Thaddeus Whelan for Mayor

13 June 2025

To my Seattle community, please be safe and know your rights tomorrow.

seattletimes.comWhere did Seattle’s affordable housing go?In one decade, Seattle turned into a vastly riskier place to live for poor people. It became nearly impossible to afford even the cheapest market-rate housing.

31 Mar 2025

Erica has the right of it here. The loss of affordable housing cannot be a reliance on capital interests. The local government MUST instantiate systems that act as a counter lever to these systems moving up in cost with impunity.

Erica C. Barnett@ericacbarnett.bsky.social

This story—fundamentally, about the loss of "naturally occurring affordable housing" since 2008—has an interesting premise (there are fewer cheap units now than before the housing crisis) but doesn't support it: According to the data in the story, there are more. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

31 Mar 2025

Going after small victories like junk fee removal and other items required on rental agreements will not change the fact the giant landowners can sit on empty lots and buildings because the increase in value of the land is higher than their tax. We need to attack it there.

13 Mar 2025

Collaboration with fascism is fascism. Nobody is coming to save us, and we need leaders that are willing to do the most basic political action to save their people. Schumer is a disgrace.

Sahil Kapur@sahilkapur.bsky.social

Schumer: "For sure, the Republican bill is a terrible option. It is not a clean CR. It is deeply partisan. It doesn't address far too many of this country's needs. But I believe allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option."

After a long weekend, I'm back in the saddle. It's time for another deep dive into a Seattle problem with a policy solution! Today, I want to cover one of the more direct criticisms I have of Harrell and the OneSeattle plan, its anemic public transit ideas.

Ok, side rant over. Tying this up neatly, we are all human. We are not our cars, or our homes. We need to make sure the HUMANS can exist comfortably first. To do that, we need to start acting like our mass transit is our first option, and right now, the Light Rail is an afterthought.

secure.anedot.comAllies of Thaddeus WhelanJoin me in supporting Allies of Thaddeus Whelan

Also, if you haven't yet, please think about donating $10 to my campaign. It goes a long way to helping me qualify for Democracy Vouchers, and actually being able to put these ideas into action. More so the Light Rail expansion, less so the diatribe on Cars.

Every single station should take priority when building infrastructure ad infinitum. We want to build a city for people, not for cars. This isn't a mid-tier Disney trilogy, and we don't need to act like every single building that goes up needs a 1:1 ratio of beds to parking.

That's without even covering the fact that those exact movies covered how being focused on perfect efficiency ruins important communities! THE MOVIE ABOUT LIVING CARS GIVES LESS PERMISSIONS TO THEIR CHARACTERS THAN WE DO TO TWO-TON HUNKS OF PLASTIC.

theurbanist.orgSunday Video: CityNerd Visits Seattle and Talks Freeway-Adjacent Rail (Hello, Northgate) - The Urbanist# In September, Ray Delahanty of CityNerd made a visit to his hometown, Seattle, to ride Link light rail and share some takeaways from the Northgate station area. Delahanty found Link to be highly com...

We actually see this type of growth happening IN SPITE of these decisions. Northgate is becoming a wonderful hub even as it has the black eye of a 10 lane highway right next to it. However, we should just expect every Light Rail to instantly produce a hub, we need to cultivate it.

Basically every stop south of IAD seemingly forgets that it should use the Rail as its primary transit system, surrounded on both sides by cars. Seriously, who thought "Let's make sure the cars get more space than the train." in Othello?

On a more fundamental level, and a piece may have picked up on, running the Light Rail by I-5 was always a poor decision, because it will always be compared to highway speed/traffic rather than as what it actually is; an hub of community and connection to the rest of the city.

We want our rail stations to be ingrained within our community, not something people have to park at to use. In an attempt to get around the same zoning problems they created, Harrell and his ilk have continued to hamstring the largest positive points a Light Rail station can bring.

I will not claim to be able to write or explain this better than a legend of writing, so I'll leave it below. To sum it up though, just because you spend less once does not mean you spend less forever. That is exactly where our politics have ended us up; Buying shitty boots every year.

This is honestly why Harrell's 'big news' for the West Seattle expansion being sped up by a year left me rolling my eyes. One year doesn't make a difference when the timeline is still measured in decades. I can't feign excitement when in that same amount of time we will see multiple new Presidents.

The most recognizable problem is the GLACIAL pace of expansion. It took over a decade to get a Bellevue expansion, and is going to be another decade until we get the West Seattle expansion. When @theneedling.com is writing satire like this, you have to look at how to make it better.

The most important part of all of this is expansion of the funding windows. SDOT has been very clear that the only thing really holding them up is that the city is only funding a percentage of what we could do in a year with proper resources. This leads us to Pratchett's "Boots Economic Theory.

It is no secret that I love the Light Rail. In fact, you can find me there every day going to and from work. The locations of the stops are (for the most part) in good places for getting to work by foot or taking a bus to/from a more specific place. So what's the problem(s)?

Sara Nelson's continued efforts to gut an already incredibly conservative OneSeattle plan continue to hurt us at every level.

Ryan Packer@typewriteralley.bsky.social

At council briefing, Dan Strauss says that he has been removed as the vice chair of the select committee on the Comprehensive Plan, and replaced with Mark Solomon. He says that Sara Nelson never directly told him this change was happening and calls the move highly unusual.

Reminder that Harrell called Elon a "smart innovator". If tearing our international credibility down at record pace is innovating, I don't want it.

Hello, Seattle! This is, in fact, the official Thad for Mayor account. For the most part, this will be a more formal correspondence area for me, and today, I'm going to outline one major policy that I have for the City. I'm tired of the vibes based running, as we need better answers now.

Beyond just that basic cost, rent prices being high makes literally everything worse. Its a direct corollary, and it affects everybody. If you want your groceries to be cheaper, your streets safer, and your life to be less stressed, you should want rent prices to be as low as possible.

I tried to break this up into digestible pieces so the conversation can be focused in parts. I'll try to keep my posts here focused, but if you want to see me be much meaner to NIMBYs, follow my personal @thaddeusw.bsky.social Be good to each other, and have a nice day.

Will every neighborhood get a new townhome/apartment complex? No, and that's fine! That's the whole point of making it city-wide, and not piecemeal. So lets stop acting like asking for an affordable place to live will immediately cause the end of Seattle.

If you own a home now, great! You might see your annual raise in house worth go from 20 to 18%, but even that isn't guaranteed. What is a guarantee is that if we don't act on the insane cost of living now, you won't have any friends here to brag about your house price to.

So, how do we do that? First, we need to make it much easier to build, and to do that we need the ground under the buildings. Currently, ~75% of Seattle is zoned for Single Family homes, which not only means that this space can generally only hold 3-5 people, but you can't have any more EVER.

This is a call to bulldoze every house in Seattle, its an entirely reasonable request to fight without having 3 limbs chopped off. The monied interests in this city will tell you its fine, but we have seen this type of fight before.

mynorthwest.comSeattle's population keeps growing, but that growth has slowedThe population of Seattle grew by nearly 6,000 people from 749,134 to 755,078, or about 0.8%, between July 2022 and July 2023.

First up: Housing! Probably the most voiced problem is the pure affordability of Seattle, whether you rent or want to own a home. Before COVID, Seattle was the fast growing city in the nation, but that number has slipped. Why is that? A key component is the inability for people to stay in the city.