KIRO NEWSRADIO OPINION

‘She’s upholding her bad ideas’: Jake says Seattle mayor’s new tiny home village lets people ‘do as much drugs as you want’

Jun 8, 2026, 6:29 PM | Updated: 6:29 pm

While Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson didn’t deliver on her goal of 500 shelter beds before the World Cup, she did open 75 new tiny homes in Interbay over the weekend.

Wilson told KIRO 7 that because recovery is complicated, the city is not demanding people be abstinent from drugs when they enter the village.

“She’s upholding her bad ideas,” KIRO host Jake Skorheim said on “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio.

Jake said he recently attended a wedding with several firefighters and pointed out they are responding to a significant number of calls regarding homelessness and drugs.

“You grow up dreaming about running into the fire and saving somebody from a burning building, and in reality, you’re actually just handing out Narcan all day,” he said.

Jake said the village is demoralizing for first responders who respond to addiction-related calls on a daily basis and questioned why the city is spending $16,000 per unit on shelters that don’t require sobriety.

“It has got to be kind of demoralizing when you think about, like, how much longer is this going to be a part of your career, where every day you have to see this part of society — which is like the saddest, most forgotten, totally neglected, left behind part of society — who are addicted to these horrible things that cannot come out on their own. And then the city says, ‘Hey, you know what we’re gonna do? Let’s build you a little shelter. You can just go in there and do as much drugs as you want,'” he said.

A better investment than a tiny home village

Jake said the city could instead partner with a local trailer supply company and get individual trailers for less than $16,000. He added that lawmakers could use the billions of dollars they spend on homelessness and invest it in a state-of-the-art facility in eastern Washington.

“When people see off in the distance, tell you what, life looks a little bit better,” he said.

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3

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