Welcome to The Newsfeed.

Seattle has a massive housing crisis.

New mayor Katie Wilson made affordable housing a centerpiece of her campaign.

A renter herself, she's already taken some action in her first two months in office.

Last month, the Seattle City Council approved the transfer of $115 million toward publicly owned housing for working Seattleites.

We talked about the challenges ahead during our one on one with Mayor Wilson.

You recently announced the elimination of regulatory barriers to speed up permitting process in order to accelerate the production of housing and shelter needs.

How will this fix that need?

-So this is one small piece of a large puzzle.

So we know that our housing crisis has been building for many, many years.

It has many causes.

The big one is that we have not been building housing to match our growing region.

We've also seen decades of federal disinvestment in subsidized housing.

Tackling this crisis really is an all hands on deck kind of thing, but one thing we can do is make it possible for the private market to build more housing in our great neighborhoods around the city.

And so the legislation that you mentioned, speeding up, reducing some of those permitting obstacles is, part of that.

But that's not going to solve it all by itself.

-You talked about eliminating so-called junk fees for renters.

What will that look like?

-And so one thing that you see, especially when you're dealing with some of the big kind of corporate landlords or management firms, is that in addition to your monthly rent price, which is too high... There will also be kind of hidden fees in your lease that you don't necessarily notice when you're originally signing it.

And so what we're looking at is legislation that would ban or regulate a lot of these fees so that as a renter, you kind of know what you're getting into when you sign that lease.

-I'm Paris Jackson, thank you for watching The Newsfeed, your destination for nonprofit Northwest News.

Go to CascadePBS.org for more.