Harrell's "Emergency Housing" Claims Don't Stand Up to Scrutiny, Council Hopefuls Quizzed on Crime, Renters Commission Appointments Will Get a Vote After All

Today's Afternoon Fizz.

1. Mayor Bruce Harrell, who's trying to fight off a strong challenge from labor organizer and Transit Riders Union general secretary Katie Wilson, claimed in a recent campaign mailer that he had created "Nearly 3,000 units of new emergency housing" during his first term.

On its face, this claim is impossible. Seattle has fewer than 3,000 shelter beds—also known as emergency housing—in the entire homelessness system system, and has actually lost several shelters since the pandemic, including critical beds for youth and young adults. Almost all of the remaining beds have existed since before Harrell took office.

Contacted this week about the numbers in the campaign flyer, Harrell's office said they "appear to be in reference to the shelter and supportive housing units created, funded, or in production under our administration, as available on the Homelessness Action Plan."

Even assuming Harrell's campaign misspoke and was actually using the term "emergency housing" to refer collectively to all forms of emergency housing, long-term shelter like tiny house villages, and permanent housing, that number is still misleading, or off, by at least 500 beds,

First, the Homelessness Action Plan page credits the Harrell Administration with 16 projects, including tiny house villages, an encampment, and an emergency shelter, that opened between 2018 and 2022—Harrell's first year in office. Of this group, 10 were new permanent housing projects that began construction before Harrell took office. Some, such as the Chief Seattle Club's 2021 ʔálʔal project, opened so long ago that former mayor Jenny Durkan already took credit for them. Other projects that opened in 2023 were also underway long before Harrell took office, like Plymouth Housing's Toft Terrace and Blake House projects, both funded by a capital campaign that ended in 2019.

Other projects Harrell is counting toward his success rate on "emergency housing" are still under negotiation, like a 45-unit permanent housing development on Sound Transit-owned land in the University District; are mere relocations of pre-existing shelter beds that Harrell is double-counting toward his "new beds" total (such as 77 tiny house village units); are projects that never happened—like the expansion of a Salvation Army shelter in SoDo that was thwarted by NIMBY activism; or are no longer open, like LIHI's Salmon Bay RV lot, which shut down earlier this year to make way for new indoor pickleball court.

Wilson, who campaigned for last year's social housing measure, has made housing (and progressive revenue to fund it) the centerpiece of her campaign. Harrell, in contrast, served as the face of the Seattle Chamber-backed campaign against funding social housing.

2. PubliCola continues to hear that most of Seattle's eight sitting City Councilmembers plan to support former District 5 (North Seattle) Councilmember Debora Juarez for appointment to the seat just vacated by Cathy Moore, who resigned after serving just 18 months.

A more openly law-and-order candidate, Julie Kang, has impressed some council members with her advocacy for small businesses and vocal support from community candidates—but, to paraphrase a headline we ran before former councilmember Tanya Woo was appointed to replace Tammy Morales, these forums amount to pretending the fix isn't in for Juarez already, and that all six candidates have an equal shot.

Juarez, who chose not to run for reelection in 2023, said during the city council's lone public forum earlier this week that she decided she "wanted to get back into this business because [of], viscerally, the emotion that I had watching a US senator [Alex Padilla], a Latino man ... in a federal building where he's shouting out, I'm a US senator, and he's being cuffed. That could have been my dad, my husband, my brothers." Juarez is Mexican American as well as a member of the Blackfeet Nation.

In response to questions about how she would address sex work on Aurora Ave. N, Juarez pointed out that there are just seven beds in the city for women exiting the sex trade—a comment that highlighted Moore's insistence on handing. up to $2 million dedicated to "receiving" beds for former sex workers to an out-of-town nonprofit, The More We Love, that takes women from North Seattle and moves them to shelter beds in Renton, miles south of Seattle.

At a community forum at North Seattle College the night before the council hearing, the questions—posed by former council candidate and Unified Outreach program manager David Toledo—skewed classic NIMBY: Do you support "free-range zoning"? The proposed comprehensive plan fails to support trees; how will you address that fact? "There are a lot of small businesses that are suffering with lots of violence and theft. What will you do about that? If you were convicted of a crime, would you resign?

In response to the two crime-related questions, Juarez—seeming slightly exasperated—noted that there are many types of crime, and a big difference between violence against business owners and someone walking out without paying for something. "Violence, absolutely, that's crime against a person," Juarez said. With theft, she continued, there are gradations. "We have jail capacity issues. ... We simply can't take people in for ... low level crimes when we have rapists and murderers" who should be in those cells.

Kang, in contrast, said "we need to be strict and firm" with shoplifters who steal things they don't really need.

As for the question about resignation, Juarez said it really depended on what kind of offense it was—"If I killed somebody, absolutely, but you know, if I, by accident, picked up a salad at QFC and didn't know was in my cart, I'm not gonna resign." Later, after everyone else said they would resign if they were convicted or pled guilty to even the lowest-level crime, Juarez amended her answer to "yes, I would resign." Kang, responding to the same trick question, said that "being an educator, I stay away from trouble."

The council will vote on the appointment at a special meeting at 9:30 Monday morning.

3. Later that same day, the council will take up 14 appointments to the Seattle Renters Commission that were thwarted earlier this week after Council President Sara Nelson and Councilmember Rob Saka did not show up at a meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee, declining the committee of the required three-person quorum. (Former councilmember Moore, as chair of the committee, had refused to put the long-delayed appointments on the agenda for the entirety of her term, and drafted legislation to replace the renters; commission with a joint landlord-tenant group).

In a statement announcing her decision to move forward with the appointments on Thursday, Nelson said, "I want to acknowledge the frustration my excused absence contributed to the lack of quorum at yesterday’s HHS committee meeting and apologize to the people who took the time to show up for the committee vote on their appointment to a board or commission, including the Renters’ Commission. I am grateful for their willingness to serve our city, and delays in the appointment process serve no one well."

Nelson did not say how she planned to vote on the appointments, which the committee's vice chair, Mark Solomon, put on the agenda after talking to renters' commission nominees and learning that their appointments and reappointments have been delayed as long as a year and a half.

Nelson told the Solomon, that she would be absent one day before the meeting. Multiple council sources said Saka was in his office with the door closed while the committee met just feet away in council chambers. In a statement, Saka told PubliCola he couldn't attend the meeting because of "unexpected personal conflicts."