Q&A: Dow Constantine on his proudest success and biggest regrets

King County Executive Dow Constantine announced last week that he would not seek reelection after 16 years of running Washington’s largest county. Constantine has led King County for longer than anyone in its modern history.

In that time he spearheaded efforts to transform public transit and early childhood education in the region. He’s also overseen massive growth and a homelessness crisis that never seems to ebb.

We sat with Constantine for a video interview on Friday, to reflect upon his four terms in office. The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why not run for another term? What’s different now for you than four years ago?

Not a lot, but four terms is a long time to stay in any position, and I just feel as though, after 15 going on 16 years, it’s a good time to let someone else have a turn at the helm, and for me to explore other adventures.

As you said, 15 years, what accomplishment are you most proud of?

I think probably the planning and passage of Sound Transit 3 stands out. We have been working my entire life to create the transit system this region needs, and that was the biggest step forward and continues to be an important part of my daily work.

There’ve of course been myriad accomplishments, Best Starts for Kids and the Crisis Care Centers Levy and simply getting us through a couple major economic meltdowns globally, and COVID.

But probably, looking back, I will most appreciate the way we were able to rally the region around creating a real transit system for those who come after for us.

How about your biggest regret, something you wish you’d done differently?

I’ve been thinking about this. I think we didn’t recognize, 15 years ago, the degree to which housing availability would become such a crisis. The economy was going so well. The fact that people were moving here from around the world to work in our tech industries was a great benefit in many ways, and we are now at a point where we’re very far behind in terms of the number of housing units available at all income ranges.

That is a burden on those who are trying to buy a home. That makes rents higher, and it causes those at the bottom end of the economic ladder to be housing insecure, or, in fact, become homeless.

Not just the county, but all of the cities and the state would have been better off had we really focused on ramping up the housing supply when the economy was revving up in the first decade of this century.

Why does homelessness seem like it’s such an intractable issue? We’ve pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars in myriad new programs, why does it seem so difficult to make progress?

The core challenge with homelessness is a lack of housing, and housing takes a very long time and a very large amount of money to construct.

So there are cities, mostly cities on the coasts, mostly cities that are geographically or topographically constrained, where there have been great influxes of new workers and great economic growth, but where housing has not kept up. There are other cities that have had a lot of the same factors, both positive and negative, but where you’re not seeing widespread homelessness, and really the difference is in the amount of housing available.

So we prevent thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands of people from falling into homelessness each year, we move thousands upon thousands of people out of homelessness each year, but the underlying factors, which are led by housing supply, persist. And so people keep slipping into homelessness. And it’s a difficult thing to move out of that once you’ve fallen into it.

I think that we have more of the pieces in place now than we had even before COVID started to ultimately solve this problem, but it is not something that one can solve simply, quickly or inexpensively.

You have the homelessness authority, the job of the homelessness authority is to engage people and deal with their emergent issues as they are homeless, including connecting them to services and hopefully to shelter.

We have this broader issue beyond the scope of the homelessness authority of creating the housing supply that people need. That is a private sector challenge, but also, very much for the low end of the market, a public sector challenge and we have yet to really be able to bring our responses to scale.

You’d said when you ran for reelection four years ago that you thought we were “turning the tide“on homelessness. We had a new 0.1% sales tax, which has been used to turn hotels into housing. We had the new Regional Homelessness Authority. Do you still think we’re turning the tide?

Yes, very much so. There are far fewer homeless encampments now. I credit a lot of our partners, including the city of Seattle and Mayor Harrell’s administration, for having helped not just chase people away, chase people from one jurisdiction to another, for helping to house people and to help them begin becoming self-sufficient again.

With our investments in behavioral health, there’s going to be another missing element of the picture that is being filled in, which is a place for people to go if they’re struggling with mental health challenges or addiction challenges.

You mentioned Health through Housing, and I want to remind you that over 1,000 people now are in a Health through Housing unit receiving services. Those are not just apartments, they’re places where we have the services to support people who have problems beyond simply being unhoused.

I think that ultimately we are going to reach that place where unsheltered homelessness is rare and brief.

What’s at the top of the list that you’re like, “Gosh I really wanted to get that done”?

There are plenty. Fixing the state tax system would be pretty high priority. It is inexcusable that Washington state has among the worst tax systems in the country, even though we have among the best economies in the country. There are the resources here if everyone was simply paying their fair share to be able to do all the things that need to be done, to pave the roads and build the rail and educate kids and house those who are struggling, and all the rest.

You’d announced in 2020 that you wanted to close both the downtown adult jail and the youth detention center. Neither seems likely in the near future. Is that disappointing? Do you have second thoughts on making those announcements?

I announced that we should work to close youth detention, and I do believe that we would be better off with decentralized facilities with different levels of security for youth who have different levels of risk. There are 34 youth charged as youth in juvenile detention today — I also moved those charged as adults from the adult jail in Kent to the youth detention facility in Seattle, so that they could get more the programming available to youth.

But for the 34 charged as youth, that is 34 kids in a facility built for, I think 112, is unnecessarily large and institutional, and although a handful of them are charged with serious violent crimes, a lot of them could be handled differently and in ways that would ultimately produce better results.

For the adult jail, that is a different issue. It’s simply old and obsolete, and we need to replace that jail with a new one that is built along more modern lines, both in terms of design and in terms of our philosophy of how we’re dealing with adult offenders.

That is inevitable, because the jail built in the ’80s was built on a very old model. So both in terms of its design and its physical condition, it is well beyond its useful life. And so that is a project that I will be working on this year, and my successor undoubtedly will be working on for many years to come.

What’s next for you, do you have ambitions to run for another office, or what’s next?

Well, I’ve been running for and serving in office for 30 years, this coming year. I started running for the state House of Representatives in the middle of 1995, so I am welcoming the opportunity to take a break at least from campaigning. I would say that it’s possible I will run for office again in the future, but I’m more excited about being able to narrow the focus a bit and to put my energies into some of these things I’m passionate about.

I see you’re wearing a UW pullover. Would you have interest in being the next president of the UW?

Well, any good Husky would have an interest in being president of the University of Washington. I’m not sure that I fit the profile. Generally, they tend toward people who’ve spent most of their careers in the academy. I’ve spent my career in the arena, doing battle in politics, but I stand ready to serve my university however my university needs me and that will probably not be as its president.

I’m co-teaching a class as a volunteer right now, in the College of Built Environments.

I love my university, where my parents and grandfather before them got their education, and I think it is, in many ways, the most important institution in our region, economically, culturally and, of course, educationally.

And of course I’m getting ready to head out to the game in a half-hour.

Go Dawgs.

Go Dawgs.