Seattle keeps promising it’s got this under control. The numbers are having a pretty rude laugh about that. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. I’m Cassidy, Devin’s here, and today it’s drug enforcement that isn’t really enforcing what was promised, a mall redevelopment that buried the parking under the shiny stuff, and a mayor who showed up to a transit town hall but skipped the transparency part. And King County is finally asking somebody to take a hard look at the homelessness authority — which, yeah, only took a crisis and a half. All right. Reform on paper, stall on the ground. Let’s get into it. Here's Amy Sundberg at The Urbanist:
The ordinance, which prioritized diversion away from jails to increase the number of people seeking treatment or stabilizing services, has resulted in a 47% increase in drug crime arrests and a 30% decrease in referrals to the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program between 2024 and 2025.
Amy Sundberg at The Urbanist pulled the numbers on Seattle’s public drug ordinance, and they’re ugly. Drug arrests are up 47 percent, LEAD referrals are down 30 percent, and only about one in five drug arrests actually led to diversion last year. That is the opposite of what the law was supposed to do. Yesterday we were talking about harm-reduction data showing fewer injections, and now we’re on the accountability side — and it’s a mess. They sold this as diversion-first. What they built looks a lot more like an arrest machine with a diversion sticker on it. Even the city’s own data shop couldn’t get the full picture out by year-end because SPD hadn’t handed over what they needed. That’s not just a policy failure — that’s a transparency failure. If you can’t measure it, you can’t hold anybody to it. And somehow that always seems to work out just fine for the department. The Urbanist, with Doug Trumm:
In 2022, Simon secured a permit for a nine-story, 234-unit apartment building with 569 parking stalls, which they christened Everis. Today, that project has topped out and is nearing move-in this summer. Phase 2 of the development is under construction next door and will bring the housing total to 420 apartments, while utilizing the same parking garage around which both developments wrap, forming what is sometimes called a " Texas Donut."
Doug Trumm over at The Urbanist got a look at Simon Property Group’s Northgate redevelopment: 420 apartments, which sounds a lot better until you hit the other number — 569 parking stalls. That’s more parking spaces than homes, and it’s sitting next to light rail. The city doesn’t even require residential parking in urban centers anymore, so Simon basically volunteered to build this. It’s a Texas Donut — the whole project wraps around a parking garage. That’s the centerpiece. Not the housing. Not the transit access. The garage. To be fair, some of those stalls are for the ground-floor retail. But even with that, you’re still way above a one-to-one ratio at one of the city’s better-connected transit stops. Four hundred and twenty units is real housing, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But we keep putting the infrastructure of car dependency right next to the infrastructure of transit, and then acting surprised when the ridership math doesn’t work. The Seattle Times writes:
The Metropolitan King County Council voted unanimously Tuesday to request a report by Aug. 1 from County Executive Girmay Zahilay, identifying steps the Authority has taken in response to a recent damning audit, options to address funding shortfalls and a “decision framework” on whether to continue, amend or end the county’s involvement in the agency.
The King County Council wants a full report from Executive Zahilay on the Regional Homelessness Authority by August 1, and depending on what turns up, the six-year-old agency could be on its way out. The Times had that one. Four million in questionable admin costs, six million over budget, eight million just missing. That’s not a troubled agency — that’s a case study in what happens when you build a bureaucracy to manage a crisis instead of solve it. To be fair, the RHA was underfunded from the start. Smaller cities in the region never came through with their share, and that’s a structural problem that predates any audit finding. Sure, but you don’t get to burn through eighteen-plus million in questionable spending and then blame the suburbs. At some point, the people sleeping outside are still sleeping outside, and that’s the number that matters. From KOMO News:
Meanwhile, Sound Transit is facing a $35 billion budget shortfall as it faces rising construction costs, inflation, and revised revenue projections. The West Seattle Link Extension project would reduce travel time in half for trips to downtown and create new connections between downtown, Interbay, and Ballard.
Sound Transit is staring down a $35 billion budget shortfall, with construction costs, inflation, and revised revenue projections all hitting at once. Mayor Wilson showed up to the town hall to push West Seattle and Ballard extensions, which is fine. But when KOMO asked her a transparency question, she walked. Of course she did. You can stand at a podium and talk about trains, but the second somebody asks about your office, suddenly it’s not the right moment. Meanwhile, West Seattle residents are still waiting on light rail that voters approved years ago. The West Seattle extension would cut commute times roughly in half for trips downtown — that’s real. But a $35 billion hole is not a minor line item, and people deserve transparency about how decisions are getting made inside that budget crunch. The voters approved this rail. The money went sideways, the mayor won’t answer questions, and transit advocates are out here begging leaders to follow through on what was already promised. That is not a great look for anybody. From Aaron Granillo at MyNorthwest:
What should be peak season for some businesses in Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood is instead being choked off by a major marina construction project. The fencing went up as part of the Leschi South Marina Wave Attenuator and Facility Improvements project, a $7.9 million effort led by Seattle Parks and Recreation and the Seattle Department of Transportation.
Leschi waterfront story out of MyNorthwest: a $7.9 million Parks and SDOT marina upgrade is eating the spring lunch rush. The Bluewater Bistro owner showed up to chain-link fencing basically across his front doors on a sunny 80-degree Monday. And here’s the kicker — he says they were told construction would happen in the fall. So either the schedule slipped and nobody told the businesses, or somebody told them what they wanted to hear to get buy-in. Either way, that owner is eating the cost of the city’s planning failure. To be fair, replacing creosote-treated piles and aging timber piers is real deferred maintenance — this isn’t a vanity project. But “we’ll do it in the off-season” is a promise, not a suggestion, and it sounds like that promise got dropped somewhere between Parks and the contractor. Two tables on a sunny day in May. That’s not an inconvenience — that’s potentially a month of payroll. And the city will move on to the ribbon cutting like nothing happened. Got thoughts on today’s Seattle stories, a correction, or an idea we should dig into next? Send us a note at seattledailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We read every message.
We’ve got links to all of today’s stories in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can find the original reporting there and dig in a little more.
That’s Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Wednesday. This is a Lantern Podcast.