Mayor Katie Wilson made her first appearance at the State of Downtown event on March 11 and opened by thanking DSA’s Jon Scholes for serving as a co-chair of her transition committee. The Mayor said her transition team reached out to community leaders to hear from the “broadest possible cross-section of people to hear about your needs and what you would like my administration prioritize and accomplish.”
Mayor Wilson said the message back from the community was clear, “We heard that affordability, homelessness, and public safety are among the very highest priorities for almost everyone in this city — and I know that is true for downtown.”
She emphasized that downtown is an economic engine for the city and that it “will be on display like never before” during the upcoming FIFA World Cup. The Mayor pointed out that downtown has over 100,000 residents in a cluster of neighborhoods, incredible public spaces, “amazing” local businesses, and a new playground. “In many ways, it’s a model of what a vibrant neighborhood should look like. . . when downtown succeeds, Seattle succeeds and the entire region benefits” the Mayor explained.
Highlighting homelessness and public safety, the Mayor declared that “we all agree on the importance of addressing these issues.” While acknowledging the challenge of making progress on these issues, Mayor Wilson expressed “I’m determined to prove that we can take on big challenges together and accomplish big things” including keeping our parks and public spaces “welcoming and accessible to all.”
To start, Mayor Wilson discussed the executive order she signed the week before to start the process of creating 1,000 new units of housing this year – “and that’s just the first step for the 4,000 units I hope to open over the next four years. . . It’s time we started treating this emergency like an emergency and my plan will do exactly that.”
“The goal is simple. Fewer people living outside. More people moving into housing. And more welcoming public spaces for everybody,” the Mayor stated.
Then, she addressed the public safety issues facing downtown. “We also need to act to make sure people are safe and feel safe when they come downtown.” The Mayor called on expanding the work of the CARE team, which intervenes with people having mental health crises and focusing police and outreach teams on the “highest impact areas, even as we continue to work to address our police staffing shortage.”
The Mayor moved on to say she has heard from many businesses about the cost of doing business in the city and how its tax code contributes to those costs. She restated her belief that progressive taxes have to be a part of the solution to addressing the city’s “significant” budget shortfall but also declared that “it’s not ideal for our tax environment for businesses to be wildly out of step with neighboring jurisdictions. And I will be keeping that in mind as we look at options.” She added that, as a progressive and socialist, she wants to restore faith in government that it is a “good and effective steward of our collective resources.”
Derek Thompson, co-author of the book “Abundance” with Ezra Klein, also spoke to the DSA crowd. He advocated that an abundance agenda is needed address issues of “manufactured scarcity.” An abundance agenda would combine the best from different ideologies. “It would take the left’s emphasis on human welfare . . . and combine that with the right’s fixation on national greatness . . . and libertarian’s obsession with finding bad rules.”
He went on to critique Democrats by pointing out that blue states have the hardest time building new housing and have the largest homelessness populations. And why has Texas led the nation in solar power if that is a progressive priority? Thompson said part of the reason is that Democrats “have learned to associate success with how much spending they authorized, rather than how much they actually built with that spending.” He offered that Democrats need to focus on accomplishments and not just spending.
