‘First step is addressing housing costs’: Army veteran seeks Seattle mayoral seat to push for more progressive change
Jun 21, 2025, 5:00 AM
Seattle’s mayoral race is in full swing, with candidates campaigning as much as possible before the August primary election.
One candidate, Thaddeus Whelan, believes Seattle needs bold, progressive leadership, and he thinks he’s the one to provide it. Whelan joined “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio with Charlie Harger and Manda Factor to outline why his approach to the mayoral office would be different than his predecessors.
“I’ve seen what federal overreach and a heavy hand can cause, how it can cause problems for even just regular people,” Whelan said.
Whelan pushes progressive change in Seattle mayoral race
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Whelan is a Texas native who studied at Princeton University and spent time in the Army at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Even though his campaign focuses on a myriad of issues, Whelan said that government overreach and affordable housing are among his top priorities.
“I would genuinely say that the first step is addressing housing costs so that we can actually have affordable housing for everybody, not just homeowners, but for everybody,” Whelan said.
When it comes to Seattle’s rampant drug problem, Whelan believes that the legalization of drugs is “the genuine way to get to harm reduction.”
“I hate to bring this to our current events with the ICE raids that are happening within the city, but once you criminalize it, and once you start attacking people for for doing these things that are effectively civil in nature, you are causing them to go into the shadows and hurt themselves more,” Whelan said.
Whelan, who lives in North Seattle as a project management analyst for the FAA, says he has experienced the rising unaffordability of the city firsthand, and that rising costs have many consequences on Seattle.
“There’s actually kind of a diasporic reaction when it comes to crime. We’ve seen violent crimes go down, but we’ve actually seen shoplifting, petty theft, and breaking and entering having a slight uptick,” Whelan said. “That is genuinely down to a socio-economic condition that people are just not getting what they need. We don’t pay people enough to live in our city. People are struggling to survive, and a lot of that comes down to just making certain that people have their basic needs met.
Listen to the full conversation below.
Listen to “Seattle’s Morning News” with Charlie Harger and Manda Factor weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio. Subscribe to the podcast here.
