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SEATTLE’S NEW MAYOR ON HER ‘SEWER SOCIALIST MENTALITY’  
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Jordan Bollag
January 2, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Ahead of her swearing in today, Seattle mayor Katie Wilson talks to
Jacobin about the everyday pressures squeezing working-class people
and why she’s a democratic socialist. _

Katie Wilson, a self-described democratic socialist and longtime
community organizer, narrowly defeated incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell
in November, Photo by Sarah Kusz / courtesy of Katie Wilson for Mayor

 

Katie Wilson is being sworn in today as the fifty-eighth mayor of
Seattle, following one of the closest and most consequential mayoral
contests in the city’s recent history. Wilson, a self-described
democratic socialist and longtime community organizer, narrowly
defeated incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell in November in a race that
reflected deep public frustration with rising housing costs,
homelessness, and economic inequality.

Wilson’s path to City Hall was not conventional. A political
newcomer in terms of elected office, she built her reputation over
more than a decade as cofounder and leader of the Transit Riders
Union, advocating for transit equity, renter protections, and
progressive revenue measures such as the JumpStart payroll tax on
large employers. Her campaign tapped into widespread dissatisfaction
with Seattle’s affordability crisis — where many households spend
a disproportionate share of income on housing — and offered a
platform centered on expanding affordable and social housing,
rethinking public safety approaches, and pursuing tax and spending
reforms to shift the city’s policy priorities.

In a wide-ranging conversation with _Jacobin_, Katie Wilson discusses
how her administration plans to confront Seattle’s affordability
crisis, and what it would mean for a democratic socialist to govern
effectively from City Hall. Wilson reflects on the limits of symbolic
politics, the hard trade-offs of executive power, and the challenge of
delivering tangible improvements in everyday life — while building a
broader working-class coalition capable of sustaining change beyond a
narrow electoral victory. The interview has been edited for length and
clarity.

JORDAN BOLLAG

What were the major issues that came up in your campaign, and what are
your policy priorities for the city?

KATIE WILSON

I campaigned on a strong platform and message of affordability. The
issue that prompted me to get into the race was the vote in February
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on funding for Seattle’s new social housing developer. And I think
among other things, that [ballot measure] showed that people really
feel the affordable housing crisis is a top issue right now.

Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve seen enormous increases in basic
cost of living, from the cost of rent to the cost of childcare and
food and everything. And I think it’s at this point where not just
the lowest-income households, but people who consider themselves
middle class or who have decent jobs, are just looking around and
wondering how much longer they can hold on in a city like Seattle. And
so tackling the affordability crisis really was a core message in my
campaign, and it’s going to be a core theme for me in office.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. But we need to do
everything we can, pull all the levers we can at the city level to do
something about the cost of these basic items.

JORDAN BOLLAG

On homelessness, you’ve criticized your predecessor Mayor Bruce
Harrell’s strategy of blanket sweeps without any next steps or
support. But you’ve also had some interesting comments about how too
often the Left has failed to put forward a response to this crisis. So
how can we end the inhumane approach to homelessness that we see from
the political establishment, but also give a positive left response
rather than falling into a kind of libertarian hands-off approach?

KATIE WILSON

During the campaign people would ask me, “What are your top three
issues or your top three priorities once you’re in office?” And
sometimes my answer to that was, “Homelessness, homelessness,
homelessness.”

Back in 2015, Seattle first declared a state of emergency on
homelessness and it’s just gotten worse since then. And particularly
_unsheltered_ homelessness. Seattle’s like a national outlier in
terms of how many people we have sleeping unsheltered on the street,
and it just can’t keep going that direction for so many reasons.

The homelessness crisis is going to be a major challenge for my
administration. And [solving it] is not rocket science, in a sense. We
have models that work. We know that the vast majority of homeless
people who are living unsheltered, if they are offered a space inside
that actually works for their needs and situation, they will accept
it. And so, it’s a matter of creating those realistic pathways for
people to get from the situation that they’re in to a place that is
stable and where they have the supportive services that many people
need.

But that’s hard for a lot of reasons. It’s hard for reasons of
resources. It’s hard because some people, especially someone who’s
chronically homeless and has complex needs related to drugs and mental
illness may need a lot of support. And so, part of the question is
just, where do the resources come from?

[There’s also the question of efficiency.] Right now, if you look at
our homelessness response system, there are so many players, and often
it ends up being really inefficient in the sense that we’re helping
someone over here, but then they kind of fall off a cliff. So we’ve
got the hospital that’s treating someone who is homeless and in
crisis, and then they get discharged back onto the street. And it’s
like, that is a moment where we should be helping someone inside. To
some extent, it’s a matter of reorganizing the systems that we have
so that we’re actually creating those realistic pathways for care.

On the Left, as radicals, we like to go _to the roots_, which is
always good. And long-term social housing is an anti-homelessness
policy.

We know that high housing costs and the affordable housing shortage
are at the root of our homelessness crisis. That’s been established,
if you look at jurisdictions around the country, and there’s a very
direct relationship between housing costs and availability of
affordable housing and homelessness rates. The results aren’t going
to be immediate, but we obviously need the kind of upstream root-cause
policies that support people and families so that they don’t become
homeless in the first place.

On the left, as radicals, we like to go _to the roots_. Long-term
social housing is an anti-homelessness policy.

In Seattle in particular, given our rates of unsheltered homelessness
and, like you said, the policy of the outgoing administration which is
just sweeping people from place to place, we need that short- and
medium-term plan that both recognizes the tragedy that unsheltered
homelessness is for the people living it, and then also takes
seriously the public safety and quality of life issues that it creates
for other people.

Sometimes [people] on the left have an attitude, and I’ve been
guilty of this myself in the past, where we kind of look down on
people who get frustrated about having to routinely see and interact
with homeless people who are mentally ill or using drugs in public or
whatever. And we think of them as lacking compassion or just not
understanding the roots of the crisis. But I think we have to
understand that that anger and the tendency to cast blame, whether
that’s at the city or at homeless people themselves, it’s kind of
a natural reaction.

And this is really a working-class issue too, right? If you’re rich
and you just drive into the garage of your fancy condo tower or you
live in a gated community — you’re mostly insulated from this
homelessness crisis. But if you’re a working person who rides public
transit and walks around your neighborhood, you probably are going to
have some interactions that are disquieting and sometimes frightening.
And if you work in a grocery store or a public library or you drive a
bus or some other job where you interact with the public on a daily
basis, that’s even more true. Lots of frontline workers are
assaulted by people experiencing mental health crises that are
exacerbated by being homeless. And during the campaign, I talked to
many such workers, and often they’re young people with progressive
left politics, but then their personal experiences at work lead them
to what might sound like incongruous positions on homelessness and
public safety. They’re like, “No, I want more cops around.” Or
they’re like, “Yeah, some people need to be forced into
treatment.”

I think that we need to take this really seriously on the Left and
really understand the nuances of it. So we need short- and medium-term
approaches that really start from these realities and these
experiences, and then also take seriously the need for increased
investment in drug treatment and mental health treatment, as well as
shelter and housing. And also understand that there is a role for law
enforcement. That people who are homeless and addicted to drugs are
often involved in various kinds of illegal activity beyond just
existing in public space and using drugs. And how we deal with the
kind of hotspots that exist in certain neighborhoods in Seattle where
there is active drug dealing and markets in stolen goods. That’s not
easy, and there’s a role for police in that.

So anyway, it’s complicated and I know that I don’t have all the
answers, but I really do think that this is something that we have to
figure out. I’m sure it will not be without controversy and
missteps, but, it’s definitely a very high priority for me to make
progress on some of those really gnarly issues. And honestly, there
are going to be issues, there are going to be policies that I put
forward and issues that my administration champions that are going to
put us at odds with business or certain parts of the business class.
But I really think that homelessness is an area where my
administration’s going to have to work closely with a lot of
business interests and where there are honestly some very strong
shared priorities. There might be differences of opinion about how we
pay for stuff, but I can tell you that businesses small and large are
desperate for real progress on the homelessness crisis.

JORDAN BOLLAG

In your race, just like in Zohran Mamdani’s race, your opponent
attacked you for previous support for defunding the police. I thought
you were effective at acknowledging both where the movement was coming
from but also the problems with the approach. Mayor Harrell ran on
public safety, but did not really deliver, and he oversaw shortages
and turnover at the Seattle Police Department. So what would be your
vision on public safety and having an effective police response but
also holding police accountable for overreach? There’s been
discussion of the recent SPOG [Seattle Police Officers Guild] contract
and your decision to keep [Chief of Police Shon] Barnes, and I’m
wondering what you’re thinking about all that.

KATIE WILSON

I mean, it’s funny reflecting on the total discrediting of the
defund slogan, in terms of everyone just being like, “Oh yeah,
defund failed.” But if you think about it, a big part of that
platform was establishing an alternative response [to public safety]
and civilianizing roles that police don’t need to perform. And those
things remain extremely popular, right?

On the campaign, I spent a lot of time talking about like, yes, we
need to expand our care department, which is Seattle’s alternative
response, and we need to make it effective and allowed to respond to
more kinds of calls, and we need to civilianize other roles that the
police don’t need to perform, like responding to non-injury traffic
accidents and taking down reports of property crime. And all that
stuff was totally part of the defund platform.

I don’t think we would have a care department today if it wasn’t
for the 2020 movement. The SPOG contract that you mentioned puts some
unfortunate limitations on the kinds of operations of the care team in
terms of the kinds of situations that they’re allowed to respond to.

I’m hoping that we can get creative, with leadership from the
mayor’s office in coordination with the police department, with the
care department, and with our fire department, as well as with
external service providers that have alternative response or street
outreach teams and things. I think that we can actually do a lot more
than we’re currently doing in terms of making sure that the right
kind of responder arrives at crisis calls, and that we’re not
responding with an armed police response when it’s unnecessary.

I do think that we need to focus on better policing, trying as much as
possible to recruit officers from within the neighborhoods and
communities that they’re going to be policing in.

I’m really eager to get to work on that. And then in terms of
policing, accountability is still an issue. We have this 2017
accountability ordinance which, while not perfect, also just still has
not been implemented, largely because of the police contract. So
there’s work to be done there, although, until the contract comes up
for negotiation again, we’re a little bit limited in what we can do.

I do think that we need to focus on better policing, trying as much as
possible to recruit officers from within the neighborhoods and
communities that they’re going to be policing in. And we’re also
very far from our goals in terms of hiring women officers. And I
understand the kind of leftist response that says, “you can’t
reform policing just by making the officers look like the diversity of
the population.” But I do think there’s an importance to that. It
speaks to the culture within the department.

We can make progress on all of that, and we need to, and then,
obviously, there are all of the upstream things that we need to do to
make crimes of poverty and desperation less likely. There’s a whole
area of work around gun violence prevention and youth violence
prevention, and how we can better support underserved youth and make
sure that we have mentorship programs, job training programs, and
places that youth can go where they don’t have to spend money, where
there’s community and things for them to do.

All of that I think is really important. And then honestly, just
making real progress on unsheltered homelessness is a big part of this
as well. Police spend a huge percentage of their time on
homelessness-related things.

JORDAN BOLLAG

You mentioned that you launched your campaign in the wake of the
victory of a ballot initiative to fund mixed-income, publicly owned
social housing. But we’ve already seen delays and turmoil and
funding delays and turnover at the social housing developer. So, how
can we make sure that we actually build social housing at a large
scale, so that it’s something that makes a real difference in
people’s lives?

KATIE WILSON

Yeah, I think this is so important. This is why I jumped into the
race, and it’s so important to me that our social housing developer
is successful. It’s going to be a big project to really get the
social housing developer up and running so that it can build social
housing at scale and also operate it.

This is especially important given the goals of the developer to have
resident participation in the management of the buildings. It’s so
important that we get it right and that it’s not seen as a failure.
[But] like you said, it’s been slow going, and part of that is
because of lack of support from the mayor’s office.

In the first half of this year, the revenue is going to start coming
in from the new tax that was approved in February. And I think
that’s anticipated to be about $50 million a year. I haven’t seen
any updated revenue projections, so I don’t know if that’s
changed. So it’s very important that we’re ready to receive that
money and to begin putting it to good use. That’s going to be a very
high priority for me.

Fifty million dollars a year is a lot of money, but not when it comes
to developing and building new housing [at scale]. So we’re going to
need to be creative about acquiring existing housing as well as
developing new housing. And one thing I talked about on the campaign
was exploring using the city’s bonding capacity. So I do think that
that’s something that we should look at, to figure out if that is a
good idea. There’s another idea that I’ve been thinking about that
I know the folks over at Washingtonians for Public Banking have put
forward, I’ve discussed with them a little bit, which is basically
creating a public bank or a public development authority that could
start as a revolving loan fund for the social housing developer using
the city’s current assets.

So that’s kind of a potential alternative to issuing a huge bond
that would have to be paid back with interest. The upshot is my
administration is going to be doing some deep thinking about housing
finance and how we can best use the money that’s coming in, and
other ways that we can leverage the city’s assets and borrowing
power to make sure that we’re able to get the social housing
developer and build housing at scale.

That could also look like exploring partnerships with Seattle Housing
Authority, with King County Housing Authority, and other entities. One
of the cool things about the social housing developer is that it’s
committed to union-built housing, which is somewhat unusual for the
affordable housing sector, and I think there’s an opportunity there
to build the political coalition that has an interest in doing this at
scale, and coming up with the resources to do so.

Our goal is to build affordable housing at scale, but there are also
other models of nonmarket, community-owned, and community-controlled
housing and space that the city should be doubling down on.

And it’s an interesting time to be thinking about that, because
we’re in a moment where the private housing market is flagging in
terms of construction. Permit applications are way down, and there are
lots of union workers out of work. So, can we get it together to build
the political momentum to really get social housing going in a way
that can be a significant investment in our economy, in a way that’s
putting union workers to work in the coming years?

Our goal is to build affordable housing at scale, but there are also
other models of nonmarket, community-owned, and community-controlled
housing and space that the city should be doubling down on. Seattle
already has land trusts, co-ops, and projects that create affordable
housing for artists and other residents, and the city can be a much
stronger partner in supporting and expanding those models.

JORDAN BOLLAG

Fifteen years ago, you founded the Transit Riders Union, which has
fought for a city that’s walkable, bikeable, and has reliable public
transit. Now that TRU’s founder has been elected mayor, what does
that mean for the transportation and the urban planning in Seattle?

KATIE WILSON

I think that we deserve a world-class mass transit system in Seattle
so I’m definitely going to be working on that. One way that I think
about this is in terms of “mode shift.” It’s kind of an abstract
way to look at it, but, from the point of view of the climate crisis,
from the point of view of improving the quality of life in this city,
how do we shift people away from single-occupancy vehicles and toward
other modes?

The city has some rather ambitious goals around mode shift that we are
just not anywhere on track to meet. So, the city can do a lot of
things, and one is improving public transit.

We don’t directly control King County Metro, the bus system, but the
city does buy a lot of bus service from Metro. We have a renewal
measure coming up next year for some of that, so that’s an
opportunity to think about how we’re doing that, possibly expanding
that.

The city can do dedicated bus lanes. One of the issues I campaigned on
was bus lanes on Denny, for Route 8. So things like bus lanes and bus
shelters and the kind of infrastructure around the bus system that the
city controls — I think there’s a lot more that we can do about
that. I also will have a seat on the Sound Transit board, and there
are a lot of critical decisions to be made — unfortunately mostly
having to do with huge budget shortfalls — around Sound Transit.

A lot of the work that I did with the Transit Riders Union was around
transit affordability, and winning free or low-cost fare programs. One
piece of legislation that the Transit Riders Union was actually
working on — that was interrupted by the pandemic — would have
required large employers to pay for transit passes for their workers.
That would be a first-in-the-nation thing as far as I know, and I
still think that’s a good idea.

In general, free transit is worth exploring. There are some real
trade-offs there just because money that you would spend making
transit free can also make transit better, and if you make transit
free, it becomes even more important to make it better because more
people start using it and it kind of overtaxes the system. But I think
that’s worth exploring, and that would be a conversation with King
County because it would be in some ways hard for Seattle to do that
alone.

Dense, affordable housing is also a transportation strategy and a
climate strategy.

And obviously, bike and pedestrian safety is really important. Another
thing I’ll say is just that, transportation is one thing, but dense,
affordable housing is also a transportation strategy and a climate
strategy, because when people live near where they work, near where
they do other things, it also becomes more feasible for them to bike,
walk, take transit. So transportation can’t really be isolated from
housing policy.

I’m inspired by what socialist mayors in Europe have done; so
we’ve got Anne Hidalgo in Paris who has gone big on social housing
and the “fifteen-minute city” concept and expanding bike lanes
around the city. In Madrid, there’s Manuela Carmena, and she did a
lot of public housing and these low-emission zones, which is a concept
that’s been talked about here too, and then there are the
“superblocks” in Barcelona that Ada Colau pioneered.

So there’s a lot of cool socialist left–urbanism kind of ideas
that are inspiring, that we can look at in other cities.

JORDAN BOLLAG

That brings me to another question, which is that relatively recently,
you’ve been identifying yourself more often as a socialist, but it
wasn’t necessarily a front-and-center label in your campaign. So
what does being a socialist mean? What is the importance, or lack
thereof, of the label?

KATIE WILSON

First of all, I’ll say I’ve been a socialist for a very long time,
since before it was cool to be a socialist.

I was a socialist when I moved to Seattle back in 2004. I don’t know
how deep to go here, but one thing I’ll say that’s relevant and
that ties to my career is just, as a socialist, I believe that the
profound changes that need to happen in our society and our economy
can only be accomplished through the organized power of working
people.

I’ve been a socialist for a very long time, since before it was cool
to be a socialist.

I think that a major challenge for the Left in the twenty-first
century is figuring out how we organize effectively and build real
institutional power, and the labor movement has historically been a
major vehicle of that. And obviously it’s critical to hold the line
and build union membership as much as possible, but union density
keeps falling, and there are structural reasons for that that are not
easily overcome. So we also need to experiment with other forms of
organizing and building power, and that belief has really guided my
career.

I cofounded the Transit Riders Union as kind of an experiment in that
vein, and we started out as this anti-austerity membership
organization of transit riders during the Great Recession and grew
into a multi-issue, economic justice organization that fights for
higher wages, stronger renter protections, progressive taxes, and so
on. That kind of emphasis on organizing and building power is a really
important part of it for me and something that I plan to carry into
the mayor’s office.

Using that office to encourage grassroots organizing, to put forward
policies that folks on the outside can organize and build power around
is really important to me.

If you’re asking what being a socialist means theoretically or
something, I could talk to you about that for a long time, but right
now the engine of our economy is the endless accumulation of private
profit, and capitalism has been very effective at producing wealth and
incentivizing certain kinds of creativity and innovation, but it also
tends to concentrate that wealth in the hands of a few, and it rests
on exploitation of workers and the natural environment and has at its
core this self-undermining dynamic that in my opinion marks it out as
a transitory phase in humanity’s evolution. I think that we can do
better and that, ultimately, we’re going to have to figure out how
to do better.

It’s tempting for me to use my mayoral platform to start a big
conversation around socialism, but I don’t think that’s what I was
elected to do. So yeah, I didn’t make being a socialist front and
center of my campaign, but I also didn’t shy away from the label.

The other thing that I’ll say is in terms of how [being a democratic
socialist] influences my mayorship: I have a very deep appreciation of
how change happens, and that it comes from the bottom to the top, so
using the office to encourage organizing and building power is
important. But also, as a socialist, the more that we can move toward
recognizing things that are public goods, and fund and provide them as
such, the better, right? Childcare is an obvious example where, at
least in the United States, we totally fail to treat childcare as a
public good. Maybe a less obvious one is high-quality local news, and
I have a proposal that I’m excited to roll out at some point around
public funding for local news outlets.

I have a very deep appreciation of how change happens, and that it
comes from the bottom to the top, so using the office to encourage
organizing and building power is important.

So that’s thematically related to being a socialist — believing
that we should be providing more things publicly, and in general, this
moment with obviously Mamdani being the big example, I think we have
this opportunity here in Seattle too. There’s this opportunity for
socialists or people coming from the progressive left who are coming
into executive positions like mayorships to really show that we can
govern, right?

And if we’re socialists, we believe the government should be able to
do big things. So if we’re trying to make the case for socialism,
but then our government is failing to deliver basic services, that’s
a problem, like, we’re not making our case very well. I just think
that there’s an opportunity here to demonstrate that competence. I
don’t want to minimize the challenges or ignore the deliberate
undermining of government that’s happened in the context of
neoliberalism, but I do think that there’s a lot that we can do at
the local level. It’s a kind of sewer socialist mentality. But I
think that there’s a lot we can do.

JORDAN BOLLAG

Another important socialist mayor was Bernie Sanders, who won his
first election by a mere ten votes, which is similar to you, really
winning this election by a tiny margin. And in Bernie’s case, he won
reelection by a much larger margin, really created a movement, and
mobilized ordinary people against the city’s political establishment
successfully. But there are also left-wing mayors who have lost
support. We’ve seen in Chicago poor approval ratings for Mayor
Brandon Johnson. In Seattle, a few years ago, we had a wave of more
conservative candidates defeating progressive incumbents.

So, given that the business establishment, or what we might call the
capitalist class, is going to try to crush you on many issues, how can
we expand our base and turn this victory into a larger transformation?

KATIE WILSON

That’s a great question. I think there’s a real opportunity here,
partly because even though my victory was narrow, if you look at how I
was attacked during the campaign, it wasn’t really about being a
socialist or being on the left. They tried that before the primary,
and it just didn’t work. There was a _Seattle Times_ piece in the
fall where they talked to the other side’s political consultants,
and they said they’d tested different lines of attack in focus
groups. The idea that I was “too far left” just didn’t resonate.
So they ended up focusing almost entirely on me being inexperienced.

And I think that’s important, because it suggests that the vision
and platform I put forward are actually more popular than the
narrowness of the win might imply. There are a lot of people who were
fine with the agenda itself, but who voted for Harrell because they
were persuaded — by a couple million dollars’ worth of advertising
— that I wouldn’t be able to carry [that agenda] out.

If we’re trying to make the case for socialism, but our government
is failing to deliver basic services, that’s a problem — we’re
not making our case well. There’s an opportunity here to demonstrate
that competence.

So what I think that means is that, if we show real effectiveness, a
lot of those people will come around. There are plenty of folks who
didn’t support me in the election but actually want me to succeed
— they just doubted that I could do the job, in large part because
they were getting mailers with my ten-year-old résumé on them or
whatever.

Ultimately, people want to see results, and that’s going to be the
key. In terms of certain elements of the business establishment, or
the capitalist class, trying to undermine me, like yeah, sure,
that’s going to happen. I do really think, and — we’ll test this
out in practice — but I really think that homelessness and public
safety are two areas where there is a lot of common ground, and where
they want to see progress and everyone wants to see progress.

And so I think this is really a matter of, again, demonstrating
results on issues that everyone cares about and being smart about
picking your battles.

That’s really going to be the key, being smart about picking your
battles, and then also being smart about how you conduct those
battles. The big, ambitious, controversial things that I want to do,
it’s going to be very important to build a coalition that can
support them and to have a real strategy around organizing and
building the public will and narrative that makes things that looked
impossible become inevitable.

So there’s a lot of strategy involved there, and there’s going to
be a lot of organizing and coalition-building that’s going to go
into that. It’ll be interesting to see what happens.

JORDAN BOLLAG

That makes me think about the role of grassroots organizing during
your administration. Zohran emerged from the Democratic Socialists of
America, while you come out of the Transit Riders Union. I’m curious
how you see your relationship with progressive organizations going
forward. In New York City, we’ve seen the launch of a new group, Our
Time, meant to organize Zohran’s supporters around his agenda. Do
you think something similar makes sense in Seattle, or do you expect
to work primarily through existing organizations like TRU, DSA, or
others?

KATIE WILSON

I don’t think those two things are mutually exclusive, and, I
don’t want to anticipate any announcement that we might make, but
let’s just say there are discussions going on, there are plans afoot
to perhaps create something analogous to Our Time.

I think that becomes important because there are all these people who
got involved in my campaign and who are attached to the movement, so
to speak, through that, right? And so you don’t want to lose those
people. So we may be going in that direction. But in my mind, creating
a new organization, it’s not going to be this fully-fledged
membership organization in the way that TRU or DSA are, right?

What we’re able to win will exist along a wide spectrum, from
watered-down legislation to something much more robust. Where we end
up will depend heavily on the strength of organizing that happens on
the outside.

I think that part of the function of that organization we would build
would be to be a bridge between campaign volunteers and people who are
kind of connected to my campaign or my administration, to
organizations like DSA and TRU, that are organizing at a deeper level.

I anticipate that, as we take up specific issues, we’ll be looking
for ones we can move on relatively quickly. One example I talked about
on the campaign is rental junk fees. It’s a really good organizing
issue because it’s broadly popular — no one likes hidden fees.

At the same time, what we’re able to win will exist along a wide
spectrum, from legislation that’s watered down and not very helpful
to something much more robust. Where we end up on that spectrum will
depend heavily on the strength of the organizing that happens on the
outside. I would expect to convene a group of organizations that do,
or want to do, tenant organizing, and work together to develop both an
organizing strategy and the legislation itself.

JORDAN BOLLAG

How do you see your role in engaging beyond the city, in the county-
and state-level reforms you will need in order to deliver for
Seattleites?

KATIE WILSON

I anticipate having a very close working relationship with our new
county executive, Girmay Zahilay, on the many, many issues that cross
the city and the county, and obviously transit is a big one of those.
And homelessness is a big one of those too because the city and the
county jointly fund and influence the King County Regional
Homelessness Authority. Also public health is housed at King County,
and then also our court system and King County Jail. There are all
these issues where really close collaboration is necessary, and so I
anticipate doing that. And then at the state level, there’s so much.
We have our Seattle delegation, or our legislators from Seattle, and I
also anticipate working closely with them. Tax reform, progressive
revenue at the state level is very, very important right now.

We have this very regressive tax system in Washington State, still the
second most regressive in the country, and so I think that the city
can be a really strong voice and strategic partner in figuring out how
we move our tax system in a more progressive direction. Taxing the
rich and wealthy corporations instead of working and poor people. And
that’s both getting more revenue at the state level for things that
affect Seattle residents, but also getting more local options for tax
authority.

That’s actually more important in the county than the city because
the city already has more tax authority than the county does, for
example. It would be great to have a progressive statewide income tax.
So that’s a project to work on. A lot of the things that I’ve
worked on in my career with the Transit Riders Union, like minimum
wage stuff and renter protections, ideally that is stuff that would be
done statewide.

So I think there’s an opportunity for Seattle to take a leadership
role in convening progressive local elected officials around the
county and the state in advancing policies locally that can help to
create a statewide movement. For one example, on the junk fees thing,
up in Bellingham, they passed legislation around rental junk fees,
which has ended up not as strong as one might hope, but it’s cool
that they did that. And I know the DSA up there was involved, and Jace
Cotton, the council member up there who pioneered it, we were in touch
with him at the Transit Riders Union. When one jurisdiction does
something, I think it can inspire other jurisdictions, and it would be
cool to have that happen more systematically and really link up
progressive and leftist-socialist electeds around the state to do
stuff that could then turn into statewide legislation.

_Katie Wilson is the mayor of Seattle._

_Jordan Z. Bollag is an organizer with the Seattle Democratic
Socialists of America, former policy director of the 2024 Marianne
Williamson presidential campaign, and a member of Jewish Voice for
Peace._

 

 

 

* Katie Wilson
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* Seattle
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* sewer socialism
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* Democratic Socialists of America
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