City Council, Development, housing

Developers Ask for Mandatory Affordable Housing Fee Holiday as Permits for New Apartments Dry Up

By Erica C. Barnett

A group of apartment builders is asking Mayor Katie Wilson and the City Council to consider rolling back the fees they pay every time they build new housing. The developers, calling themselves the Seattle Housing Roundtable, are asking the city to reduce Mandatory Housing Affordability fees by 90 percent this year, followed by an 80 percent reduction next year and a 75 percent reduction in 2028, with a goal of permanent MHA reforms by the following year.

According to Ian Morrison, an attorney with the land use firm McCullough Hill, MHA “was a good idea when it was originally envisioned, at a time when interest rates were much lower and the economic climate was a lot more positive and predictable.” But, he added, “What we’re seeing now, using the city’s own data, is MHA as a part of a project that was viable in the late 2010s no longer work.   That means housing will not be built in Seattle today.”

The Seattle City Council approved MHA in 2019 as the final component of former mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA). The program made developers build affordable housing or pay a fee every time they built new apartments in Seattle’s multifamily areas (at the time, Seattle still had single-family zoning). In exchange, they were allowed to build more densely.  The framework took for granted that new market-rate apartments have a negative impact on neighborhoods that developers must mitigate by funding affordable housing.

This consensus has shifted just in the seven years MHA has been in effect, as scarcity has made apartments increasingly unaffordable and more people understand that density is an environmental necessity and an answer to growing demand for housing. At the same time, the funding MHA produces for affordable housing has plunged from a high of $74 million in 2021 to just $22 million last year as development has slowed. Last year, developers filed applications to build fewer than 2,000 new apartment buildings, a drop of almost 90 percent from a peak of 17,400 units in 2020.

Developers and land use attorneys we spoke to seemed reluctant to say outright that the city should get rid of MHA altogether, although it negatively impacts their bottom line. Holly Golden, a land use attorney at HCMP Law Offices, said that with lower fees, “you’d still see millions of dollars of MHA fees, plus new construction jobs and permit fees to keep [the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections running during the building downturn. … Getting projects started provides a huge financial benefit to the city budget at a time when they really need it.”

Taxes on construction are inherently volatile, and there’s a real question about whether MHA aligns with the reality of Seattle as a majority-renter city with an acute housing shortage. If the city agrees to an MHA “holiday” and development rebounds, a surge in other funding sources like the Real Estate Excise Tax could help offset the loss of MHA dollars.

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Not every jurisdiction funds affordable housing by charging a fee on development. PubliCola has reported on a concept called funded inclusionary zoning, in which developers get tax breaks for including affordable housing in their projects. The concept flips the script on development, treating density (i.e. apartments, i.e. renters) as a good thing while also ensuring that affordable housing gets built. Developers aren’t charitable organizations—if a project doesn’t make sense to them, they won’t build it—so instead of penalizing new housing with fees, cities like Portland are trying incentives to build new housing at all income levels.

“There are ways to ensure that inclusionary zoning programs work for the long term and are well calibrated to ensure they don’t impede housing,” Morrison said. “But getting those details right takes time.”

Eddie Lin, the head of the city council’s land use committee, told us on a recent episode of Seattle Nice that he’s “open to a temporary reduction in MHA fees. It needs to be tailored to the right size to get construction going, but not more than we need.”

Eliminating MHA completely, Lin continued, is a nonstarter; the fee, he said, remains “incredibly important for developing additional affordable housing. … We want to be mindful of not giving away too much more than we need to.” MHA reform, he said, might include addressing the fact that developers currently have to pay a fee for building in low-rise zones but not in neighborhood residential—the former single-family zones that now allow essentially the same density as low-rise areas.

Ray Connell, managing director at the developer Holland Partner Group, said it’s possible the impact of MHA and other taxes and regulations in real time by looking east across Lake Washington. “All the cranes are in Redmond,” where fees are lower, “so projects get started,” Connell said. “It’s amazing to go over there and see a bunch of new projects and cranes in the sky. Why is it happening over there? It’s not a hard cost issue, and it’s not an interest rate issue. Yes, it’s the jobs… but it’s also the additional fees that we have to face on this side of the lake.”

Redmond recently adopted an aggressive inclusionary zoning package that says 10 percent of all new units in housing with 10 or more units must be affordable. In four years, Connell said, “there won’t be cranes in certain areas of Redmond. … We can’t get those areas of Redmond to work anymore.”

Courts, King County

County Assessor Pleads Not Guilty to Stalking, Must Wear Ankle Monitor in Five-Year No Contact Order

By Erica C. Barnett

King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson will have to wear an ankle monitor and stay 1,000 feet away from his ex-fiancée, Seattle PR consultant Lee Keller, while he awaits trial on the two charges of violating a no-contact order Keller obtained against him last year. Wilson pled not guilty to both charges; his next pretrial hearing is scheduled for May 5. The no-contact order is for five years, expiring in 2031.

Wilson was arrested last July for showing up repeatedly at Keller’s home while a no-contact order was in effect. Keller accused Wilson of stalking and coercive control; the two reconciled briefly while the restraining order was in effect. Before his arrest, Wilson used a photo taken during that period in which Keller was smiling to argue in court that he posed no danger to her and that the order should be lifted.

According to a Seattle Municipal Court spokesperson, the company that provides GPS monitoring to the city, Sentinel, has to inform the court if a defendant violates a no-contact order. In domestic violence cases, the victim can opt in to an app that alerts them if the person under the order comes within 1,000 feet of wherever they are. Keller said she plans to use the app.

Keller told PubliCola by email that she’s “deeply grateful to the Judge, the Seattle Police, the City of Seattle and the prosecuting attorney’s office for their careful work around this. I feel better knowing there are people keeping track of his whereabouts. I just hope this is not prolonged and that my protection order stays in place for the longest period possible. And that he now understands the seriousness of breaking the law.”

The no-contact order prohibits Wilson from messaging, emailing, or calling Keller or from speaking to or going near her even if she “invites or allows you to violate the order’s prohibitions.” It does not prohibit Wilson from creating social media posts that subtly allude to Keller, which she has accused him of doing in the past.

Wilson appeared virtually at Wednesday’s hearing, and said little more than “I’m more than happy to comply with the no contact [order].”

The King County Council voted unanimously last year to demand Wilson’s resignation. Assuming he remains defiant—last month, he stood up and waved when a speaker at a Downtown Seattle Association event invited elected officials to stand for applause—he’ll be in office for the rest of 2026. He is not running for reelection.

City Council

Larger Library Levy Moves Forward; Founder of AI Worker Surveillance Startup Appointed to Ethics Commission
Seattle librarian Betsy Kluck-Keil holds up a “visual aid” at the library levy committee meeting Wednesday—a t-shirt that reads, “library > Google”

1. The Seattle City Council’s library levy committee, which includes all nine councilmembers, approved amendments to this year’s library levy proposal that will add almost $70 million to Mayor Katie Wilson’s initial $410 million proposal. Maritza Rivera, who chairs the committee, voted against every one of her colleagues’ amendments, saying that while “I love libraries,” increasing the levy further was fiscally irresponsible.

“With the proposed package, we would have $310 million left for future levies, including the housing theft and transportation levies. If all the amendments pass today, then we will only have $230 million left. The additions from the amendments today, while worthy, are increasing items that are already in the mayor’s package at a time when we can’t afford more. We know there are other needs that are coming. Let’s face it, we’re only in year two of this madman in the President’s president’s seat. Who knows? Who knows what else we will have to deal with. And of course, everyone keeps talking about affordability in Seattle these days, that seems more real than ever.

The city faces a state-mandated property tax cap of $3.60 per $1,000 in home value; the new levy, which is virtually certain to pass, will leave Seattle with just $310 million in capacity for future levies, such as the housing and transportation levies, Rivera said.

“If I felt that we could add this levy without jeopardizing future levies or adding to our affordability crisis, I too would add more,” Rivera said. “We don’t have a crystal ball to predict what will happen in the future. We’re operating with the knowledge that we have today. There is no judgment here. There is this is not about who loves the libraries more. This is about fiscal responsibility and our ability to pay for all our needs.”

The levy cap is a real, looming issue, and one the council should arguably be taking on more directly—for instance, by advocating for broad changes to property tax law in Olympia. If it isn’t the library levy, it will be the Seattle Transit Measure, or the next transportation levy, or election funding, or Seattle Center—whatever unlucky levy happens to fall in a year that Seattle’s property taxes finally touch the cap.

The amendments the committee passed include funding for repairs and maintenance at the Central Library downtown, seismic upgrades at the Columbia Branch library, multilingual children’s programming, and elevator and escalator maintenance, and air conditioning in libraries that current lack it. In an apparent response to Rivera’s comment, last month, that the city has federal FEMA dollars coming in to pay for cooling systems in five libraries, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said, “I would note that trusting our library’s future to Donald Trump’s FEMA is irresponsible.”

Deferring maintenance always leads to higher costs down the line, Rinck added. “Any pennies we pinch now will will cost us dollars seven years from now.”

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2. On Thursday, the city council’s governance committee voted unanimously (with three councilmembers present) to appoint Evan Smith, the founder of a company called Ethosphere, to serve on the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission. Ethosphere sells AI software to retail companies so that they can spy on their sales associates—or, as a boosterish Geekwire profile put it, “help associates improve their performance while giving managers better visibility into what drives sales.”

Retail companies that use Ethosphere’s system—and it’s unclear at this point which, if any, retailers have signed up—will require floor staff to wear microphones that record every conversation they have on their shift; these recordings get transcribed and analyzed by AI large language models “to assess how well employees followed the brand’s selling approach,” according to Geekwire. Sales associates the AI finds out of compliance could be penalized, retrained, or fired.

For anyone who’s worked retail, the dystopian nature of this kind of “productivity” software is obvious; selling khakis for minimum wage could soon mean submitting to intense surveillance by companies that consider workers interchangeable sales pitch dissemination machines.

None of that is directly related to the work of the ethics commission, which decides whether elected officials have violated ethics and elections law, among other responsibilities. But it does indicate on which side of the management-worker divide Smith’s sympathies fall. Smith didn’t show up for his nomination hearing on Thursday; according to Ethics and Elections director Wayne Barnett, he was “in San Francisco.”

Crime, Police

SPD Dedicates Three Officers to Magnuson Park, Citing Success with “Disorder” and Property Crimes During Pilot
City Councilmember Maritza Rivera and Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes

By Erica C. Barnett

Citing a “double-digit” reduction in crime since the launch of a pilot that added police patrols in and around Northeast Seattle’s Magnuson Park last summer, Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes announced that SPD will assign three full-time officers to the park. The officers will report to the North Precinct, and will essentially be on call there if needed, but otherwise, their jobs will involve patrolling the park and doing what Barnes calls “neighborhood-oriented policing.”

PubliCola first reported on the pilot expansion in January.

Barnes said SPD chose Magnuson Park, which is surrounded by some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, “because it’s the second largest park in our city [and] we have housing on the property”—hundreds of low-income and affordable units run by Mercy Housing and Solid Ground.

“We also chose this location because I heard from the community about … the rise in disorder crimes” such as noisy parties and street racing, Barnes said.

In the expanded program, SPD will assign three full-time officers, working in pairs to do bike and foot patrols in and around the park, getting to know people who live in the area and “fulfilling our obligation of problem oriented policing and community policing, which is the hallmark of my leadership philosophy,” Barnes said. The officers will be assigned to the North Precinct and will still be expected to respond to calls from other areas if necessary.

Asked why the city didn’t expand the Magnuson pilot into neighborhoods that have experienced more crime, like Rainier Beach or Little Saigon, Barnes said, “It’s not always about [putting resources in] the highest-crime area. One of the reasons we chose this particular location [is that] it’s our second biggest park. It has homes here as well. We’re hearing from the community. It just seemed like a good place to start and kind of work through some of those bugs.”

SPD has assigned new police academy graduates “who are not quite ready for patrol” to the area around 12th and Jackson, Barnes added. Additionally, “We’re looking at a space now, I believe at Third and Pine, that could be available for us” in the future. An SPD spokeswoman declined to provide additional details about the space Barnes mentioned.

City Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who represents Northeast Seattle, said there are “people living in the park that I very much care about, and I want to make sure that our families and the kids that are living here at Mercy Housing and Solid Ground are living in a safe environment, as well as the surrounding neighbors and all the people that come to visit the park.”

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The “double-digit” crime reduction Barnes mentioned appears to refer to a drop in reported crimes during the 90-day pilot period compared to the same period in 2024.

SPD’s public crime database shows that the number of reported crimes in the Sand Point neighborhood, which includes Magnuson Park, shows that there were 113 fewer reported crimes during the pilot period than the same period in 2024. However, a broader look at crime trends in the area and in Seattle as a whole shows that crime was lower across the city last year, and continues to trend lower in 2026 than in 2025, indicating a more general reduction in crime than the success of a specific pilot in one area.

One of the most infamous incidents of police violence in Seattle happened in Magnuson Park several years ago, before former mayor Bruce Harrell hired Barnes away from his previous position in Madison, Wisconsin. In 2017, officers shot and killed Charleena Lyles, a Black mother of four who called 911 during a mental health crisis, in her apartment. Lyles’ killing was one of the incidents that spurred calls for unarmed first responders with social work backgrounds to assist people in crisis. Although the city never admitted liability, Seattle paid $3.5 million in 2021 to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit by Lyles’ family.

SPD’s press event took place about 700 feet from where Lyles was killed.

When a TV reporter asked about past “officer-involved shootings” (shootings by police) in the park, Barnes appeared confused. “Officer-involved shootings?” he said.

After the reporter, who did not mention Lyles by name, attempted to elaborate— “there have been some tense events that have happened in the past”— Barnes responded: “I think no matter if it’s Magnuson Park or any other area in the city, we want to make sure that we’re policing in a way that’s procedurally just and that’s according to the expectations of our community. … That’s what policing is to me—knowing the people who may be dealing with issues, the people who may be dealing with mental health crisis, because when you know them and you can communicate with them, you have better outcomes.”

City Council, Density, housing, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Seattle Council Hears from Renters Who Want Quality of Life and Homeowners Who Want to Keep Neighborhoods to Themselves

By Erica C. Barnett

As the council takes up the remaining “phases” of Seattle’s latest 10-year comprehensive plan update—which, as a reminder, was subject to repeated delays by the Harrell administration starting in 2023—opponents of new housing are pulling out all the stops to convince the council that allowing renters to live in neighborhoods will destroy urban forests, kill birds and orcas, and make life unbearable for property owners across the city.

Homeowners, including many who made a point of ID’ing themselves as “native Seattleites,” predicated environmental disaster, community fragmentation, and the extinction of various animal species during several hours of public hearings yesterday on the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan, which would establish density limits in new “neighborhood centers” and along major bus lines and rapid transit routes.

The proposed changes, which would leave the overwhelming majority of the city’s residential land untouched, would give more renters access to neighborhoods with ample public trees, safe sidewalks, and quiet streets. Currently, most rental housing is restricted to highways and large arterial roads, which spew pollution directly into apartment windows and are among the city’s most dangerous, noisy, and unpleasant places to live.

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On Monday afternoon, activists even trotted out a group of young children to perform a song-and-dance routine about “lot sprawl”—a concept promoted by Tree Action Seattle, a group that opposes denser housing in neighborhoods on the grounds that new housing often results in the removal of trees on what were formerly private lawns. “Big trees, we need them so,” the children belted. “Lot sprawl has got to go.”

The agenda of most tree activists in Seattle isn’t about adding street trees or maintaining and replacing trees in parks, where a plurality of the city’s tree loss actually occurs.  In a recent action alert, Tree Action said explicitly that  “street trees are not a solution” to tree loss because there isn’t enough room in public right-of-way to achieve a 30 percent tree canopy citywide. (In reality, development in single-family areas amounts to a tiny fraction of overall tree loss in Seattle.)

As I noted on Bluesky yesterday, little kids don’t understand housing policy, much less arcane concepts like “lot sprawl.” Using children to promote an adult political agenda is particularly ironic in this case, since anti-housing policies will make it impossible for most kids who are six years old today to live in Seattle when they grow up.

You know who can't understand housing policy? Little kids trained to sing a song on behalf of their parents' anti-housing political agendas. You know who won't be able to live in Seattle if we don't allow more housing? People who are little kids today.

— Erica C. Barnett (@ericacbarnett.bsky.social) 2026-04-06T23:02:40.796Z

The fever-pitched backlash is occurring alongside a larger push to go bigger on housing in the remaining phases of the comp plan. This push is coming largely from young Seattleites and others who belong to Seattle’s renter majority, which is getting increasingly fed up with both rising rents and the limited options for people who can’t afford to buy a typical million-dollar house in Seattle.

Last week, Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she wants to accelerate the adoption of the comp plan update, restoring the neighborhood centers Harrell removed from the plan and expanding the frequent transit zones where new apartments will be allowed beyond the (frankly embarrassing) half-block that’s in the current proposal. While Wilson’s proposal isn’t on the council’s agenda yet, it figured heavily in the comments both for and against the “centers and corridors” portion of the plan.

During the recess between the two public hearings, supporters of Wilson’s “taller, denser, faster” agenda rallied outside City Hall for a competing vision of Seattle—one where renters have access to the neighborhoods many homeowners want to keep to themselves.

Wilson herself kicked off the rally by thanking the group for gathering to support a “deeply important, if somewhat esoteric, topic of the day—Seattle’s municipal zoning codes!”

“Last week, you heard me announce my administration’s taller, denser, faster housing program. I guess that’s the official name now,” Wilson said. “What that means is that we’re going to start with a more inviting, optimistic assumption of our growth capacity. … We are going to plan to allow more housing in every neighborhood, creating an equitable distribution and meaningful housing choices. Every neighborhood should be an open, welcoming place for people and families to live.”

The opposition to Wilson’s plan is going to be fierce, as people who bought houses decades ago fight to restrict where housing can go and impose tree planting and retention mandates on apartment developers that do not apply to them. But there was heartening news for housing advocates yesterday, too. After the rally, which also featured disability advocate Cecelia Black, Community Roots Housing leader Colleen Echohawk, and City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, pro-housing activists filed upstairs to testify in favor of Wilson’s more inviting, optimistic vision.

One of them, Jason Weill, introduced himself as a longtime Seattle resident and homeowner who was “excited about all the growth and vibrancy happening in our city” but “really concerned about the rising housing costs and the constraints that we have on where we can build housing. I’ve lived in apartments built so close to I-5 I could hear highway noise 24 hours a day, and air pollution was a constant health hazard because I could only cool my apartment by opening the windows.”

Apartment renters across the city can relate to this exact situation—as someone who rented apartments on or within a half-block of three major roadways with nonstop, heavy traffic, I certainly could. The city’s renter majority—a population that  includes the mayor herself— is pushing back on the belief, enshrined in our zoning codes, that only homeowners deserve access to the most livable parts of our city. It’s now up to the city council to resist the urge to maintain the unsustainable status quo.

City Council, housing, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Expand Housing Faster; Councilmember Rivera Wants to Audit Human Services

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson is a renter on Capitol Hill, giving her a unique perspective that differentiates her from any previous mayor, and she plans to keep renting through her term. On this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we discussed how Wilson’s personal experience renting in Seattle (and struggling to afford escalating rent) may have impacted her decision to go “bigger, taller, and faster” on what’s left of the city’s comprehensive plan update.

In Wilson’s tree-lined neighborhood, single-family houses and apartment buildings mingle effortlessly with newer townhouses and condos, all within a short walk of multiple bus routes and a light rail station. In other words, this mayor has actually experienced the benefits of renting in a neighborhood with lots of trees, walkable amenities, and frequent transit, making her less susceptible to NIMBY arguments that apartments destroy neighborhood “character” or make neighborhoods unlivable.

As Sandeep pointed out, public opinion in Seattle has moved consistently in a YIMBY (yes in my backyard) direction for at least the past decade. That’s good news for Seattle’s renter majority—brand-new housing, though not affordable in itself, takes pressure off Seattle’s acute housing shortage—and bad news for NIMBYs who want Seattle to stay the same as it was when they bought their houses for $23,000 in the ’70s.

We also discussed Councilmember Maritza Rivera’s still-vague proposal to “audit Human Services Department contracts.” Sandeep and David think it seems like a pretty good idea in light of an audit at the county’s equivalent department that found widespread problems among “high-risk” contracts—why not “look under the rock” and see what’s there? “From my side, we’d want to make that a campaign issue,” Sandeep said—perhaps previewing what Rivera’s reelection campaign will look like?

 

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I countered that as with the Equitable Development initiative, Rivera seems to be fixating on contracts in one specific area (the DCHS contracts were largely first-time contracts with small Black- and brown-led nonprofits) rather than considering which type of contracts across all city departments are worth scrutinizing for waste, fraud, and abuse. (I also noted that the smaller contractors targeted in the DCHS audit do not generally contract with the city.) Sandeep said these kinds of contracts came out of the “peak woke period” after COVID and so should be subject to greater scrutiny.

As I reported, auditing $300 million in human services contracts is far more complex than the kinds of audits Seattle’s auditor typically does, and would tie up resources for years at a small office with just five audit staff. Just as a factual matter, I’ll stand by what I said on the podcast: No matter how much we agree that it would be great for all public contracts to face close scrutiny (no one supports waste, abuse, or fraud), given that the city will never have the resources to audit every contract, the city has to make choices. If that choice is always to audit human services providers and never audit police spending, for instance, that’s an expression of priorities, not an objective assessment of what kind of city spending merits extra scrutiny.