Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson outlines housing plan as race intensifies

General Election Day is less than two weeks away, and the race for Seattle mayor is entering its final stretch.

After taking the lead in a poll over Mayor Bruce Harrell, Katie Wilson started laying the groundwork for her potential administration.

“We’ve been doing a lot of serious work to make sure that I’m going to be ready to step into office and lead from day one,” Wilson told “The John Curley Show” on KIRO Newsradio Thursday.

Harrell recently claimed Wilson lacks the experience to become mayor, saying she has “zero housing experience” and has “done no work in the sector.”

Meanwhile, Wilson sees the homelessness crisis as a housing issue.

“There’s lots of homeless people in Seattle who work full-time jobs, and they might live in their vehicle, or they might even live in a tent, but housing is so expensive that it’s just really hard to afford that. That’s more of an issue here,” Wilson shared.

And really, if we look at it, we’ve had this tech boom for the last 10, 20 years, we’ve had population growth, and our housing stock hasn’t grown to match, and that’s really driven up rents. It’s really driven up home prices, and so we have a much worse homelessness crisis here as a result,” she continued.

Wilson said building more housing comes down to Seattle’s land use and zoning laws.

“One of the things that we can do, that I’m interested in, is expanding the number of neighborhood centers around the city, and so those are areas where, kind of like neighborhood business districts — you’re allowed to build higher, you’re allowed to build more multi-family housing. There’s a lot of things we can do in our land use and zoning laws to make it possible for the private market to build more housing in the great neighborhoods all over the city. And we absolutely need to do that,” she explained.

When asked about deterring homeless people from other cities from coming to Seattle, Wilson said she doesn’t think that’s the right approach.

“Certainly within King County, it’s true that a lot of people who become homeless in other cities end up coming to Seattle because that is where lots of the services are. That is where a lot of the shelter is — and so we do need those other cities to step up — but I don’t think that trying to take a hard line here in Seattle on not helping people who become homeless somewhere else is the right way to do that,” she said.

Watch the full discussion in the conversation above.

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