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Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson has a potentially transformative plan to reduce homelessness — using the city’s unusually high number of affordable housing units sitting empty to bring thousands of people off the street.

At the end of 2024, nearly 2,800 units of publicly funded housing in Seattle were vacant. They were renting for close to the price of the private market and too high for extremely low-income people.

Wilson wants homeless people to use them if no one else is, so has proposed the city cover the rent and cost of social services for them. She has pitched adding 4,000 emergency ho

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