Socialist in Seattle

This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

On January 2nd, surrounded by supporters with yellow “This is Your City” posters, Mayor-elect Katie Wilson told the crowd assembled for her inauguration at Seattle City Hall that they have “a right to be here and to live a dignified life, whatever your background and whatever your income.” Governing well, she said, would mean focusing on both bread and roses: better material circumstances and basic respect.

Elected by just a 2,011-vote margin in November, Wilson was best known as the co-founder of the Transit Riders Union, a local progressive organizing group. She is also an open socialist. In advance of last year’s election, incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell used predictable attack lines against Wilson, calling her inexperienced and her platform “complaints with no solutions.” Despite her victory, proving Harrell wrong will be a tall task.

Seattle may be one of the most left-leaning cities in the country, but the city council currently lacks a progressive majority and the state legislature is reluctant to approve new taxes, like the income tax Wilson said she would consider. Even vocal supporters who’d known her for years began criticizing Wilson from the left over her turning on surveillance cameras during the World Cup. And business-backed polling suggests other, more conservative city residents believe Wilson isn’t taking public safety seriously enough, especially after she ousted the city’s police chief in July.

Wilson can also point to some victories. Thanks in large part to her influence, Seattle’s city council recently approved both a universal free school lunch program and a ban on the “junk fees” landlords use to squeeze money out of renters. Larger changes to the city’s public transit system and housing market are in the works.

“Being a progressive left mayor has its challenges, and I think there’s definitely some actors out there who would rather score points and try to undermine a progressive left administration than actually work together for the good of the city,” Mayor Wilson told the Prospect almost eight months after her inauguration. “But I’m really proud of the work that we’re doing.”

The work has really only begun. Wilson must handle a multiyear budget deficit in the hundreds of millions and keep together an increasingly fractious coalition, while overseeing meaningful “sewer socialist” reforms to housing and public transit. And the clock is ticking on her opportunities.

Seattle hasn’t re-elected a mayor since 2005. If Wilson remains popular, being able to credibly back primaries from the left could give her a leg up at the bargaining table. But the most recent poll, funded by the local Chamber of Commerce, found only 37 percent of city residents approve of her performance so far. If public opinion continues to sour, Wilson’s dreams of a $1 billion social housing bond will remain out of reach.

WES MILLS, WILSON’S SUCCESSOR AS GENERAL SECRETARY of the Transit Riders Union, says he was “supremely confident from the jump” that she would be elected mayor. “A whole lot of people did not like [the Harrell] administration, and just from a pragmatic political perspective, we were running into the whole anti-incumbency wave,” he explained. Wilson also “sounds like the kind of person who listens to you, who understands what you are saying, and who has the same context that you do,” Mills said.

According to Wilson, the dominant factor in her decision to run for office was the overwhelming victory of Proposition 1A, a 2025 ballot initiative that taxes employers to properly fund the Seattle Social Housing Developer. Harrell supported a very limited alternative, but over 60 percent of voters still opted to support the more ambitious measure. That upset, in Wilson’s estimation, revealed an opening for the left.

Despite running as a socialist, Wilson was never endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the organization continues to maintain a comfortable distance. One early Wilson volunteer recalled that there was never a recognizable “DSA presence” at her campaign events.

A second difference between Wilson and New York City’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani—who was elected and assumed office on the same day as her—is that Wilson’s social media posts do not automatically go viral. There is no online trend joking about how just mentioning her name will fix your neighborhood’s pothole or broken traffic light.

She hasn’t inspired as much devotion from the left as Mamdani. “We’re having this kind of ‘doomer’ moment of buyer’s remorse with Katie, where we feel like she’s not living up to our expectations,” explained Jeff Paul, the co-executive director of pro–social housing nonprofit House Our Neighbors. “She’s not as cool as Zohran, obviously, and I feel that too. That is my emotional response. But to anybody who’s listening on the left in Seattle, we can’t stay stuck in that place. We have to make the most of what is in front of us.”

The area where Wilson has made the most progress is easily public transit. In July, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved a ballot initiative for this November that if approved would renew the Seattle Transit Measure, a 2020 sales tax devoted to transit, for ten years and double its revenue, producing hundreds of millions more dollars to improve bus frequency and reliability, expand streetcar and light rail, and more robustly subsidize fares.

Sarah Gaspard, a relatively recent arrival to Seattle, attended a July city council meeting to support the proposal. Gaspard told the Prospect she’d been happy when Wilson first announced her run because of the chance to have a “more transit-oriented advocate as mayor” when, in her opinion, the topic had been relatively neglected under Harrell.

The system of trains, buses, and ferries serving Seattle commuters might compare favorably to many other American cities, but regular users still find it wanting. Per the 2025 Seattle Transit Measure performance report, ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. More acutely, poor bus service on Route 8 has become infamous. Wilson’s very first executive order called for the creation of a dedicated bus lane there, and in August she personally painted “Bus Only” on Denny Way as part of the change.

The sales tax has been in place since 2014, but the ballot measure would rapidly expand the investment. According to Kirk Hovenkotter, executive director of the Transportation Choices Coalition, Wilson’s leadership has been critical. She is “someone who believes in better bus service and who wants to make and provide great public services,” Hovenkotter said.

Gaspard said she’s “glad that [Wilson] was able to get the full sales tax increase because it’s not maybe the most equitable funding measure, but it still helps people a lot.” The total tax burden is estimated at under $5 a month for the median two-person household, and “if that gets you to work on time, so you don’t miss an hour of work or you don’t miss an important medical appointment, that’s worth it,” she stated.

Wilson herself is reliant on public transit. An anti-Wilson screed penned by the Washington Post editorial board last year began by noting that “she does not own a car.” When Wes Mills was asked why no one on Wilson’s transition team was focused on transit, he would genially joke that “there is someone, she’s called the mayor.”

“Improving the transit system can sound a little wonky or something, but this is really affordability legislation in my mind,” Wilson said. “Because it’s making our most cost-effective form of transportation viable for many more people, really getting those bus lines to a level of frequency and reliability that the line cook or the janitor can actually rely on the bus to get to work every day and doesn’t need to drive, or perhaps doesn’t even need to own a car.”

SAVING MONEY ON TRANSIT IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT for Seattleites because their other expenses are soaking up more of their paychecks. Over the last ten years, house prices in the Seattle metro area almost doubled, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ measure of rent in the area increased by well over 50 percent.

These trends, in addition to the sizable and growing unhoused population, have made Seattle one of the most active social housing hubs in the United States. Inspired by the social housing models in Red Vienna, Singapore, and Montgomery County, Maryland, organizers’ goal is that “in 25 years, 25 percent of the housing in Seattle is social housing,” according to Suresh Chanmugam, a steering committee member for House Our Neighbors and another nonprofit, Tech 4 Housing.

Passed in 2023 with support from local labor unions, Wilson’s Transit Riders Union, and House Our Neighbors, Initiative 135 established the Seattle Social Housing Developer. Then, in February of last year, voters approved Proposition 1A, funding the new organization.

Earlier this year, the Seattle Social Housing Developer bought its first property, the Elara at the Market, for $60.9 million. A beautiful building just blocks away from the famed Pike Place Market, the Elara (constructed in 2018) contains 150 units. As current residents move out, vacancies will be filled by new residents earning between 0 and 80 percent of the local median income, who will pay permanently affordable rents. Over 10,000 Seattleites applied for units in the building during a two-week open lottery.

“We have a housing shortage,” city resident and early Wilson donor Mark Hamann said matter-of-factly. He explained that while he has nothing against social housing, he believes “what social housing does is it guarantees somebody a musical chair … but the problem in musical chairs is that you don’t have enough chairs. We need more chairs.”

Paul and Chanmugam each stressed the importance of building more and denser housing in Seattle. “Housing density is incredibly important for both housing affordability and for climate implications,” Paul related. “Dense urban places are how we get good, frequent public transit. That’s how we get walkable cities, and that’s how we prevent sprawl.”

The public need demands solutions beyond social housing, Chanmugam offered. “Developers, you know, if they were the evil people that we sometimes think they are, would be building lots of housing if they were somehow getting away with huge amounts of profits,” he said. “But they’re not. It is currently unprofitable to build housing. The real villains in housing in America are the landlords and the wealthy white owners of McMansions, the NIMBYs, right? Landlords thrive off of no competition. And Katie Wilson ran on this.”

Under Mayor Harrell, Seattle’s comprehensive housing plan, which lays out metro needs for the next 20 years, significantly cut back on development relative to what the planning department initially proposed, in some cases by up to half. Wilson, by comparison, has called her effort to upzone Seattle the “Taller, Denser, Faster” plan.

“We’re going to be looking at basically allowing apartment-style multifamily housing, not just right along a busy arterial, but within a five-minute walkshed,” she explained to the Prospect. “Trying to allow more housing to be built in more places, and also just a more ambitious zoning proposal for neighborhood centers and urban villages that would allow taller buildings and just a wider scope.”

She also stressed that policymakers “need to pay attention to housing all across the income spectrum, from market-rate housing all the way down to permanent supportive housing, and of course shelter.” Toward this end, Wilson recently issued an executive order creating a “Housing Production Task Force” and upgrading the permitting process to help both affordable and market-rate projects pencil out and get approved.

But executive orders can only go so far. When speaking about city politics, many Seattleites will name-drop the so-called “Seattle process.” One city resident helpfully defined the phrase as “how every proposal to do anything in the city just gets bogged down in minutiae or arguments, and so it’s hard to make things happen quickly.”

Some of Wilson’s most high-profile efforts have fallen victim to the Seattle process. On the campaign trail, she promised to open 4,000 new shelter beds by the end of her first term, and 500 by this summer’s World Cup. But the city is nowhere close to meeting that goal. In an interview with local news site PubliCola, Wilson attributed the delays partially to her nascent relationship with the city council.

Her rezoning plans could also fail. The city council recently voted to limit appeals of environmental reviews for zoning changes, a change Wilson praised. But upzonings approved under Harrell are still working their way through the courts. In the meantime, constructing more dense, environmentally friendly housing is on hold. Despite rapid rent increases in recent years, the city only issued building permits for seven new residential construction projects in July.

For Wilson’s most ambitious plans to succeed, the city council will need to sign off on more sweeping administrative changes like the new restrictions on environmental review appeals. Conservative and moderate councilors will either have to become more willing to advance the Wilson agenda or be replaced, local progressives predicted. Paul suggested that Seattle organizers “should be purposefully polarizing issues and making it clear where people stand.” Once the public can tell the difference between real progressives and their moderate impersonators, then “Katie can get more supporters in and get a majority on city council,” they stated.

Or, as Wes Mills put it, “our biggest concern for the future is, how do you organize with a city government instead of organizing against a city government?”

This article appears in Oct 2026 Issue.