A Mayor’s Socialist Goals Stall Out

BY JARED MITOVICH

SEATTLE—Like New York, this West Coast city narrowly elected a Democratic socialist as mayor last year. On the campaign trail, Katie Wilson pitched an ambitious agenda: lower costs, tax the wealthy and build thousands of shelter units for the homeless.

However, in recent days, the mayor stunned allies and observers by proposing a city budget with no new taxes, scaledback pledges and nearly $50 million in cuts across various departments—all while boosting spending for police officers.

The small-c conservative proposal bears little resemblance to the rent freezes, city-run grocery pilots, and luxury second-home taxes emerging from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York.

Since taking office in January, Wilson has struggled to shake up City Hall. The 44year-old former transit organizer has been hobbled by a $175 million budget deficit, staff upheaval, and a steep learning curve on public safety—Seattle’s most intractable issue, and one progressives nationwide have been eager to show they can tackle.

A summer shooting near the Space Needle, at the Bite of Seattle food festival, left three people dead, including a suspect, and exposed governance gaps. A communication breakdown between the mayor’s office and Seattle police kept the public in the dark about the shooting for five hours, and the official emergency alert system went unused. At least one suspect remains at large, and the fallout haunts City Hall.

“I don’t know who is in charge but someone needs to assume command,” Wilson’s police chief, Shon Barnes, texted command staff an hour after the shooting, according to messages released by the Seattle Police Department. Barnes, who was out of town at the time, resigned days later, and the mayor has apologized for making mistakes. Prominent Seattle-area companies such as Microsoft, Nordstrom and Starbucks have demanded a public-safety plan from Wilson by year-end.

For her signature initiative on homelessness, Wilson promised 4,000 shelter units by the end of her term—double her predecessor’s target— ignoring some campaign advisers who warned the figure was unrealistic, according to a senior staffer on Wilson’s campaign. After she took office, Seattle’s business community donated $3 million to kickstart the project, but the funds sat unused for months as City Hall stumbled through bureaucratic hurdles to scope out sites for tiny homes, according to Joe Nguyen, who runs Seattle’s business lobby.

By September, Wilson cut her goal to around 1,000 beds in two years, blaming budget constraints and the pace of government. She called her original goal aspirational. “The point of putting that big number out there is we need to talk about the scale of the crisis,” Wilson told the Seattle Times.

Nguyen, a former state senator, was less generous. “Welcome to government,” he said in an interview.

Homelessness and public--safety concerns aren’t new to Seattle. Wilson, a first-time candidate, unseated incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell in part because voters were unhappy with the status quo. She ran on her background as a renter who understood Seattle’s affordability crisis. On public safety, she embraced the city’s well-regarded alternative response efforts and other policies that excited her political base—some of which have come back to bite her.

On the trail, she strongly opposed expanding Seattle’s network of surveillance cameras warning they could render neighborhoods “more vulnerable” to the Trump administration’s “attacks on immigrants, trans people, and big cities in general.” In January, Wilson officials asked if it was possible to pause or reallocate a $3 million expansion of the network approved by City Council, according to emails viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Then, a month into Wilson’s term, two high-school students were shot and killed while waiting for the bus in Rainier Beach, by the shores of Lake Washington. Grieving parents urged Wilson, a mother, to address youth gun violence. “Turn the damn cameras on” became a rallying cry.

The mayor has since moved toward expanding the camera network—switching some on during the World Cup and ordering an independent audit of the system’s data protections, due this month, before making a final policy decision.

Some allies describe Wilson as a consensus-builder who takes time to understand an issue and is willing to change her mind. But her hedging has dismayed some former campaign staffers and supporters. Wilson “shouldn’t go back on the impression that she gave during the campaign, which is that she would reject mass surveillance,” said Cliff Cawthon, an organizer with the Community Not Cameras coalition who worked with Wilson for years before supporting her campaign.

Council member Bob Kettle, the centrist public-safety committee chair, said Wilson isn’t governing like a Democratic socialist because “when you’re faced with the realities of sitting in the seat and doing the job, you have to deal with those realities.”

Wilson’s new budget proposal calls for funding 66 additional police officers citywide in the next year.

Seattle has about 1.31 officers per 1,000 residents, 43% fewer than San Francisco and 58% fewer than Boston.

While New York makes for an easy ideological comparison, it is San Francisco that has become the envy of Seattle officials. An adviser to Wilson joined business leaders on a trip there in September, where they met with members of the administration of Mayor Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat, to study his tactics for cleaning up streets, reducing homelessness and improving the corporate climate.

“They clearly have serious people doing serious work,” said Jon Scholes, president of the Downtown Seattle Association, who joined the trip. “I mean, it’s not just symbolism and performance. It’s real governance and management.”

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson ran on an ambitious progressive agenda. She recently has had to scale back her goals.

LINDSEY

WASSON/ AP