Katie Wilson put “faster” in the name of her housing plan — and somehow 2028 is what faster looks like. And while Wilson’s density agenda stretches to 2028, Sound Transit is burning millions on billboards for a system sitting on a $34.5 billion gap. A sitting councilmember said trust “has been eroded.” That’s not me — that’s an elected official. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily — today we’re watching where Wilson’s housing mandate actually lands, whether bigger shelters can scale under an accountability system auditors just dinged, and what Sound Transit’s ad budget says about its priorities. Devin, take it. One unanimous council vote on shelter zoning, one 2028 caveat on density, and a transit agency buying ad space. Pick the one that’s actually moving. Ryan Packer, writing in The Urbanist:
After explicitly campaigning on tackling restrictive zoning regulations in the name of housing affordability, Mayor Katie Wilson is advancing her Taller Denser Faster zoning update to allow more types of housing across Seattle. Though the broad contours of her "Taller Denser Faster" plan were announced last month, its full scope is continuing to be fleshed out.
Ryan Packer at The Urbanist has the first real timeline on Wilson’s “Taller Denser Faster” plan — and the lede is right there: “faster” is in the brand, but the process could run to 2028. That’s not spin. That’s what the resolution sent to council last week actually says. The name says “faster.” The fine print says 2028. I need to know who signed off on that branding. To Wilson’s credit, the scope is genuinely broader than Harrell’s version — the resolution tells OPCD to look at new and expanded growth centers, not just the old urban village footprint from the ’90s. That’s a real shift. Whether a council that still has to sign off lets it survive is the 2027 question. She ran on busting restrictive zoning, and now the council’s being asked to “buy in” and “influence” the plan — which is process language for “slow it down.” If this comes back amended into the Harrell approach with a new logo, that’s the story. This one's from MyNorthwest:
The Seattle City Council (SCC) unanimously passed a measure that allows for larger homeless shelters and tiny home villages. The legislation approves temporary shelter sites, including tiny home villages, RV and vehicle safe lots, and tent encampments, to increase capacity by 50%, raising the maximum from 100 to 150 residents. It also paves the way for a 250-bed shelter in each city council district.
Nine to zero. That’s the vote. I’ve watched this council drag its feet on housing and shelter for years, and they just passed a zoning change unanimously — no one hiding behind process, no one killing it in committee. A 50% capacity increase and a path to 250-bed shelters in every district is a real outcome. Unanimous votes at the Seattle City Council are rare enough that the number itself is news. But here’s the tension: this bill scales up the exact shelter infrastructure the KCRHA audit flagged earlier this week — $45 million in costs auditors couldn’t trace. Councilmember Foster says the goal is a “successful first year of expansion.” The accountability system that’s supposed to prove that is the same one auditors just said can’t follow the money. I hear you on the audit, but I’m not ready to vote against building beds because the paperwork is bad. Fix the paperwork. The school buffer zone amendment got stripped out — nonprofits said it would slow delivery — and the council let it go and passed the thing anyway. That’s choosing outcomes over optics. Fine, choose outcomes over optics — until the audit comes back and you can’t show what the outcome was. Foster said the goal is expansion so successful it justifies continuing, and that’s a reasonable standard. I just want to know who’s tracking whether it clears that bar, because right now that job belongs to KCRHA. Jason Rantz, writing in Seattle Red:
A high schooler cornered Seattle City Councilmember Dan Strauss with a question last week that Sound Transit still hasn’t answered well. Why is Sound Transit, an agency $34.5 billion in the hole on its voter-approved ST3 expansion, spending money to resurrect an old zombie-themed billboard campaign?
The ST3 board vote is ten days out, and Sound Transit is running a zombie-themed billboard campaign in Greenwood while sitting on a $34.5 billion gap. We’ve been tracking the hard math on this all week, and now it’s in billboard-politics territory. Seattle councilmember Dan Strauss said at the Executive Committee Thursday that trust in the agency “has been eroded.” That’s not an outside critic — that’s a board-adjacent elected saying it out loud, in a committee room, eight days before the vote. A high schooler asked Strauss the question, and Strauss took it to the committee: why are we spending money on billboards in Greenwood when we don’t have the money to get to Ballard? I’ve been saying that all week, and now an elected official is saying it in an official setting. That’s not me being loud; that’s the argument walking into the room. Worth noting — this board already slid the ST3 program once, back in 2021, by five years. The May 28 vote would push the financial plan out to 2052. Billboards don’t build light rail, but they do tell you something about institutional priorities when the money is supposedly not there. When King County writes a check to a nonprofit running, say, a youth job-training program, what’s actually supposed to happen before that money goes out the door — and if an auditor later flags a bad payment, does the county claw it back? So the system is supposed to work in layers: program staff review invoices, verify that services were actually delivered, and flag anything that looks off before payment clears. The problem is that a major audit last August found King County’s Department of Community and Human Services — which handles nearly 90 percent of all county grants — wasn’t doing those basic checks. Per the King County Auditor, DCHS grant-making nearly doubled in just four years, from $922 million in the 2019-20 cycle to $1.8 billion in 2023-24, and the department was steering more of that money to what it classifies as “high-risk” organizations — groups with little track record. Auditors looked at four youth programs and found unapproved payments and possible fraud. Then in May, the county’s Office of the Ombudsman released a follow-up independent review of 19 community organizations tied to those same four programs and identified roughly $690,000 in questioned costs across 224 separate transactions involving 16 organizations — with red flags including potentially altered documents and possible conflicts of interest. On clawing money back, it gets worse: county auditor Kymber Waltmunson was so concerned about DCHS’s internal response that she wrote directly to the County Executive’s office asking a third party to take over the investigation, saying the county was not responding appropriately. Was this really a case where the warning signs came out of nowhere, or did people inside the county know something was wrong and sit on it anyway? Reporting from the Seattle Times found that senior leaders got an anonymous complaint as early as 2023 alleging a contractor was collecting thousands of dollars for youth job training without doing the work — and then sat on it for a year and a half, even as the county’s own records showed obvious problems with the contractor’s finances. The County Council did vote unanimously in September to require stricter fiscal oversight, and the proposed budget adds staff to do that work, but the auditor’s escalation to the Executive’s office says the accountability piece — actually recovering misspent dollars and holding people responsible — is still unresolved. Watch for whether that third-party investigation gets authorized, and whether any of that $690,000 in questioned costs actually gets paid back. This one's from The Seattle Times:
Mayor Katie Wilson and Councilmember Rob Saka came out in support Monday of a capital bond for Seattle Center, likely appearing on the 2027 ballot, though possibly earlier. If passed with 60% support, the measure would fund improvements to the aging campus, such as an overhaul of its HVAC and electrical systems, as well as a possible renovation of its centerpiece Armory building.
Wilson and Saka are backing a Seattle Center capital bond — probably on the 2027 ballot, needs 60 percent to pass, and would cover HVAC overhaul, electrical upgrades, and maybe a renovation of the Armory. The size is still undecided. They introduced a nonbinding resolution Monday to start figuring that out. So Wilson is telling us housing can’t move faster than 2028 and also asking voters to fund air conditioning at the Armory. That’s two separate ballot tracks, and one of them is not a tent city. To be precise, Saka said he wants private dollars to match public money at least one-to-one — maybe three-to-one — but then immediately acknowledged that much private money may not actually exist. That’s a pretty big caveat to tuck into a launch announcement. A nonbinding resolution that kicks off a process to decide how much to ask voters for — this started in 2024 as a ten-year planning exercise, and we’re still in the “how much should we ask” phase. Wilson needs 60 percent of voters to say yes to HVAC. Good luck running that alongside whatever the county is also putting on the ballot. If Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily is part of your routine, consider subscribing wherever you’re listening. And if you have a moment, leave a quick review — it really helps other people find the show.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can dig into the source there.
That’s Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.