Northwest Reports

Why Pandemic Relief Set Off a Fraud Frenzy

Emergency actions put money in the hands of struggling small businesses — and opened the door for some scammers. 
Three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the relief efforts enacted by the U.S. government to shore up small businesses are still headline news. But the stories aren’t about recovery; they’re about fraud.
Crosscut investigative reporter Brandon Block recently examined how the crime spree that has hit every corner of America played out in our state, revealing how easy it was for individuals and businesses to scam federal pandemic relief programs out of thousands – or even tens of millions – of dollars.
Federal prosecutors working on these cases say that the 1,500-plus charges already brought across the country for such crimes are just a drop in the bucket. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Eastern Washington, for instance, has charged 14 people and one business so far with charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and identity theft on counts involving a total of over $20 million.
Pandemic funding did help millions of people and businesses stay afloat in a critical time, but for this episode of Crosscut Reports, host Sara Bernard talks with Block about whether prosecutors will ever get to the bottom of the fraud that came with it.
Read our full report on efforts to track down pandemic-relief fraud here.
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Reporter: Brandon Block
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

What WA Voters Think of the Supreme Court

We asked Washington voters their opinions on the court and their thoughts on current cases. Pollster Stuart Elway shares his takeaways.
It has been a tumultuous year for the U. S. Supreme Court. Last June the Court, with an expanded conservative majority, handed down a decision that ended federal protection for abortion and set off political shockwaves.
Now the Court's nine justices are considering a number of other cases that could reshape the country's relationship to race, technology and even democracy itself — and that's not even the half of it. 
We wanted to know what people in Washington state think about the federal Court, so we pulled registered voters from throughout the state and asked whether they approve of the Court, how they would change it and what they think of this new slate of cases.  
For this episode of Crosscut Reports, guest host Mark Baumgarten speaks with Crosscut pollster Stuart Elway about the surprising results, which show an electorate uncertain about the Court and maybe not quite as partisan as recent history might suggest.
Read more about the Crosscut/Elway Poll on the Supreme Court here. 
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Credits
Host/executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
Guest: Stuart Elway
Producer: Seth Halleran
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

How UW Does Diversity Without Affirmative Action

Reporter Andrew Engelson discusses WA's 1998 ban of the practice, and what UW has done since to increase racial equity on campus.
The U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to strike down affirmative action across the nation, but if it does, little will change in Washington state. Washington has banned the practice since 1998, the year a ballot initiative altered state law to prohibit considering race as a factor in college admissions and in other public settings. 
After the ban was passed, enrollment of students of color at the University of Washington plunged, but numbers have crept back up over the years due to efforts such as outreach to high schools with high minority populations.
Colleges and universities across the country, now facing a similar affirmative action ban, have few other models to follow as they ponder how to promote racial diversity on their campuses. So freelance journalist Andrew Engelson asked: Since 1998, has UW met its racial-diversity goals, and if so, how?
For this episode of Crosscut Reports, host Sara Bernard talks with Engelson about how the end of affirmative action affected who goes to college; what UW has done since the 1998 ban to work toward campus racial diversity; and the implications of UW’s challenges and outcomes for higher education across the country.
Read our full report on affirmative action in higher education here.
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Producer: Seth Halleran
Reporter: Andrew Engelson
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Who Should Care for Street Trees?

Reporter Hannah Weinberger discusses the Seattle policy that many homeowners didn't even know existed.
“Street trees” are the ones that line a city’s medians, roads and sidewalks. They beautify and provide wildlife habitat, of course, but they also help mitigate climate change.  That’s part of why the health of Seattle’s street trees is so vital to the city’s goal of increasing its diminishing tree canopy. 
But while they’re technically on public land, maintaining street trees is not the city’s responsibility; their upkeep is the financial responsibility of the adjacent homeowner.
Crosscut science and environment reporter Hannah Weinberger found that out after exploring just how complicated caring for this part of the urban canopy really is. It’s expensive, and often people don’t know that street-tree care is up to them until they run into something major like a sidewalk uplift. It’s a common situation in many other cities, too.
For this episode of the Crosscut Reports podcast, host Sara Bernard talks with Hannah about the problem of street trees. As Hannah puts it, she wanted to get “people to think about, how does our city handle the maintenance sharing for public goods? And whose responsibility really should it be to do that care?” Figuring this out could go a long way toward making Seattle greener, healthier and more resilient.
Read our full report on street trees here.
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Producer: Seth Halleran
Reporter: Hannah Weinberger
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

The Effort to End a Tribal Housing Crisis

The Suquamish Tribe is using federal dollars to create more affordable housing. Crosscut reporter Luna Reyna discusses the roots of the problem and the solution.
For many years the Suquamish Tribe and its citizens owned less than half of the land on their reservation in Washington, and many of those citizens have long struggled to afford housing there.
This reality is based in large part on the forced federal assimilation policies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s also because of what the 21st-century U.S. government has called “Broken Promises.”
But recently the tribe has been getting its ancestral land back and building affordable housing for its citizens. 
For this episode of the Crosscut Reports podcast, Indigenous affairs reporter Luna Reyna talks to host Sara Bernard about the new effort, the federal funding that is making it possible and the troubling history that has made it necessary.
Read our full report on the Suquamish effort here. 
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Reporter: Luna Reyna
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

The Future of Downtown Seattle

Reporter Josh Cohen discusses the city's plans — and readers' moonshot dreams — to improve the central business core.
Just as technology was making working-from-home more convenient, the pandemic, and the social-distancing requirements that came with it, accelerated the process. Remote work is probably here to stay, so it’s unlikely offices in Downtown Seattle will ever be filled to capacity again – and the decreased daily worker traffic will impact, perhaps permanently, the businesses that depended on their presence.
Crosscut city reporter Josh Cohen has been speaking with city leaders, urban planners, real estate professionals, business owners, workers and even Crosscut readers to take stock of a post-pandemic Downtown: not only what the impact of these past few years has been, but what the central business district’s future could look like.
For this episode of Crosscut Reports, host Sara Bernard talks with Cohen about Downtown’s future: Given that things are not going back to the way they were, what could the city envision instead?
Read our report on the future of downtown Seattle here. 
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Reporter: Josh Cohen
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Providing Afghans With Refuge After War

Director Thanh Tan explains how her experience as a child of refugees led her to help those displaced after the fall of Kabul and make a Crosscut docu-series about their plight. 
When Thanh Tan learned that the United States military had withdrawn from Afghanistan and left the capital, Kabul, in the hands of the Taliban, she felt she needed to do something.  
She saw striking similarities between the plight of Afghans fleeing their country in the wake of the withdrawal and the plight of her parents and others who had fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
One way she responded was to create a mutual aid project to help Afghan refugees arriving in Washington to find housing and other resources. Another was to pick up her video camera. 
For this episode of the Crosscut Reports podcast, host Sara Bernard talks with Tan about her new Crosscut docu-series Refuge After War, which draws on her personal experience to explore the parallels between the two refugee experiences, and tells how she believes we can prevent repeating the difficult history her family experienced.
Watch Refuge After War here. 
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Reporter: Thanh Tan
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

The Painful Legacy of the Wah Mee Club Killings

Reporter Maleeha Syed talks about revisiting Washington's worst mass shooting without reopening wounds.
It has been 40 years since the Wah Mee massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in Washington history and one that had a devastating impact on many of the residents of Seattle’s Chinatown International District. 
For some, it wasn’t just the shooting that caused the pain, but the media’s coverage of the tragedy, which employed xenophobic tropes that painted the neighborhood as a dangerous place. In fact, some survivors have asked journalists not to cover these anniversaries anymore. 
For this episode of the Crosscut Reports podcast, host Sara Bernard talks with reporter Maleeha Syed about her recent story focusing on the effects of that coverage.
Syed discusses what she views as the responsibilities of a journalist from outside the community when reporting something so sensitive. And she shows how the community has told its own story over the years.
Read our full report on the Wah Mee Club killings here. 
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Reporter: Maleeha Syed
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

Why People Are Paying So Much for Alden Mason’s Paintings

Ten years after his death, the Seattle painter is having a moment. Reporter Margo Vansynghel discusses the increased interest in his work.
When Alden Mason was in the prime of his career, he was well-known among those who followed art in Seattle and those who collected it. Yet the artist from Skagit Valley never saw the success of other 20th-century Northwest painters like Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. 
Now a recent surge of interest in Mason's work has put his legacy a little closer in kind to that of those so-called Northwest Mystics. 
Of particular note have been the sale prices of his paintings at multiple auctions, which have doubled in just the past year. 
For this episode of Crosscut Reports, guest host Mark Baumgarten talks with Vansynghel about her quest to understand why Mason's art is having a moment, what it tells us about the current art market and, surprisingly, how it might have inspired an alleged fake.
Read our full report on Alden Mason and his increasingly popular paintings here. 
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Credits
Host/executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
Reporter: Margo Vansynghel
Producer: Seth Halleran
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.

The Rise of the Unionized Barista

Reporter Lizz Giordano discusses the recent labor organizing push in Washington and the struggles between Starbucks and its workers.
When employees at a Starbucks coffee shop in Buffalo, New York, voted to unionize in December 2021, it was big news. The result was a first for the Seattle-based corporation. Since then, workers at hundreds of locations across the country have followed suit. 
But in the year since, almost nothing has happened at the bargaining table. And union members allege that Starbucks has retaliated in a number of ways, from closing unionized stores to creating new benefits for nonunionized workers. 
For this episode of the Crosscut Reports podcast, host Sara Bernard speaks with investigative reporter Lizz Giordano about her story on what, exactly, has been happening at the bargaining table. 
She also discusses what comes next for these workers and what their efforts say about the broader debate around unions, workers' rights and a post-pandemic labor market.
Read our full report on the Starbucks union negotiations here. 
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Credits
Host/Producer: Sara Bernard
Reporter: Lizz Giordano
Executive producer: Mark Baumgarten
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If you would like to support Crosscut, go to crosscut.com/membership. In addition to supporting our events and our daily journalism, members receive complete access to the on-demand programming of Seattle’s PBS station, KCTS 9.