PubliCola's Seattle Predictions for 2025

Things that shouldn't happen but will, things that should happen but won't, and things that will definitely happen in the coming year.

By Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit, and Sandeep Kaushik

The three co-founders of PubliCola—that's me, PubliCola columnist Josh Feit, and my Seattle Nice sparring partner Sandeep Kaushik—have put together our annual list policy-obsessed, 100-percent accurate Seattle predictions for 2025. Each of us gave the assignment our own spin—I'm going out on a limb by boldly predicting things that will definitely happen in Seattle next year; Josh is predicting things that shouldn't happen but will; and Sandeep has a list of things that won't happen, but should. - ECB

Erica's Predictions: Things that definitely will happen

Predictions are vibes. By that I mean: Even when they don't come true, a good prediction captures the zeitgeist of the year, whether or not it's correct in all the details.

One reason I believe this, probably, is because I'm notoriously terrible at making specific, particularly political predictions. This goes way back, to at least 2003, when I referred to a city council candidate as a "formidable" challenger to the incumbent, Peter Steinbrueck—less than three months before he dropped out of the race because he couldn't raise any money. (Steinbrueck went on to win with nearly 83 percent of the vote.)

But another reason I think this is because it's basically true. No, my 2024 prediction that the new council would move quickly to reverse renter protections like the winter eviction ban didn't pan out—but only because the council wasted months getting up to speed on what the city does, and the repeals got pushed to this year, when they'll likely happen.

And yes, I was technically wrong when I said the council would find it harder than expected to close a $250 million budget deficit—but only because I didn't anticipate that council members who campaigned on making "hard choices" would practically trample each other to endorse a cynical short-term fix—using revenues from the dedicated JumpStart payroll tax to fill the entire budget gap.

As for my prediction that the then-new drug law wouldn't have much of an impact? Well, the city failed to invest adequately in new diversion or treatment programs, so the people who are getting arrested for using drugs in public are still largely ending up back where they started—on corners like 3rd and Pine and 12th and Jackson, where police stage occasional raids that only push people to the next neighborhood over.

So with those caveats out of the way, here's my list of specific, measurable predictions that will definitely come true in 2025. At least in spirit.

Big picture stuff:

Federal funding cuts will hit Seattle because of our status as a "sanctuary city," and we won't be remotely prepared.

Monday, January 6 marked the first time a council member (Cathy Moore) publicly raised serious concerns about the incoming Trump Administration's promise to cut federal funding to cities that refuse to participate in mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. But the city has done little to plan for what happens when we no longer have access to federal emergency response dollars (pretty critical during COVID), federal housing funds, which come in the form of tax credits as well as direct subsidies that make our housing levy pencil out, and federal transportation funds, without which we would have no functioning transit system.

If Seattle really is going to do its part to protect immigrants from racist deportations (and people seeking reproductive and gender-affirming care from prosecution and jail), the time to start planning was last November. But the mayor and council have shown little inclination to discuss what losing funds will mean, much less come up with a plan to deal with this near-inevitability.

The city council will amend the tree ordinance to prevent even more new apartments, all in the name of environmental protection.

The comprehensive plan isn't the only policy area where council members are likely to weaponize the city's environmental goals to prevent new housing in the city's single-family enclaves. Last year, the city council passed a comprehensive tree protection ordinance that requires property owners to navigate a labyrinth of new restrictions (and pay thousands of dollars) if they want to remove a tree larger than 12 inches in diameter. (We called it byzantine and pointed out that most of Seattle's tree loss occurs in city parks, not on privately owned lawns). But so-called tree advocates, whose transparent (and often explicit) goal is preventing development in the single-family neighborhoods where they own houses, have argued that these new rules don't go far enough.

During the council's first two meetings of 2025, on Monday, Councilmember Cathy Moore accused housing advocates of dismissing trees as a "NIMBY issue" (again, I'll point readers to the piece I wrote about why the focus on trees in people's private yards won't actually protect the city's tree canopy, while tree planting requirements would), and said she plans to do something to stop the "indiscriminate cutting of trees relating to development" that she claimed is allowed under the current tree law.

Expect a tree code update this year that hews closely to the demands of groups like Don't Clearcut Seattle, which has misrepresented city regulations to argue for expanded tree requirements for multifamily housing along with dramatic increases in tree removal fees. (They also want to create permanent, legally binding tree covenants for private residential properties). These policies are designed to prevent the housing council members claim they want, but they'll pass as long as the rest of the neighborhood-based council members go along with Moore and Northeast Seattle Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who has also cited trees as a reason not to allow new housing in her low-density district.

Elected officials will take the wrong lessons from the ongoing uptick in police hiring.

As Sandeep notes below, the Seattle Police Department has started to reverse a trend that began during the 2020 pandemic, when police officers began retiring and quitting en masse, in some cases to avoid COVID vaccine requirements. However, the new hires will not come close to meeting Seattle's (already scaled-back) version of the nationwide 30 by 30 initiative, which calls for three out of ten new police recruits to be women by 2030. Recruiting women to become officers will turn out to be more complicated than just hiring the former chief of a department that hit that goal; it will require deep changes to a culture of misogyny and actions to remedy past and current gender discrimination in the department.

The city council will continue to take its cues—and legislation—from the mayor, further blurring the gap between the legislative and executive branches.

Although the council did exercise initiative this year by reversing many progressive policies—reinstating special "stay out" zones for drug users and sex workers, expanding the city's use of jail beds for misdemeanor offenders, and bringing back the old prostitution loitering law, to name a few—much of the legislation they passed this year came prewritten from the mayor's office, from legislation to increase the city's control over the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, to a proposal to remove restrictions on SPD's use of "less lethal weapons" for crowd control.

Hell, the entire 2025 budget radically shifted the way the city funds general government services, and no one protested except Tammy Morales, who cited bullying by her colleagues as the reason she resigned last year. Sure, individual council members will occasionally butt heads with specific departments (for Rob Saka, that's SDOT; for Moore and Maritza Rivera, the city's planning and land use departments), but they won't oppose the mayor who helped most of them get elected.

Even major appointments now play out like faits accomplis: Harrell chose Madison, Wisconsin police chief Shon Barnes as the city's new police chief without any public process or even a list of finalists. It's hard to overstate what a break this is from longstanding practice; I went back 25 years, to the appointment of Gil Kerlikowske, and could find no examples in which a mayor appointed a permanent police chief without publicly vetting multiple candidates.

The council would be wise to question Harrell's judgment when it comes to police chiefs. Just last year, Harrell defended disgraced former police chief Adrian Diaz as a "fine leader" whose "integrity is above reproach." (Diaz, who was facing allegations that he had sexually harassed and discriminated against his female subordinates, announced he was gay on a right-wing talk show the following day. Seven months later, Harrell fired him for having, and lying about, an inappropriate relationship with a woman he hired.)

But they won't. The head of the city council's public safety committee, Bob Kettle, has already offered Barnes a "warm welcome" to his new job in a Harrell press release, and the council will almost certainly follow suit, approving the mayor's pick after a perfunctory hearing process.

And some quick hits:

Despite near-unanimous support from the council she helped get elected, Sara Nelson will face a serious reelection challenger and could lose her seat.

Despite a lackluster first term (see Sandeep's predictions, below), Mayor Bruce Harrell will not face a serious challenger and will win reelection, after a shakeup that involves the appointment of two, if not three, new deputy mayors.

Despite the city council's successful push to place the social housing funding measure, I-137, into a low-turnout February election slot (more on that underhanded effort here), the proposal will pass, because the concept is broadly popular.

Despite overwhelming public support for turning Pike Place Market into a pedestrian-only zone, the streets around the Market will still be choked with cars at the end of 2025.

Rob Saka will still have to look at his nemesis—that fucking curb!—every time he drives to or from his downtown office, as SDOT finds reasons not to spend $2 million removing it.

The city will end up spending more money defending the Seattle Police Department against lawsuits, including the cost of outside attorneys, legal judgments, and settlements, than in any previous year.

The city will expand the Stay Out of Drug Area zones after a strange phenomenon that no one could have possibly predicted: Drug buyers and sellers move to just outside the SODA boundaries, where they aren't subject to banishment. Surely expanding them just a little bit further—say, to the area between I-5 and the waterfront and South Lake Union to 12th and Jackson— will finally be the thing that stops people from being addicted in the first place.

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Josh Feit: Things I don't want to happen, but definitely will

1. We’re all Sally Bowles now.

You’ll be in a bar on Capitol Hill, and you’ll overhear a group of guys at the table next to you making heated, racist comments and siding with Donald Trump on everything from locking up Liz Cheney, to making federal employees sign a loyalty oath, to waging war on the media, to abandoning Ukraine and invading Panama and Greenland.

It won’t be so much a conversation as an intentional provocation from these bros in branded red hats.

Certainly, the conversations you overhear in Seattle have changed over the years. It’s hard not to notice that young people around town—whose conversations used to focus on indie theater projects, cool bands, and lefty politics—have turned their attention to stock options, angel investors, and fractals.

But this year, with MAGA fully emboldened, Seattle will be among the many American cities where Trump Creep will take hold as trickle-down bullying begins to define life under Trump 2.0. Sadly I fear it will transition into hate crime territory too, with an uptick in targeted crimes this year.

2. The unnerving dystopian trend identified in a 2024 Princeton University study showing that people are spending more time at home will continue to nag at our aspirational sense of cosmopolitanism. My guess is that Seattle’s status as a tech destination—we led the U.S. on tech worker “in-migration” in 2023—will make the problem more acute here, as Fortnite and Doordash make the perfect evenings in for introverted programmers.

Silver lining, though, that I would like to happen—and I think it will: Watch for Seattle to emerge internationally as a hotbed for a new digital/AI boundary-pushing arts movement that will, ironically, make our homebody city a cultural mecca.

3. Pickleball will continue its breathless colonization of Seattle Parks’ tennis courts. Amy Yee is turning over in her grave.

4. Every coffee shop, restaurant, and bar in the city will continue to violate the King County health code and state law by allowing dogs inside as waiters and baristas continue to normalize the violation by petting Buddy and letting him leap up on the bar and lick their hands.

It’s a complaint-based system. So, the only recourse for people who aren’t comfortable with dogs joining them for lunch (without making a scene or being tagged as the bad guy) is to file a complaint with the Health and Environmental Investigator Food & Facilities-Environmental Health Division at Public Health Seattle-King County, which you can do here.

5. Despite having served just one term on the King County Council, Seattle’s Girmay Zahilay will get a lock on the progressive and Democratic vote to (pretty handily) beat two-term Councilmember and former Bellevue City Councilmember Claudia Balducci. Zahilay's voting record on the council, like Balducci's, is cautiously liberal (they both supported keeping the youth jail open, for example), but he has cultivated the perception that he's more in line with the left.

Unlike Zahilay, Balducci has played a starring role in the urbanist movement over the past two decades. Her miraculous advocacy in the 2000s and 2010s overcame the Eastside’s corporate NIMBY contingent to bring light rail to Bellevue and Redmond, which will connect to Seattle over I-90 this year.

6. Finally, two 2025 predictions related to density and the city's comprehensive housing plan.

First, the term “social engineering” will be twisted into a winning argument against new housing in the comp plan debate. The plan represents an attempt by the Office of Planning and Community Development to push back against 100 years of actual social engineering toward car dependency. (Mayor Harrell has already watered down the plan, emphasizing the kind of “corridor zoning” that currently concentrates apartments on busy arterials). Opponents of pedestrian-oriented density will accuse the city of using "social engineering" to force new rental housing into Seattle's wealthy, white enclaves—much like the pernicious, but winning, logic that brands affirmative action as racist.

It’s the same logic I’ve reported on before: Seattle’s homeowner faction agrees with Trump’s Project 2025 mandate against allowing multifamily housing in single-family zones.

Second: Despite continued mixed results, the heavy-handed push to bring remote workers back to the office (talk about social engineering)! will sap the burgeoning non-downtown renaissance that has otherwise nudged urban life into Seattle’s outer neighborhoods.

And while Seattle will see a minimal uptick in downtown activity as workers begrudgingly buy lunch to take back to their cubicles, it won't be the full-scale revitalization Harrell and downtown business groups have promised. And abandoning neighborhoods during the day will seal the deal on perhaps the biggest fail of the Harrell administration: Blowing the opportunity we had to transform Seattle into a citywide sustainable city of the future.

Sandeep Kaushik: Things that should happen, but definitely won't

Predictions are perilous things, until you realize the point of offering them is not to predict what is actually going to happen—it's to highlight areas of public concern, areas where change ought to happen, even if it won’t. Anyway, that’s my claim when it comes to predictions, and I’m sticking to it. I’m offering the following three predictions, none of which are going to come true, which is really too bad because all of them should.

Prediction 1: Seattle shakes off its malaise (miss you, Jimmy Carter!) and starts coming up with big new ideas again.y

You don’t have to spend too much time walking around Seattle to realize that the state of the city is pretty meh. We’re (thankfully) not living in the zombie apocalypse that was Pandemic Seattle anymore. But things around here aren’t all that vibrant, energetic or that much fun, either. Seattle has lost a step from where it was pre-pandemic–we’re feeling a little Joe Biden these days–and this twilight fugue state vibe seems like it just may be the new normal in Seattle for the foreseeable future.

The tepidness of Seattle’s recovery seems to go hand in hand with the paucity of big new ideas energizing the civic dialogue. Right after the November election, economics blogger Noah Smith wrote an insightful, must-read piece titled “The blue cities must be fixed,” in which he argued that blue cities’ decades-long renewal foundered in the 2010s, as first housing costs and then street disorder soared and municipal governance grew increasingly bloated, inefficient and enamored with ridiculous radical chic ideas (like defunding the police and abolition).

That tracks with the trajectory of Seattle. We are a city that still clings to a self-image as an urban paradise built on the twin pillars of economic innovation and effective, cutting-edge progressive governance. Ten years ago, that self-perception seemed grounded in reality. We really were doing big things in Seattle, and engaging in what our current mayor, somewhat clunkily, calls “Space Needle thinking.”

In 2014 we were the first big city in the country to adopt a $15 minimum wage ordinance, based on a carefully crafted, smart policy compromise forged via breakthrough negotiations between business, labor and other stakeholders. Soon after, we struck another “Grand Bargain” between developers, affordable housing advocates and the city that created the successful Mandatory Housing Affordability program while helping to spur strong housing growth in Seattle far beyond comparable left-coast cities (though still inadequate).

Back then, the city launched what has become a highly praised early learning program that now benefits nearly 2,000 mostly lower-income children at dozens of sites across the city. We solved complex policy challenges with smart legislation accommodating the emergence of Transportation Network Companies, creating a siting and regulatory structure for newly legalized marijuana businesses, and regulating short-term rentals, among other groundbreaking laws that are often cited as a model for other big cities around the country.

But that period of big-ticket policy innovation now seems like a speck in our civic rear-view mirror. I’d argue the last really big legislative move the city has made was passing the JumpStart tax in 2020, and outside of taxation questions (which the Seattle public reflexively supports) the last really big-deal, unalloyed policy winner at the city was the 2018 creation of the Seattle Promise program offering free community college to every public high school graduates in the city. Since then, we’ve been much more focused on small ball, like the 46 points in the mayor’s Downtown Activation Plan, many of which are worthwhile but none of which seem particularly transformative.

So is 2025 going to be the year that Seattle shakes off its inertia and comes up with big new policy ideas commensurate with the scale of the problems we face? On homelessness, or fentanyl, or housing affordability? I wish, but I’m not holding my breath.

Prediction 2: Suburbs finally get their due for policy innovation.

While Seattle is stuck in a so-so, status quo funk, there’s a good argument to be made that a lot of the innovative policy energy has quietly been migrating to the King County suburbs, where elected officials are delivering quality of life wins as they pioneer innovative approaches that address pressing problems.

I want to revisit this “the suburbs have stolen Seattle’s thunder when it comes to policy innovation” development in more depth in the not too distant future, but for now I’d point to three promising suburban initiatives that have caught my attention:

• The Regional Crisis Response Agency You probably haven’t heard anything about this (I hadn’t either until recently), but those toothless yokels in the five northern suburban cities of Kirkland, Bothell, Shoreline, Kenmore, and Lake Forest Park (that’s right, Deliverance country!) came together last year to form the Regional Crisis Response Agency, which deploys 13 initial staff and a $5 million biennial budget to basically do what Seattle’s slow-starting, still underutilized CARE team is tasked with doing: Pairing civilian crisis responders with police and fire in a dual dispatch co-response model. And the initial results have been promising.

• Similarly, Bellevue piloted its own alternative 911 response, called the Community Crisis Assistance Team, back in 2021, with excellent results, and then launched full scale operations in the late summer of 2023. The program uses specially trained plainclothes police officers in unmarked cars, paired with mental health professionals, to respond to emergency calls about people experiencing mental health crises. The program includes not only immediate response, but ongoing case management.

• Auburn Community Court. If you want to see a functioning community court that is actually making a difference in people’s lives, trek out to the benighted South King County hinterland of Auburn, Washington. There, you’ll find a therapeutic court unlike the failed Community Court in Seattle, which offered no substantive therapeutic interventions to address the underlying conditions of those diverted there (until City Attorney Ann Davison rightly pulled the plug on this failed experiment in revolving-door permissiveness). In the Auburn Community Court (and similar courts in Redmond and Shoreline) the court is actually paired with a “resource center” that connects people to actual services. And unlike in Seattle, there are actual consequences for not showing up. The end result? Participants had 87 percent fewer jail bookings compared to the year before enrollment.

So is 2025 the year that the enlightened cognoscenti of Seattle publicly admit that the suburbs are doing a much better job of solving the problems we seem too paralyzed and too ideological to solve? Not fucking likely. Which, come to think of it, may be a good thing–flying under the radar and escaping much media attention or notice has probably been a significant factor in these efforts' success.

Prediction 3: This is the year that abolition/defund ideas finally get banished from local policymaking.

To some non-trivial extent, this has already happened in Seattle. More than one councilmember is no longer in office, at least in part, because they called for defunding the police and funneling public dollars to abolitionist activists in 2020. As mentioned above, Seattle’s absurd abolitionism-inspired no consequences, no actual help Community Court is no more. And 2024 is the first year since the pandemic where Seattle will end the year with more police officers than when the year started, as a big boost in police salaries and efforts to streamline the recruitment and onboarding of new officers has begun to deliver results.

Plus, like it or not, the current City Council has passed multiple pieces of public safety legislation to disrupt drug markets and the violence-riven stretch of Aurora Avenue where a major exploitative prostitution market exists. And in what is perhaps the most underrecognized public safety development, in terms of impact, King County in November finally relented–in the face of sustained pressure from the city – and has resumed bookings for offenders arrested for misdemeanors like shoplifting. And in August, the King County Council voted unanimously to reject efforts to close the youth jail, which Executive Dow Constantine had once promised to do by 2025.

So does all this mean that the era of abolition/defund is finally over? And that we’ve finally reached a more moderate consensus on public safety? Please—this is still Seattle. On that note, I’ll make one prediction that will come true: We’ll be debating these ideas yet again in the two upcoming City Council races, and in City Attorney Ann Davison's bid for reelection.