Katie Wilson’s Short-Sighted Homelessness Plan Would Decimate New Affordable Housing Production

Seattle, WA – Today, Mayor Harrell’s re-election campaign released the following statement after Katie Wilson shared more details of her extreme plan to reduce affordable housing development. The Harrell campaign previously outlined and explained the infeasible nature of a plan to build 4,000 units. After this scrutiny revealed the severe cuts that would be required for this plan, Wilson rewrote her proposal to gut affordable housing production and repurpose 3,000 existing affordable and market-rate units ill-equipped to serve as homelessness housing.

Read the Harrell campaign’s statement below:

Katie Wilson claims to care about affordability, yet her signature plan would gut funding for the most effective tool we have to increase affordability: more housing.

Let’s be very clear what Wilson is proposing: Wilson wants to raid voter-approved investments in the production of thousands of units of affordable housing, and slash critical funding that helps affordable housing providers operate in a difficult economic environment.

Wilson’s retread idea for homelessness is to take people off the street – many with severe behavioral health and substance-use challenges – and isolate them throughout the city in market rate and workforce housing units where services aren’t in place to help them heal, recover, and get on a path to long-term stability.

This Wilson proposal is a blueprint for disaster – depriving low-income and working people of new affordable housing, setting up vulnerable people with complex needs to fail in environments not designed to support them, dooming struggling affordable housing providers, and betraying the voters who overwhelmingly passed the Housing Levy because of its clear commitment to build more housing.

Perhaps most shocking is that a near exact replica of this plan was tried before – and it failed in spectacular fashion. In 2022, KCRHA pledged to reduce unsheltered homelessness in the Downtown core to functional zero in less than a year by placing homeless individuals in vacant apartments. That didn’t happen. A small fraction of people were housed, and the authority ended the program a year and a half later after wasting millions of dollars in private and philanthropic investment.

Now, with this plan and a commitment to house every homeless person Downtown by the World Cup just six months into her term, Wilson wants to repeat this failure – this time at the expense of building new affordable housing.

Katie Wilson’s plan is a clear statement that the historic investments in affordable housing championed under Mayor Harrell would end if Wilson is elected mayor. Now we know why Katie Wilson has refused to put a price tag on her plan – because it’s based on faulty math that would decimate affordable housing production and providers, and undermine the will of the voters.

Meanwhile, Mayor Harrell has opened over 1,000 units of permanent supportive housing and funded even more – the universal standard best practice for addressing homelessness response and helping those in need recover. This clear focus on permanent supportive housing is part of the reason the number of people moving from shelter to permanent housing has increased by 50% under Mayor Harrell’s leadership. Real, impactful progress.

The public safety issues connected to homelessness on our streets too often lie at the interconnected challenges of mental illness, substance-use disorder, and housing instability. Mayor Harrell’s plan recognizes that shelter alone will not fix this problem, and, instead, we must fund intensive case management facilities tailored to stabilization and recovery. These efforts and their impact can be seen in investments like Co-LEAD, the STAR Center, and 100 new non-congregate shelter units set to open later this year, in addition to increased funding for additional shelter units with supportive services tailored to people with complex challenges in Mayor Harrell’s proposed budget. Solving public safety challenges at the intersection of homelessness requires quality and an actual realistic plan, not just quantity.

If re-elected, Mayor Harrell’s plan is to further invest in these kinds of service intensive beds that will put people on a meaningful path to recovery. He won’t slow down affordable housing production; he will accelerate ongoing work to fund, build, and open thousands of units of permanent supportive and affordable housing, all while making it easier and faster to build market-rate housing to moderate rents. A real plan – rooted in real action – that will get results.