Week in Review: June 20, 2025 - with Robert Cruickshank

Hacks & Wonks Interviews with Seattle City Council District 2 Candidates

“‘No Kings’ protests in Seattle, nationwide counter Trump military parade: Live updates” by Seattle Times staff and wire services from The Seattle Times

“Ferguson prepares for possibility of Trump deploying troops in Washington” by Jake Goldstein-Street from Washington State Standard

“WA immigrants’ protected health data shared with deportation officials” by Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks from The Seattle Times

“King County’s Housing First Initiative Boasts High Success Rate” by Amy Sundberg from The Urbanist

“WA cuts funding for homeless encampment removal program” by Greg Kim from The Seattle Times

“Saka: People Who Support Keeping "Curby" Are Anti-Immigrant, Radical "Defund the Police" Carpetbaggers” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola

“Council Taps Brakes on RealPage Ban, Delaying One Week to Address Building Owner Concerns” by Erica C. Barnett from PubliCola

“Seattle Public Schools lifts waitlists at popular schools after public outcry” by Sami West from KUOW

“Op-Ed: Seattle Public Schools Enrollment Practices Starve Schools and Harm Students” by Sarah Clark and Joe Mizrahi for The Urbanist

Find stories that Crystal is reading here

Listen on your favorite podcast app to all our episodes here

[00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm your host, Crystal Fincher. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work, with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it.

This week, we posted a convenient lightning round comparison chart from our Seattle City Council District 2 candidate interviews. Check out our website if you're trying to figure out the difference between the candidates at officialhacksandwonks.com. And if you're struggling with all the Seattle City attorney challengers, we also have a chart for them too!

Today we're continuing our Friday week-in-review shows, where we review the news of the week with a co-host. Welcome back to the program, friend of the show and today's co-host: chair of Sierra Club Seattle, longtime communications and political strategist, Robert Cruickshank. Welcome back!

[00:01:07] Robert Cruickshank: Thanks for having me again, Crystal. Good to be here.

[00:01:10] Crystal Fincher: Great to have you here. Well, we certainly have a few things to talk about today, starting out with the 'No Kings' protests and ICE activity in Tukwila. What happened here? What did we see with these 'No Kings' protests? And what statement was being made?

[00:01:28] Robert Cruickshank: I think that, first of all, you saw what appears to be the largest protest in American history by different measurements - millions of people across the country showing up in cities large and small, places urban and rural - to protest against Trump and the Trump administration in many of its forms. Here in Seattle, at least 70,000 people showed up at Cal Anderson Park. My family and I were there - we brought the kids - listened to some great speakers, including Pramila Jayapal and others, talking about the various ways in which we need to resist Trump. One of the things that I think really turbocharged attendance at these 'No Kings' rallies - here, certainly in Seattle, and around the country - is what we've seen in the last month or so, which is a massively stepped up effort by the Trump administration through ICE to round up, deport, take away immigrants, to arrest people - roll up to a Home Depot parking lot in southern California in an unmarked SUV with masks covering their face and just grab people and drive off. We also saw things like members of Congress being arrested, senators being arrested, New York City elected officials being arrested. These acts of authoritarianism, I think, really helped draw people out. I saw a lot of signs at the rally in Seattle about ICE - the need to melt ICE, to abolish ICE, to stand up for immigrants, to stand up to this authoritarianism. So I think that while these 'No Kings' protests were planned well in advance - reacting to Trump's monarchical ideas, his authoritarianism more generally - I think we're starting to see a major focus of this become the horrific abuses of human rights, of law, and of authoritarianism in the administration's anti-immigrant policy. And it is a blanket anti-immigrant policy, to be very clear about this.

That wasn't the only thing that happened this week. Late last week, a number of people received text messages telling them that they needed to report to a Homeland Security facility in Tukwila over the weekend, which was highly unusual. And part of what this administration is doing is putting people in an impossible position - where you are told you have to show up for an administrative meeting, a hearing, whatever - you're told you've got to report to Homeland Security as a condition of your being in this country. And if you refuse, you're subject to arrest. However, if you show up, you're also being arrested. That is where, for example, earlier this week, New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander was at one of these hearings and standing up for an immigrant who he was helping - and got arrested when he questioned this. Even here in Washington State, former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart was helping an immigrant friend of his, who he was caring for in Spokane, when they got called into one of these hearings and was arrested on the spot. And Ben Stuckart led an impromptu protest to try to block the van from being taken away. Well, what happened here in Seattle is protesters showed up at that facility in Tukwila - used informal, impromptu barricades, tried to block off the facility and tried to prevent any arrests, deportations from happening. What you're seeing here is, I think, really important, because it's a deliberate provocation. It's a provocation by the Trump administration, Stephen Miller - who's leading a lot of this in the White House - ICE, to not only provoke fear into the hearts of every immigrant in this country. But to also pick fights with people who want to stand up against authoritarianism and stand up for immigrant rights. And there's a whole discussion about - Well, do you give Trump what he wants? But I think we all have an obligation to stand up against authoritarianism when we see it. We all have an obligation to stand up and resist violations of human rights when we see it. And I think what you're seeing last weekend - whether it is in Tukwila, with people showing up and creating barricades to stop deportations, or whether it's in Seattle, with 70,000+ people showing up to march in the streets - there is a broad resistance that exists in this country that is feeling emboldened and empowered and is going to fight back. And I think that is a very positive, promising sign.

[00:05:43] Crystal Fincher: I think it's a really positive and promising sign. And I think a lot of people are waking up to the fact that if they don't stand up, there may not be anyone else who does. We've seen institutions, frankly, fail us. We've seen that the backstops and the checks and balances that are supposed to prevent stuff like this - that appear to be, on their face, just plainly unconstitutional - the removal of due process, like that's just not supposed to happen. But it is, and a lot of things that we assume were supposed to stop it have not stopped it. So really, it is up to communities mobilizing. And I think you raised a really good point when you talk about the provocation of this activity - the provocation of completely overnight changes of people's immigration status, of our stance towards immigrants in this country. That people who are not identifiable - faces covered, completely nondescript uniforms, just - we've seen take people off the street, essentially disappear them, and no one knows where they're at. That is a provocation, and it's frustrating to many people to see the response to a provocation - a response that they want to get, that they know they're going to get - being covered as if it's violent on its own and uncalled for, inappropriate, uncivil. And it's a response to incivility. It's a response to what appears to be unconstitutional, just violating people's basic rights, and just being not compatible with what we consider to be how we want our communities to be, who we want to be in our communities, what we value in our communities.

And so I think what we've seen with a number of these responses is that they've been effective. We've had protests that - but for protests - they would have rounded up more people. They did have plans to escalate activity. And one thing I think they're finding - and a lot of people are noticing - is that it's hard to fight on multiple fronts at one time. And so the more people who are turning out, the harder it is for them to act like this is just concentrated operation and limited bad actors who are preventing lawful activity. And I think it's really heartening, too - to not only see people turn out in Seattle, but to turn out in Des Moines and Federal Way and Bremerton and Lynnwood and Port Orchard and Bellingham. And these cities that you don't necessarily associate with traditional political protests - there's a protest that's going to be there. And maybe not a big Democratic or progressive population, but people from all walks of life, from all backgrounds, from broad ideologies, standing up together and saying - What we're seeing is unacceptable, and we're willing to show up and do something about it matters.

[00:08:51] Robert Cruickshank: I think that's spot on. I mean, there was maybe a thousand people in Wenatchee - so it's central Washington, rural Washington, places far from the usual blue parts of the state, where there are people speaking out. And it's hard to speak out in a place like that. I think people were sharing videos from rural Iowa of people coming into, holding 'No Kings' signs at the corner of their small town. That matters. And you talk about question of provocation and how to respond. Elected Democrats - Chuck Schumer, others - often try to wag a finger and say, Don't give Trump what he wants. What he wants, above all else, is the same thing any other authoritarian wants - is for us to silently walk away and give up. That is, above all, what they want. The thing they do not want is organized, sustained resistance. And giving back organized, sustained resistance is absolutely essential to stopping this - to have any chance of restoring a real democracy in this country and hopefully purging Trumpism and MAGA from our politics, which we have to do at some point.

[00:09:58] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I also want to talk this week about a revelation that Washington immigrants' protected health data was shared with deportation officials. What happened?

[00:10:11] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, this has been a fear for a while. Washington and other states that provide health coverage to undocumented immigrants and their families - that's a very good thing to do - it does involve collecting some health data. And the promise has always been that the state will do everything in its power to prevent that information being shared. Some of that does wind up in the hands of the federal government. And when you have Barack Obama in the White House or Joe Biden in the White House, the privacy of that information is upheld. But Stephen Miller and his gang in the Trump administration are trying to find every bit of information they possibly can to target immigrants. And what they got Robert F. Kennedy to do - was to help use his own authority to try to start getting at some of this information of who are the immigrants, where are they, who's undocumented, where are they. They're doing this massive data hunt across all levels of government to try to pull everything together they can, because Stephen Miller is determined to do this mass deportation. He wants millions of people to be rounded up, arrested. And going after health data is one piece of it. And that's fairly alarming because health data is intensely private and you need to get healthcare - it's not something that people can just neglect without putting themselves at risk and their families at risk. And so to see this happen is alarming in and of itself - it's another sign of just how right-wing and extreme Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is - but it is yet another example of how the basic privacy and our rights to privacy are under assault, as part of this widening authoritarianism emanating from the White House, under the cover of their hunt for immigrants.

[00:11:54] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, absolutely. I think you raise a good point about our values here in Washington. In Washington, we understand that we're all better when we all have access to healthcare. And so this was part of the Medicaid program - but federal dollars in Medicaid are prohibited from being spent on undocumented immigrants, so in Washington state, we made the decision to say we're going to cover it with state funds. And it was through that decision and communication after that that said - 'Hey, if you're undocumented, that's okay. You can access healthcare. We're not going to care about it. We want everybody to be healthy. And if people are unhealthy, it makes everyone else unhealthy. And so don't worry about that - you can give us your information, we'll keep it safe, won't put you in any kind of danger.' And then, as part of some data agreement to share Medicaid data - now, whether that only refers to federally funded activity or also includes state-funded activity is a question that we don't know - but through the collection of this data, and through basically giving it to a centralized Medicaid data store, all of this information was sent. And as you said, this Trump administration is going after the lowest hanging fruit in order to try and make their quota numbers for deportation - that's been reported to be 3,000 deportations a day, which they're having trouble meeting, because, shocking, there did not appear to be roving hordes of criminal immigrants, as they tried to paint the picture of, that these are just people working hard in their communities, living their lives. And that information was taken by Homeland Security. So now everything from people's addresses to what issues they were dealing with, probably employment information was collected as part of that - all of this personal data is now in the hands of Homeland Security. By the way, it wasn't just undocumented immigrants - they have anyone's information, documented or not, citizen or not, in Washington State now.

But it really does raise the question of - are our state officials being as careful and judicious with this information as they should be? Are they understanding that handing over data has consequences, that collecting and storing data has consequences? Was there thought given into - were there ways to not hand over this data? Or did we just do it without question? I think these are the types of questions that need answers. I think this is something that really needs to be uncovered and dissected to make sure that it doesn't happen again throughout any of the state departments. I really hope to see a deep dive on this because this is really consequential - and is the reason why so many data privacy advocates say it's so important to have policies around this. It's so critical not to collect this information in the first place. I think also underscores how important it is to pay attention to what's happening on a state and local level - because what's happening with this administration cannot happen without the cooperation and information from the state and local level. And if we don't agree with it, which we have said at a state level - Bob Ferguson has talked about not doing this and has taken this administration to court previously - then how are we backing that up with our actions? I think that's really important to examine.

[00:15:28] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think there needs to be a full review by the Governor's office of everything the state is doing to protect the privacy of data, to protect privacy of individuals, to not cooperate with this regime in D.C. on any of this stuff. And Ferguson talks a good game on a lot of things, but this is just as important as saying you're going to fight the federalization of the National Guard. It's just as important as saying you're filing a lawsuit against DOGE taking away previously approved money for the state. You have to step up and stop - every tool you have - Homeland Security's attempts to violate our privacy, to attack our human rights, and to undermine the promises we made to people in good faith.

[00:16:15] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, this is not a theoretical problem. We are seeing in real-time how this data is being used. And that so much of our community and us as a state - we've said, We do not agree with this. So we do expect to see that carried out from our state and local officials.

Now, I want to talk about - kind of a ray of sunshine - a bit of good news that was announced this week. And that was we received data that King County's Housing First initiative boasts a high success rate. This has been a challenging issue on how to deal with homelessness. And a lot of people have been frustrated for a while, saying - We're seeing what's working in other cities around the country, and we just want to do that here, too. We finally did with Housing First - and what did it show?

[00:17:05] Robert Cruickshank: Well, Amy Sundberg wrote about this at The Urbanist this week - and King County released data showing that Housing First policies work incredibly well - they work a lot better than other policy. 95% of people in permanent supportive housing through the Housing First program remained housed over a year. Whereas in emergency housing - where you just put people in the first place you can find and not provide a lot of support, just a roof over the head, which is valuable, but much less effective - 58% of those folks stayed housed after a year. So it's clear that these Housing First policies, especially when they're provided alongside other services that people need, it works. Because homelessness is not a moral failing of the individual experiencing homelessness, it's a moral failing of the rest of our society to not meet that person's need. And if you get them housed and provide the services at the place where they're being housed, you are far, far more likely to actually solve this. And this just infuriates people on the right wing of our politics - whether it's Sara Nelson or the Republican Party, or whoever - because they really believe that homelessness should be punished. It should be punished with criminal action, police action, forcing people into rehab - because the assumption is that the problem is there's something wrong with you, whether you're in mental health crisis or a drug addiction, and that's why you're homeless. Even folks experiencing those problems find that under Housing First policies, they have a better success rate of getting treated and therefore being able to actually sustain housing. So the record is very, very clear that Housing First works. But you're going to, I think, continue to see attacks on Housing First policies from people - not because it doesn't work, but it violates the core ideological belief of people on the political right that you have to punish homelessness. They can't stand anything other than punishing homelessness. They viscerally react against the idea of genuinely helping people who are experiencing homelessness, even though Housing First policies have been proven again and again and again, to be the most effective thing you can actually do to tackle homelessness.

[00:19:21] Crystal Fincher: It really is. And it's not really close, as we just saw in the comparison of percentages and results. The other element, I think, is that the kind of punitive punishment approach appears to be cheaper upfront. It's really always more expensive in the long run because you don't solve the problem and you're continually treating symptoms without addressing the root cause and the thing that actually makes the difference. And we see that in the approach to just sweeps in perpetuity - moving people from one place to another without really solving or intervening in the real issue, versus getting people into housing - that takes more work, that takes more coordination upfront, it takes more of an effort to stand up the people and the processes to do that. But once that happens and when that is funded, it actually does do so much more to solve the problem, to permanently get people off of the streets - where that's reflected elsewhere in police overtime, and in these back-end costs that end up blowing up budgets, but aren't reflected in that initial cost.

[00:20:32] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah. It was 10 years ago - 2015 - when then-mayor Ed Murray in Seattle declared a state of emergency around homelessness. That's 10 years ago. And the primary way the City has responded to homelessness is through sweeps. They've done some things to invest here and there - there's some money that went to Tiny House villages, there's some city money that is in these Housing First programs - but it is not the primary method of response. They spent 10 years essentially sweeping the problem all over the city, and it isn't getting solved without housing. Housing First is the first step. The other thing, of course, you have to do is try to prevent homelessness by building more housing of all types, including subsidized affordable housing. But for those who are already experiencing homelessness, Housing First policies are the thing that need to be done. If we'd been funding this at the scale we needed - starting 10 years ago, when Ed Murray declared that state of emergency - thousands, literally thousands of people would be housed, they'd be having their various needs met, and there would be a lot more people still alive today. Because the death toll of being homeless is significant - and the failure of the city to really triple down on these successful Housing First policies is a problem. And we still have people like Sara Nelson out there railing against them at every possible opportunity. This is something that I think will need to be a major element of campaigns in Seattle this year - What are we going to do about homelessness? It comes up every two years when there's a City election. We have the answer in front of us - it is Housing First - and we need to fund it at the scale that is needed.

[00:22:06] Crystal Fincher: We absolutely do need to fund it at the scale that it is needed. And it looks like the county is leading the way in doing this and showing results. But as you say, it is as important to turn off the faucet here. We're trying to bail out the house and the faucet is still on. And the biggest contributor to homelessness is high housing costs. There's a lot of people who talk about - Oh, you know, it's addiction, it's criminality. But the areas with the highest housing costs - not the highest crime rates, not the highest rates of addiction, but the highest housing costs - experience the highest rates of homelessness. It is an affordability issue. It is a housing issue. We have to make inroads with that. We have seen a lot of encouraging activity from the state level on down to make this happen - and that needs to continue. And that needs to be paired with these processes. But it's a challenging conversation for a lot of people, because a lot of times when these conversations are being had in the media and presented in this left versus right frame, the right frame is - We just need to punish them, throw them in jail, that'll clean them up - without any acknowledgement that jail is extremely expensive. It's more expensive than just about anything else. We spend a lot of money on that. Check public budgets - that's extremely expensive - we have to defund other things in order to fund that kind of response. We've had to defund other things to fund the endless sweeps response in the city of Seattle. Those things don't work. They're not easy. It's not as easy as trying to mandate treatment, especially because that treatment barely exists - that capacity is low, anyway. So to really get to addressing the root of the problem - and I do commend King County, both the executive and the council, for leading here and taking this action - and we do need to see more people following if we're as serious as about addressing this homelessness problem as the rhetoric suggests.

But we did also see some challenging news in that Washington State cut funding for the homeless encampment removal program, which was also experiencing success. What was the difference between this encampment removal program and sweeps? And why was the funding cut for it?

[00:24:31] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, so this started under Jay Inslee a few years ago, and in response to a lot of visible homelessness along Interstate 5 and other state-owned highways. And what this program did was either rent or outright buy hotel space across the state to get people out of tents, and into at least a roof over the head. Now we talked about the Housing First policies and how if you have permanent, supportive housing with wraparound services around them, you get the 95% success rate. You still had 58% success with emergency housing, which is what this Washington State right-of-way program had attempted to do - just get people in out of the elements. And that is a good thing to do - rather than just destroy someone's tent and belongings, throw it away and send them somewhere else, and you lose track - what the state was trying to do with this program is to get people actually into a warm bed with a bathroom, and a door that locks, and a roof over your head. And this was also providing a lot of success to the people who needed help, who were living in these tent encampments. It was also providing political success for Democrats, who have been getting hammered on this issue across the state. And you can still now drive anywhere in Washington state and see visible homelessness - this is not a Seattle problem. As housing has become more expensive in this state, homelessness explodes everywhere. And so, Inslee was trying to address this with this program.

But what happened was earlier this year - when the State Legislature and the Governor Ferguson decided they didn't want to pass a wealth tax - instead, they issued a whole bunch of budget cuts. And one of the things they cut was this program. So their reluctance to truly tax the rich and the biggest corporations in the state meant that a program that was providing real beneficial help to people experiencing homelessness, as well as political benefit to Democrats - they just cut it. There's so many mind-boggling cuts that this legislature and governor did this year out of their refusal to tax the rich - at least at the scale that is needed - there were some increases in taxes on the rich that did happen this year, like increases in the capital gains tax. So they did some things, but they held off on the biggest thing that they could have done, which is a wealth tax. And this is the consequence - people experiencing homelessness are going to pay a price because a program that was giving emergency shelter is now going away. And Democrats will pay a political price, when homelessness resurges along these very visible places all across Washington state. It is one of these cuts that I'm just looking at legislators and the governor thinking - Is it really worth it to you to appease Brad Smith, the CEO of Microsoft? Is it really worth it to appease Amazon? Is it really worth it to appease Boeing? - to harm homeless folks and harm your own political prospects by cutting successful programs like this. I don't get it.

[00:27:30] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. I mean, the success is in actually getting people off of those highway right-of-ways, off of that property. Whether you're a Democrat or a Republican - at the end of the day, most people are looking around and what they can visibly see and making an evaluation based on that. You have got to make progress on the problems that you say are problems and your top priority. This was doing that. So to move backwards - I'm in the same place you are - it is baffling because this was actually delivering on promises and on priorities. And so just a confounding result. And people say - Ah, in tough budget times, there are tough choices to be made - which are true. But I think you accurately pointed out - they made some choices that made those choices harder and the options worse, by not pursuing the kind of progressive revenue that they could have. But also, you do have to deliver at the end of the day. You do have to improve life and conditions on the ground. So we'll see what happens from here.

I want to turn to the city of Seattle and talk about a couple of developments here. First, Rob Saka wanting to make a deal impacting traffic safety, pedestrian safety in the most confounding way, and seemingly by throwing some people under the bus. What's the deal here?

[00:29:04] Robert Cruickshank: So Rob Saka has been on this crusade against a curb that was placed into the middle of a street in West Seattle as part of a Rapid Ride transit project. And this is normally done by SDOT to help prevent cars from passing a bus when it is stopped to pick up passengers. This helps traffic flow more safely and smoothly, protects the bus, protects the bus riders. The one that Saka objected to had been put in front of a preschool, and people were no longer able to just turn left off the street into the parking lot - you had to go up, make a U-turn, or come around in a different way. Right? Big deal - this happens all the time in the city. It's helping everyone stay safe, right? If you can't have a car suddenly turning left out of the blue into this parking lot where the little kids are - those kids are safer as well. But Saka was up in arms about this on the campaign trail. He's been fighting against this curb all along. And now, activists who are fighting for safe streets and pedestrian safety in West Seattle have put up cartoon signs based on a Brett Hamill comic naming this divider in the center of the road "Curby." And what Rob Saka did was announce that SDOT had worked out some sort of solution - where you can park or stop in the bus area or use the bus lane at certain hours of the day, you can make certain turns into the parking lot, but "Curby" will stay. And Saka made it clear that he's aware of the "Curby" phenomenon - he's aware of the criticism by calling it "Curby," and saying that "Curby" will stay.

That's not all Saka did. He really doubled down - and he's been framing this as an equity issue and trying to paint pedestrian safety advocates as somehow privileged folks who don't care about working class people because we can't make a free left turn off a street. And in this long email - I think it was over 2,000 words, email blast - he blamed what he called a "radical proxy 'war on cars,'" hypocrisy on immigrant justice, he talked about that safety advocates are "harassing" immigrants. According to Erica Barnett, who wrote about this, Saka's equating these pedestrian safety advocates with Trump and his deportation agenda. I mean, it's just unhinged stuff from Rob Saka. I mean, I get that there is a dispute about how we use the streets. I get there is this dispute about this curb. Being a local elected official means sometimes you're going to be arguing over stuff like this. Right? When we worked the mayor's office for Mike McGinn 15 years ago, this sort of thing came up - you deal with it. But you deal with it - hopefully, reasonably - which is just not what Rob Saka is doing at all. He's going out of his way to disparage and demean people who are just fighting for safety, including the safety of the immigrant families all throughout the city, including those using that preschool. It's just utterly unhinged stuff from Rob Saka.

[00:32:08] Crystal Fincher: It is. And I think it's important to note that - one, this is happening against the backdrop of several pedestrian deaths in his district, which is why there was such an outcry from every sector of the community - that something has to be done. Seeing people being critically injured and killed - just trying to cross some crosswalks, just trying to cross the street, walk along the street - has been increasing. This is a problem. We talk about the problem of gun violence. We talk about the problem of people being hurt by other means. This is as unacceptable. We don't want people being hurt, succumbing to violence - whether it's gun or traffic, or whatever else have you. If there was a major health hazard that was killing people, people would be up in arms to address it. So this is pretty standard there. And on top of that, some of the most prominent voices in the most impacted communities by this kind of traffic violence are low-income, immigrant, people of color - and they're making their voices heard. So the kind of disappearing, of erasure of this is pretty offensive to all of the people in the community who are in the groups that he's saying are being harmed, who are standing up to make their voices heard and saying - 'Hey, I rely on the bus. I've got to walk there. My kids have got to walk to the bus to take it to school, and it's dangerous and I'm scared and I want something to be done.' To completely erase those voices and kind of speak over them is pretty offensive in and of itself. And so I just - it's really disappointing to see this. It's disappointing to see the attention and expenditures of money that have been fighting this problem instead of going to actual solutions to address and actually solve the problem. And just the defensiveness around this is pretty mind-boggling for an elected official.

[00:34:18] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, it's very mind-boggling. As someone who's worked in city government, this is not how you deal with the public. It's certainly not how you deal with the public and expect to be taken seriously or respected by it. When you talk about advocacy from low-income communities, communities of color around traffic violence - I don't believe Saka has done very much at all to advocate for safety along the Sound Transit light rail corridor and MLK in South Seattle, where we continue to see traffic violence, people getting hit and killed - sometimes by light rail vehicles, sometimes by cars turning to beat the train. It is a serious problem. Tammy Morales and others have spent years trying to raise concerns about this - trying to get Sound Transit to step in and fund it, trying to get SDOT to step in and fund some of this stuff. Saka's nowhere to be found. Saka's not speaking up on this. And as you point out - instead, he's trying to silence those voices that have spoken up by trying to make this seem like elite white folks only care about buses. Assuming like no low income person in his district's riding the Rapid Ride - many are. It's just very self-serving, I think, of Rob Saka in a way that is fundamentally offensive. And hopefully this is something that people in West Seattle are paying close attention to - especially come 2027, when Saka is up for reelection.

[00:35:36] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I also want to talk about a RealPage ban being delayed. So what is RealPage? Why was a ban put in place? And why is there now a delay?

[00:35:49] Robert Cruickshank: So what has happened in the last five years is a lot of apartment owners - some large, some small - have started to use algorithmic price indexes to set rents. And what this does is take the normal practice of a landlord looking at comps - going on Craigslist and saying, Oh, you have a two-bedroom apartment in Ballard, what are you renting it for? Oh, you rent it at $2,000, I can try to rent mine for $2,000 - taking that and turbocharging it by using algorithms to set rents as high as possible. It is essentially a form of highly sophisticated, high-tech price gouging. And it is something that a lot of people in the housing advocacy movement have called to be banned. The Biden administration was looking into this with its Department of Justice last year. Many states have taken on bans of algorithmic price fixing. And RealPage is a company that is a leader in using algorithms to set rents as high as possible. Cathy Moore had been proposing this - maybe one of the only good things she can do before leaving office next month - but it was going to be fast tracked and back to the City Council. But all of a sudden, this week, the brakes are pumped. Apartment owners' lobbyists are raising concerns. Property managers are raising concerns about - Oh, it could cause problems in X, Y, and Z ways. And so all of a sudden, the one, the few good things we saw out of Cathy Moore's office, one of the few good things that this City Council was doing to help renters is all of a sudden stalled. And I think it's just another example of how even something that is pretty obvious to do, like ban this sort of price gouging and ban using high-tech to gouge renters - you can't get through easily this Seattle City Council. It's just one thing after another from this current City Hall, targeting the people who are trying to afford to to live in this increasingly expensive city.

[00:37:42] Crystal Fincher: It really is another confounding thing. Because among the most popular things - if you poll, if you ask around, and looking at results of elections - are renter protections right now. This is not a partisan issue. It doesn't matter left versus right. It doesn't matter whether a city has a history of voting for Republicans or Democrats on a local level. We've seen a number of local initiatives across the state dealing with renter protections, and they're passing everywhere - because people everywhere are recognizing that the rent is too high all over the place, and seeing the collusion and price fixing happening. And kind of saying - 'Is it not enough that you and your billionaire buddies are already making out like bandits? You have to collude to just raise a little bit more and squeeze out every last cent of profit from the people who can least afford it.' It's not enough, and it's just too much, and it's time people start putting some guardrails around this and standing up and saying - 'At some point, enough is enough.' And this is beyond that point for just about everyone, just about everywhere.

So to see this Council, once again, wade into an issue like this - where there's broad public support, similar to how trying to lower the minimum wage for gig drivers, pretty universally unpopular. And they found that out the hard way by trying to proceed with an unpopular policy and then getting their surprised Pikachu face when the entire community turns out against it - feels like we're going down the same path. What we've known is that, you know, there have been rumblings about weakening of renter protections far and wide for a while now - that this is something that is on the agenda. This seems to have been added to that agenda. And anything that can be done to maximize profit, to minimize regulation - we're seeing landlords and some of the big developers, some of the far-right elements really advocating for. This is no different than the big corporations on the Congressional level - just making a play with their lobbyists to extract every ounce of profit from us and to reduce regulation. This is this on the local scale. And why it's so important to pay attention to local elections is that we're seeing this happen. And kind of unambiguously, to the detriment of regular people, regular renters - which are so many people in Seattle and increasing number of cities now. So just challenging to see them wade into another issue - hoping people aren't paying attention, but that we already know is broadly unpopular. Out of all the things on their plate that they could be addressing, here we go.

[00:40:29] Robert Cruickshank: Exactly. And it's striking to me that this is one of the few things that was potentially going to help renters. But this is an anti-price gouging tool. If you are fleeing a hurricane in the South, and you stop at a gas station and suddenly the price of gas is 100% higher than it was before. Or you stop at a hotel and suddenly a room that was listed the day before at $100 a night is now $300 a night - people prosecute that stuff. That's just obvious price gouging, taking advantage of a crisis. And that's what RealPage exists to do - there's a housing shortage, and it exists to help people take advantage of that shortage by gouging renters as much as possible. Banning RealPage doesn't solve the housing crisis, but it helps. And it certainly helps - prosecuting people who try to take advantage of it - I'm all for that sort of prosecution. I'm all for those sorts of bans. But it's just striking to me how even this, which is broadly popular and easy, struggles to get out of the City Council.

[00:41:30] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. And the same people advocating for the policies that create these housing shortages are the same people advocating for these policies that take advantage of that housing shortage. Same donors, same elements - and it's a problem.

Last thing I want to talk about today is that waitlists have been lifted in Seattle Public Schools - what this means, why these waitlists existed in the first place, and what the result of that is going to be.

[00:42:02] Robert Cruickshank: Yeah, this is an issue that is bubbling up over the last few months in Seattle Public Schools and starting to get wider attention. I mentioned Tammy Morales earlier - she had shown up at a school board meeting in April to advocate that these waitlists be moved. Sarah Clark and Joe Mizrahi - two school board members who are running for re-election this year - had a great op-ed in The Urbanist last month about this. What happens is - just take a big picture view - if you have a lot of money and privilege in this city, you can send your kid anywhere. You can send your kid to a public school, you can send your kid to a private school - you have your pick. But if you don't have that privilege - if you're a low-income immigrant family - you have a school that is assigned to your student. But what if that doesn't work? What if that program at that school doesn't meet your needs, but something else nearby in the public system would? For 50 or so years, Seattle Public Schools has had a school choice process - within the public system. These are people not leaving public education or staying in public schools - who can apply to send their kids to a different school. It could be an option school, an alternative program, even just a different neighborhood school, right? There are stories of immigrant families who want cousins to stay together - totally reasonable.

But earlier this year, the school district said - We're not going to process any of these waitlists that had been created to get into these schools, whether they're neighborhood schools or option schools, because doing so would reward privilege. Their argument was that - and very similar to what you were mentioning about Rob Saka earlier - that it's only just privileged white families who want to use the school choice process. And if we do that, then we're going to just reinforce their privilege and undermine neighborhood schools and hurt kids of color. Well, at that same school board meeting that Tammy Morales was at, there were parent after parent, homes and families of color, explaining why it was crucially important to them that these waitlists be moved so their students could go to the school they wanted to go to. And it is the case that we've seen historically over the last three to four years, families who don't get those choice applications honored increasingly leave the district. And this is true, particularly in South Seattle, where the highest number of choice applications came in. And again, these are not people trying to leave the district, they're not trying to leave our public school system. They might just want to send their kid to a different school down the road in the same neighborhood to get a different program. And public opinion polling shows the public gets this - that it's more equitable to have those options within the public system, rather than deny that. And say the only people who get a different program for their kid - you have to have money for it. So I think the advocacy of people like Tammy Morales, Sarah Clark, Joe Masrahi, and others, parents from across the city - made a real difference here.

The last thing is that this is all connected to an issue that has not actually gone away, which is this idea of closing schools. One of the things that the district was trying to do is starve the enrollment of the schools they want to close and manipulating the process of enrollment behind the scenes. There is still a desire among at least three of the school board members - led by Liza Rankin - to close a whole bunch of schools. They didn't do it last year because they couldn't get four votes - they only had three. But as the August primary approaches, people need to ask school board candidates - Where do you stand on this? Would you vote to close a bunch of schools? Would you vote to close any at all? I don't think this has gone away. And I think the fact that parents won another victory - parents across the city, to be clear - is a sign that advocacy gets the goods when you organize.

[00:45:31] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. Advocacy does get the goods. Are there any forums coming up? How can people figure out where the school board members and candidates stand on school closures?

[00:45:42] Robert Cruickshank: I think there are forums coming up that are being organized. The school board elections are one of the key turning points facing Seattle Public Schools right now. The other is they're hiring a new superintendent. And there are public forums happening this week and next. You can go to seattleschools.org and find information on those forums - to advocate for what you want in a new superintendent. And the folks on the board who want to close schools want to hire a superintendent who will support their school closure plan. I think it's crucially important instead that we bring in a new superintendent who wants to go in a very different direction. In Chicago, when Rahm Emanuel was mayor 12 years ago, he closed 50 schools. It was incredibly devastating - not just to the city as a whole, but to Black and Brown communities in particular. Chicago's current progressive mayor, Brandon Johnson, came out of the organizing against those closures. So you can see what they've done instead is push for what they call community schools - where the community, the neighborhood has a real stake in the operations of that school, where they bring in wraparound services from the community, community partners, organizations to help provide the full range of student needs. That's a model that progressives around the country are embracing. Let's start exploring that here. I'd love to see candidates for the board and for superintendent advocate for that. That's something we need from the public - is more small-d democratization and bring the public in, especially neighborhoods that have been consistently redlined or shut out of power, whether in the South End or far North Seattle, where there are also large immigrant populations. We can run this district in a better way if we actually throw the doors open, rather than have sort of top-down behind-the-scenes management.

[00:47:20] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. Well, we will continue to pay attention and try and keep folks updated there. And with that, we thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks on this Friday, June 20th, 2025. The producer of Hacks & Wonks is Shannon Cheng - and she's the best. Our insightful co-host today was chair of Sierra Club Seattle, longtime communications and political strategist Robert Cruickshank. You can find Robert on Bluesky at @robertcruickshank.com. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Bluesky at @HacksAndWonks. You can find me on Bluesky at @finchfrii, spelled F-I-N-C-H-F-R-I-I. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday week-in-review shows and our Tuesday topical show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. Reviews actually make a huge difference. You can get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at OfficialHacksAndWonks.com.

Thanks for tuning in and talk to you next time.