Harger: Housing, the Bite of Seattle shooting, security cameras. Mayor Katie Wilson keeps finding new ways to postpone hard decisions

About 46,000 Seattle renter households spend more than half their income on housing.

Half.

Rent gets paid. Groceries get squeezed. The down payment account receives whatever survives, which in plenty of households amounts to loose change and a heroic little tax refund. I know young people who work, save, and do everything we told them responsible adults do, and the house keeps moving farther away anyway.

Meanwhile, the people who actually build things are drowning in paperwork and reviews, and they’ve done the math. Fine, they say. No houses. I’ll build a warehouse in Sumner instead. A warehouse gets permitted much faster, and not once has anyone asked it to respond thoughtfully to neighborhood context.

Mayor Katie Wilson knows all this. She ran for mayor on it. Housing affordability was one of her signature issues, and her own executive order lays out the emergency in her own words: nearly a third of Seattle households stretched past the affordability line, 112,000 more homes needed by 2044, and annual housing units in permit applications down roughly 60% from a typical pre-pandemic year.

A 60% collapse in the pipeline. Identified by the mayor. In an order titled “Rapidly Accelerating the Production of All Kinds of Housing to Support Affordability.”

Her response to the housing crisis? A task force.

Sense of urgency? Its final recommendations are due in September. Not next month. September of 2027.

“Rapidly” is doing some heavy lifting.

It’s the third time this year Seattle has watched the same move. Clear information after the Bite of Seattle shooting? Still waiting.

A decision on the Stadium District security cameras? More review.

Now her signature issue, the one she ran on, the one she styled herself an expert on, goes into a room for 13 months. The pattern is the story: Seattle elected a mayor who says she knows the material cold and cannot bring herself to make a call on it.

So what exactly does a task force need 13 months to discover? Walk through why the permits actually collapsed, and you’ll see the problem: there’s nothing left to find.

Why Seattle housing permits fell 60%

Some of that collapse is beyond any mayor’s reach. Interest rates roughly doubled the cost of borrowing money to build. Materials cost more. Construction labor costs more. Plenty of apartment projects died in a spreadsheet because the numbers stopped penciling, and no executive order un-kills them.

But stack Seattle’s own contributions on top. Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) fees. Permit timelines that stretch months longer than neighboring cities. Parking mandates, infrastructure requirements, hearings, appeals.

Every month of delay costs money. Every revision costs money. When rates were near zero, projects could absorb Seattle’s process tax and still pencil. Rates went up, the cushion vanished, and the projects that die first are the ones carrying the heaviest local load.

Katie Wilson backed away, and it wasn’t the first time

Thirteen months of study. Then recommendations, legislation, hearings, implementation, permits, financing and construction. At this rate, a 28-year-old renter could qualify for senior housing before the ribbon cutting.

Now, the mayor’s order does a few things immediately. City departments will assign people to help affordable-housing developers navigate the permitting system, which is one solution. Another would be to make the permitting system navigable.

But the bigger decisions go to the task force, and that may tell us something about what happens when Mayor Katie Wilson gets close to making one herself. The Seattle Times reported her administration had been considering a steep, temporary reduction in the MHA fees developers pay on new construction. The idea was pretty simple: projects aren’t penciling, so reduce one of the costs and see whether some of them start penciling again.

Then nonprofit affordable-housing developers objected, and they had a perfectly understandable reason. They rely on that money. Which brings us to the part of governing that can’t be solved by gathering more information. Two groups want different things. Both have a case. There is no spreadsheet that makes everybody happy, and no task force is going to discover a magical third option in which developers pay less and nonprofits somehow receive more.

Eventually, somebody has to choose.

Wilson chose more conversation.

And that’s where the concern about indecision begins to look less like a political attack and more like an observation. It is not unreasonable for a mayor to study an issue or listen to stakeholders. In fact, both are generally preferable to guessing. But the purpose of gathering information is eventually to have enough information to make a decision. Otherwise, you’re just collecting it.

Sandeep Kaushik, a political strategist who’d land comfortably on the left in most American cities, called the task force a “real failure and lost opportunity,” and summed it up: “I guess our housing affordability crisis isn’t so urgent after all.”

And once you notice that tendency, you start seeing versions of it elsewhere. The permanent decision on Stadium District security cameras is waiting for more review. After the Bite of Seattle shooting, Wilson was notably quiet at a moment when the public wanted information and visible leadership. Different issues, certainly, but they arrive at the same uncomfortable point in the process: the facts are in, the competing interests have spoken, and now someone has to make the call.

One more Seattle touch: The mayor’s office told The Seattle Times it hasn’t decided whether the task force meetings will be open to the public. The city may spend a year rethinking its housing rules in meetings its residents can’t watch.

Olympia is moving in inches. Seattle is moving in studies

Olympia deserves some credit on the state level. Over the past few sessions, the Legislature actually passed bills that may help. Duplexes and fourplexes are now legal in neighborhoods that spent a century zoned for one house on one lot. You can build a backyard cottage without treating it like an application to build a nuclear plant.

Was it watered down in committee? Of course. Everything is. But those are real laws producing real permits in cities all over the state right now.

Which is what makes the Wilson approach so frustrating. The mayor doesn’t need a study to tell her what the study will say. Her own executive order already says it: supply lowers costs, and the city’s own requirements are a significant barrier. The state showed the path. It’s incremental, and it’s imperfect, and it exists.

So run the tape one more time. After the Bite of Seattle shooting, the mayor stumbled badly getting basic information to the public, and now an Inspector General will spend months determining why. The Stadium District cameras are dark while another review decides their future. And now housing, the issue Wilson campaigned on and the crisis her own executive order describes in alarming detail, gets a task force whose final recommendations arrive more than a year from now.

These aren’t identical decisions. But the governing instinct is starting to look familiar.

When the easy part is identifying the problem and the hard part is choosing between competing interests, Katie Wilson keeps reaching for more process.

Seattle has plenty of process.

What it needs from a mayor is a decision.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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