Last August, an alarming, high-profile audit of King County’s Department of Community and Human Services’ spending on “high-risk” youth program providers found widespread problems and indications of potential fraud. So now, 10 months later, has DCHS been able to clean up the issues that led to the serious internal control problems the audit surfaced?

New DCHS Director Susan McLaughlin joins Erica and Sandeep (while David is away) to make the case that DCHS is back on track. The agency is now emphasizing “a culture of accountability,” McLaughlin tells us, and is implementing new supports for smaller community-based organizations to document their work. McLaughlin also expresses strong opposition to a recent proposal from King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski that would require the council to directly approve all spending under the county’s Best Starts for Kids program, saying his proposed approach would “have devastating impacts” by bottlenecking DCHS' work.

Going beyond the audit aftermath, McLaughlin tells us that she is confident that DCHS is ready to provide oversight of homelessness services contracts if County Executive Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Wilson decide to claw back those contracts from the troubled King County Regional Homelessness Authority (as they're rumored to be planning), and shares insights about what DCHS learned from the contentious process of siting its new Seattle crisis care clinic on Capitol Hill.

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Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice, which takes up Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to double the current transit sales tax. It’s a familiar Seattle policy dilemma: how do we pay for the reliable public transit we need without relying on regressive taxes?

Next, we examine the newly passed Housing Opportunities Package (HOP). It’s a massive set of zoning changes and regulatory shifts aimed at kickstarting residential construction across the city. Is the unanimous vote a good sign for the upcoming, high-stakes battle over Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan?

Finally, we’re opening the mailbag to field your questions and comments. If you’ve got a take on transit, thoughts on housing, or just want to tell us we’re getting it wrong, write in at realseattlenice@gmail.com.

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Daryl Fairweather, Chief Economist at Redfin and author of Hate the Game: Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love, and Work, joins us to explain why the housing market is doing something it almost never does here: cooling off.

In this episode we break down the recent headlines that stopped Seattleites mid-scroll: prices here are dropping here faster than anywhere else in the country. Fairweather points to the perfect storm behind the slowdown: sky-high mortgage rates hitting expensive markets the hardest, Amazon layoffs, and a local tech sector that's lost the confidence it had pre-pandemic. She says San Francisco is eating Seattle's lunch right now, thanks to its AI boom.

But Daryl also sees a silver lining: a slow, steady reset could finally make Seattle more livable and affordable for working people.

We also get into the policy fights. Should Seattle build its way out of the crisis with more market-rate housing, or invest in social housing? (She says: yes, and yes.) Why does she think rent control or stabilization backfires? What can Seattle learn from Austin's building boom, and what should it absolutely not copy?

And what about AI? Daryl thinks it could genuinely help by speeding up permitting or making modular housing cheaper to build. But she's not buying the hype wholesale. Contractors still need to show up and do the work, and no algorithm is going to fix a bureaucratic bottleneck.

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Thanks to Uncle Ike's pot shop for sponsoring this week's episode! If you want to advertise please contact us at realseattlenice@gmail.com

Support the show

Your support on Patreon helps pay for editing, production, live events and the unique, hard-hitting local journalism and commentary you hear weekly on Seattle Nice.