Four reform stories on the board today, and the city's own scoreboard is giving us a mixed read. This is Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: a $6 million land buy with no unit count locked in, a drug crackdown one week in, and 1.1 million transit boardings — where the data finally showed up, and it isn't telling one clean story. Here's Capitol Hill Seattle:
The legislation on the table this week would authorize the Seattle Office of Housing to use $6 million in appropriation from the state legislature to acquire the surplus Washington State Department of Transportation property at 2625 East Montlake Place E for the development of 50 owner-occupied, permanently affordable homes.
The housing committee takes up the Montlake Homes bill on Wednesday — $6 million to buy a one-acre surplus parcel off the SR 520 lid for 50 permanently affordable, owner-occupied homes. Credit where it's due: Capitol Hill Seattle broke the state's plans for this site back in November. The timing is what I'd circle. November to a committee bill in late June. The city had months on a parcel it knew was coming, and it's only now authorizing the acquisition. And the bill only buys the dirt. Fifty homes is the press-release number — but the developer gets picked by an RFP that hasn't happened yet, financing is 'existing levy or other capital resources,' and there's no date for a shovel anywhere. It's a real dollar figure on a real parcel — I'll take that over a zoning memo. But with $6 million in, where's the income targeting, and what's the timeline? 'Affordable homeownership' is a phrase until there's a price somebody can actually qualify for. Also, the $6 million is a state appropriation through the Office of Housing, not city general fund money. So Olympia is basically paying for the land buy — the city's role here is mostly process. This one's from PubliCola:
After PubliCola reported on a King County Council supplemental budget amendment that would have prohibited spending county funds on safer smoking supplies for drug users, the proposal’s sponsor, Councilmember Rod Dembowski, decided to withdraw the amendment and replace it with one that simply requests more information on the program.
So, in the county's midyear budget fight, per PubliCola, Councilmember Dembowski floated defunding a harm reduction program the reporting calls successful. Read that twice. Defund the thing that's working. And the timing matters here. The city is one week into a supply-side crackdown in Little Saigon — that's coming up — while the county is arguing over whether to fund the treatment side at all. Right, so one government's clearing the corner and the other's debating whether to pay for the off-ramp. Pick a lane. And there's a lobbyist angle in here too — PubliCola flags who's working the human services contracts. When the money's contested, the influence shows up. Erica Barnett does not bury that detail. The CARE responders, the civilian build-out the city keeps selling — that all runs on this same contracting environment. You can't staff up a new system while the county is threatening the contracts it depends on. From Michelle Esteban at KOMO News:
Nearly a week after Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said the city will no longer tolerate open-air drug use and sales in the Little Saigon neighborhood, conditions at the notorious corner of 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street appeared largely unchanged.
One week in. Wilson stood up and said the city won't tolerate open-air drug use at 12th and Jackson — and KOMO walks down there and finds it's largely unchanged. There's your report card. The promise was specific. So was the corner. A week later, KOMO says the scene looks the same. Here's where the pieces connect. The mayor is hitting the supply side — arrests, diversion, or jail. Meanwhile, in the county midyear budget we just talked about, they're fighting over whether to fund the harm reduction and treatment contracts on the other end. You can crack down on a corner all you want. If the treatment side is in budget limbo at the county, you're squeezing one end of a balloon. Right — and Wilson herself called this corner a city failure. So when the fix is also stalling, what's the actual enforcement metric here? Arrests made? People diverted? Give me a number from that corner. King County Metro writes:
Mix two match days, add some baseball and include a healthy dose of sunny weather. The result: record ridership as the region continues to choose transit over driving. King County Metro and Sound Transit have released preliminary ridership estimates of 1.1 million boardings systemwide for June 15 and June 19 FIFA World Cup Match days.
1.1 million boardings across June 15 and June 19 — that's Metro and Sound Transit combined, with a single-day Water Taxi record on top of it. Two match days now, not one. Two days, two numbers, both huge. The system survived the World Cup and posted a record. So here's my question — what's Metro's plan to keep even one rider from that 1.1 million after the tournament packs up? And notice whose press release this is: Metro's number, Metro's banner. Seattle's transit dollars buy service hours from Metro, but the city's fingerprints aren't anywhere on that headline figure. Right — and that's what gets me. The city can broadcast 1.1 million boardings in near real time, but it can't post a daily enforcement count from one corner in Little Saigon. So be consistent about what you measure. From Ryan Packer at The Urbanist:
The pedestrian pilot in effect on Pike Place right now will shape decisions around what comes next, ahead of a deadline to approve permanent regulations this fall. But as Market advocates, business owners, and city officials all start to forge some sort of consensus about the long-term future of vehicle access through the 119-year-old market, a prominent Market group is throwing cold water on recent sales data within the historic district.
So the PDA's numbers are in — commercial tenant sales up 6.5% across the Market in 2025, restaurant sales up more than 10% in the busy season. That's a direct answer to the question of whether pedestrianizing Pike Place would gut businesses there. And the data says sales went the other direction — up. So naturally Friends of the Market, who've been fighting this since 1964, show up to tell us sales going UP is somehow bad news. That's the move to watch. When the metric you asked for comes back against you, suddenly the metric becomes the target. We just heard the World Cup story — 1.1 million boardings, Water Taxi record. Now sales are up at the Market during a pilot. Three wins in one episode, and I gotta ask: is Seattle just good at counting the good stuff that lands in its lap? That's the catch with all of it. The barriers are only up on match days, weekends, and big events right now. So the sales bump and the World Cup crowds are tangled together — and the fall vote on permanent rules has to sort out how much is which. If Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily helps you keep up, take a moment to subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening. It really helps other people find the show.
What we're watching next: Seattle has a fall deadline to approve permanent rules for vehicle access at Pike Place, so we'll keep following that process.
As always, we've put links to every story from today's briefing in the show notes, if you want to dig into the details or revisit anything that caught your ear.
That's Seattle Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.