PubliCola Questions: Mayoral Candidate Joe Mallahan

The T-Mobile executive is back after 15 years taking on what he describes as Mayor Bruce Harrell's failures on homelessness, misogyny at SPD, and addiction.

By Erica C. Barnett

Joe Mallahan, a longtime T-Mobile executive and entrepreneur who narrowly lost the 2009 mayor's race to Mike McGinn after the two men beat out then-mayor Greg Nickels in the primary, has reemerged after 15 years outside the political limelight and is running again for mayor.

Mallahan's views on local politics don't fit neatly inside any particular political lane—he blasts incumbent Bruce Harrell for sweeping homeless encampments and failing to build shelter while saying people with addiction should be subjected to government-endorsed "interventions"—but his pitch against Harrell is pretty simple: Harrell, Mallahan says, has run the mayor's office as a sexist boys' club and has failed to make any noticeable progress on any number of issues, from police hiring to homelessness to housing affordability.

I spoke with Mallahan late last week. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PubliCola (ECB): When you ran against Nickels 15 years ago, your pitch was basically that he had failed to manage the city well during eight years in office. What’s your pitch against Harrell?

Joe Mallahan (JM): I don’t think Bruce Harrell has any vision for solving homelessness. I think his motivations are how to please developers. He talks about housing constantly. Every time I’m debating him on this, I talk about the need to deploy thousands more tiny house villages and more congregate emergency bed capacity. We’ve lost about 1,500 to 2,000 emergency beds compared to 10 years ago, because with COVID congregate [shelter] didn’t work. Bruce is all about building, building, building, but there’s still 5,000 people living on the streets, and he’s sweeping them around like they’re pieces of dust.

Sweeps are traumatic. They lose their documents, they lose the relationships they might have developed with a social worker. Capitol Hill, the Chinatown International District, Ballard, and other neighborhoods have massive increases in homelessness because you’re sweeping them from downtown.

ECB: One of the lessons of COVID was that we shouldn't go back to the old noncongregate shelter model—people don't like sleeping in dorms and they don't tend to stay long enough to engage in services.

JM: If a shelter is a bunch of beds on a gymnasium floor, I can understand. It doesn’t provide personal security. We need to build shelter in a way that provides an adequate level of personal security. Tiny houses are the most ideal. You get one home for one or two people. Families have their own system. This is individuals living on the streets—almost all of them with mental illness or addiction.

ECB: In a recent forum, your fellow mayoral candidate Joe Molloy strongly took issue with your claim that most homeless people have mental illness or addiction, and I do too. It's a common belief that isn't backed up by research or surveys with actual homeless people.

JM: Joe’s perspective comes from living in a sanctioned tent encampment, most of which have rules, and my experience comes from traveling the streets in Rainier Beach and Ballard Avenue and literally sitting on the curb talking to people who are homeless—saying, ‘Tell me your story. Are you using? Do you consider yourself addicted?’ And every person I talk to on the street tells me that story. And talking to service providers like Immanuel Services in South Lake Union, We Heart Seattle, a couple of other service providers. So I’m pretty connected to the homelessness situation. You could say Joe’s more connected, but Joe only talks about Tent City 3.

ECB: You told me recently that you support "pressing" people into treatment. What does that mean to you?

JM: We have this attitude that you can’t get someone to be successful in treatment if you force them to go. I understand that point, but if you take a person with addiction and you put them into an apartment with no community—people like you and me, we have people to press us to deal with our shit. These folks on the street have got nobody to press them, and the idea that at some point they’re going to be ready to accept treatment—we’ve to to create with these individuals an intervention-ish culture.

If I give someone a tiny house, and they’re using and they’re impacting that community, and I say, ‘You’re impacting the community. You can’t be here anymore,’ then they’re using in public. And then I’m arresting you, and now we’re going to take you to drug court and you’re going to have one more opportunity to go into treatment, and [if you don’t], you’re going to be in jail for a little while. To me, that is more loving and respectful of the person suffering from addiction than just letting them continue to kill themselves.

ECB: You've criticized Harrell's leadership of SPD. Do you think the city is on the way to turning the police department around, and how specifically do you think the mayor has failed to lead SPD?

JM: First off, I think it’s great that we’re adding a ton of new police, but we’re doing it by paying $50,000 signing bonuses—so, congratulations, you offer a $50,000 signing bonus to a brand-new young cadet—you’ll increase your ranks. (Editor's note: SPD's $50,000 signing bonuses are only available to people moving from other police departments; new recruits receive a bonus of $7,500). Fine, that’s a win, but we still have massive attrition. In the time we hired 60, we lost 20.

I think the reason we continue to lose officers is a lot of these folks are miserable. Maybe sometimes it’s because they have on victim glasses, or maybe there’s so much sexual harassment in the police department.

I experienced a cultural training at T-Mobile that really changed my perspective, and one of the key tenets was ‘shadow of a leader’—how you behave as a leader creates a shadow of how your direct reports behave. The sexual harassment in the police department—I’m not saying it started with Bruce Harrell but it ain’t going to get fixed with Bruce Harrell.

ECB: Why should voters believe it will get fixed under you?

JM: I committed to 50 hours of ridealongs in my first year. I’m on the campaign trail constantly talking about the mayor’s misogyny and the need to have respect for women, and I think it makes a huge difference to have an executive of a city promoting that.

ECB: One thing that has changed since 2009 is that more than half the city’s population are renters. At a recent candidate forum, you agreed with the statement that the city should change its tenant protection laws laws in response to landlord concerns. Can you elaborate on that?

JM: If I’m a landlord and I’m charging $1,000 for rent and I’ve got $900 of expenses, I’m expecting to make $100 of profit. If I’ve got 10% bad debt because 10 percent of folks aren’t paying me, I’m now breaking even or losing money.

My best friend Tommy’s a lefty liberal. He says, ‘If you evict someone, you’ve created another homeless person.’ Yeah, but if this landlord, oftentimes a not-for-profit, has to shut down their operations, then you’ve created a bunch more homeless people. I get the motivation for renter protections, but if there’s too many of them and they’re not rational, bad debt becomes a really big problem.

Maybe the solution is to subsidize people who have really bad debt, but foisting all that onto landlords is just going to get people to stop building rental units.

ECB: You’ve talked about building in the immediate vicinity of light rail stations. But urbanists would argue that people who rent apartments should also have access to Seattle's historically single-family neighborhoods, and that the comprehensive plan should go further to accomplish that. How much more housing do you think is appropriate in the city’s historically single-family neighborhoods?

JM:We spent billions of dollars building these beautiful light rail stations and the neighborhoods around the stations have all known that density would be allowed there, and their land value has grown dramatically. I don’t think it matters to them whether it’s a 2-or 30-story building. I think we should think about going higher around transit stations. And the impact on trees there is small because it would be a very, very dense environment.

When we passed the new tree ordinance, there’s something called an Urban Forestry Commission, and they completely opposed the new tree ordinance. And the Urban Forestry Commission only had three meetings over six months with the council and the mayor when they were talking about this in 2023, and the Master Builders [Association] had 37 meetings.

I had a fundraiser up on Queen Anne, and there was this wealthy individual saying, ‘Hey, Joe, this plan doesn’t create affordable housing. It just creates opportunities for developers to take a residential lot and turn it into four or five tombstone, $1.3 million housing units and that doesn’t accomplish anything.' And I thought, you’re a wealthy guy, you live in a beautiful neighborhood, you just don’t want this development. And then I heard the exact same thing in the Central District. A developer has carte blanche to clearcut a residential lot.

The city says it has 28 percent canopy, but it’s 8-foot-high trees. It could be a shrub; it could be a rhododendron. This new plan is going to deforest places like the Rainier Valley and the Central District, and I think we should be thoughtful about that.

I also think we need to talk about an anti-displacement policy. I talked to three different African-American women who live in the homes of their parents. They’re professionals and they can’t afford to stay in their homes because taxes are so high. If, on their block, someone builds four $1 million units, the land value gets reassessed and their taxes increase significantly.

ECB: Seattle has effectively abandoned Vision Zero, the effort to reduce road deaths and serious fatalities to zero. What would you do to make Seattle streets less dangerous for people who aren’t in cars?

JM: I think we should automate traffic control. That technology could be deployed to say, ‘You’re going too fast, and here’s a ticket.’ I’ve been going to every light rail station in the city in the mornings, handing out literature, and at Othello station, I handed out literature for about 10 minutes before I said, ‘I can’t do this is.’ It’s so freaking dangerous—the cars going by on MLK doing 40 mph in a 25—and I realized if I distracted a person for half a second, that could be unsafe.

We have these light stations sitting in the middle of a freeway. And the reasons it’s a freeway is because no one is enforcing speed laws. Automation of traffic control is a huge part of getting to zero fatalities, but it’s also a win in terms of the police budget. It’s also a win in terms of reducing the opportunities for police and a resident to enter into a situation that could create escalation.

ECB: The city is facing severe deficits in the coming years, even before you factor in cuts to basic services that are going to come from the Trump Administration. How would you propose fixing this looming budget shortfall, and would your solutions include progressive taxes?

JM: Washington state tax laws and the Washington State Constitution saddle us with an unbelievably regressive tax scheme. If we need to raise revenue, I would look for progressive ways to do it, and I also think wealthy individuals are whom I’d like to pay more if we can figure out a way to do it.

I’m a little concerned that taxing big companies right now is a little bit dangerous. I do have a fear of losing tax revenue from corporations, because of the JumpStart tax, which I’m a huge fan of, and the social housing tax, which I’m a huge fan of. Those things combined make me think we should tax individuals. If we have to raise taxes, the next place to raise them is on wealthy individuals—who, by the way, just got a 2 percent tax break from the federal government.

I think there’s real efficiencies to be driven on city government spending. There’s homeless outreach organizations that have been ginned up out of nowhere that have big city contracts, and the mayor’s office has turned down the council’s request to audit those organizations. Community Passageways—they have an $8 million outreach budget and people have said that outreach is not effective or meaningful, and Sara Nelson requested an audit of that and the mayor said ‘We’re not going to do an audit right now.’ Third Avenue Project is another $8 million spend that I don’t understand what they’re getting from it. There’s no reporting on how that’s going and what we’re paying for, but the money is still going out the door.

I think DOGE is completely bullshit, but at T-Mobile, I ran corporate strategy and analysis and I hired like half a dozen or more operations research PhDs. These are people who are highly educated in systemic thinking and analysis. And we drove billions of dollars out of a $40 billion operation just by smart thinking and analysis.

ECB: Last question: Why did you vote for Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary, given that Trump had locked down the Republican nomination by then?

JO: I was trying to keep Trump from getting Washington state delegates. Everyone I knew was doing that. Biden had the endorsement wrapped it. It was a classic Dem dilemma—I can’t have any impact in Washington state, so I’m voting for Nikki Haley. I think it’s delightful that Bruce Harrell is emailing his that Joe Mallahan is a Republican and the best dirt he can dig up on me is that I voted in the Republican primary once.

One more thing I wanted to bring up. The police stopped investigating sexual assault for six months, because we took detectives and turned them into patrol officers so we’d have more patrol capacity to do sweeps, and you’d have to be someone like Bruce Harrell to allow something like that to happen. At the Seattle Times editorial board meeting, Bruce blurted out, ‘I doubled the sexual assault division from four to eight officers.’ Well, it was originally 12. He’s positioning it as if he solved the problem. He doesn’t care about sexual assault.