Katie Wilson has never held elected office, but the longtime community organizer and Transit Riders Union co-founder is now the Democratic front-runner for Seattle mayor after winning nearly 51% of the vote in the August primary against incumbent Bruce Harrell.
For many Seattle civic leaders, the tech companies operating here have often represented a double-edged sword. Corporations including Amazon, Expedia Group, Google, Meta and numerous others provide well-paying jobs that stoke the economy, but the influx of affluent workers has strained the region’s housing affordability and availability.
As Seattle grapples with persistent issues including homelessness and fentanyl abuse while debating how to fund city services, Wilson wants to engage the tech sector as part of the solution. But how that would specifically play out is unclear.
“Seattle’s a very innovative city,” she said. “We have a lot of big challenges here, but as I’m going around the city and I’m talking to residents and I’m talking to business owners and talking to tech workers, there’s so much promise here.”
Wilson helped design and pass Seattle’s controversial JumpStart payroll expense tax in 2020. A majority of the revenue — $360 million in 2024 — is generated from 10 companies, including Amazon.
“The JumpStart tax, overall, I would call it a very successful policy,” she told GeekWire. “It both prevented devastating service cuts during the recession, and also has basically allowed the city’s budget to be balanced for the last four years.”
The tax evolved from a previous “head tax” proposal in 2018 that drew sharp criticism from Amazon, which later announced that it was moving thousands of jobs to nearby Bellevue.
Speaking at the GeekWire Summit in 2021, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy called out the strained relations with Seattle leadership, saying that “the City Council has become less enamored with business or with Amazon.”
Those tensions have eased during Harrell’s term, and Wilson said she aims to work with the company. She touted her coalition building efforts and said collaboration is possible even if parties are not aligned on every issue.
“Obviously Amazon and the other big tech companies are very important players in our city and in our economy, and so I think it’s very important that the city has working relationships there,” she said.
But the question of how to fund city operations continues to plague Seattle, which now faces a two-year budget deficit of nearly $150 million.
The overarching challenge, Wilson said, is that Washington has the nation’s second-most regressive tax system due to its lack of a state or local income taxes, and reliance on taxes that hit lower-income residents harder than the wealthy.
The state passed several new taxes on businesses earlier this year to help fund public schools, community safety programs and other services. Some tech leaders in Washington, including Microsoft President Brad Smith, have been vocal in criticizing recent state tax proposals that impact businesses.
To help fill Seattle’s budget hole, voters earlier this year passed a tax on big companies to pay for public housing. Wilson supported the measure, while Harrell, Amazon and Microsoft opposed it.
Harrell proposed an alternative funding mechanism for public housing from the existing JumpStart tax. In a recent debate, the mayor said he wants affordable housing, but expressed concern about businesses leaving Seattle over higher taxes.
Wilson is also a proponent of taxing profits made from the sale of stocks and bonds, though the Seattle City Council last year narrowly rejected a proposed 2% capital gains tax.
What the state and city need, Wilson said, “is a progressive tax system that is robust enough that it is funding the public goods and services that we all depend on to have a functional state, to have a functional city.”
Economic diversification
While tech dominates the Seattle economy, Wilson is interested in diversifying that focus. In a recent post on Reddit, she cautioned that a heavy reliance on the tech sector could pose problems for Seattle down the road.
“We’ve really been blithely riding the tech wave for the past 15 years and I don’t think we can just assume that will continue,” she wrote.
Wilson told GeekWire she’s making “building a green economy” a high priority. That would include partnering with the University of Washington and the Port of Seattle to foster job creation around clean energy and other climate technologies.
In January, the city teamed up with the UW and others in launching the Seattle Climate Innovation Hub to support entrepreneurs in the climate sector and to aid the revitalization of the city’s downtown.
Revitalizing and re-envisioning downtown
Seattle’s downtown continues to regain some of its pre-COVID vitality, which has improved as employees are recalled to offices. But the recovery remains fragile as downtown vacancy rates are above 30%. Wilson is interested in developing a stronger residential presence in the city’s core to boost its vibrancy beyond 9-5 working hours.
“The future of downtown is obviously very central to Seattle’s future as a whole,” she said. “And I would really want to put a big focus on the transformation of downtown to also more of a residential, 24-hour neighborhood.”
That could entail building more housing downtown and converting offices to residential spaces where feasible. The city would also need to add more amenities such as grocery stores, pharmacies and childcare, plus improving safety.
Tackling homelessness and substance abuse
While Amazon and Microsoft have stoked the region’s economy, those gains have contributed to rising housing costs. To help address the situation, the tech giants are funding the construction and preservation of affordable housing. Amazon recently touted the creation of 10,000 units in the Seattle area since 2021.
But the homeless crisis in Seattle and the surrounding county has continued to worsen over the past decade.
Wilson has vowed to establish 4,000 spaces for people experiencing homelessness, including tiny shelters, overnight beds in church facilities, and other emergency solutions. She said next summer’s World Cup matches in Seattle will put pressure on the city to move unhoused people off the streets.
She also wants to explore the creation of a municipal voucher program to help people rent the thousands of vacant apartments that are earmarked for affordable housing, but still too expensive for many renters.
And as the fentanyl crisis continues in Seattle, Wilson is eager to employ new treatments available to people struggling with the drug, and also wants to pair treatment with shelter stability and housing.
“It’s going to take money,” Wilson said of her plans to address homelessness. “A lot of that is going to be existing, repurposed money, and potentially also new money. But I think we can get there over four years.”
