PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Katie Wilson

"Harrell's the status quo, and it’s not working," Transit Riders Union leader Wilson says.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has been in office for 16 of the last 18 years. Katie Wilson, general secretary of the Transit Riders Union, says he represents a "status quo" that isn't working for the city.

Wilson is a longtime advocate for progressive causes. She played a central role in many successful local organizing efforts, including efforts to raise the minimum wage in Seattle and several suburban cities (most recently in Burien, whose leaders are so mad about the higher minimum that they're suing Wilson and the Raise the Wage Burien campaign to overturn it.) She served on the city's progressive revenue task force, which recommended a number of options for progressive new fees and taxes, including the local capital gains tax Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed last year. And she has been a prominent local voice on renters' rights, fighting for key tenant protections inside and outside Seattle as part of the Stay Housed Stay Healthy Campaign.

As a progressive activist who's never run for office before, Wilson acknowledges she's well outside the Seattle establishment. But she says last year's election—in which Proposition 1A, a funding measure backed by social housing advocates, roundly defeated a tepid alternative backed by Harrell—shows that Seattle supports social housing and wants it to work. When Wilson and I spoke earlier this week, I started by following up on an earlier conversation about how last year's victory for social housing inspired her to run.

PubliCola (ECB): When we talked before, you said you were inspired by the success of Prop 1A and that that was a factor in your decision to run. Can you say more about that – what does social housing’s victory say about Seattle voters’ willingness to elect a more progressive mayor?

Katie Wilson (KW): I think what it really shows is just how out of step the current mayor is with the people who he’s supposed to represent. Prop 1A won in a landslide and Harrell is the face of the opposition campaign that was funded by the Chamber of Commerce.

It shows that the voters want action on affordable housing, and that’s what I want to see. We need people who are going to stand up and work for the city and not just obey corporate backers. Everyone got mailers in their mailboxes with Harrell’s face plastered on them that were funded by Amazon and Microsoft and the Chamber, and I think voters are smart and can see through that, and it shows that voters are eager for big action on affordable housing.

ECB: What kind of action would you take on affordable housing if you were mayor right now, including social housing?

KW: If we had a mayor right now who wanted to see the social housing developer work, there are very easy things he could be doing. He could make sure social housing gets the same density bonuses in the comprehensive plan that other types of affordable housing are getting. I think we need to go big. Councilmember Zahilay has proposed a billion-dollar bond for social housing. I would like to explore how we can do one of those at the city level. We would need some research into bonding capacity and mechanisms by which it could be paid back with rents.

We’re seeing discussions going on now around the comprehensive plan, and some decisions will be made this year. I think we need more housing almost everywhere, especially in great neighborhoods that already have parks and schools and grocery stores and small businesses, and I think adding more people more residents to those neighborhoods will make them even more vibrant.. And I think we need to have a strong anti-displacement approach, especially in neighborhoods like the Central District and South Seattle that have already been impacted by displacement to make sure that people who brought their homes years and years ago are able to pay their property taxes so they’re not displaced.

Seattle now is a city of 56 percent renter households and it’s rough out there. I think there are ways that we can strengthen our renter protection laws—like clamping down on rental junk fees, deceptive practices, and algorithmic pricing.

ECB: The council that voters elected in 2023 is, safe to say, considerably more conservative than you are on many issues. How would you bridge that political gap to work with a council that may not agree with you on the best goals or policies for the city?

KW: Obviously we’re not going to agree on everything, and there may be things that I couldn’t get done because of that. I do think that we want some of the same things, like seriously addressing homelessness and public safety. I think there’s a way to get beyond ideology and have a fact-based, evidence-based conversation about what actually works. I think it’s very important to have honest differences of opinion in public and work together behind the scenes.

In the moment we’re in, we need to be prepared for whatever is coming down from the federal level over the next few years—whether it’s attacks on civil rights, budget cuts, or other things that harm Seattle residents. And I don’t think our current mayor has a plan. One piece of this is new progressive revenue. The last city budget cycle was hard, and the only reason we didn’t see truly devastating cuts to public services was the JumpStart progressive revenue tax, which I played a key role in passing in 2020—coincidentally, one of the two years in the past 16 that Harrell hasn’t been in office.

As mayor, I will work to pass progressive revenue to make sure we do not go into a financial death spiral. I was on the progressive revenue task force, which came out with a list of options, which are not all shovel-ready. Unfortunately, the mayor has shelved that. We need to pick it back up and have a long-term, short-term and medium-term plan for revenue, especially if we’re going into a recession.

ECB: In your recent piece about what the left has gotten wrong on homelessness, you talked about how people on the left need to acknowledge that some unhoused people cause visible disorder and other problems because of mental illness and drug addiction. Beyond acknowledging it, what will you propose doing to address unhoused people with addiction and mental illness, who tend to face the most barriers to stable housing?

KW: We know what works, we have models that have been pioneered here in Seattle that are proven to help get people off the streets, and what we’re lacking is the political will to scale those solutions up.

I think what we’re seeing from the current administration is a tendency toward cheaper Band-Aid solutions that don’t actually work, and that’s why we have twice as many people sleeping on the street as New York City, which is mind-boggling.

We have an excess of studios right now. I think we need to put people into those studios. I’m not suggesting something like a rapid rehousing voucher, where after six months someone is homeless again. It would still be time-limited, but maybe more like five years. A lot of the homeless population just needs a home. I also think we need to do rapid acquisition of buildings with intensive case management and wraparound services for people who are cycling through the criminal justice system system. We need to have strategies for both those sections of the population and we need to prioritize them using both existing resources and new revenue.

Harrell made a promise on the campaign trail four years ago to create 2,000 units of new housing or emergency shelter and he hasn’t come close. And it’s not just failure come to do the right thing—it’s active obstruction. Real Change wrote about Brighton Tiny House Village— Nickelsville has been working for years to locate a tiny house village there and cranky neighbors shut it down.

It is very important that we scale the JustCare model up for encampment resolutions for the most unsafe encampments so that we can really do something about them without shuffling them around. Mayor Harrell has some temporary success kind of clearing Third Avenue, so to speak, but those people just moved to Little Saigon. We need to do better than that. JustCare is part of it, but I think also we do need to prioritize the speed of opening shelters. There has definitely been a bias over the last ten years toward permanent structures, which I understand, but right now, with 7,000 people sleeping on the streets, we need to prioritize tiny house villages, safe spaces like churches that have space where people can sleep and, and municipal rent vouchers.

I also think we need to crack down harder on people doing big-time drug dealing and adopt a treatment-based approach for people using and small-time drug dealers.

ECB: Every candidate these days seems to agree that we need to hire more police—a change from a few years ago, when everyone was talking about alternatives to police. Do we need to hire more cops; if so, how; and what other strategies should the city be adopting to improve public safety beyond turning this one lever?

KW: I do think that it is hard to ignore at this point that we have a police staffing shortage, and if you are in a dangerous situation or you’re the victim of a crime, you have a right to expect that if you call the police they will arrive in a timely manner. Right now, police response times are unacceptable, and I do think that in the short term, we need to hire more officers.

I also think we need to greatly expand our unarmed response systems. We need more medical professionals and skilled social workers. We have the CARE department, so that’s a start. My understanding is that the way the Harrell administration is interpreting the CARE response is that there always have to have police present. I believe that could be interpreted differently, and unfortunately [the Seattle Police Officers Guild] also is a factor in stymieing the growth of the CARE department because it’s a bargaining chip for them, and unfortunately the mayor and council did a bad job of negotiating that contract.

ECB: There’s been a big shift since the murder of bus driver Shaun Yim toward more heavily policing buses and trains—it’s almost like the era of less punitive approaches to things like fare evasion never happened. Do you think we need more security on buses and trains, and what should it look like?

KW: This is personal to me. I ride transit almost every day, usually with my young child, so I definitely occasionally experience situations that feel, certainly uncomfortable, and in some cases unsafe. My organization [the Transit Riders Union] has a range of opinions, but speaking for myself as candidate, I do think we need more official presence on board transit. What that looks like is open for discussion. Is it ambassador-type roles, security- type roles? I do have some concerns about the idea of having armed security or police on transit because of the kind of militarized environment it creates and the potential for danger it creates. We need to have that discussion. We need to try things at a small scale and see how they work.

ECB: Are there other things you would do, as mayor, to improve the regional transportation system?

KW: We just passed a big transportation levy, which has some really good things in it. I would definitely want to focus on making those dollars go as far as possible, especially when it comes to multimodal improvements.

We also have coming up, next year, the Seattle Transportation Benefit District renewal. That’s an opportunity and it’s also a challenge. All of us who care about public transit would like to see a regional measure because we know that, outside Seattle, there’s a lot of transit deserts with infrequent service. We have a lot of folks that are commuting in. I would want to coordinate closely with the state to try to figure out a way to do a regional measure. If we were to do a Seattle-only measure, I would want to do it in a way that left open the route to a regional measure in whatever way we can.

I also just think that we can have a vision. The official slogan for my campaign is “This is your city,” and I was thinking that the unofficial slogan can be ‘We can have nice things. I think we need to be visionary and ask, what can Seattle be? We were the first city in the country to pass a $15 minimum wage. What else can we lead on?

ECB: You're an outsider, and some might consider you a long-shot candidate. What's your path to victory?

KW: I am running to win. I’m an outside candidate, for sure. I’ve never been a politician. I’ve never aspired to run for office. But I’m an outside candidate who knows city hall. I’ve built and led coalitions that have won major victories that have put money in people’s pockets and improved their quality of life, and in that process I’ve gotten to know how city hall works. I’ve seen the interplay between the mayor’s office and the city council, and I’ve seen how it can be functional or dysfunctional .

Harrell has been in City Hall for 16 of the last 18 years. He is the establishment. He’s the status quo, and it’s not working. Things are getting worse. He appointed a high school buddy to lead the regional homelessness authority at a very sensitive time for that organization. He appointed an incompetent police chief who resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment and having an affair with his staff. His external affairs director resigned amid rape allegations. At the most basic, I think he has poor judgment and we can do better.