PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 2 Candidate Eddie Lin
Lin, who represents the Office of Housing at the City Attorney's Office, wants deep investments in youth gun violence prevention.
By Erica C. Barnett
This November, voters in District 2 will choose a replacement for Tammy Morales, the progressive councilmember who resigned in January and was replaced, on a short-term basis, by SPD crime prevention coordinator Mark Solomon, who has said he will not run for the position.
The election will mark the end of an unusually tumultuous time for the council, which consists overwhelmingly of first-time members, most of them elected in 2023. With first-term council president Sara Nelson on the ballot as well, it’s conceivable that by this time next year, the council will have only one member, Dan Strauss, serving a second term—an unprecedented situation, according to Seattle Municipal Archive records.
District 2’s new council member will have their work cut out for them. Many citywide problems, including displacement, a lack of affordable housing, gun violence, traffic deaths, disinvestment in social services, and inequitable access to amenities like grocery stores and parks, are magnified in Southeast Seattle. Rainier Avenue South, for example, has consistently been one of the two deadliest roads in the city for many years, yet efforts to slow traffic and decrease collisions on the busy arterial have been limited to gentrified neighborhoods, like Columbia City, or ineffective at reducing deaths and injuries.
Beyond these district-specific concerns, the new councilmember will have to address a looming budget crisis, vote on a new police contract that can and should fix accountability issues that the most recent contract ignored, and come up with solutions to the citywide housing shortage—all at a time when cuts to federal funding threaten to make every problem facing the city exponentially worse.
So far, four candidates have filed to run for Council District 2; more could join the race before the May 9 filing deadline.
Eddie Lin grew up in North Carolina, the son of a Taiwanese immigrant and a white mom who met at Duke University not long after the Loving vs. Virginia ruling made it illegal for states to prohibit interracial marriage. As a mixed-race kid growing up in the South, he said, he and his brother struggled to fit in; there weren't a lot of mentors around "who understood what my brother and I were going through."
After attending law school at Seattle University and living in Oakland for a few years, Lin and his wife moved back to Seattle at the height of the Great Recession, and he went to work for Perkins Coie—one of several Big Law firms currently under fire from the Trump Administration. In 2017, after applying three times, Lin landed a job at the City Attorney's Office, where he has represented the city's Office of Housing since 2019—a job that, Lin said, gives him direct insight into how affordable housing gets built and how city government works.
Lin is one of two current candidates for the District 2 council job who sought appointment to the seat that ultimately went to Solomon. PubliCola spoke with him last week.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
PubliCola (ECB): The city may have to make major cuts this year and in 2026, according to the latest revenue forecast and the potential for federal budget cuts that the city will need to help backfill. How would you propose addressing these shortfalls, and are there parts of the city budget that are ripe for cuts?
Eddie Lin (EL): That situation is never easy, but we have gone through this before. In general, I do think it’s not great to just take an all-cuts kind of austerity approach. I do think there’s some revenue we can raise. I am supportive of a local capital gains tax, and I’m supportive of defending our JumpStart tax. We could look at raising the JumpStart tax, but the revenues are predicted to go down from that [source]. You can’t raise it forever or businesses are going to start to change their behavior. And we’ll see what happens with the state—if there’s a state JumpStart tax, that would limit the incentive to go over to Bellevue [to avoid the Seattle tax].
I think you have to lead with your values. You have to lead with protecting the most vulnerable and core services, so I would want to lead with the people who are on the streets, with our homelessness investments. I would love to expand them if we could, but certainly we should protect them.
If we’re looking at cuts, I think you need to engage with the community to see what their priorities are. I wouldn’t want to talk just to [city] department heads or managers— I would want to engage with everyday workers about what they think is most effective or what are the most important services not to cut. I also think we need to lead by example, in the sense that the people who are making the highest salaries in the city need to lead by taking the cuts first. And maybe it’s a progressive cut. Whether you’re going to make a huge savings that way, I don’t know, but the point would be to show that we’re in this together and you need to lead by example.
ECB: If the budget next year comes down to stark choices—like using JumpStart to fund homelessness programs that are seeing huge federal cuts, even at the expense of housing construction—what will your priorities be?
Getting people off the street as quickly as possible is going to be my priority. I love permanent housing, and that’s critical and we need to continue to do that, but that’s going to take time and need a lot more resources than we have, especially in a budget crisis. I think we need to expand tiny house villages, I think we need to expand other types of shelters, and we probably should be looking at vouchers. We might need to replace some of the federal vouchers that are going away.
I would like to do some kind of housing mediation for people that are at risk of eviction. In our current system, we do fund lawyers for tenants, and that’s great, but too often that results in just delaying eviction. I’ve heard there are good results from the housing mediator program through Housing Connector, so if you can get to people before their arrears get too high, that might be a better approach in terms of how we spend our money.
One thing that’s going to be hard is that housing production is going to come to a grinding halt. That produces sales taxes and helps to grow our property base, so we should do whatever we can to reduce burdens for housing developers—whether that’s in the comprehensive plan or design review or parking requirements. If it really is like, they’re not building at all and we need to incentivize it, if we need to update [Mandatory Housing Affordability], we should do that.
ECB: What are you some specific steps you would support to promote more housing development?
EL: There’s potentially other things that we can look at in terms of our permitting requirements and what we require for developers in terms of utility infrastructure. Could we look at paying for that utility infrastructure when there’s water main issues? You have to pay for it somehow—it’s either developers or existing ratepayers, but we put a lot of costs on new development and that drives up the cost of housing. There are some times when you might say, well, this new lot is in a far-off location, so why should the other ratepayers pay for that? But then there are other times when it’s burdensome because another developer has to pay for it and they have to wait like 15 years for latecomer fees. It's hard to say if that’s fair or unfair, but it’s something we might need to look at.
ECB: Would you propose changing the comprehensive plan to allow more housing?
EL: I certainly support going as big as we can within the scope of what we’re allowed to do. Certainly protecting the neighborhood centers throughout the city as much as possible and expanding them, and then things like reducing or getting rid of parking requirements, at least for housing.
ECB: You've said you voted against the measure to fund social housing. Now that it has passed overwhelmingly, what policies would you support as a council member to help the social housing developer succeed?
EL: I voted yes on 135 [the measure that created the social-housing developer] and I voted yes to fund it, but I did vote for 1B [the countermeasure to fund standard affordable housing using existing city funds]. I supported the progressive revenues, but I also supported being a good steward of the fund, because we have not seen social housing in the US before and I wanted to see proof of concept before going all in.
But if you’re an elected official, sometimes you lead and sometimes you follow, and there are a number of things we can do update zoning standards to help developers take advantage of affordable housing bonuses—things like height and density. We can look at surplus property—not just city property, but Sound Transit will probably have surplus property around new light rail stations. Those could be great places for social housing.
The other part would just be ensuring that they have access to those funds as quickly as they need them. I’m sure they’re hiring and staffing up. and if we need to loan the funds that are low interest rate or zero percent interest rate until the tax comes in, or if there’s a lawsuit, the city could loan them funds until that gets resolved.
ECB: The police department's budget continues to grow, even as other departments are asked to make cuts. Do you have any appetite for discussing cuts to SPD’s budget this year?
EL: I think public safety is a top priority for the city and for District 2. We are low on officers, and that results in a lot of overtime, so I don’t know if it’s more expensive to be paying all this overtime instead of hiring officers. I’d also like to see the CARE Team expand.
One thing that I would like to see, and this would be a new program, but I would really like to see some dedicated funding—like $20 million per year—going to youth gun violence. Gun violence has been on the rise, District 2 sees way more gun offenses than the rest of the city, and I think our families and our community want to see something done for youth gun violence. The issue is, when something happens, there is this reactive response. We call up the nonprofits and say, “What can you do?” and “We’ll give you immediate one-time funding,” but addressing youth gun violence requires long-term relationships with youth and funding our human services providers.
ECB: How would you fund that kind of program, given the city's budget situation?
EL: The feds are going to be cutting gun violence prevention efforts at the county level. When you talk about JumpStart, you can see how those funds can be dedicated to other purposes. Whereas if we did a $20 million levy, it would be dedicated to gun violence response.
ECB: There's been a lot of focus on crackdowns in so-called hot spots where drug sales tend to concentrate, like 12th and Jackson. The city has been arresting more drug users and has the authority to seek orders banning people from being in certain areas if they're accused of drug-related crimes. Do you think this is the right approach?
EL: Is it performative or is it actually achieving the goals? I think the jury’s still out on that. I do think the public wants us to address public safety issues. So let’s talk about 12th and Jackson. That neighborhood deserves public safety. And so, what is the right approach to that? I don’t think it’s the approach we have been taking, which has frankly been more of a hands-off approach. I don’t think allowing open-air drug markets is the right approach.
Now, I don’t think locking everyone up, especially drug users, is the right approach either. We need treatment, we need shelter and housing for folks, but for those who are dealing drugs, I think we need law enforcements and arrests. I’m excited to see the friends of little Saigon are trying to do a place-based approach to safety that includes environmental design types of approaches. They’re patterning it off Rainier Beach’s approach from ten years ago. I met with a police officer recently and he said something like, you can’t arrest your way out of a social problem. And that is absolutely true, but while we are working on the root causes of these issues, you also do need to address disorder.
We have to look at all the pieces of the puzzle. How do we get real rehab and treatment in our jail? How do we get a real drug diversion court? King County’s is, like, a super-intensive 10-month program with treatment, housing, counseling, and job training. I think that’s pretty successful, and that’s for people charged with serious felonies. So there’s a stick, but there’s also the resources for people who choose to participate.