Can Seattle’s new democratic socialist mayor deliver?
By Sal Rodriguez | January 2, 2026
While the election of Zohran Mamdani to be the next mayor of New York City dominated national headlines, voters in Seattle also elected a self-described democratic socialist to be their next mayor.
With 50.4% of the vote, Katie Wilson ousted the center-left incumbent Bruce Harrell. Wilson will take office on Jan. 1, 2026.
Wilson made a name for herself as a longtime progressive activist in the city. In 2011, she cofounded the Seattle Transit Riders Union, which among other things promotes the idea that transit is a human right and therefore argues for free or reduced fares and expanding transit services. In 2020, Wilson was also involved in crafting the so-called Jumpstart Payroll Expense Tax on large employers in Seattle, which raises hundreds of millions of dollars per year and has increasingly been used to paper over the city’s budget deficits.
Given her ideological commitments, her policy ideas are generally what you’d expect them to be. She has said “it’s worth exploring a public option grocery store,” for example, and that Seattle should look into or pass a litany of taxes, including a capital gains tax, a vacancy tax on both residential and commercial properties, a digital advertising tax and a local estate tax.
“The city needs to be smart about using our existing budget efficiently and effectively, but we must also raise new progressive revenue to continue to deliver the services residents depend on, from libraries and parks to shelter and emergency response,” she argues.
This government-action-first approach naturally trickles down to her top policy priority of housing.
Wilson has said she was partly inspired to challenge Harrell after the success earlier this year of a ballot measure to create a Seattle Social Housing Developer to develop publicly-funded housing in the city. “It shows that the voters want action on affordable housing, and that’s what I want to see,” she told PubliCola. “We need people who are going to stand up and work for the city and not just obey corporate backers.”
Wilson has been direct about what she wants to see on matters of housing. Her campaign website says she will, in addition to ensuring the Seattle Social Housing Developer works to fulfill the promise of social housing, “pursue a $1 billion bond for union-built affordable housing, because incremental progress isn’t enough.”
While Washington state preempts local governments from implementing rent-control policies of their own, Wilson told the local NPR affiliate that, “she wants landlords to pay moving expenses if they raise the rent more than 5%.”
If these all sound like top-down, heavy-handed government meddling of the sort that will produce worse results than a deregulatory approach, you are right. However, Wilson exhibited appreciation for the private sector’s role in the housing market during a podcastdiscussion.
“[We] absolutely need to be making it easier to build more housing,” she said. “We need the private market to build a lot more housing around the city in order to address our housing shortage. And one of the big reasons why we’ve seen these astronomical rent increases over the last 10, 15, 20 years is because housing production in the private market has not kept pace with the growing population and especially the influx of higher-paid tech workers.”
She goes on to argue that the private sector can only generate so much and that it’s up to the government to ensure there’s more housing specifically for lower-income Seattleites, which is where her plans come into play.
There are two distinct things to watch, then: whether she can actually make it easier for more housing to get built and whether she can get the Seattle Social Housing Developer to build sufficient cost-effective housing at a reasonable speed.
To the first point, legalizing greater density housing in more parts of the city will be key to getting more housing online. She would also be doing the Lord’s work if she can simplify the city’s permitting processes, including by ditching or really streamlining the city’s design-review program. She should also take a look at the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, which has been described by researchers as a “tax on some additional development.”
To the second point, there are reasons to be skeptical of government-run housing projects. The sluggish, costly experience of Los Angeles building housing for the homeless is one major real-world data point for good intentions going wrong.
It’s hard to disagree with my colleague Steven Greenhut’s observation about Seattle’s social housing dreams:
“One must be delusional to believe the solution to the city’s housing crisis is to empower a government-run housing developer that can’t evict tenants, has access to a giant taxpayer slush fund, and is run by tenant activists who bicker about racism and don’t understand markets.”
Alas, the voters of Seattle wanted a democratic socialist with a penchant for tax increases to lead them and have already given their blessings to a highly interventionist role for government in the housing market.
How far will Wilson go? How quickly can she adapt when her ideals conflict with economic and political realities? Can she moderate on the job? Can Katie Wilson prove skeptics wrong and effectively govern Seattle? The answers to all of these remain to be seen.
Sal Rodriguez is opinion editor for the Southern California News Group and a senior fellow with the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of Dynamism or Decay? Getting City Hall Out of the Way, published by the Pacific Research Institute.
