At the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival on May 31 in Seattle, the Cascade PBS newsroom hosted a “Share Your Story” table, offering attendees an opportunity to share what was on their minds.
Several people wanted to talk about the future of housing in Seattle. Attendees criticized the prioritization of dense housing projects as well as the inaccessible cost of housing in the city.
One of the first people to stop by our booth was Rachel Kay, who was highly critical of civil processes and housing in the Seattle metro area. Kay says she had been friends with a person named Eucytus, who died by suicide during an eviction conducted by the King County Sheriff's Department in 2023.
“[Eucytus] asked, for example, for mental health counselors and the CARE team to be sent to assist them, rather than cops, and that request was ignored by their property manager,” Kay said.
Kay says Eucytus grew up in poverty and was injured during their machinist training and unable to complete the program. Kay believes more of the city’s resources should be put toward solving the housing and homelessness crises rather than toward law enforcement.
“We’re not providing enough resources in terms of helping poor people get the education they need in order to get living-wage jobs,” Kay said.
Kathleen Wolf researches nature-based human health at the University of Washington. She expressed concern for the long-term environmental impact of Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan.
“The comp plan is reinforcing access, creation, design, construction of housing, but it is dismal, dismal in terms of including landscape in those designs,” Wolf said.
Wolf also believes more housing developments should retain “big trees.” She says these trees are the identity of Seattle, but are often torn down with the city’s authorization. While she acknowledges concerns about space, Wolf says architects have designed templates that save large trees with the same number of planned housing units.
One attendee told us he thinks many developers are focusing too much on building as many units as possible, and not enough on building communities. He used his own neighborhood as an example.
“Shoreline is allowing lots of development of these town homes everywhere. That just creates more fractioned living,” said Paul Barrera. “There really just needs to be more gathering spaces.”
Barrera provides legal representation for one such project in North Seattle, designed to be more walkable and with a sense of community in mind. He’s optimistic about the One Seattle plan.
Other attendees were more critical of the current presidential administration than of local officials. Rajat Aggarwal, who was volunteering at the Ideas Festival, wonders why there seems to be so little response to the President’s actions from the Democratic party.
“Why is he able to do these things without any resistance?” Aggarwal asked. “I would have assumed that, you know, a strong opposition would be formed that will make things harder for him.”
Mike Nelson, a retired attorney, thinks President Donald Trump has turned the executive order into a “fourth branch of government.”
“The legislative branch can’t play its role, the judicial branch certainly can’t play its role and even the executive branch is having difficulties because it’s being stepped on,” Nelson said. “It’s time that people step back and do something.”
Mike Pesca, who was at the Ideas Festival to host a live taping of his podcast The Gist, saw the “Share Your Story” table and decided to sit down and chat for a few minutes. He wanted to talk a little more about his session with Jake Tapper and the United States’ shift to what he called a “low-trust society.”
“[To restore trust], very successful media outlets have to operate on the ideals of transparency and not just feeding the audience what they want,” Pesca said. “On my show, I do an ‘I was wrong’ week, it gets a lot of credit from the listeners and let me tell you, you don’t run out of material.”
