Katie Wilson, the Normal Secretary of the Transit Riders Union and long-time native progressive organizer, is working for Seattle mayor.
That is Wilson’s first run for workplace, however she’s already well-known in Seattle’s political spheres as an organizer and coverage advocate, preventing for—and profitable—campaigns for elevating the minimal wage, inexpensive transit, and progressive income, in addition to an everyday columnist for The Stranger and The Urbanist. She joins a small area of rising challengers in opposition to our Chamber of Commerce-backed mayor, Bruce Harrell.
In an in-depth dialog with The Stranger, Wilson described the mayor she hopes to be: a coalition builder who’s capable of attain throughout the aisle to seek out widespread targets, with out diluting progressive, research-backed insurance policies; and a daring innovator, keen to check new concepts and push ahead on points which have stagnated on this metropolis for a decade.
Can she be that mayor? She’s untested in elected workplace, however for voters questioning if she will be able to get it performed, she urges them to take a look at her report as a coverage advocate. “I’ve spent the final 14 years of my profession organizing, constructing highly effective coalitions that win main victories for working folks,” she instructed The Stranger. “And I’ve performed all that from the surface. I might be pleased to place my legislative report up in opposition to Bruce Harrell’s any day of the week.”
Wilson’s resolution to run for mayor solidified simply 4 weeks in the past, after Seattle resoundingly voted to help Proposition 1A and fund a social housing developer. In that vote, she noticed a metropolis enthusiastically help a daring, new concept. “There’s going to be an extended highway forward to place the items collectively to make social housing work in Seattle,” she says. “And we want management that is going to battle to make that occur.” However when she regarded to the particular person meant to hold out that mandate, it was Mayor Harrell—the literal face of Prop 1A’s opposition.
For Wilson, that distinction captured simply how out-of-step Harrell is with Seattle voters. “That was certainly not my solely motive for working,” she says, “however that was the second that tipped my pondering: Seeing Harrell’s face plastered on all these mailers attempting to undermine the brand new social housing developer—a marketing campaign funded by Amazon and the Chamber of Commerce—and seeing the resounding vote of confidence of Seattle voters and the need to go large and daring on inexpensive housing.”
“Seattle voters confirmed that they need large, daring motion,” she mentioned. “And so we want higher management. That is why I am working.”
Her frustration with Harrell didn’t start with Prop 1A. The town’s total housing and homelessness disaster encapsulates what she sees as Harrell’s failures as a pacesetter: a time period outlined by inaction and lack of creativeness. “4 years in the past, when Harrell was working for mayor, he made some large guarantees on homelessness. He promised to open 2000 models of emergency housing shelter in his first 12 months; he didn’t even come near delivering these numbers.”
As a substitute, the disaster has deepened on his watch—Seattle now has twice as many unsheltered homeless folks as New York Metropolis—a failure that Wilson thinks was avoidable. “It is unacceptable,” she says. “We have to discover a method to get the parents who’re at present sleeping on the road inside.”
Step one, she says, can be to acknowledge the disaster of unsheltered homelessness and shift the town’s priorities. “There’s been an emphasis right here over the previous years on constructing everlasting constructions, and there are some good causes for that, however we have to transfer sooner,” she says. “I feel we must be opening Tiny Home villages. I feel we must be working extra intently with religion communities and different areas that exist already.”
She takes inspiration from dynamic applications like Function. Dignity. Motion.’s JustCARE, which piloted area groups that would take an individualized strategy: engaged on the bottom with folks in encampments, assessing every particular person’s distinctive psychological well being historical past, any felony background, and cycle of homelessness, earlier than efficiently inserting them in lodging.
Homelessness is, at its core, a housing disaster, she says. But it surely doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This strategy permits the town to additionally deal with the nexus of unsheltered homelessness, the fentanyl disaster, and psychological well being. That might imply “quickly buying a number of buildings, and ensuring that individuals are going to have all of the help they want,” she says. “After which we will actually deal with particularly that very small a part of the homeless inhabitants that’s biking via the felony justice system, and that’s additionally usually a part of the drug-involved inhabitants.”
“We must be providing folks the housing and the providers that work for them,” she says. “If we’re not each investing extra in remedy and ensuring that that remedy is built-in with housing and persevering with help providers, then we’re simply going to fail.”
To strategy these convergent crises, Wilson says she’s keen to be iterative, to strive new concepts, and to put money into those that work. She proposes doing this via pilot applications—testing evidence-based approaches on a smaller scale, and ensuring the town can put their cash behind the applications that work.
None of that is potential with out new income—particularly a progressive income stream like a capital positive aspects tax that taxes our metropolis’s wealthiest residents, relatively than growing the tax burden on working and middle-class households. Harrell has proven little curiosity in such a tax, but when elected, Wilson thinks that she will be able to make {that a} actuality. In 2023, Wilson served on the town’s Income Stabilization Workgroup, “and we regarded into the town’s income choices. And we now have choices! A few of them are going to require extra work to be shovel prepared, however the present administration is just not doing that work.”
It’s one other place the place she says Harrell’s administration is out of step with the town’s residents, pointing to polling that exhibits a majority of Seattle voters help a capital positive aspects tax. “Clearly, there are going to be some individuals who do not need to elevate new progressive income—Chamber of Commerce, I am you,” she says. “However I feel that extra broadly, amongst each the inhabitants and stakeholders, folks acknowledge that want.”
That is the place she highlights her expertise as a coalition builder—the trait she thinks distinguishes her most from different potential progressive candidates. Simply final 12 months, she introduced collectively staff, small enterprise house owners, and elected officers to cross a better minimal wage in Burien.
She’s crucial of Harrell’s historical past of hiring family and friends into important authorities roles, and emphasised that certainly one of her strengths is figuring out tips on how to construct a group that may get it performed—it doesn’t matter what “it” is. “I am very keen to study from folks,” she says. “I am not right here to say I’ve no ego, as a result of I do not suppose anybody can say that. However I need to do a superb job, and I need to study from the individuals who know their stuff. And so I am not going to encompass myself with sure males. … Metropolis Corridor should not be an previous boys membership. We want people who find themselves competent. We want people who find themselves keen to be sincere, together with to their bosses, after they suppose issues might be working higher. And that is the form of mayor that I might be.”
She’s the primary to acknowledge that she’s been a vocal critic of most of the conservative-leaning council members who can be her colleagues and collaborators if she was elected, although. “I do not need to disown that in any respect. On the similar time, I feel it is essential for a mayor and council members to work collectively so far as potential, on as many points as potential,” she says.
“There are points the place we would like related, if not precisely the identical, issues,” she continued. “I feel that the council members at present in workplace all do, ultimately or different, genuinely need to do one thing about homelessness and public security, for instance. So if we will actually have a fact-based, evidence-based dialog about what works and about what’s essential to get there, I feel we will make progress. We do not all must have the identical politics to make progress.”
Earlier than she determined to run for workplace, she began writing a sequence right here in The Stranger, analyzing why the progressive left suffered such severe losses within the 2021 metropolis elections, and what we will study from them. She used it as a type of self-reflection—to determine tips on how to reclaim a political narrative on the left that captures voters. And whereas we’ve had some substantial progressive wins within the final 12 months (see Prop 1A and the election of Alexis Mercedes Rinck), Wilson thinks we nonetheless have work to do on reclaiming the narrative of this metropolis.
In a January column, she sparked controversy and disagreement amongst progressives when she proposed that the left struggled to talk to the common Seattle voter about homelessness. She argued that the left was right concerning the root causes and mandatory options for homelessness and the opioid epidemic. That seen drug use doesn’t equate to crime; that the “root reason for homelessness is a extreme scarcity of inexpensive housing, the results of neoliberal underinvestment in backed housing and an extended historical past of exclusionary zoning, intensified by Seattle’s tech growth; [That] the answer is to fund housing, shelter, and providers at scale; [and] that sweeping folks from one place to a different is merciless and ineffective.” However she additionally argued that the left (herself included) had largely disregarded the truth that many Seattleites noticed on the streets—a visual drug and housing disaster that makes some residents really feel much less protected, whether or not or not the statistics again that feeling up.
In her interview with The Stranger yesterday, Wilson stood by that evaluation. “We have now to get on the root causes and acknowledge what these root causes are,” she says. “However on the similar time, we have to additionally take a look at what individuals are experiencing on the bottom after they stroll down the road they usually really feel unsafe as a result of somebody’s behaving aggressively and erratically, or doing medicine and dealing medicine. We have to do one thing within the quick time period. We won’t simply say, ‘Nicely, we’re gonna get everybody the issues that they want. And in a far-off utopia, you are not gonna have these issues, so simply dangle tight.’”
To Wilson, which means taking over the very emergency measures she’s proposing—speedy acquisition of shelter, on-site assets, and long-term remedy choices. “If we won’t deal with realities like that, then it isn’t simply that we’re not politically viable, we’re not match to manipulate. And I feel that we have to study to manipulate if we will make progress—if we will do the visionary issues that we need to do and construct the world that we need to construct. We want to have the ability to train that duty. We won’t simply be shouting from the sidelines.”
That feels particularly urgent now that Trump is in workplace—placing progressive metropolis and state governments on the defensive. Wilson believes that the proper progressive metropolis management can defend its residents, whereas nonetheless making progress the place it’s most vital. “In the event you take a look at the report of the work that I’ve performed over time, it is all been centered on getting outcomes,” she says. “It has been centered on profitable concrete issues that put cash in folks’s pockets and enhance their high quality of life. That is the main target that I might need to deliver into Metropolis Corridor. Regardless of the nationwide scenario is, regardless of the native political scenario is, let’s work out the issues that we will get performed that can make a distinction on the bottom, and let’s do them.”
“The following few years below Trump, shit goes to be flying at us left and proper,” she continued. “And we’re additionally going to must batten down the hatches and make it possible for we’re defending folks.” Progressive income would enable us to be extra resilient if the Trump administration targets us for progressive insurance policies, she says, “and, in fact, we’re all nervous about impacts on immigrant communities, on the LGBTQ neighborhood. So it is inevitable that a number of the issues that we do are going to be reactive, attempting to make it possible for issues do not transfer backward.”
But when elected, she refuses to remain on the defensive for 3 years. Even below Trump, she says, “we will have imaginative and prescient.” One such imaginative and prescient is a mission she’s been constructing a coalition round for 2 years already—a mannequin to help native journalism, much like our democracy voucher program. It might set up a public funding stream for native information shops, permitting particular person residents to allocate that cash to their most well-liked outlet. “We principally live in a time when there is no sustainable monetary mannequin for a lot of the journalism trade,” she says. “Right here in Seattle, we’re poised to not simply defend and react, however to do one thing artistic and forward-looking…I feel it is a mannequin that actually has potential to strengthen our native information ecosystem, increase accountability reporting, in order that we now have extra eyes on Metropolis Corridor. We have now extra eyes on the firms that exert a variety of—usually unaccountable—energy in our metropolis.”
“I feel that we could be each,” she says. “We are able to each deal with the fundamentals and deal with protection, and we will take into consideration how we will transfer ahead and do visionary issues. I imply, we are the metropolis that did the $15 an hour minimal wage—the primary large metropolis within the nation. So I feel we will additionally think about the town that we would like Seattle to be.”
On this 12 months’s election, she’s asking voters to think about along with her—and consider that she will be able to make it occur. “I am a critic of Metropolis Corridor, however I additionally know Metropolis Corridor,” she says. “I am not coming into this as a novice in how politics works and the way authorities works and the way governing works and I feel that is an vital place to fill proper now—in a time the place the established order is clearly not working. We have to do issues in a different way, but additionally we have to do issues thoughtfully and from a spot of data and expertise
