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There’s a good chance you’ve seen the classic 1990s romcom “Sleepless in Seattle,” and perhaps have even caught yourself fantasizing about owning a houseboat like the one featured in the movie. Though that particular residence isn’t available for purchase — it was acquired by a tech company executive for more than $2 million back in 2014, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal — another floating Seattle villa has just popped up on the market, this one asking just under $2.5 million.
Built back in the late 1970s and since updated, this two-story aquatic showpiece is docked in a primo Mallard Cove locale on the banks of Lake Union, in the Eastlake neighborhood of Seattle, and features two bedrooms and two baths in a little over 1,800 square feet of open-concept living space. (That’s large, as houseboats go.) The new owner will pay annual taxes of around $845, with HOA dues costing $475 per month.
Technically a floating house rather than a houseboat, because it’s permanently moored and therefore not mobile, the primary allure of the brightly hued wood-shingled and metal-roof structure lies largely in its breathtaking scenery. While it sits near the back of the moor, behind another row of floating houses, walls of big wood-trimmed windows and an expansive rooftop deck overlook the sparkling lake and skyline, complete with unobstructed Queen Anne, Gas Works and Wallingford views.
The bright orangish-red front door opens into stylish interiors adorned throughout with a mix of tile and hardwood floors, high ceilings and built-ins. From there, a spacious great room warmed by a gas stove and boasting sliding glass doors flowing out to a waterside deck holds a living room and dining area, along with a wood-clad kitchen outfitted with an eat-in breakfast bar and newer stainless appliances. There’s also an office space and a bath tucked off to the side.
A hand-crafted spiral staircase in the home’s entry hall heads upstairs, where a large sky-lit master retreat comes complete with a private balcony, cozy fireside sitting area and walk-in closet, plus a nicely amenitized bath sporting dual vanities, a soaking tub and glass-encased shower. Some bonuses: a 34-foot boat slip, two parking spaces and an electric car-charging station in a “convenient” garage.
The listing is held by Melissa Ahlers and Shannon Campbell of Compass.
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t’s not every day you encounter a pharmaceutical manufacturer whose “About Us” page starts with a quotation from Italian novelist Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”:
“There was a language in the world that everyone understood ... It was the language of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a search for something believed in ...”
So begins the self-description of Selkirk Pharma, a contract pharmaceutical fill-and-finish manufacturer based in Spokane, Washington, whose goal is to be the world’s most reliable manufacturer of injectable drug product. In November 2021, Selkirk executed a purchase and sale agreement to acquire 10.7 acres of land adjacent to its facility to add “critically needed capacity for the manufacture of commercial and clinical trial drugs,” including vaccines and biological therapeutics.
Seattle may be the state’s life sciences hub, but Spokane is spinning out its own cluster in the industry.
“Spokane is a special place to live, work, and invest,” said Patrick Haffey, Selkirk’s CEO. “We are grateful to be here and plan to make a series of long-term investments in this community over the coming years.”
The land acquisition expands the Selkirk campus to more than 27 acres, providing space for three standalone factories, the company explained, with Plant 1 completed earlier this year.
With a robust membership and grant funding out of the gate, the Evergreen Bioscience Cluster in Spokane aims to make the state and the entire Mountain Northwest “a magnet for bioscience.”
Photo courtesy of Evergreen
At full capacity, the Selkirk campus is expected to employ roughly 750 scientists, engineers and operations personnel.
Selkirk’s original building launched construction in June 2021, just three years after the company’s founding. “Selkirk was founded two years prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic with the intent to build much-needed pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity on U.S. soil,” Haffey said that month. “Seeing three years of work come together in the construction of this building is an important milestone for our biopharmaceutical clients and their patients.”
In an interview with Contract Pharma this fall, Haffey said, “Outsourcing is an obvious component to risk reduction and reliability, but it can play a bigger role than that. At Selkirk, we come to work and all we think about is quality manufacturing done as efficiently as possible. We just moved into our new building a couple months ago, a ground-up, greenfield, purpose-designed building for contract manufacturing, with concurrent processing of multiple products within the same facility. We’re qualifying that capacity now, and we’re within months of GMP production for fill-finish services.”
In May, India-based Jubilant HollisterStier LLC announced it had entered into a $149.6 million cooperative agreement with the federal government for vaccine production that will enable the company to invest $193 million to double its injectable filling production capacity at its Spokane facility by 2025. The agreement is in addition to the company’s $92 million filling line expansion announced in November 2021, which will be commercially available by the end of 2024.
“Jubilant HollisterStier LLC is committed to making the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain more resilient with domestic manufacturing facilities and less reliant on foreign suppliers,” said Pramod Yadav, CEO, Jubilant Pharma Limited, which has six manufacturing facilities worldwide and employs around 4,600 people.
The two projects fit well into Greater Spokane Inc.’s Life Sciences Spokane plan, part of the organization’s larger VISION 2030 strategy to create robust health care and life sciences industry growth, projecting an annual economic impact of more than $1.7 billion and over 9,000 jobs for our region by 2030.
Surging Seattle
A five-hour drive to the west on the state’s opposite end, Seattle’s life sciences construction pipeline is the fourth largest in the nation at 1.5 million sq. ft. Moreover, among expected construction completions over the 18 months beginning in October, more than half of the 1.3 million sq. ft. is pre-leased.
The Puget Sound region employs 19,400 people in the life sciences, with a healthy 49% growth rate in the sector’s employment over 10 years, says Cushman & Wakefield. It’s not just operations, either, as 150 life sciences companies are headquartered there, including Adaptive Biotechnologies, Sana Biotechnology and NanoString Technologies.
A total of $351.3 million in biotech startup funding deals had occurred through September in the Seattle area, says the report, including Kineta’s merger with Boston-based Yumanity Therapeutics, and the looming $40 billion acquisition by Merck of Bothell-based biotech firm Seagen, now employing nearly 3,000, in a deal expected to close by this fall.
“The majority of the region’s life sciences inventory is situated in the Lake Union submarket,” the report notes. But some new office projects have been converted to life sciences because of high demand. “Unison Elliott Bay is a current 300,000-sq.-ft. office-to-life-sciences conversion that will become available in early 2023,” C&W says. There is another 3.9 million sq. ft. of life sciences space in the planning stages in or near the submarket, with rents in the $70-$90 triple-net range.
Other submarkets heating up because of low vacancy include Bothell, where Sana Biotechnology leased 80,000 sq. ft. that will replace its manufacturing facility in Fremont, California. Meanwhile, Alexandria is pursuing a development in Bellevue and SECO is planning the 1.4-million-sq.-ft. Southport West project in Renton.
Among other recent lease deals:
Sonoma Bio83,773 sq. ft.Unison Elliott Bay, Seattle
Cajal Neuroscience79,565 sq. ft.eleven50, Seattle
Parse Biosciences33,952 sq. ft.Dexter Yard North, Seattle
Bristol Myers Squibb32,744 sq. ft1616 Eastlake, Seattle
AltPep31,270 sq. ft.eleven50, Seattle
Variant Bio31,270 sq. ft.eleven50, Seattle
Outpace Bio20,319 sq. ft.Dexter Yard South, Seattle
Tune Therapeutics15,058 sq. ft.Boren Labs, Seattle
Such investments are undergirded by life sciences degree completions that totaled 2,562 in 2020 from the University of Washington, Seattle Pacific University and Seattle University. They find complementary resources internationally known life sciences institutions such as the Allen Institute, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Benaroya Research Institute. From 2018 to 2022, Seattle was No. 6 in the nation in NIH funding, with $6.8 billion.
Drink It In
This chart of recent projects shows how both pharma and food & beverage have contributed to Washington’s economy in the past two years. Food and beverage production supports 164,000 jobs in Washington, and agriculture and food manufacturing generate $20.4 billion annually in state revenue.
Darigold, the top project on the list, broke ground in September on a facility in Pasco that is slated to open in early 2024 and will process approximately 8 million pounds of milk per day when fully operational from more than 100 dairy farms in surrounding communities. Since the cooperative’s original announcement in summer 2021 after reaching a land sale agreement with the Port of Pasco, the planned investment has grown from between $450 million and $500 million to $600 million.
“The Pasco project represents our third major capital investment in as many years, the largest investment in our co-op’s 104-year-history, and a significant step in an ongoing strategy to expand and modernize Darigold,” said Joe Coote, the co-op’s CEO. “We are a beloved heritage brand with deep roots in Washington and around the Pacific Northwest, but there’s still considerable opportunity for us to leverage industry growth — here at home and around the world — to become a top-tier global dairy producer.”
Ten years after brewing its first batch of beer, Bellevue Brewery completed construction in September on its new facility in Bellevue’s Spring district.
Photo courtesy of Ware Malcomb
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The entrance to this Eastlake marina looks like an unassuming gate behind an industrial building, but once you’re in the ultra-private community near the University Bridge, you’ll find this extremely cute houseboat toward the end of the dock. While it was built in 1997, it’s full of all those classic nautical details: polished barrel ceilings, skylights, and creative wood framing.
Unlike many houseboats that change hands frequently, this one’s had a single owner for the last 25 years. Recently remodeled, it's really built for living in, with a functional, streamlined design that takes advantage of its limited 560 square feet.
The entry is through the open living room and kitchen, separated visually by a bar-height table. There’s enough space here for a small couch and reading chair. On the mostly wood-grain ceiling, painted beams frame a skylight, and on the walls, beadboard wainscoting contrasts with deep red paint. The full kitchen is boat-sized with an itty-bitty electric range, but fits the essentials, including a double sink that makes small-space cleanup easier.
Down a small hallway to the back, the place manages to fit two whole bedrooms, each with at least a double bed and some space to walk around them—both with skylights and adjoining a three-quarter bathroom. They even offer a little more privacy than the typical small-boat bedroom; no nooks or bunks here. One midway down the boat is a little cozier but still fits what appears to be a queen-size bed. The larger one at the end of the vessel features windows on three walls. The decor is similar to the living room, with the wainscoting and bold paint job, but both bedrooms have small accent walls with floor-to-ceiling wood grain for some extra boatiness.
The front porch, which is covered and faces the dock, is the main outdoor space and certainly has enough room for lounging. It seems likely that past visitors have climbed up to the curved roof. Being at the end of the dock, it’s not hard to find space to hang by the water. There’s even enough room on the slip to tie up a kayak or two.
Slip rent at this marina is $1,500 a month, which includes water, sewer, garbage, and electricity. Check to see what else the marina offers, too; sometimes there’s laundry or storage that renters can take advantage of. Alternatively, it could move to a different marina—including one with an owned slip—pretty easily.
Listing Fast Facts
63141 Fairview Ave E
Size:560 square feet, 2 bedrooms/0.75 bath
List Date: 11/17/2022
List Price: $395,000
Listing Agents: Courtney Cooper Neese, Seattle Afloat
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Yesler Way — a steep, busy street that early Seattle lumberjacks used to skid logs down into Elliott Bay — physically splits the Yesler Terrace neighborhood in half. But for years, it’s also been a political boundary between two Seattle city council districts.
"When it comes time for an election, you have people that are going out to their neighborhood and they're saying, 'hey, let's come together and vote for this person, let's vote for this issue,'" said Jude Ahmed, who works down the street at the Urban League, a social services nonprofit that advocates for Black communities.
"But then they start to realize — 'oh, there's a line dividing us.' So on the other side of the street, people have totally different candidates on their ballot."
In 2021, following the 2020 U.S. Census, Washington state re-drew its Congressional districts. Last year, cities and counties in Washington re-drew their political boundaries too – and in 2023, local elections will take place under those new maps.
The maps can shift the balance of power between neighborhoods simply by splitting some neighborhoods up – and bringing others together.
To Ahmed and other advocates, neighborhoods like Yesler Terrace have been drowned out for years.
Yesler Terrace was named after its public housing complex – the first in the state, and the first racially integrated one in the nation. But that project has been dismantled and is being replaced by denser private development, much of which is supposed to be affordable.
Between the construction and the three hospitals within a mile, it's a loud neighborhood.
NiRae Petty moved to Yesler Terrace after college because it felt like a vestige of the Central District she remembers. Once a majority Black neighborhood, the Central District where Petty grew up is now a majority white.
"A lot of people are still here. Their families are still here," Petty said. "They still go to the same community center. And it's almost like, just because we've got a streetcar and a coffee shop and we see goldendoodles walking around, does it mean that, you know, people aren't still here?"
Petty took a job at Urban League too. But a few months ago, she moved across town when her rent got too high.
At some point last year, Petty and Ahmed realized the lines that divided Yesler Terrace were being redrawn.
Usually redistricting is a process Republicans and Democrats do, sometimes behind closed doors – like in Washington state in 2021, a process so un-transparent it drew lawsuits.
Seattle’s redistricting process was supposed to be better. It was also a first for the city, since Seattle voters decided to move to a district system just 10 years ago. This map drawing was nonpartisan, and basically all done out in public.
"They're making the map right there in front of the cameras," said Dave Bradlee, a software programmer. "I'm like, 'that's really cool. That’s what I’d like to see more of.'"
Bradlee is a former Microsoft programmer who designed an app that allows you to draw your own redistricting maps. He named it Dave’s Redistricting App, without really thinking about it, because he never thought it would be big.
"I don't know, maybe I was eating like Dave's Killer Bread or something like that, you know?" he said.
But governments and advocacy groups around the country have used it. Seattle’s redistricting commission even used it, and they let the public submit their own maps using Dave's Redistricting App.
The final map put Yesler Terrace where Petty and Ahmed wanted it. Not just all together, but in the same district as the South End, Seattle’s only city council district that’s a majority people of color.
To do that, the redistricting commission picked a map that split a different neighborhood to the north – Magnolia. It’s a quieter, whiter and wealthier neighborhood dominated by single-family homes, though it’s also changing.
A Magnolia resident who identified himself as Pat Kraft spoke out against the change during a public comment period.
"Dividing us in any way is... well, it's offensive for who we are and who we want to be," Kraft said.
Former Seattle mayor Greg Nickels was the only member of the five-person commission to vote against the final map.
"I tried to express this towards the end of of it: good process, but it was a bad product, in my opinion," Nickels said.
Nickels, app designer Bradlee, and others proposed maps that didn’t split Yesler or Magnolia. But the redistricting commission didn’t pick those.
NiRae Petty's stance: It would be great if we could keep every neighborhood together.
"We know why you don't want to be split. Like, we know why because we don't want to be split," Petty said.
But every map the commission seriously considered split some neighborhood in some way. It's unavoidable in the current system, which requires the city be split in seven equally-populated parts.
So Petty would rather make sure the people who are the most marginalized – the most under threat – stay together.
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The first time Gregg Popovich watched Dejounte Murray play basketball he saw chaos, for better and worse. It was 2016, the Spurs were title contenders coming off a 67-win season, and in front of their revered coach stood a 6' 4", 170-pound teenager who had just been drafted with the 29th pick to one day replace the irreplaceable Tony Parker as San Antonio’s floor general.
“He looked wild as hell,” Popovich remembers. “He looked skinny and weak and long and talented and energetic. Not a great shooter but really great in the fast break and loved playing the game. So there was a lot to like.”
Almost five years later, Murray is an integral part of San Antonio’s present and future, a lanky, old-school quarterback who uses his panoramic view of the court to routinely make the play his team needs instead of the one he wants.
He’s also one of the league’s most refreshing and effective anomalies, a lead ballhandler who doesn’t take or make a bunch of threes; most of Murray’s damage is inflicted from the midrange—a space defenses are typically happy to concede—where he’s tirelessly honed a reliable jumper. “His pull-up now is basically automatic,” says Spurs guard Derrick White.
Murray organizes half-court sets with precision (his turnover rate is down significantly this season), crashes the glass like an old-school bruiser, and has a serious understanding of what it means to lead, qualities that contradict the Baby Boy sobriquet his grandmother gave him when the John Singleton film Baby Boy came out. (To this day, pretty much everyone who knew Murray before he reached the NBA still calls him Baby Boy.)
Further separating him from most at his position is Murray’s second-to-none defense. Opposing coaches legitimately worry about the pressure he puts on their point guards. “I gotta warn LaMelo [Ball] about him, make sure that LaMelo knows you can’t take a play off with Dejounte,” says Hornets coach James Borrego, who spent two seasons as Murray’s assistant coach in San Antonio. “He’s hunting you down. He’s looking for one mistake that you’re gonna make, and he’s gonna pick you or really turn the game.”
Murray’s progress has yet to eclipse some of his game’s holes, including the fact that he’s yet to bloom as an efficient scorer. But given the route he took to get where he is, the win-now situation he was drafted into and the adversity he’s endured since he made it (most notably in the form of a torn ACL in Oct. 2018), blemishes are understandable. Each year, though, the gap between Murray’s strengths and shortcomings narrows significantly.
He spent most of his rookie year slow-roasting in the G League and getting DNP-CDs. The next season he became the youngest player in NBA history to crack an All-Defensive team (Kobe Bryant, Anthony Davis and Tim Duncan are the only other players who also qualified during their age-21 seasons).
Today, he’s San Antonio’s most vital building block, with present-day two-way production that still barely sniffs what his ultimate ceiling can be. “This is my first year in the NBA being free to just, you know, play,” Murray says. “Coach Pop, he let me off the leash a little bit.” To compare Murray to the rest of the league, heading into this season only 11 players in the last 10 years averaged at least 15 points, seven rebounds and five assists per game for an entire season. All have made an All-Star team. Murray will likely finish his fifth season on the right side of that threshold, hinting at a very near future where triple doubles (of which he’s accrued four this year) are a regular occurrence.
NBA folk hero Jamal Crawford, a longtime mentor and close friend who grew up in the same section of Seattle, believes Murray deserves to win Most Improved Player. “He can do everything on the court, and the smoothness with which he does it, like, I love watching him,” Crawford says.
With Patty Mills—a 32-year-old backup on an expiring contract—as the only Spur who’s been there longer, Murray has not only grown to embody the organization’s cultural tenets—long marked by sacrifice, accountability and unpretentiousness—but positioned himself as a torchbearer, someone who can teach, lead and guide the younger players on today’s team, along with those who enter San Antonio’s ecosystem in the years to come. The timing, for a proud franchise that’s currently shifting from the postscript of a ludicrously prosperous era into whatever happens next, could not be more ideal.
“When I talk to Spurs people, there's a belief about Dejounte,” Borrego says. “They really believe ‘This is the guy that’s gonna lead us as our point guard into the future.’ ”
When the Spurs draft a new player, Murray immediately asks the front office for his phone number. Dinner at Murray’s home is an unofficial part of the onboarding process. He goes out of his way to impart lessons, from why it’s O.K. to spend time in the G League early on to steps they can take to earn the coaching staff’s trust and know what’s going to be expected from Day One. Murray isn’t shy about assuming that burden, and when San Antonio missed the postseason in 2020 (for just the second time since he was born), he felt responsible.
“I was hurt last year when we didn't make the playoffs because I felt like I let them down,” Murray says. “As far as carrying the legacy on, the winning culture, yeah, I think I’m responsible for that. I’m part of it. It’s a team game, but I’m a natural-born leader.”
The Spurs are on a path to qualify for the Play-In tournament as a 10 seed, which means they will need to win two single-elimination games before they actually make the playoffs. The odds aren’t in their favor. But Murray’s extraordinary focus, selflessness, unique physical build, and eagerness to learn have not only accelerated his development, but made San Antonio a spirited underdog that shouldn’t be written off, now or beyond this season.
“His age belies his maturity,” Popovich says. “Sometimes I’ve been too hard on him—not nearly as hard as I ever was on Tony Parker, that’s for sure. But he handles coaching. He’s not affected by criticism.”
Former Spurs teammate Danny Green can speak to that experience firsthand. “I was in the Tony category when I was there as well,” he says. “San Antonio will humble you quickly … and it’s not for everybody.”
The resilience that helped Murray push through a trying professional start wasn’t entirely organic, though. It was molded through heartbreak; a glimpse at why he is the way he is only fortifies the belief that Murray is a person worth investing in. Years before he was a Spur, when even the thought of playing in the NBA was a different universe over, Murray faced a nightmarish adolescence, perfused by grief, terror and harrowing uncertainty.
“It’s a story that’s never been heard before because I was in the streets for real, for real. I didn’t live off of nobody’s name,” he says. “It ain’t nothing to brag about. This s--- is crazy when I wake up. I’m playing in the NBA. I'm on a video game. I have fans that buy my jersey. It still don’t feel real. I’ve been here five years; I feel like it’s a dream still.”
It’s a background that can either breed languishing cynicism or unbreakable conviction. Murray embraced the latter, along with a perspective that helps explain why he’s so devoted to not letting the talent he was blessed with go to waste—why the torn ACL, on the eve of a breakout season, was almost immediately seen as an opportunity to attack rehab. One year later, the Spurs signed him to a $64 million extension before knowing how his knee would respond to even a second of live action.
“There is just an approach that he has. And I think people see that and gravitate to that,” Spurs general manager Brian Wright says. “In the spot that I sit in, you’re betting on the human, their willingness to work and how much it means to them. I know that he has all of the attributes, all of the desire and all of the commitment to be an incredible player in this league for a long time. And that’s what we expect him to be.”
Every player who makes the NBA is a miracle. Every story is spruced with dabs of luck, a trail of serendipity, cosmic happenstance and mounds of adversity that were eventually cleared. For Murray, the mere fact that he’s still alive and free is its own tall tale. “I feel like the path I took to get here,” he starts, “what I had overcome, nobody ever overcame. Nobody’s ever been in my situation and made it to where I’m at today.”
Sitting in an aspen-colored New Balance hoodie inside his spacious San Antonio home, graced by a firepit and glass-walled pool in the backyard, Murray’s current reality is a world removed from the South End Seattle neighborhood he grew up in, where desperation and ruthlessness went hand in hand.
“When people hear or talk about the South End, it’s like, ‘I’m not going to the South End,’ ” says Terry Thompson, Murray’s uncle. “If you’re not from there, that's not somewhere you want to be.”
The neighborhood is notorious for gang violence, drive-by shootings, drug dealing and addiction. David Crisp, Murray’s high school and college teammate who currently plays professionally overseas, remembers attending a Pro-Am organized by Crawford. “One of our teammate’s dads got his car broken into during the Pro-Am.” While attending Rainier Beach High, Crisp would sit in class every day and listen to police sirens wail across the street. According to The Washington Post, in 2016 more than 75% of the school’s students were economically disadvantaged and 95% were students of color.
Murray’s complete childhood story can’t be told in full because he isn’t ready to tell it. But even the slightest overview can clarify how dreadful the backdrop was.
“I'm in the stage right now where I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to tell my story to motivate the world and allow the world to know who Dejounte Murray is,” he says. “I’ve been real quiet and to myself about it, because it traumatized me. To this day it haunts me still. If you just think of the streets, a young kid in the streets, gangbanging, around drugs and just doing anything to get money, that was what it was. That’s what I was. I wouldn’t even say I was taught that. It was that or it was no way.”
When Murray was first arrested in middle school, it didn’t phase him. “Juvenile? That was nothing to me at 11 years old. I wasn’t scared; I wasn’t nervous, because I knew what to expect from going to jail.” His relationship with violence was frequent, felt in the body-numbing sensation that takes over after hearing a close friend or cousin has been fatally shot. His mother was in and out of prison and his father wasn’t always around. “I love my mom to death. My dad, me and him are still working on ways to become closer,” Murray says. “He wasn’t a deadbeat, but neither one of them were full-time parents.”
Looking back, Murray says that lifestyle was less a choice than a fate he was born into. “As crazy as it sounds, I’m not the only one in my family that went through the worst. My whole family, from my grandma … I heard stories about my great-grandma being a part of gangs and being crazy and doing the worst. You hear the word cycle, like it’s just a cycle; it’s passed down from generations. Everything was passed down to us. Selling drugs or doing whatever in the streets, it was normal to my family.”
Murray bounced from one apartment to the next, one hotel room to another. Couch to couch. His mother was kicked off state housing the first time he was arrested. Evictions weren’t uncommon. “I don’t even have a favorite cartoon. That’s how much I was in the streets. You know what I’m saying?” Murray says. “I can’t even tell my daughter I had a favorite cartoon growing up, and that f---- with me. That bothers me a lot.”
(Murray’s daughter lives in Seattle. He sees and talks to her as often as he can. In the middle of an interview for this story, Thompson received a text from Murray reminding him to pick her up new fish for her tank.)
If they aren’t dead, almost everyone who was part of his life during that period is in state or federal prison, some serving sentences that will last most of their lives. These were Murray’s two possible fates when he was detained again, while living with his great aunt, around the time he was transitioning from freshman to sophomore year. He called Thompson from jail, and a plan was laid to move in with his uncle as soon as he got out. Murray spent the next few years there, along with nights at the apartment of Thompson’s friend Mitch Johnson. (Johnson is now an assistant coach with the Spurs.)
“He was tired of having to watch his back. When you’re in a gang or you’re hanging out with people from the streets, you gotta watch your back,” Thompson says. “And so you can’t do both. Do you want to be a gang member? [Or] do you want to be somebody that’s successful in life?”
Along with so many others in Seattle’s tight-knit basketball community Thompson, who played professionally overseas before a knee injury ended his career, saw enough potential for a college scholarship. All Murray needed was structure and advice from people whose own success couldn’t be argued with.
“You can’t let a kid like that slip through the cracks,” says Will Conroy, a former NBA player from Seattle who coached Murray at Washington. “Basketball wasn’t on the forefront of his everyday survival. A lot of people were able to help him.”
Those names include Conroy, Murray’s uncles, Rainier Beach assistant coach David King and, crucially, Crawford. Murray started receiving text messages and phone calls from the NBA star after they first met when Murray was in the sixth grade. “Baby Boy is special, man. You could see the look in his eye. He had a genuineness about him and a coolness about him,” Crawford says. “The one thing about Dejounte is, once he locks in and once he gives you his word, that’s it. That’s what always separated him. You didn’t have to say, ‘Dejounte, I already told you that.’ He grasped it immediately.”
Once Murray joined Rainier Beach’s basketball team in the 10th grade, his time on the streets ended. Priorities shifted as he grew to become something of a burgeoning local myth. There was the 33-point, 30-rebound game against current 76ers wing (and college teammate) Matisse Thybulle in the Metro League Championship. Or the night before Crawford’s wedding, when the three-time Sixth Man of the Year invited Murray (then 16 years old) to take part in a Midnight Madness exhibition. Murray, with arms that resembled two guitar strings, dropped more than 40 points in a game that featured a slew of NBA players. Chris Paul was a teammate. “Ask him why he did me like that,” laughs Crawford, who was matched up on the opposite team.
During Murray’s sophomore year, Rainier Beach was down five with nine seconds left in the state championship when Crawford—an alum who had flown up to watch the game from courtside—left early to catch his flight back to the Clippers. Walking through airport security, Crawford texted the school’s longtime coach Mike Bethea: Man, coach. It’s all good. We’ll be back next year. “I said, ‘Hey, man, we won!’ ” Bethea remembers. A key steal by Murray at the end of regulation made the impossible comeback a reality.
Division I offers poured in from several elite programs, but Murray chose to stay home and attend Washington, where his singular drive precluded him from having anything that resembled the typical college experience. “We would go to parties; we were all freshmen, chasing girls,” says Thybulle, who was in the same recruiting class. “I kid you not, Dejounte was in the gym shooting. We’d ask him to come out and he’d be like, ‘No, I’m staying in tonight.’ And then we’d find out he went and got shots up.”
On more than one occasion, Murray and Crisp strolled back to the gym around 10 or 11 with a box of Pagliacci Pizza, well after a three-hour afternoon practice earlier that same day. Instead of walking back to their dorm when they were finished, both would crash on giant beanbags in the locker room, then wake up at 6 a.m. for another workout.
The routines aren’t too different now. “Dejounte wasn’t the type of kid that was hanging out much,” says Green. “If he did go out once in a blue it was random. You wouldn’t see it much. He wouldn’t be drinking or anything. He was in the gym. He stayed in the gym.”
When Mark Caesar, a Seattle-based trainer, visited Murray in San Antonio a couple of years ago, he was woken up at 5:30 a.m. with a simple question: “You ready to work?” The obsession with basketball is so deep that the Spurs have asked Murray’s roommate to get him out of the house, go on a vacation, and take his mind off the game. There hasn’t been much luck with that. When he’s not playing basketball he’s watching basketball. “Tonight I’m gonna have four [games] on my TV, two on my laptop, two on my other laptop, one on my phone,” Murray says. “Like, that’s Dejounte.”
It’s a way to balance the life he’s living with the one he used to know. Murray has had falling outs with some people in his life when he was younger, but he remains close to others. He answers penitentiary calls from old friends every day and regularly logs into JPay, a service that allows him to transfer funds to inmates. “That’s my life,” says Murray. “Play basketball, take care of my daughter, and I feel like I’m responsible for making sure my brothers that made mistakes are eating good, living good and knowing that somebody cares for them.”
There are 20 seconds left in a late-January game against the Celtics when Murray switches onto Kemba Walker and transforms into a booby trap. The Spurs are clinging to a two-point lead, and standing a few feet above the key, Walker starts a left-to-right crossover he usually executes in his sleep. But this time, almost as soon as the ball hits the court Murray’s hand is there to poke it away. By the time Walker realizes what happened, Murray is on a fast break, sealing the game with a dunk on the other end. “Kemba’s probably been ripped maybe five times in his whole life,” Green says. “Those arms, man. He’s got long arms like Kawhi.”
Murray is masterful at baiting his prey. He studies scouting reports and takes genuine pleasure learning and remembering different tendencies. “I’m not going to say I’m going to pick Kemba all the time,” he says. “That mother------ got the ball on a string. I just knew what he was gonna do right there. It’s kind of like how the Kevin Durants of the world and Carmelos of the world were blessed with a gift to be unbelievable scorers. I feel like I was gifted on the defensive end.”
If Murray has a signature move, the way he snatches the ball from offensive stalwarts is it. Those who know firsthand how difficult it actually is are more impressed than anyone else.
“It’s borderline impossible,” Thybulle, an elite perimeter defender, says. “A lot of guys will never even attempt it because they’re like, ‘I don’t want to get beat and get yelled at.’ That’s part of the reason why I don’t do it. I don’t trust that I could get away with it and keep my guy in front of me. These are guys he’s stealing the ball from, getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s a pretty crazy concept to be able to take the ball away so easily from guys who, that’s their calling card. That’s their thing.”
Murray’s brand of on-ball defense toggles between pesky and intimidating. It makes his high school coach think about Gary Payton. One of his assistant coaches in college is reminded of a cobra. Murray’s arms were built to extinguish a live dribble. Two helicopter blades dangle from his shoulders, always stabbing at the ball with those pencil-stick fingers that are somehow always a centimeter longer than whoever he’s guarding thinks they are. “He was hell in practice,” laughs Grizzlies forward Kyle Anderson, a former Spurs teammate who remembered how another ex-teammate, Mills, was a frequent victim. “Poor Patty.”
For good reason, players don’t actively seek out the situation Walker found himself in. According to Synergy Sports, Murray ranks in the 95th percentile as an isolation defender this season. Taking him on without help isn’t advised and he knows it. “A lot of players are gonna call a pick-and-roll on Dejounte,” he says. “I just have that pride where you’re not gonna beat me one-on-one. It's not happening.” Before games, Murray’s teammates like to place bets on how many opponents he’ll rip.
The attitude was established on concrete courts in Seattle, honed during games of 21 with his much older, much larger uncles who told him from the start that there wouldn’t be any handouts. If he wanted the ball, he had to steal it or corral someone else’s miss. It’s here where Murray fell in love with defense and what it means to compete. It’s why he is so relentless. “If you get him with a move, you gotta cut him off or get the shot up quick because he’s coming right back,” Crisp says.
In a March 1 loss to the Nets (a game sent into overtime by a gymnastic Murray jump shot as time expired), he helped hold Kyrie Irving to three second-half baskets and an uncharacteristically inefficient 9-for-24 shooting night.
Off the ball he might have an even more devastating impact, if he’s skying for a one-armed rebound—“That dude will go in there and f--- around with the biggest people; you see it with guys like Russell Westbrook, but Russell Westbrook’s body is built for it,” says Conroy—skipping into a passing lane and turning an ostensibly harmless pass into a game-changing miscalculation, or stifling another man’s drive before diving back out to his own assignment on the three-point line.
The goal for every offense in today’s NBA is to create space. Murray eliminates it as well as anyone. He flickers in and out of gaps with an advancedunderstanding of timing and angles. Trying to score against San Antonio when he’s on the floor is a maddening five-on-six battle. Just ask the Warriors, who saw Murray steal the ball eight times in a Feb. 8 Spurs win.
San Antonio is known for carefully plotted half-court actions, but Murray’s activity on defense sparks transition opportunities that give their offense a different dynamic. He almost always makes the right decision when the game goes scriptless—an area of expertise that his college teammates used to marvel at. During fast-break drills, his instincts were flawless. They never saw a mistake.
To be most feared when the other team has the ball, as Murray is, subverts what it means to be a franchise player in today’s NBA. But while defense is the first paragraph of his game’s CV, it’s a steadily improving jump shot that’s shredding any preconceived notion about what Murray can eventually become. Entering the league, no part of his skill set created more doubt. Now, with long arms, a high release and a tight-enough handle to get where he’s comfortable whenever he wants, it’s a legitimate weapon. (Only Chris Paul, Brandon Ingram and Devin Booker have made more pull-up twos than Murray this season.)
When Murray first landed in San Antonio, Chip Engelland, the team’s renowned shot doctor, laid out a long-term vision and told him, “You’re either gonna execute the plan or not.” Says Murray, “What he meant by that is, ‘We’re not gonna try to go be Stephen Curry overnight.’ ”
The formula requires sweat, trust and patience. Do you want to be a great shooter or do you want to be a good shooter? is the question Engelland, Murray’s Yoda, asks over and over; it drives their relationship and all his progress.
The two began around the basket then worked their way to the free throw line, where both believe Murray can someday crack 85%. (He’s at 80.3 this year, up from 70.0 as a rookie.) They’ve since ventured out to the midrange and have sights set on conquering the three-point line, where he shoots just 31.8% on 3.0 attempts per game. From how far apart his fingers should be on the ball to where it needs to fit in the palm of his hand right before it’s released, Murray feels confident in his shot because he’s still learning how to do it.
“We still have a long way to go, but we’re on the right road to being what I know I can be one day,” Murray says. “Chip really wants to see me be great. Like, he’s a big reason why I want to wake up every morning and go to the gym and work.”
There’s also a direct throughline here between Murray’s upbringing and self-belief as it relates to the slow erosion of weaknesses in his skill set. “When I came in a lot of people said, ‘He can’t shoot.’ S---, that’s fine with me. S---, I was never taught. My life wasn’t like these kids getting drove to practice, getting drove to the gym, getting drove to games. I wasn’t at the gym with a trainer telling me to lock my elbows, snap my wrists, use my legs,” he says. “It’s insane, the stuff I didn’t know. I was just playing raw in high school and college. The Spurs are the first people to really teach me how to play the game.”
When asked how he knew his nephew was special, Thompson remembers watching him in the third grade against the best team in Portland. Murray was fouled with no time on the clock and his team down by a basket. “He looks over at the coach and says, ‘I got these. I got these,’ ” Thompson says. “He goes to the free throw line, taps on his chest, and knocks down both free throws. I’m like, ‘What the heck?’ ”
That poise never left. “Most point guards look to the bench every time they make a mistake, they look to the coach to see what he’s saying,” says Green. “He just played. A lot of times Pop would have to yell at him, ‘Hey, we’re gonna run this,’ or tell Dejounte, ‘Look, this is what you need to do,’ and he’s like, ‘All right, I got it.’ He took charge. He made decisions early on and he was comfortable with himself.”
Nothing is promised in the NBA. No player is guaranteed to maximize their ability, or grow at the rate expectations suggest. But as frustrating as last year was, including all the different ways the pandemic kept Murray from working out as aggressively as he normally would (he bought an outdoor hoop when the season was suspended but broke the rim soon afterward), the improvement he’s shown this year in spite of its brevity is exciting. He shines brightest in the summer, when nobody is watching.
“I’m an offseason guy that really likes to take, you know, great, big, big jumps,” he says. “There’s guys who look like stars their first year, they fade away, or they look like stars a couple years, they fade away,” Murray says. “I like Kawhi Leonard’s development, not just because he was a Spur [or] a good friend of mine. I watched him a lot when I got here. If you go check the stats, he got better every year. It wasn’t just one year, then he waited three years. It was a jump every year, every category.”
Murray has done that this season, in part because of his evolving relationship with Popovich, who’s emboldened him to attack the game with a level of freedom that wasn’t afforded in his first two seasons—or ’20, when a minutes restriction stalled genuine betterment.
“At some point a coach and especially a point guard start to speak the same language and understand what’s going on in games,” says Popovich. “Who hasn’t touched it in a while? What’s the score? What do we need? It took a while for all that to sink in because he missed a lot of time. At this point he’s got enough time with me game after game after game to understand what I’m looking for, and, in general, what it takes to run a team and win basketball games.”
There’s one part of Murray’s game that Pop would like to see even more of, too: “He'll turn down threes from time to time and I’ve got to go to him and let him know that the worst thing that can happen is it doesn’t go in. You know, your family still loves you and you still get a paycheck. The hell with it. Shoot the next one.”
On a franchise that doesn’t give minutes, shots or decision-making opportunities to players who haven’t earned them, Murray is just now holding keys so many were handed right away.
“I know that there’s so much room for me to improve because I’m still playing catch-up with everybody in this league, damn near,” Murray says. “I had to go a whole totally different route than a lot of guys my age. On the basketball side of things I never had a trainer. Nobody knew the game to teach me the game. My uncles, we played it for fun at the parks. We were never taught it. We’d have no male figures around us. Male figures around us was drug dealers.”
The game is its own mental remedy for a 24-year-old who spent most of his formative years instead learning how to survive deadly threats that literally lurked around every corner. But no matter how deep Murray dives into himself on that search for greatness so many in his profession are on; total escape from his past is impossible. A cure for the anguish he feels does not exist. Part of him wishes it did, but the rest knows that he wouldn’t be who he is now having lived someone else’s experience.
“I still deal with a lot today,” Murray says. “The main thing is for me to get in the gym and meditate. I don’t party, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. [The] gym is like my club, my therapy. It’s my life. I’ll be damned to allow these problems to affect my job, affect my work, affect me from being great. I was taught to find a way. That’s why I’m at where I’m at today.”
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Murray was dominant that night. Porter was sensational in the fourth quarter, driving the Rockets to a much-needed win.
When Porter said that night and again Monday that they shared a hard road to the NBA, he did not go into the details. Murray usually only hints at that history. But there is an understanding that just making it as far as they have, to be able to share that hug on the court in San Antonio, says a great deal of how far they have come from their South End Seattle neighborhood and the crime and violence and death that surrounded them.
The game was just the second meeting in the NBA of the longtime friends and former teammates, the first since Porter’s rookie season with the Cavaliers. Each occasion remains special.
“Coming into the league, that first game that we did compete against each other, it was an unreal moment and we always talked about being able to accomplish what we have, coming from where we came from, being from the same background and growing up together,” Porter said. “We know how tough it is to make it out of Seattle. Both of us being able to do it and do it together, it is something we always talk about. We’re proud of what we’re able to do for the city and for each other.”
Murray was a senior at Rainier Beach High when Porter made the team as a freshman. Murray would play one season at Washington before he was drafted by the Spurs to be groomed as Tony Parker’s successor. Porter became a highly coveted recruit, playing one season at USC before he was drafted by the Cavaliers.
Murray’s success allowed Porter to see someone from his neighborhood make it. But more than showing it could be done, it gave both something they could share.
“I always had my confidence,” Porter said. “It more so made … us more close just because of the purpose. Where we grew up, a lot of people kind of steer off the right path. He was able to change his whole life. It’s an incredible story. He is definitely someone I will always look up to.
“That’s my big brother. We were on the same team back home. Three, four years to have someone to look up to, him experiencing what he was experiencing, and me being able to learn from that, was definitely making me a believer, more of a believer in myself.”
Their NBA paths leading to their next meeting Tuesday at Toyota Center have been very different. Murray became a tough-love project of Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, overcoming an ACL injury, earning All-Defensive team honors in just his second season (2017-18) and playing this season at an All-Star level, as he demonstrated in scoring a season-high 32 points in a triple-double performance against the Rockets.
“It’s a beautiful story,” Porter said of his friend’s success. “He took his time and overcame it.”
Following several off-court incidents, Porter became available to the Rockets in a trade a year ago last Saturday for a protected second-round pick the Cavaliers are unlikely ever to receive. At the time, Murray responded on Instagram that it was “A MISTAKE THEY WILL REGRET FOREVER!!!!”
Porter received more notoriety this season following a locker room blowup Jan. 1, leading to a one-game suspension. The Rockets, however, were determined to make it what coach Stephen Silas called “a bump in the road.”
Porter was up and down in his first games back. He was 3 of 13 in Washington but nailed the game-winning 3-pointer in the final second. He went 9 of 27 in a three-game homestand but excelled through the recent five-game road trip, averaging 17.8 points on 48.4 percent shooting while seeming more patient and in control. He nailed decisive shots — again — in wins at San Antonio, Sacramento and Salt Lake City.
Along the way, and especially after the Jan. 1 incident, he cut himself off social media, escaping the “negative” comments and helping him focus.
“I tend to take breaks from social (media),” Porter said. “Nowadays, social is used more as negative than positive. It was created more for positivity, but 2022, you know how that goes. I advise people to take a break. There’s a lot of fake stuff out there that you see. Just a little break. I do it all the time.”
His conversations with Silas were not about how he is viewed outside the Rockets or how to deal with that. The emphasis was not on rehabilitating his reputation but on growing from the incident.
“My communication to him was more about our relationship and his relationship with his teammates,” Silas said. “Not so much every other thing. When we have these conversations, we’re always talking about the controllables. For me and him, the controllables are about how we relate to each other, how we communicate with each other.
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When Seattle City Council budget committee chair Teresa Mosqueda released a full slate of tweaks to Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 2023-2024 budget early Monday morning, very few of the councilmember amendments adding Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) projects and programs made it into the final proposal. That’s largely due to a more pessimistic-than-anticipated revenue forecast earlier this month that sent the council into damage control mode. This morningThe Urbanist covered how Mosqueda’s task of “delicately balancing” the final list of council priorities resulted in prioritization of spending like school health centers, abortion care, and cost-of-living increases for human services providers.
Many proposals, such as a $2.25 million expansion of the Home Zone program to improve traffic safety in neighborhoods that are currently lacking sidewalks or $2.5 million to get the Thomas Street “Redefined” corridor redesign back on track (after it was cut by Mayor Harrell), were left on the cutting room floor. Also dead is a proposal to tax bike and scooter share rides at 25 cents per ride, a proposal that would have cost about as much as it was expected to raise.
In fact, thanks to the incredibly gloomy revenue forecast, several essential transportation programs see significant cuts in SDOT’s two year budget as proposed, including a $4 million cut over two years to the city’s sidewalk safety repair program, and a $3.2 million cut to the bridge painting program. Those cuts join painful ones in other departments as well, including a $1.5 million cut to the Seattle Parks and Recreation’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance program.
But the package does propose to add two new sources of city revenue to support transportation, providing new resources for priorities important to many councilmembers while not impacting programs elsewhere in the budget. The most significant one of these is an increase of $10 to the city’s Vehicle License Fee (VLF), currently at $40. But rather than use this funding to backfill sidewalk repair, or bridge painting, the current proposal would use most of the funds generated in the first year of the increase to fund a priority of one councilmember.
Transportation chair Alex Pedersen, who proposed to increase the VLF in the first place, has been advocating for improvements to the NE 45th Street overpass in the U District, improvements that had originally included space for people biking but which have now been watered down to just barriers: fences and railings. SDOT cited pushback from Washington State Department of Transportation, with its traffic engineer fretting about freeway on-ramp queuing, for abandoning the uphill protected bike lane formerly under consideration. The $1.5 million currently earmarked for this would utilize over 75% of the funding gained from raising the VLF in 2023, with the remainder going to another Pedersen priority, bridge major maintenance, a separate program from bridge painting.
It’s not at all clear why $1.5 million should go toward one project in District 4, when more neglected areas of the city continue to bear the brunt of most of the traffic violence in the city, especially in the same budget that defunds the sidewalk safety repair budget by millions per year.
In 2024, the anticipated $4 million per year from the VLF increase would be split equally between bridge maintenance and Vision Zero safety improvements. That additional safety money joins $1.3 million allocated by the mayor for 2023, but an additional increase for next year as proposed by Councilmember Tammy Morales was left out of the package. Morales, who represents District 2 where the city continues to see an incredibly disproportionate share of traffic fatalities and serious injuries, is not satisfied with the status quo and is pushing for yet another amendment that would fund improvements to South End streets.
An amendment allocating $250,000 to pedestrian improvements around Ballard’s brewery district, requested by Councilmember Dan Strauss, and signed onto by Councilmember (and Fremont Brewing Company founder) Sara Nelson was prioritized in the budget ahead of any projects that specifically target Seattle’s most dangerous streets.
“I was very surprised that none of our proposed improvements [amending the budget] got added,” Morales said in an interview with The Urbanist Tuesday. She said that her office is still pushing to add a budget proviso holding funds within SDOT to add protected barriers to bike lanes in the South End, upgrading them from the existing paint-and-post material. The city has been adding sturdy barriers to projects like the Green Lake Outer Loop and Morales has been highlighting that imbalance. “The fact that even a proviso didn’t get in makes me really frustrated.”
City Moving Ahead With Doubling School Zone Speed Cameras
Another Pedersen proposal moving forward in the final package is a proposed doubling of the city’s school zone cameras. This will require an expenditure initially using funds that would be funding street improvements directly, instead directing $3.7 million to logistics that relate to expanding the camera program from 35 schools to 70 in advance of the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 school years. Those 70 schools are described as a “minimum” number of new cameras.
The city doesn’t have a good estimate of how much revenue will actually be generated by the new cameras, currently estimating an incredibly conservative $1 million per year. Of course, the ultimate goal of the program should be to collect very little funding from the program as drivers obey the speed limit to improve safety around schools. In this way the planned expansion of the school zone camera program calls to mind the city’s Sweetened Beverage Tax, passed in 2017 with the intention of reducing consumption and now just one of a number of revenue sources that are sending the city scrambling when the forecast comes in lower-than-expected.
On Monday, Mosqueda emphasized some additional safeguards that the council is attempting to put on the camera program.
“We have also added, in conversation with the sponsor, specific language to address equity issues, so we are placing school zone cameras across the city,” Mosqueda said. “No longer will it be the case that there’s higher proportion of school zone safety cameras in especially communities of color. We want them equitably placed across the city and we have also directed the department to include language to have a grace period [of issuing warnings before official citations].”
By city ordinance, the funds generated from school zone cameras in Seattle are required to be reinvested in making safety improvements on school routes and in pedestrian safety. The state legislature recently authorized cities across the state to add cameras to places like hospital zones, parks, and school walk routes themselves (not just immediately outside the school), in addition to intersections that have a higher-than-average crash rate, but the city hasn’t signaled any interest in utilizing that authority. Those new cameras could be operated 24/7 and might lead to a more substantial behavior change than the school zone cameras, which are only on before and after school.
Parking Enforcement Stays With SDOT…For Now
A central question that the city council was grappling with this fall has been what to do about the city’s Parking Enforcement Unit, which had been transferred from the Seattle Police Department to the Seattle Department of Transportation, but essentially only in name, with many structures tying parking enforcement to SPD still in place. A major factor in this was a supposed lack of resources available to parking enforcement within SDOT, with many officers working long hours due to hiring shortages, and issues connecting parking enforcement with the data they used to have access to within SPD.
The proposed deal brokered between the mayor’s office and the council would keep parking enforcement within SDOT, allocating an additional $8.3 million in new funding, for additional hires (adding a proposed 88 officers and 12 supervisors), overtime, supplies, and new uniforms, which would apparently have an impact on morale. Breaking from their colleagues, Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pedersen voiced support for moving parking enforcement back to SPD and funding all of Mayor Harrell’s SPD budget asks (including the controversial ShotSpotter surveillance equipment) and already had an op-ed to that effect ready to roll in The Seattle Times on Monday.
Under the rebalanced budget, whether SDOT will be the permanent home for the parking enforcement or not will be left up to an interdepartmental team to figure out, with the timeline for that team to deliver a final report moved up to next April 15, a very quick turnaround. The direction to that team is a goal codified in city law that the final home of the unit should “bolster public trust and confidence in a reimagined system of community safety,” while maintaining the core responsibilities and mission of the unit. But politics may ultimately win out over all other arguments.
The mayor’s signal that he prefers parking enforcement to stay at SPD is a clear break from the hard fought concession won from the 2020 protests and backed by a broad coalition led by Decriminalize Seattle and King County Equity Now. The op-ed from Nelson and Pedersen suggests they’d rather relitigate the “defund” slogan and cast blame on their colleagues over having an honest conversation about how to best operate parking enforcement. Having SDOT in charge of parking enforcement might actually improve outcomes from a public safety standpoint and help them create more efficient use of limited street space, as The Urbanist’s Patrick Taylor has argued.
Major changes to the budget aren’t expected before a final vote next week, but there could be some final tweaks that reduce some of the pain that will be felt by the cut of some essential SDOT services. The city is currently banking on a quick recovery to get revenues back on track, but throwing basic sidewalk repair, bridge painting, and ADA improvements over the side isn’t a great signal of things to come.
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Ryan Packer lives in the Summit Slope neighborhood of Capitol Hill and has been writing for the The Urbanist since 2015. They report on multimodal transportation issues, #VisionZero, preservation, and local politics. They believe in using Seattle's history to help attain the vibrant, diverse city that we all wish to inhabit. Ryan's writing has appeared in Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, Bike Portland, and Seattle Bike Blog, where they also did a four-month stint as temporary editor.