting puts average cost of capital for Health Through Housing purchase and rehab in the hundreds of thousands per unit, with ongoing annual operating costs still faster and often less expensive than ground-up PSH, but not immediately.

Villages, by design, are lower-capital and build faster; they’re not apartments, and we shouldn’t pretend they are, but they can get people alive, inside, and plugged in to the pipeline of support that comes along. The proper question is not which one model to pick,but rather how to sequence and patch together a variety of models: get people into good non-congregate shelter space today; move them into PSH as it comes online.

What of the “long stays” criticism? It is understandable to worry when shelter and supportive housing capacity is tight. The answer is not to disassemble villages; the answer is to organize them as front doors to housing, and not as cul-de-sacs.

Seattle should publish monthly, provider-level data exits to permanent housing, median time to exit, returns to homelessness so that the public can be informed whether supportive services are working or not. The City is already seeing benefits for small houses; let’s lock that transparency in for all properties and make ongoing operation depend on open performance measures.

Turning this idea into action will take a careful rollout plan. To speed up the timeline to open up villages, the City could pre-permit a village network with clear rules for operations. A framework for the program could look something like this:

• Pre-clear 10–12 locations ahead of time under the 2020 authority with environmental, utility, and transportation screenings done ahead of time.
• Publish a rotation calendar 12 months ahead of time;
• Provide complimentary moving/storage support for residents, during each relocation so the “mobility” expense should be allocated to operators, not the residents themselves.
• Establish a re-deployable, modular kit. Standardize cabins/pods, office units, hygiene trailers, and security lighting so they can be relocated in days, not weeks, to minimize neighborhood disruption and resident stress. 
• Implement good-neighbor policies. Incorporate daily trash collection, needle picking up, lighting, and one point of access for businesses and neighboring residents and post turnaround times.
• Stand up wraparound services on-site.

Portland’s Safe Rest Villages offer a proven model for dignified, managed outdoor shelter with wraparound services. While these sites are primarily semi-permanent rather than mobile, their structure of non-congregate pods, 24/7 staffing, case management, and behavioral health on-site demonstrates what well-governed, service-rich villages can achieve.

Eugene’s Opportunity Village adds another layer, showing how resident self-governance and micro-units can stabilize people and accelerate transitions. Seattle can borrow from both models, adapting them into a mobile, flexible network using our existing operators and data standards.

Tiny house villages should also be right-sized to context. In high-density near-transit districts, prioritize cabins/pods and limit RV pads; in industrial areas, introduce managed RV stalls with hookups, gray-water disposal, and car repair partners, alongside safe-parking best practices, which include resident governance and grievance channels. Seattle could borrow from Eugene’s Opportunity Village playbook: resident councils, posted community rules, and open grievance processes reduce conflict and increase safety. )

Finally, let’s talk about the fear behind so much resistance: scale.

Mobile villages are not “the solution.” They’re a bridge that scales — a way of humanizing street-to-home journeys as we add PSH, ramp up rent subsidies, and mend the back door with eviction prevention.

Seattle already is leading the charge with the addition of two more City-funded villages and existing programs have shown tiny homes with higher-than-average permanent-housing exits.

Rather than going back and retreading the previous war over tiny home villages, we can design a next-generation, transparent, outcome-driven solution that is responsible to the community and responsive enough to meet the need where it actually exists.

The issue is not mobile villages versus permanent housing. The issue is waiting until we have the perfect solution versus building a humane, tested stepping stone that gets people inside today, with a clear path to stay there.

The post Op-Ed: How Mobile Villages Could Tackle Seattle’s Homelessness Emergency first appeared on The Urbanist.

In late 2021, more conservative-leaning tough-on-crime politicians — Mayor Bruce Harrell, Councilmember Sara Nelson, and City Attorney Ann Davison — came to power in Seattle, riding a wave of backlash to the progressive response to the 2020 George Floyd protests against police violence and frustration with the Covid-19 pandemic. All three politicians were defeated at the ballot box in November, signaling a leftward shift in Seattle voter sentiment, which was presaged by Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s easy victory last year.

While Wilson ran on a platform of affordability and good governance, she didn’t shy away from talking about homelessness and public safety. Instead, she offered an alternative to the hardline punitive approach of Harrell, who emphasized his efforts in hiring more police officers even as he negotiated two contracts with the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG) that drastically raised the price tag on how much each officer costs the City. 

“Affordability, quality of life, and community safety are inextricably linked,” Wilson told The Urbanist in a written response. “When working families can actually afford to live here, that strengthens communities. And when neighborhood businesses are thriving and public spaces feel safe and welcoming to people of all incomes — that’s what makes a city livable.” 

Insha Rahman, the vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute, compared Wilson’s run to that of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, as both candidates suggested police officers shouldn’t have to do everything.

“I think we saw a very similar binary choice in Seattle of Bruce Harrell doing more of the same — tough on crime but keep the status quo — versus Katie Wilson, who said we’ve got to be doing public safety differently,” Rahman told The Urbanist.

Vera Action ran a national poll in May 2025 that showed 60% of voters preferring what Rahman called a “serious about safety approach,” which Rahman said she saw Wilson do during her campaign.

“The most important measurement isn’t just about numbers of shelter beds, dollars spent, or crime statistics reported to the police,” Wilson said. “It’s about whether people have a safe place to go at night, whether we’re sending the most appropriate responders and how fast our response times are, and whether people of all incomes feel safe in their neighborhoods and believe that our city and our public spaces work for them.”

Focusing on this approach, Wilson walked back her defund stance of 2020, instead focusing on providing support to the police while recognizing that policing can’t solve many of the problems they’re being asked to address. 

Wilson expressed strong support for the City’s new civilian-run Community Assisted Response & Engagement (CARE) department that provides alternative 911 response to crisis calls and civilianization of public safety tasks that don’t require a badge and gun. Wilson called for a more coordinated response to gun violence prevention, holding police accountable when they’ve engaged in misconduct, and scaling up diversion programs that already have a successful track record. 

“What I’m going to be judged on, what my administration is going to be judged on, first and foremost, is homelessness and public safety,” Wilson said in an interview with Breaking Points. “And I really think that in the first couple years, we’re going to need to drill down and make progress on those really basic quality of life issues and show, I think we have an opportunity here for people on the progressive left to basically show that we can actually govern.”

The nexus between public safety and homelessness

During her campaign, Wilson drew a strong line between public safety and homelessness. She criticized Harrell’s approach of spending City resources sweeping homeless people from place to place instead of investing more in getting people housed, promising to open 4,000 new units of emergency housing by the end of her first term. 

Instead of homeless encampment sweeps, Wilson favors a model more like the JustCare program, developed in Seattle during the pandemic, which focused on rapidly placing unhoused individuals into empty hotel rooms while providing them with intensive case management. Washington state used a similar model in their Rights-of-Way Safety Initiative, which cleared encampments in public rights-of-way by moving them into housing. This program ran for two years and was considered a success before most of its funding was cut this year in the state’s 2025-2027 budget. 

CARE Chief Amy Barden thinks this focus on emergency housing could be a game changer, providing the missing link needed to more effectively stabilize the people suffering on Seattle’s streets. “You can provide case management and medical support, but if you can’t accommodate a safe housing provision, it’s hard to break the cycle,” Barden told The Urbanist. 

Barden explained it’s extremely difficult for people to break harmful cycles of poverty, behavioral health issues, and addiction without a place to sleep and be safe.

A big question is how quickly Wilson will be able to stand up new emergency housing, particularly given the difficulties in siting facilities and tiny home villages, and where she’ll find the resources to do so in a tight budget. 

“We know this is, mayors are sort of made or broken in their first three to six months on issues like public safety,” Rahman said. “It’s the kitchen table issues.”

The current Seattle City Council voted earlier in November to proviso, or reserve, $29.9 million for the cross-departmental Unified Care Team, which conducts homeless encampment sweeps, the lynchpin of Harrell’s model of homelessness response. That budget maneuver could make the transition to a different model more challenging, though mayors have thwarted provisos before. 

The council also put a proviso on $11.1 million in the Human Services department that Harrell had earmarked for a new one-year shelter program. This money will potentially be used to backfill federal Continuum of Care funding the City might lose next year: in other words, to maintain the housing options and services the City already has rather than add new beds.

Wilson plans to be strategic, focusing on what will get results and being mindful of the scale of the homeless problem here in Seattle. She’ll be putting together more detailed plans of how to fund and implement her approach in her first months in office, plans which she expects to include redirecting existing funds.

“An effective homelessness response will be expensive, but what we’re doing now has a high price tag too, especially if you consider the indirect impacts in addition to the direct costs,” Wilson said. “And I believe that the people of Seattle are eager to see the city implement a compassionate, effective strategy to address homelessness, and would be happy to put the resources into an approach that they can see is working.”

CARE alternative response

During her campaign, Wilson focused on the potential of the CARE alternative response team and further civilianization of the police department to provide appropriate and faster responses while freeing up the police to address more serious issues that require a gun and badge.

In his last budget proposal, Harrell used part of a small sales tax increase to fund the expansion of the CARE team, doubling the number of responders from 24 to 48 and increasing coverage hours to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. 

However, Harrell also negotiated a new contract with SPOG that, while allowing the CARE team to be dispatched by themselves for the first time, severely curtails which calls they’ll be able to answer solo. 

Scheduled to receive a final council vote in December, the new contract stipulates that the CARE team cannot go by themselves to a call that is inside a private residence, business, or vehicle or at a homeless encampment. They’re also not allowed to respond solo to calls that are related to public drug use or drug possession or have any “drug paraphernalia” present, including the presence of tin foil, which can be constructed into a makeshift pipe. 

In response, CARE is developing partnerships with the King County Jail and local hospitals in order to assist people being released. Callers to 911 will also be able to request CARE responders. Barden is hopeful SPD will also start referring more suitable calls directly to CARE.

Contracts for diversion services such as Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD), Co-LEAD, and We Deliver Care will be moved from the Human Services Department to the CARE department next year in the hopes of improving coordination. Barden would like to see homelessness response anchored in 911, with more dynamic possibilities for who responds based on specific situations instead of a static team of police officers and social workers. 

Still, in order for the CARE team to operate as designed, Wilson will be forced to reckon with SPOG, convince the state legislature to intervene, or think creatively about how to provide this first response without getting mired in a legal battle over labor agreements. 

“I’ll be working closely with the leadership of CARE and the SPD to maximize the effectiveness of the program within current constraints, and seek additional flexibility going forward,” Wilson said. 

Meanwhile, SPD’s community service officers (CSOs) are close to finalizing their contract with the city that will designate their civilian body of work. In last year’s contract, SPOG agreed to a new list of tasks that could be given to civilians instead of officers, and many of these will now be handed to the City’s 24 CSOs. 

While the CARE team and the fire department’s Health One and Health 99 respond to clinical matters, CSOs will respond to other issues, such as responding to lost, missing, and found property calls, delivering messages, and performing wellness checks that don’t have a clinical component.

“This is a great step forward,” Barden said. “I think you should have community helper functions in [SPD.]”

This formalization of the CSO role will give Wilson an opportunity to lean more heavily into civilianization of public safety functions.

“The key question is whether we’re deploying our resources effectively to keep people safe. That’s what matters,” Wilson said.

Violence prevention 

Wilson doesn’t need the support of SPOG or SPD to invest in and scale up violence prevention efforts, including gun violence prevention programs. 

The City Auditor’s Office offered up several critiques of Seattle’s current attempts at curbing gun violence earlier this year. Harrell didn’t let this stop him from announcing $14.7 million in gun violence prevention efforts as part of his fall campaigning spree. It is unclear how much the Auditor’s Office recommendations were taken to heart as part of his proposal.

Meanwhile, Public Health – Seattle & King County told The Urbanist earlier this fall that the city had indicated they would no longer be providing funding for the Regional Peacekeepers Collective starting in 2026. An initiative of the King County Regional Office of Gun Violence Prevention, the Regional Peacekeepers Collective uses a public health approach and provides support and services to young people and their families most at risk of gun violence.

Wilson expressed her disappointment in the Auditor’s findings that Seattle hasn’t been following best practices when it comes to preventing gun violence. 

“Other cities have proven strategies that work,” Wilson said. “We need to implement those evidence-based approaches, coordinate better across jurisdictions, and make sure our violence prevention investments are actually producing results.”

In her platform, WIlson also discussed the role of diversion programs, apprenticeship and job training programs, and other programs that focus on building skills and community relationships, especially for youth and young adults. 

Wilson’s selection of Quynh Pham, the Executive Director of Friends of Little Saigon, as one of four co-chairs of her transition team suggests her strong support of neighborhood models of public safety. Earlier this year, Friends of Little Saigon launched “Phố Đẹp (Beautiful Neighborhood),” an inclusive framework to public safety that prioritizes a housing first approach, providing services, and cleaning and activating public spaces. 

Friends of Little Saigon based the initiative on a specific framework recommended by the Auditor’s Office that also influenced another successful neighborhood-based violence prevention project, Rainier Beach: a Beautiful Safe Place for Youth. Wilson also called out the work of the University District Partnership. 

Federal tests might come early

Rahman suggested Wilson could also gain credibility with Seattle residents around public safety based on her response to potential federal overreach, ranging from Trump deploying the National Guard to Seattle to further ramping up of illegal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity. 

“Our city and state have strong laws on the books to protect immigrant communities, but the Trump Administration’s record shows that these laws aren’t enough to ensure Seattle would actually function as a sanctuary city if federal troops are deployed,” Wilson said. “I opposed this year’s expansion of the CCTV program in large part for this very reason — as immigrant rights and civil rights leaders repeatedly pointed out, expanding and centralizing surveillance would make it all too easy for the federal government to target people here.” 

At a candidate forum sponsored by the advocacy group Whose Streets, Our Streets! in October, Wilson’s answers to several rapid yes or no questions showed her skepticism of surveillance, especially during President Donald Trump’s second term, which has been marked by a vast expansion of the country’s surveillance apparatus. 

At the forum, Wilson said she would pause new surveillance camera installations until an independent review proved they reduce crime without harming immigrants and communities of color, would require consent before authorizing surveillance in immigrant-heavy communities in Seattle, and committed to not deploying new surveillance technologies.

While standing up to Trump, Wilson will need to help Seattle residents understand what she’s doing to address public safety and homelessness during her first several months, and indeed, her entire term. She’ll be drawing on her experience as a coalition builder and community organizer both to solve problems and communicate clearly about them.

“To me, good governance means creating real opportunities for community input, being transparent about tradeoffs and challenges, and building coalitions to support transformative policies,” Wilson said. “It means treating people as partners in solving our city’s challenges, not just people who pay taxes and receive services. It also means honest communication — not just when things are going well, but when we hit obstacles.”

The Wilson campaign also set among its goals restoring faith in government in general.

“The city faces big challenges, but I believe strongly in the capacity of government to be effective, responsive, and get things done.”

The post Katie Wilson Charts New Course on Public Safety and Homelessness first appeared on The Urbanist.

Working in Pioneer Square as a nurse, I am overwhelmed with relief that Katie Wilson is in the race for Seattle Mayor. Katie has demonstrated time and again that she prioritizes people and the best interests of our community. We are at an inflection point and we have a chance to do some real good at reducing the pain the Harrell administration has caused and address the housing crisis which Harrell has mishandled.

The Harrell administration has tried to make our unhoused neighbors disappear by overseeing sweeps that maximize displacement and harm to human life. The Seattle Unified Cares Team, performed more than 2,200 sweeps annually in 2023, even during brutal inclement weather events, despite community outcry. Between 2023 and 2024, this program came at a price tag of approximately $52.5 million. 

As a nurse, I can assure voters this is a waste of our taxpayer dollars. Instead of addressing the problem head-on with essential resources, sweeps actively make the comorbidities of homelessness much worse. I have seen sweeps rob people who are homeless of their personal belongings including wheelchairs and walkers. This in no way leads to any kind of recovery or long-term stability. All the Harrell team can seem to think of is prescribing the hammer to a patient population that has only known the hammer of brutality.

Katie Wilson is an experienced organizer who has helped win victories we all benefit from. She’s campaigned for minimum wage, progressive revenue, social housing and renter protections. She got the city to buy in to subsidized Orca transit cards. She is committed to building an additional 4,000 new shelter units as well as implementing full-time summer K-8 child care. Wilson wants to increase access to public bathrooms. As a health professional working with vulnerable populations on the long road to recovery, this is the kind of track record and willingness to improve quality of life that I can get behind.

Harrell has held elected office in Seattle City Hall for almost 20 years. In that time Seattle rent and regional homelessness has ballooned to the public health crisis it is now. The Harrell administration has used money intended for housing — the Jumpstart progressive payroll tax Wilson made happen — to fill gaps in the City budget. He chose to be the face of opposition to House Our Neighbors’ social housing campaign, going against the will of the voters. 

Wilson is a candidate who can appreciate that the fear we experience when we see needles on the sidewalk is not OK, and also that the solution needs to be about getting people inside, not to routinely displace them. Camps in public parks are a symptom of poverty and systemic inequality and a housing crisis that our local leadership in the city council and the Harrell administration has refused to address. 

In my line of work we have a statistic that most Americans are two paychecks away from being unhoused. Time and time again we find that housing people costs less than caring for them in emergency rooms and jails. A King County program showed that getting people into supportive housing prevented emergency room visits. 

The Harrell administration had so many opportunities to rise to the occasion, but chose to displace people instead. Our unhoused neighbors are the result of inequality, they are not the causes of harm. The ultrarich people driving wealth inequality don’t ride the bus or hang out in our parks. But they do seem to fund Harrell’s reelection campaign. 

Katie Wilson is asking for a well-earned shot to continue her long run of organizing to make all our lives more livable. In my line of work, we say human life is precious. I see that idea reflected in Wilson’s approach to government.

The Urbanist elections committee endorsed Katie Wilson. Remember to get your ballot into a dropbox by 8pm Tuesday, November 4.

The post Op-Ed: Opioid Treatment Nurse Shares Why They Support Katie Wilson first appeared on The Urbanist.

It will be no easy feat for whoever wins. With the median home sale price sitting at just under $1.5 million, Bellevue is one of the least affordable places to live in the state, outstripping Seattle by a wide margin.

Up for election in Bellevue are:

• Position 1: Paul Clark and (appointed) incumbent Vishal Bhargava;
• Position 2: Naren Briar and incumbent Conrad Lee;
• Position 4: Pradnya Desh and incumbent Jared Nieuwenhuis;
• Position 5: Matthew Rish and (appointed) incumbent Claire Sumadiwirya, and
• Position 6: incumbent Mayor Lynne Robinson and Nicole Myers.

The Urbanist has endorsed Bhargava and Sumadiwirya.

Community health and stability through anti-displacement

All candidates agreed that the city needed more affordable housing, but they didn’t all agree on how to best go about creating said affordable housing.

Several candidates noted that this is particularly important for Black, brown, and Indigenous communities, who continue to suffer displacement, thanks to policies that have intentionally undermined any wealth-building ability. It is also harder for families from these communities to buy and rent, in the first place, due to racism and discrimination.

Sumadiwirya, an immigrant herself, said that there is overlap between historically marginalized communities and the professions that don’t currently allow people to live in the city.

“I’ve seen how housing instability cascades to job loss, educational disruption, and health crisis every day. This is not just a topic to me,” she said. In addition to continuing affordable housing projects, she said, it is important that Bellevue “create pathways for homeownership of community historically being discriminated from the lending process.”

Bhargava said that the city needed to “invest equitably, directing resources to neighborhoods that have historically been left behind, improving sidewalks, access to transit, [and] housing affordability, where the need is the most.”

Briar noted that the median price of Bellevue’s roughly 520 listings on the market was $1.5 million, and said that this spoke to the need to create more housing supply. She believes in “empowerment through ownership,” and said that many people she has spoken with, particularly elders, can neither afford to downsize their homes nor stay in Bellevue.

“And so they end up going to Snoqualmie, North Bend, or other cities. They’re displaced by their own city,” Briar said. “We have to implement new configurations of homes that allow various options at various costs.”

She also said that during the housing land use code amendment vote, Lee was asking what “walkability” and “stacked flats” meant.

“Well, once again, my opponent’s attacking me —” Lee began, before host Scarleth Lever cut him off to remind him that it was not a debate. Lee said that, as an immigrant, he understands what it is like not to be able to afford to live somewhere, and that he believes people who could not currently afford housing deserved “a seat at the table.”

Desh highlighted the need to “publish a clear dashboard” that shows how quickly affordable, transit-oriented development is happening within the city “so that we stay accountable and fix bottlenecks fast.”

Myers said that she believes that it’s important for the city to maintain the affordable developments already in the pipeline, as it goes through the changes imposed by the Housing Opportunities in Mixed-Use Areas (HOMA) land use code amendment.

“People living in affordable housing should be [able to stay in their homes] and it’s the rents that should fluctuate, not the other way around,” Myers said. “So as your income goes up, hopefully you still maintain eligibility for the housing and you don’t have to leave, even if you’re now able to pay more.”

Myers also agreed with Desh, and said that this kind of data can help families understand “how long it takes a family like yours to obtain housing just so you can plan for it and figure out what’s likely to happen to you.” She also said that the city needs to keep data on rental losses, “because we know that with some of the changes and development that’s happening, people are already getting displaced from longtime rental homes.”

Myers has been less than supportive of plans to create middle housing near transit, stating that even just nineplexes are “too many” homes for Bellevue’s transit areas. She has also supported retaining surface parking lots near transit-oriented developments, claiming they would act as buffers between pedestrians and busy arterial roads. (Update: Myers later expanded on her parking and rezoning thinking in this blogpost.)

In response to whether the city should create more east-west bike connections in the city, Myers told cyclists that they should just take their bike on a 2 Line train.

Supportive services and homelessness response

Nieuwenhuis avoided giving any substantive answer to Lever’s question about how he would navigate “strong public opinion against new revenue and the use of funds for low-income housing or homelessness responses,” instead stating that Bellevue residents want “a plan, a budget, a timeline, and clear metrics to evaluate the success of any program, and they want to be included. So it really starts with transparency and results.” 

His opponent, Desh, said that she respected taxpayer concerns, and that the goal of building affordable housing remained paramount. She said that, as a startup founder, she is used to doing more with less, and outlined a clear plan to navigate negative public opinion.

“So,” Desh continued, “we prioritize existing dollars first, run pilot projects with sunset clauses, and use pay-for-performance contracts. Then, we publish clear dashboards, time to permit, cost per unit, school stability, and exits from homelessness. Then, when people see results, accountability builds trust, and that’s how we deliver transit-linked affordable housing.”

The candidates who followed Desh largely agreed with the dashboards idea, in the interest of transparency.

Lee took a step back, however, and appeared to suggest slowing down the creation of supportive housing and homelessness response services. He said that the city needed to have “responsible fiscal prudence” and “money to invest.”

“It’s an important area that we need to invest, so there’s no question about it, but we need to make sure the public is willing to understand what we’re investing in,” he said. “We need to be mindful of everybody’s working together, and we need to know how the money is spent, and we’ll continue to work on that. We have sources from everywhere, but we’re going to keep on looking at them, and this is proactive. Otherwise, Bellevue would not be the way it is today, unless we’re proactive.”

During the five-second “yes or no” round, Lee, Clark, and Robinson all attached conditions to inclusionary zoning. Clark and Lee both said inclusionary zoning should not be mandatory, and Robinson said that she supports inclusionary zoning only if it came with on-site performance metrics.

Sustaining permanent supportive housing in the face of federal cuts

Lever noted that Medicaid is a key funding source for permanent housing operations. She asked candidates how they would ensure permanent supportive housing, emergency shelters and homelessness-related services could continue, in the face of sharp federal cuts.

Desh opened her answer with an anecdote: Three times, she said, she opened her home to families who were about to experience homelessness.

“And each time I gave them free access to my house’s basement apartment because I just can’t allow something like this to happen whenever there’s something I can personally do about it,” she said.

At a citywide level, her number one strategy is “care with accountability.” This means building where services and transit already exist and using reliable sources to fund operations.

“For sustainability, use operating funds such as the already mentioned [House Bill] 1590, housing stability dollars, ARCH project-based vouchers, Medicaid billable behavioral health — the part that still does exist — and use multi-year, outcome-based contracts so providers can retain staff,” Desh said. “Every site, of course, needs to have a good neighbor agreement and those agreements need to be enforced with 24-7 staffing, safety.”

Her opponent, Nieuwenhuis, said that he supports continued community partnerships with organizations like The Sophia Way and LifeWire.

“I believe that housing stability means preventing homelessness before it even happens,” Sumadiwirya said, and underscored her support for emergency rental assistance and rapid rehousing. She also highlighted wraparound support, such as childcare, transportation to a job that is nearby, and readily available mental health services.

Bhargava agreed with the need for permanent supportive housing, as well as the need to prevent homelessness, rather than just respond to it. He also said that the city needed to ensure community safety: “these are not two different outcomes because we have to achieve both.”

“This means making sure that when we identify sites, we have early and open engagement with the community. We also need to set clear operational performance and safety targets,” Bhargava said, adding that any operating partners need to have available resources for onsite mental health support, drug use rehabilitation, and “even increase policing if we need to, to make sure that safety is getting addressed properly.”

Bhargava also advocated for onsite services for non-emergency events, in order to decrease police calls.

Clark took a more stringent tack, noting that the Bellevue Police Guild had endorsed him. He said that the city needs to revisit the “guardrails” that it “left on the table” when the council implemented HB 1195, which allowed the city to create permanent supportive housing.

Required minimum separation between sites, clear reporting standards — that was all left on the table,” Clark said. “I think we should revisit them. And when people raise concerns, we can’t just call them NIMBYs and move on. … Security and stability in these sites are crucial to those living in them, as well as those in the surrounding neighborhoods. Same goes for shelter facilities.”

Clark also noted that “recent events at PorchLight” — a man who had previously stayed at the homeless shelter beat a person to death in July at an encampment near the facility — have created an air of concern, and that the beating shows “the need for transparency and accountability there, and a focus on public safety.”

PorchLight is Bellevue’s only homeless shelter serving single adult men, and has been heavily targeted by right-wing commentators and not-in-my-backyard activists. Notwithstanding the murder this summer, a staff report from the Bellevue Office of Housing has noted overall crime and safety statistics show a positive trend in the vicinity since the facility began operating in 2023. Most of the calls to Porchlight have been for non-life-threatening emergency services.

Specific policies and trade-offs

In response to the specific affordable housing policies each candidate would bring to the table, several pointed to Bellevue’s Comprehensive Plan, overhauled last year after the legislature passed a state mandate that municipalities substantively address the state’s affordable housing crisis.

Briar said that she supported specific policies the city had already planned to implement, as outlined in its Comprehensive Plan. She listed several that were “all very exciting to me,” because they encouraged adding more and different types of homes in proximity to existing transit centers, schools, parks, and jobs.

In speaking to difficult trade-offs, she also pointed out that Lee voted against light rail routes “when 58% of the public voted in favor of it.”

“The aforementioned items of affordable housing, of neighborhood character — these things are not antithetical to one another. We build affordable housing by increasing the supply. It doesn’t have to be difficult,” Briar said, adding that things like investing in transit is how to retain neighborhood character.

“My opponent has been living in the city of Bellevue for less than two years. Just as a reminder,” Lee said, emphasizing his 50-year tenure in the city and more than 30 on the council. “How does she know what a Bellevue citizen wants? … I’ve been listening. I’ve been talking to you. … I listen to various opinions and accommodate them [to] make decisions. It’s not easy because people don’t think the same way.”

And though Lee didn’t miss the chance to say that he was “glad that my opponent has said a number of things the city is already doing,” he didn’t bring any new ideas of his own to the table, either. Instead, he stated that “the city has grown to such a scale that we have to make it work,” that this was difficult, and that “talking about it is one thing. Making it work is one thing. I’ve been on the council for all these years that we’ve been making it work.”

Part of the reason the state mandated that municipalities created affordable housing is because cities like Bellevue have not been making it work.

Myers pointed out that the city may face challenges when it comes to building in formerly single-family zones that are now cleared to hold multiple homes. She said it is important for both new community members and existing residents to build “as gracefully as possible,” ensuring tree retention and fitting all the necessary services into those areas.

Bhargava, who chaired the planning commission as it updated Bellevue’s Comprehensive Plan, also highlighted a few specifics he “had strong feelings for”: Encouraging mixed-use and middle housing near transit, schools, and parks; expanding affordable housing specifically near transit; and investing in pedestrian and bike connectivity throughout the city. He also supports a no net-loss approach to tree planting.

While she didn’t list any specifics, Sumadiwirya said that the city needs to center any difficult conversation with “a very clear north star.” 

“For me, having a policy that’s focused on, that’s compassionate, consistent, and also committed, that puts our community first, should be the policy we put in the core of our growth and also our future planning,” Sumadiwirya said. “I remember when I first moved here 30 years ago, I didn’t see a teacher who looked like me. But now my kids can actually experience, learn new things with teachers who look like them. That is priceless. … When a policy is not made for the most vulnerable group, it’s not a policy for anybody.”

Sumadiwirya was the crucial swing vote in June that scaled back Bellevue’s middle housing plans in June. Those plans had gone beyond the state mandates, and appeared poised to make the city a leader in middle housing development.

The post Bellevue Council Contenders Spar Over Housing first appeared on The Urbanist.