Welcome to a special crossover edition of Better Minneapolis. This episode was recorded live in Seattle at the Third Wheel Pocast studio. David Therkelsen and Terry White visited Seattle as part of an ongoing project in conjunction with the Minneapolis Times where we are looking at what Minneapolis can learn, and maybe what it should avoid, from other West Coast cities.
By Terry White and David Therkelsen
For this stop, we sat down with the team behind Seattle Nice, a local podcast that takes an insider’s look at Seattle city politics from across the ideological spectrum. Joining me are Erica Barnett, founder and editor of the newsletter PubliCola and a longtime Seattle journalist, Sandeep Kaushik, a political and public affairs consultant, and David Hyde, a longtime public radio reporter who created the Seattle Nice podcast. Sandeep and David have another podcast called Blue City Blues where they discuss national topics.
The conversation covers a lot of ground. We talk about affordability and the divide between Seattle’s tech wealth and everyone else, the state’s reliance on sales and property taxes in the absence of an income tax, and the roughly two hundred million dollars a year the region spends on homelessness, including a debate about whether that money is being spent well. We get into Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, and her plan to build shelter capacity across the city, and the political resistance that effort has run into. We also talk about downtown office vacancies, the jumpstart tax on large employers, and whether Seattle really deserves its reputation of being unfriendly to business.
Throughout, you’ll hear a recurring theme: two old friends who came up together in Seattle journalism, now sitting on different sides of the city’s political divide, disagreeing openly but respectfully. That kind of conversation is something Better Minneapolis and Seattle Nice both try to model, and it’s part of why this trip felt worth taking.
So settle in for a wide-ranging look at how one West Coast city is handling many of the same pressures Minneapolis is facing right now.
Also good luck getting MPD to do the “stick” portion of this carrot stick strategy. You all gotta realize they are gonna get the same check whether they wrangle the crackhead into the cruiser, getting bit and spit on, or if they just pretend they didn’t see nuthin. Same pay check. They ain’t gonna go after street drug addicts for no incentive.
I support sales tax because living on Lake Street I have realized that even the hookers and fenty floppers pay sales tax. Sales tax is a good way to ensure that everyone at least pays something into the system even if they are straight up homeless crack addict pulling a wad of dirty ones out of their bra to buy a back of Newport 100s.