NARRATOR: Produced by Rooted in Rights, a program of Disability Rights Washington. Seattle City Council District Three Transportation and Sustainability Candidate Forum. Hosted by the MASS Coalition, Transit Riders Union, Tech4Housing, and the Housing Consortium.
[audience applauds]
(MALE VOICE): So, thank you all for joining us at this District Three Seattle Council Candidate Forum. HDC is excited to have partnered with Tech4Housing and the MASS Coalition to make these five candidate forums - this first of five candidate forums, possible. Let me tell you who the MASS Coalition members are. Seattle Club--- Sierra Club Seattle Group, The Urbanist, The Transit Riders Union, Cascade Bicycle Club, Rooted In Rights, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Seattle Transit Blog, Disability Rights Washington, Seattle Subway, Seattle Transit Blog, 350 Seattle, and 500 Women Scientists Seattle. This forum, among the dozens of ones being hosted right now, was curated by leaders working on the ground who know the challenges, champion the solutions, and are the resources that our elected officials rely on to be successful in addressing the needs in our community. The questions tonight are reflective of the passionate work being done by the housing affordability advocates, the transit accessibility advocates, the environmental sustainability advocates, and others. The theme, that I hope you are sensing tonight, is what we want to hear from the candidates are their stances and vision on the issues that most impact all of us all the time, and how they plan to work alongside the advocate communities already leaning and working in these spaces. So, I'm excited to pass the mic to our moderators tonight, Larry Hubbell, Professor at Seattle University, and Heidi Groover, Reporter at The Seattle Times. Before we begin, I just want to remind all of us that in the end, it is you and the rest of us in this community that need to be strong on the issues that sustain Seattle as a thriving and inclusive place to live. To be bold in our commitment to showing up, to telling our story through testimony, and to take on the mantle of being advocates. Thank you again for being here.
[audience applauds]
(LARRY): Thank you very much. Tonight we're really happy to have you here, and we're gonna be asking questions that were developed by the various partners here in this coalition. And you might notice that your seat you had a card, so if you would like to ask a question, because we're gonna have a section at the end where you can ask questions of the candidates. Please write it down, and we'll pick it up later. And also candidates, please identify yourself - well, I guess you already have the cards in front of you. You might want to identify yourself anyways.
[audience laughs]
(WOMAN): Please identify yourselves out loud, because some of us can't read your card.
(LARRY): Okay, great. And what we're doing is we're dividing this into several sections. The very first section is the candidates will each have 10 seconds to say who they are. No campaign pitches. Just tell us who you are, and then we're gonna be asking questions of each of the candidates. You'll each have one minute to respond to it, and then also following that, we'll have the questions from the audience, and then at the end, you'll each have one minute to make a closing statement. Thank you. And here we have our timekeeper. The timekeeper's gonna show you when you only have 30 seconds left and when you have to stop because we have a bunch of questions to ask and there's six of you. Please maintain within the limit.
(HEIDI): Okay, introductions. Start 10-second introduction, who you are, and how you traveled here to the forum tonight. Logan, we'll start with you.
LOGAN: Hi everyone. I'm Logan Bowers. Hi everyone, I'm Logan Bowers. I am a renter, a small business entrepreneur with my wife, Jerina, and an engineer, and I came here on my solo wheel, which is right there.
ZACHARY: Thanks Logan. My name is Zachary DeWolf. My pronouns are he/him. I'm a citizen of the Chippewa Cree Nation and I walked here tonight. Thank you.
PAT: I'm Pat Murakami, long-term resident of District Three. I own a small light tea company. I parked several blocks away from here and walked as much as possible, but I have to think about personal safety.
AMI: Good evening. My name is Ami Nguyen. I'm a former Tenants Right Attorney and a Public Defender. I live a few blocks from here, so I walked here tonight.
EGAN: Hello, my name is Egan Orion. I am the Executive Director of the Pride Festival, and I was doorbelling at the other end of the district so I actually drove, but I walk about six miles a day. I love walking in this district.
KSHAMA: Hi everyone. I am Kshama Sawant. I am a Seattle City Councilmember, District Three. I was first elected in 2013 as a socialist, then reelected in 2015. I carpooled from my previous event.
(HEIDI): Okay, we just have the one mic, so this is how we have to do it.
[audience laughs]
Okay, so about identifying yourselves, please do it each time you speak for people who can't see your name cards. First question, what do you think is the most important strategy Seattle can pursue to make the city affordable to live in and to prevent displacement, especially of communities of color?
LOGAN: Yes, this is probably the most salient question facing us right now. So the issues around displacement and justification come from the fact that Seattle has a severe housing shortage. I'm Logan Bowers by the way, thank you. We have a severe housing shortage. The reason we have a severe housing shortage is we added 100,000 jobs in the last eight years. We only added 45,000 housing units citywide. Of the remaining 55,000 I think we're short about 30,000 in the city. So when we have fewer homes than we have workers, somebody gets squeezed out, and what we have going on right now is that the council has made it illegal to build enough housing, and that is the land use. It is based in 1958 zoning code and it's been ratched in tighter ever since. That zoning code was originally implemented as a racial and economic segregation technique. So we live with that to this day, and we need to reverse that, and if we reverse that we can build enough housing in the city, so thank you.
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf, I want to now brief with you for a minute. So in the 1970s, the federal government was building 600,000 units of affordable housing per year. By the 1980s, they reduced that to 10,000 units plus they got rid of rental assistance. Now let me give you another statistic. Since the 1970s, the Central District - in the 1970s, excuse me - the Central District was 70% Black and African American. Today they are 18%. Two of the things I really want to explore, one is shallow-rent subsidies. This is a short-term solution, but they're doing it in D.C. and it's called the D.C. Flex Fund. This provides a shallow-rent subsidy to help people pay for their rent, stay in their home, and also build some wealth. The second thing I want to examine is actually looking at the zoning. First of all, I think we should also get rid of the payment option NMHA. The third thing I would say is we really need to examine something I used to do with Capital Champion. We did TOD, Transit Orient Development. I would really love to explore School Orient Development, so actually focusing all of our zoning ideas up, increasing the duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, missing metal housing around schools to actually make sure that our teachers and the students who are lower income and experiencing homelessness can live closer to their schools.
PAT: Hi, I'm Pat Murakami. One, I agree with Zachary. We do need to get rid of the in-lieu fee. We need to have mandatory inclusionary affordable units in every new development across the affordability spectrum, not just 80% of median. We need to charge a foreign tax investment like they do in Vancouver B.C. If one development that was sold here recently to a European company, that would have generated $111 million in taxes, that would have been 370 affordable units. We have to also stop the speculation. Blackstone is coming in, the largest real estate holder in the world, buying single family homes, making them less affordable for anybody else. So we have to stand up to these mega corporations that are literally buying Seattle out from underneath us. Many of them are from out of state and out of country. We need to support local development.
AMI: Excuse me. My name Ami Nguyen, and I grew up in Section Eight Subsidized Housing, and in addition to that, as my experience as a former tenants rights attorney, I've worked with tenants of tax credit homes, rent control, and also Section 8. And through my personal and also professional experience, I think that first MHA of zoning should spread throughout the whole city. Not every place should be zoned the same. For example, single family, we should start considering triplexes, duplexes, because what we're seeing right now is MHA of zoning in urban villages, also a lot of communities where people of color live. So when we talk about displacement, it's not only displacement of communities of color, but also displacement of families who have lived here for decades with their families because we're relying on recessive, excuse me, regressive property taxes. So we need to stop relying on that, and work to not rely on misplacing communities of color. Thank you.
EGAN: Egan Orion. So we have about 40 people, new people that arrive here everyday, and we are not producing 40 new apartments or houses, so that gets to the crux of the issue. So the answer to the affordability crisis is density, and we achieve density by having everyone participate in it. When we went through this recent economic revival, the Central District was targeted for massive development, a sort of economic redlining in the Central District. So we need to spread the wealth out to all the communities in Seattle. And 70% of Seattle is a single family zone, and that can remain that way, but we need to also integrate duplexes and triplexes. We need to really incentivize and encourage ADUs and DADUs, and spread the wealth to every part of the city so that they can all participate in the solution to our affordability challenges.
KSHAMA: Kshama Sawant. Seattle has been the construction crane capital for four years running. Construction has been booming, yet in that same period, rent has skyrocketed and housing has become more unaffordable, not more affordable. The for-profit market has completely failed us because the for-profit market builds to maximize profits for the property management corporations, the land speculators, and big developers, corporate developers. That is why we need bold policies and a serious alternative to the for-profit market. We need citywide rent control free of corporate loopholes. In the cities which have had rent control there's been proven to be a lifeline for working people, millions of working people. We also need a massive expansion of social housing, which is publicly funded, publicly owned affordable housing for working people, and King Country studies estimate that we need at least 244,000 affordable homes to begin with. That is why we need a massive expansion of social housing that can only be funded through progressive measures, progressive taxes. That's why we need to tax Big Business.
[audience applauds]
(MAN): Woo!
HEIDI: So some of you already talked about zoning but we're gonna talk about it some more. About 75% of residential land in the city is zoned single family. What do you propose specifically for types of housing to allow in the future in those neighborhoods? And we'll start with Zach.
ZACHARY: Thank you. This is Zachary DeWolf. I'm gonna go into a little bit more about my idea. I've been talking about this idea of forums in conversations across the city. I've been really excited about this idea because if we focus in our students and our families and use that as the lens by which we think of better zoning, I think we can do a lot of good in our city. So what I think is really important particularly as we think about zoning is right now we are eating at the edges of a lot of the commercial areas. A lot of the places like Chinatown-International District. Those are the places that are taking a lot of the upzone. What my idea is, is Seattle Public Schools has 105 public schools spread across the city. It would be really smart, and actually equitable, and actually bring everybody able to contribute their fair share to the growth, by changing the zoning around the schools a certain radius, maybe three to four blocks, to add missing middle, duplexes, triplexes, make sure a certain percentage of that is affordable housing. Like I said for teachers, students, and their families. Also make sure that we're integrating senior centers and child care centers. We need to really make sure our schools are hubs. It is important that we are doing place-making and centering that on students and their families.
[audience applauds]
PAT: So what we can do is have a program where we have low or no interest loans to homeowners that lift their homes and build an attached accessory dwelling unit in their basement. That would have minimal environmental impact. It would not change the character of the neighborhoods, and I hope those of you who are young and don't yet own a house and don't have a family yet, have the opportunity to own a house. I actually have a program that I want to implement to help people afford to buy a home in Seattle. So we could increase our number of units, not destroy the character of the neighborhoods, make things affordable, and the other side of that is that the homeowner would have to agree to keep the rent very low. It would have to be about $650 a month, where minimum wage workers could afford to live right here in Seattle.
AMI: I'm sorry, can I ask you to repeat the question just in case?
(HEIDI): 75% of residential land in the city is zoned single family. What specific types of housing do you want to see in those areas specifically?
AMI: Thank you. I think some of my colleagues have already discussed upzoning in terms of triplexes, duplexes, and also ADUs and DADUs, and also, another plan is if there is a multi-family that wants to keep their rent affordable, currently state law allows up to 12 years of a tax reduction. That's for state tax reduction, where I would suggest that if the apartment complex, a multi-family duplex, triplex, remains affordable, that we provide the owner longer Seattle city tax reduction so that they're further motivated past the 12 years to maintain that affordability. In addition to that, we still see a lot of housing income discrimination when it comes to renting, such as people who use Section 8. We should develop affirmative action departments that would be in the years to come self-paying to sue landlords who are discriminating against people of color and people who are using subsidized housing programs such as Section 8. Thank you.
EGAN: So I think that we're all gonna have to play our parts in communities across Seattle in order to fix the affordability crisis. On zoning, just to go back to what a lot of us have been talking about, it's really about density. Us doing our part, is also the city making sure that we have policies that encourage that sort of density that we're looking for. For example, there's a ton of townhouses that are being built around the city. A lot of times, there's that basement unit that on that first floor when you walk in that is only used for storage. It'd be great if we can incentive it - right now, you can't convert that into a second unit, but it would be a great way for folks to make a little extra income and use space that's not being utilized right now, so that's just another idea.
KSHAMA: There is no question that for housing and sustainability -
(WOMAN): Could you state your names before you start speaking?
KSHAMA: Thanks. So sorry.
(WOMAN): Yeah, thanks.
KSHAMA: Kshama Sawant. There's absolutely no question that we need greater density, both from a housing standpoint and for sustainability in reducing the carbon footprint. We need multi-family apartment buildings, and we also need larger apartments so that especially immigrant and people of color communities who live in larger families have the option of living inside the city and are not pushed out just because they have larger families. We need to stop discriminating against that. But at the end of the day, increasing density on a for-profit basis is not going to solve the problem. We have seen what has happened. The city has become greatly unaffordable. That is why we need to expand density, but on a public basis by fighting for rent control and a massive expansion of social housing by taxing Big Business. We also need to make sure that we just don't talk about zoning changes in terms of backyard cottages, just zoning changes. It's also a question of how are retiring homeowners going to be able to afford to build these backyard units? We will need public financing, public funding in order to enable that, and that also brings up the question of taxing Big Business.
[audience applauds]
KSHAMA: Oh, sorry.
[audience laughs]
LOGAN: I'm Logan Bowers. So if you've heard me talk before, you've heard me say that about one to two triplexes per city block would completely close our housing shortage in the city. That's exemplary, but we actually need to go one more plex than that, and go all the way to fourplex, and there's a really specific reason for that, and there's one other modification we have to make that to, and that is stacked flats. We need to be encouraging stacked flats, and the reason for that is stairs. So the city code overwhelmingly right now encourages development that has a lot of stairs. It's a vertical row of houses, or even if it's a triplex, it's vertical rather than horizontal. So what we're doing right now is we're decimating affordable ADA housing in our city. Fourplexes are required to have a ground unit that is level entry, which is important for folks with disabilities who need entry level housing that is also affordable. It's also important for everyone who plans to get old, because at some point we're not gonna be super thrilled about going upstairs.
[audience applauds]
HEIDI: Seattle has the most regressive tax system of any city in Washington State, which has the most regressive tax system of any state in the United States. Do you believe Seattle needs significant new revenue to address housing and transportation needs? And if so, which specific revenue sources would you advocate for? And please remember -
PAT: Sure. Pat Murakami. Well, just as I said two years ago, we need a state income tax. That's the only way we're gonna fix the regressive tax. It has to be a step tax. No income tax on low income families combined with a reduction of sales and property tax. Every new tax that has been presented by the city council never addresses the regressive tax structure. So what this requires is that the City Council get together, talk to the municipalities, and as a group, go and lobby the state legislature and get them to change the state constitution. That's the only way we're going to have a progressive tax system.
(MAN): Boo.
[audience applauds]
AMI: Good evening, I'm Ami Nguyen. And I agree we should work with the state legislatures to try to implement to an income tax. While on that page though, make sure that we get rid of the sales tax, the regressive tax. But in light of until - legislation's done, so I would suggest a capital gains and an interest in dividends tax for high-earning incomes, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that would go towards transportation and housing for our communities. Thank you.
EGAN: So I think one thing that I'm hearing a lot when I'm doorbelling and talking to voters in other forums is the fact that they can't afford to pay any more taxes, and the current council has not been using the tax money that they've been given to full effect. So we need to make sure that we're using the citizens' tax money properly, and that process is accountable. I think there's lots of places where we can recover a lot of funds. There's like 60% of folks that have dogs out there that don't even have licenses for them. So before we go back and ask people that are already stretched to the max for more money, let's make sure that we're using the money that we have. I also think that when we're looking at additional tax revenue, that we should be matching that revenue source to the project that we're gonna be using. So for example on transportation, there could be a small tax on rideshare. If we're talking about affordable housing or shelters, to double the two dollars that's charged for every room night in Seattle. That would generate like $10 million that could help us run shelters.
KSHAMA: Seattle does have the most regressive tax system in the entire nation, and the corporate politicians in Olympia for decades have strangulated municipal ability to raise progressive revenues. However, it is not acceptable for politicians to simply either pass the buck or say regular lobbying. I mean we've seen where lobbying by politicians to politicians has taken us, which is nowhere, and that is why we have to build powerful, grassroots, united mass movements to fight for taxes on the wealthy, and taxes on Big Business. The Amazon tax that we, our movement successfully fought for last year is a perfect example of progressive, truly progressive tax. It was going to be a tax on the largest 3% of businesses in our city, which is not on working people, not on the 97% of the smallest businesses in our city. It was completely viable. It was going to be spent on housing and services. It was a shameful moment in Seattle council history that seven of the nine council members and the mayor repealed that tax, which shows that we are going to have to build even more powerful movements if we are to have any hope for progressive revenues. The same logic applies for developer impact fees and vacancy taxes. We'll need a movement.
(MAN): Woo!
[audience applauds]
(HEIDI): Do you believe in the city making new revenue for housing, transportation, and other specific resources?
LOGAN: Got it.
(MAN): We can't hear the question.
(HEIDI): It was the same question.
(MAN): Okay.
LOGAN: Just asked for a review. So, Logan Bowers. So for housing, my goal is to not use public dollars and that's why I focus on land use because we can solve most of our housing shortage entirely using private dollars if we zone and legalize housing correctly. On the transportation front, I do think we need more dollars in the long-term to move more folks by mass transit. I do favor a congestion charge as a tool to serve more neighborhoods throughout the city with well, frequently run transit, so that folks can choose an option other than using a single-occupancy vehicle to get around the city. 
[audience applauds]
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf. As you've heard throughout this question, we do have the most regressive taxes, so I think we need to commit to lobbying our state. I think it's kind of frustrating when our incumbent does say that lobbying doesn't work, but it is going to take lobbying to make sure that we can actually overturn the statewide ban on rent control. So it is very important that we are lobbying and have a great working relationship with our legislature. When it comes to taxes, particularly as it pertains to homelessness system, we are only spending half as much as we need to. For example, we are going to have to work with our county partners. It has to be a regional approach. One of the ideas that I was gonna put out there is a 2.5 payroll tax to increase the funding for our homelessness services here in King County. But the other thing we're not talking about are all of the other ideas that were included in the progressive revenue task force that came out last year. So we need to think about our local estate tax. When you say think about expanding on more. We had some great progress at the state level. We can do more here in the city of Seattle. The other thing I want to think about too is that we should really try and pilot, whether it's our utilities, Seattle public utilities, is to actually base our fees and fines on income. It's a really great equitable approach. I'd really be interested in looking at that.
(HEIDI): The city has adopted a goal of zero traffic-related fatalities this year as injuries, but we are not making sufficient progress towards that goal. What will you do to make progress on Vision Zero?
AMI: Well I'm very excited, Ami Nguyen. I'm very excited to be here tonight because it's a combination of many organizations that are trying to answer this question and solve this problem. We see that while we're trying to create more public bike lanes, it's dangerous sometimes when you're having the street car, bikes intercepting the same area, and also cars coming in the same area. And it's very unfortunate that families have loss sisters and friends due to this situation. And in finding a way and a solution, I would ask the community members in here, and also community organization members who cannot make it today what they believe would be the solution. Because there are a lot of times. Excuse me, in researching this, there are many ways that we can improve the bike lanes, and also improve sidewalks, but it takes as the speaker earlier, it takes our continual effort, and also somebody in the city council member - the city council seat who will listen to the suggestions and really think hard about it and have all the organizations' thoughts work together. Thank you.
EGAN: Egan Orion. So I'm a big walker. I live in the Central District, and I work on Capitol Hill, and I often walk between those two, so this is a question that I think about a lot when I'm walking. There's that John Thomas Interchange between 23rd and Broadway, and up to 15, they did a lot of improvements this last year to put bump-outs so that there's an obvious crosswalk where there's not a bus turnout lane, but the buses actually block the traffic. The key to being successful on this whole effort are infrastructure changes, like what happened on John and Thomas, but it's also just to find anyway we can to slow folks down. I was just in a community meeting yesterday for the recent shootings at 21st and Union. That's actually another technique to also hinder crime, because their getaway routes, they usually take the fastest way. So if we can slow people down on those arterials, we also prevent some crime.
KSHAMA: I wanted to thank many of the activists and organizations who have been fighting for Vision Zero and Multi-modal Transportation and the Bicycle Master Plan for years, a lot of you for decades. Globally, 1.25 million people die in road crashes every year as we know. Sadly, my own father was one of them. He was killed in a road crash in India when I was 12, so this hits me personally. And I support all the steps that we need to make, need to take in order to make zero fatalities possible. We have to include projects that address high-crash corridors, prioritize pedestrians and bicycles and intersections, expand protected bike lanes, and develop safe routes to school. In fact, it's stunning to see the lack of infrastructure and crossing guards for walking safety of school students. We need to fill in nearly 800,000 feet of missing sidewalk located within 1/4th of a mile of schools while the crossing guard vacancy rate is at 39%. We need funding to bring it from 39% to zero. But at the end of the day, as we saw with the 35th Avenue bike lane debacle, we're gonna need to build a stronger movement to win this.
[audience applauds]
LOGAN: Logan Bowers. So any of us who bike or walk, we see ghost bikes throughout our city that are reminders that we're failing as a community on our Vision Zero goal of having no traffic fatalities. I think - let's be honest, we know what it takes. It takes good, safe infrastructure. We don't have to pioneer new designs here. It has been tried and true in many, many cities. What we need is a council that's willing to go to the mat for safety, and we haven't had that for years. You can go back through the archives of council meetings, and council members always wring their hands at the lack of state progress on safety, and nothing ever happens. We need to prioritize it. We need bike lanes that are safe enough to have to ride on with a child. We need to have protected lights where people are not gonna get hooked by a car making a free right. So this is about priorities, this isn't about some new, novel technique. We know the techniques.
[audience applauds]
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf here. I think first and what is most important again is to really center the people most affected by the issues. There's been some research and a report that actually suggests that seniors and people of color are most impacted and harmed by walking accidents, particularly native women. So we really need to, I think first, make sure that all of our crosswalks and the lights that correspond actually last longer. I was just at a crosswalk the other day. It was 12 seconds, and I was, I'm an able-bodied person, and I couldn't even make it in 12 seconds, so we really need to prioritize, particularly those crosswalks for seniors and young folks, particularly around their schools. The other thing too is when we think about protected bike lanes and our bike infrastructure, a lot of them are low-stress and then you have to cross over into a high-stress environment, either into a road, either into traffic, you have to cross something, and you can get back to low-stress bike infrastructure. I will tell you my husband does ride a bike, and it is my biggest fear when he does ride his bike to work, because I check in with him before he gets there and when he gets to work, just to say, "Did you make it?" Because often times, the bike lane doesn't connect. So I think we really need to prioritize, particularly our bike lanes. The last thing too is we just need to build now. We have particularly a Rapid - I'll talk about Rapid Ride hopefully later.
[audience laughs]
Oh, sorry.
PAT: Pat Murakami. One, the city council changed our speed limits in the city which was a good idea, but they haven't changed the signs so people aren't driving at those slower speeds. So I'd like to see residential streets down to 20, and all the other streets down to 25, like they should be. We can widen sidewalks and when we do it, I'd like to see it with water-permeable concrete, because we're building out more and more of the land, and we have a runoff issue. It'd be better for the environment, and let people share the sidewalks with pedestrians. We could even paint a line on one part for the bikes, because if my son, when he was 10, I wouldn't really want him on a busy street. I'd have no problem with him riding on a sidewalk, and we need more sidewalks. When I go to my clients' offices down in Georgetown, I walk to as many as possible, and I have to walk in the middle of the street because there are no sidewalks, and cars are parked where sidewalks should be. So we've failed, especially in our communities of color to build that sidewalk infrastructure.
(HEIDI): What does racial equity mean to you? How does it affect your approach to land use and transportation? Start with Egan, and please remember to introduce yourself.
EGAN: Egan Orion. I'm actually a fourth generation District Three resident, but I actually left and then came back. And I know that the Central District in particular has a deep history of racial inequity, and the folks were redlining there in the 60's and 70's. A lot of them are still my neighbors, and I get to hear stories about the old neighborhood. I am deeply committed to keeping the diversity of my neighborhood. On my block alone, we have black and white, gay and straight, young and old living side by side. It's not this totally harmonious vision of life in Seattle, but it's a neighborhood where we trust each other, we look out for each other, particularly when it comes to law enforcement and how law enforcement relates to people of color. That's something we need to work on, because black and brown folks want to be safe in their communities as well.
KSHAMA: So did you say racial equity in transportation, and what else?
(HEIDI): Lands.
KSHAMA: So we can see massive racial inequities both in terms of land use, which relates directly to housing justice, and in transportation, and in fact, Seattle used to have a racist redlining, which was overtly racist. Now we don't have that, but we have an economic redlining. But because of the unfortunately very high correlation in the context of capitalism of being a person of color, and being poor or low income, it is still an economic redlining means that it if you are a person of color, you're also more likely to be low income and struggling, and if you especially break it down into single-mom households and immigrant and refuge communities, these are the communities that are getting the brunt of all of this crisis. That is why we need a massive public alternative to address the question of housing injustice, and I won't go into the points I've already mentioned, because I've talked about them, rent control and social housing, because communities of color and racially marginalized groups are the most disproportionately impacted by the crisis. They're also going to be the most disproportionately affect--- positively affected. And in terms of transportation, we need expansion of public transit, and we need to stop penalizing transit-rider nonpayment.
[audience applauds]
LOGAN: Logan Bowers. So Seattle's entire history of land use has been almost entirely about racial segregation. It was explicit prior to 1958, and it was racial mixed with economic segregation post 1958 through the land use code. Even to this day, the single family zoning system that we have is an invisible wall that keeps communities of color out of neighborhoods in the city, and confines them to neighborhoods that have higher pollution levels, and less access to amenities. So for me, it is about breaking that wall so that communities can live, people can live in any neighborhood they choose. The other one I want to highlight is when folks get displaced, we need to think about transportation, especially if you rely on public transit. If you're unable to drive a car and you get displaced from the city, it is 10 times worse because you end up in a car-dependent suburb where you cannot get around, so that's very important that we do not displace folks who rely on public transportation, because that's what we have here.
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf here. I work at an organization called All Home, and I'm a program manager, and I specifically work in Youth and Adult Homelessness, and I want to be very clear about something. In the Seattle public schools, we have 4,280 students experiencing homelessness. Six out of 10 students are students of color. Addressing homelessness, addressing displacement, these are racial justice issues. This is very important. I think when we talk about equality and equity, we really need to make sure we know what we're talking about. Equality is everybody gets the same thing. Equity is everybody gets what they need and they deserve. At my organization, one our theories of change is making sure that we center the people most impacted by the crisis and the solutions, and frankly, as Logan stated, the precision with which the city and organizations put these policies on our communities, we need to respond back with that same precision. I would be really interested in making sure that particularly here in the Central District, the communities of color that were in a historically redlined area, we actually need to prioritize them to make sure they are staying in their homes. It might be making sure that they have a relief for their taxes, and making sure that we ask them actually what they need. The second thing--- okay.
[audience laughs]
PAT: Pat Murakami. I believe we live in a very racist, classist city. The Central Area, everybody admits we redlined black people to this neighborhood, now we're grooming them out. The MHA legislation disproportionately impacted low income people, people of color, and still gave the developers a huge break, because they can pay in-lieu fees, and we'll never build anything affordable. So we need to make exceptions for communities that have a historic basis, and protect the integrity of that community. I'm wiring one of the major churches here for their sanctuary so that they can broadcast their services out to the people in Burien and Canton, Federal Way, because their community has been decimated by city policy. Developers are knocking on the doors of black homeowners not just saying would you like to sell your house, but harassing them to sell their homes, so we need to change city policy. We have a race and social equity toolkit. Let's open it once in awhile.
[audience applauds]
AMI: Ami Nguyen. Everyone has discussed redlining, and back in the day, it seemed normal. And now we go 40-50 years from now, where we're saying that's appalling. But what we're still hearing in the conversation is, "Well, if we bring low-income housing or affordable housing to our neighborhoods, our property value is going to go down." That's the equivalent of what was said decades ago, and so we need to move away from that conversation, and how do we go about doing that? Obviously, we're going to engage the neighborhoods and communities, low-income communities, immigrant communities, and also communities of color, into deciding how they want their futures to be. Because a lot of times we're imposing it, and we need to move forward and put in extra work to work with the communities that historically have been marginalized in the political space. And how do we do that? We need to make sure that transportation's free for low-income and disabled communities. We also need to make sure that when we're doing land use, that we're keeping our promise that when we developed all this transportation, we promised to make it accessible to low-income communities and people of color. We need to keep that promise. And so moving forward, that's how we should use racial equity for those two matters. Thank you.
(LARRY): I'd also like to ask the audience if you could start submitting your questions, to pass 'em up to the front here. And I'd also like to remind the candidates to please identify yourself. So my question is to Kshama Sawant. According to SDOT, 45,000 city blocks are missing sidewalks. The city only has the money to build 25 blocks per year. That means it would take 1,800 years to complete the city's entire sidewalk network. What will you do to address this challenge?
KSHAMA: Clearly, as the question stated and as I stated before, there is a severe lack of good quality sidewalks and the ADA compliance is very, very minimal, and we have streets that, especially in low income neighborhoods, that don't have sidewalks at all. But the question of sidewalks is not fundamentally any different than how would we fund sidewalks? The same question is how would we fund housing? How we would fund block public transit? We need progressive revenues. We absolutely cannot drop the question. You see it popping up again and again and again. When we talk about making this city livable or affordable in any way possible for our communities that are marginalized, the question that pops up again and again is how are we going to fund these various projects? And we absolutely have to have political courage on the council. Not people who say they will listen to everybody, but political courage on the council who will have the courage to tax billionaires, tax big businesses like Amazon, and say we're going to use these revenues to fund all the things that we need. And we need to stop and use those $10 million on productive uses.
[audience applauds]
LOGAN: Logan Bowers. So I have a goal at the top of my platform, which is a 100% walkable Seattle. And this is as much about traffiC as it is about climate change because if we don't dial our fossil fuel usage in cars to zero, in about 20 years we're gonna be in deep, deep trouble from a climate change perspective. What that means is I believe every Seattleite deserves to have within walking distance of their home groceries, childcare, and a third place, like a cafe or a restaurant. We have to have that accessibility, so we can choose to walk to the amenities we need to live every day. Now the other half of this is to do these projects, we need basic governance and oversight from the council. We need to be prioritizing the appropriate things. We've had years of not prioritizing sidewalks and curb ramps. This is not glamorous. It's not fist pounding at the table that gets you out at rallies. It's making sure departments are prioritizing the right things, spending city money efficiently. We need more of that on the council so that these things get done.
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf. I think one thing that we really need to do, and I think folks have mentioned it already, or might mention it again, is the idea that we actually need to really look at our city budget, and make sure we are actually spending money wisely. I know particularly in the homelessness crisis in our system, we're spending around $6 million on outreach. And I will tell you, outreach does not house people. We need to make sure we are reprioritizing our investments to make sure they are either going for what they say they are, or making sure that we have better use for them. But what has also been important to Logan's point is that we are in the throes zone of a climate crisis, and we are going to see more and more of our roads and our sidewalks affected by the climate crisis, and we really need to address that. And particularly maybe look at some of the ways L.A. has done a really great climate action plan, increasing jobs, increasing funding. The other thing I think we should really do is make sure that the folks that are building homes on lots, or even multi-family units, multi-family housing, are also paying their fair share into making sure that the infrastructure around them actually lives up to the promise of our safe sidewalks.
PAT: Pat Murakami. Columbia City, as an example, was annexed to Seattle over 100 years ago. We still don't have sidewalks there, though they were promised when the annexation took place. We have muddy gullies where low income kids of color have to walk in the middle of the street, and are at risk of being hit, because again, they don't matter to our city leadership. There are a couple of problems here. There's a state law that limits how much SDOT can spend. Only a certain percentage of their budget can be spent by SDOT employees putting in the sidewalks. After that, it has to go out to contract, which increases the cost of doing it, and it cannot be more than $79,000 for a particular job. So when they did the curb cuts and the speed bumps at the corner of my street, it cost $1.2 million done by a Bellevue firm. We've got to change the state law so that we can have union-benefitted city employees doing this work. It would bring the cost down significantly. In addition, we should have been charging developers impact fees. We've failed to do it. They do it in Bellevue. They're building there and elsewhere. Impact fees.
AMI: I'm an attorney, and in working for nonprofits and also government, and speaking with other attorneys, a lot of times government will wait until litigation to do what they were supposed to do years ago. So for example, Los Angeles, all of a sudden they spent millions of dollars developing sidewalks to make sure the disabled communities can actually use it. That came from litigation. So you're not only paying what you should of done, but you're also paying the attorneys who litigated the matter. So we need to make sure that we have a city council that is going to effectuate sidewalks before we wait for a litigation, before we wait for lawsuit fees on our end, and also paying the attorney's fees on the other side because of an ADA violation. So there's different ways in how we want to raise taxes, but we all do agree that the disabled communities need this, want this, and also families who need to walk in safe sidewalks, not in the middle of the street fighting cars. Thank you.
EGAN: Egan Orion. Yeah, just back to the budget issue again. I think that people are frustrated in this town that we can't even get the basics right. That we're talking about bike lanes when our major arterials where most of the bikes are going right now have big potholes, which pose a big danger. So we're not even able to get the basics right. On budget, I have a philosophy of spend once. With the homelessness crisis for example, there's folks that are currently homeless that go in and out of that system because we fail to provide a mental health and addiction services, as well as support of housing. So we're spending 10 times on those folks. We're spending millions of dollars more than we should be, and people are suffering as a result. So that that money can be captured from the budget, we just need to have the creativity and the will to be able to go after that money, so that we can use it on important projects. Infrastructure projects like sidewalks, and impact fees.
(LARRY): Okay, we'll start this one with Logan. The United Nations Climate Report tells us we have about 11 years left to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50%. Given that more than 50% of Seattle's greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, what are the highest priority actions to put Seattle on the path to decarbonization?
LOGAN: I'm so glad it's finally coming up at a forum that we get to talk about climate change, because it is one of the most excess central threats we're facing at the moment. So this is where my 100% walkable goal is really, really crucial. There's no way that we'll be able to electrify every last car in the country before climate change hits us. We have to be using them less. And if we want people to use vehicles less, we have to give them better alternatives. The best alternative to a trip is a trip not taken, so that's putting things within walking distance of everyone's home. Right now, there's thousands of homes where there's nothing in walking distance. Those homes are car-dependent. It makes no sense that the city outlaws putting amenities near those houses. Number two is we have to be investing in our bicycle infrastructure and our pedestrian infrastructure as our top priorities, specifically so that those modes become more appealing to people so that they can choose something other than a vehicle. We're never gonna get completely rid of cars, but we want to be giving people as many other choices as possible. Lastly, we own our own electric utility, we can make disproportionate gains in decarbonizing the entire western grid if we manage it well.
[audience applauds]
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf. First, we're really grateful this year to our state for making sure that we are going to be carbon-free. I'm really proud to be endorsed already by Gail Charleton, and the work that they did is a really great example, but I think we actually have to be even more ambitious. LA has a climate plan right now, I think it's a really good model. One of the things that I think has been really frustrating about our local efforts is that they don't necessarily go far enough. So I think part of it is making sure that all of our buildings are electric. And the other thing I want to make sure is that we're all--- our zero carbon electricity grid, to get that to at least 80% renewable energy by 2036. The other thing I want to talk about too is food waste. Food waste has actually a huge impact on our climate crisis. I think we need to really address food waste here in this city. The last thing I will say, which we did bring up, but I think has been talked about a little bit is congestion pricing. We haven't necessarily figured out the goal of congestion pricing. I think we need to make sure it's answering one of three questions. Is it for our climate crisis goals? Is it for infrastructure needs? Or is it for revenue? And I think if it's for our climate crisis that's great, and then I think we need to figure out what we want to do with that revenue. I think we can address some of those. 
PAT: Pat Murakami. We should go back and take the dust off the neighborhood plans. In those neighborhood plans, it was a master plan and a vision for what the city would look like. And there was gonna be density and height at the urban center tapered down into the single family neighborhoods with all the job opportunities, shops, and the things that each neighborhood said they wanted in their neighborhood, that people could walk. We need to have a more robust transit system with connector buses. I am opposed to fixed rail, because steel and concrete are two of the most polluting materials out there. So we need to look at new technology, such as virtual track that's painted on the ground that they're testing in China. We should have kids here in high school or colleges learn to manufacture and sell electric bikes, and turn many of our roads into bike-only roads. If the city sold us those at cost, we could all get out of our cars. And then, a greater vision is to cover some of those streets so that we're not getting poured on in the winter months, and we use the bikes year-round.
AMI: I think we can get there by implementing all the great ideas that the organizations here have already discussed. I mean organizations that are part of the Move All Seattle Sustainability, which includes all the organizations that were listed earlier. But let's also look around the room. Who's here tonight? Who's being engaged? We need to not only have communities that are here, but also communities of color, immigrant communities, because if we have great ideas, but it's not used by the historically marginized communities, then it's not having the effect that we want it be. This isn't to impose it, the responsibilities on organizations. It's something that the city council should be asking ourselves. What are we doing or not doing to engage more communities of color, and more immigrant communities? And so I think we have the right ideas, like Logan said. We need to implement it, but we also need to make sure that it's accessible to all communities in Seattle to reach that goal together. 
EGAN: Egan Orion. So we can do this through transportation, green development, dense, walkable neighborhoods, and innovation. So on the transportation side, we definitely need to electrify all of our public transportation. The bike lanes are going to be an important part of this as well, because that is a zero-carbon solution. And the bike lanes are not just for bikes. They can also be used for E-Scooters, and Logan's solo wheel, and other forms of technology that we can't even imagine right now. On green development, we need to have zero-carbon building construction, and I think there's gonna be a really big opportunity with remodels. And it doesn't even have to be - people are saying they can't even stay in their house, how am I gonna remodel? It could actually be something very simple, like double-paned solar glass throughout the whole house. You invest once, and you actually end up saving money over time. And then innovation, innovation, innovation. I know that the incumbent has really demonized a lot of our big innovators, but we are gonna need all the innovation we can get to get out of this climate crisis.
KSHAMA: The climate change clock is ticking dangerously and for Seattle to begin achieving carbon neutrality, it will require the pace of our carbon emissions reductions to increase by seven-fold. This is a huge challenge we face. Vehicular emission is one of the top culprits. We're going to have to fully expand public transit to such a point that there is enough frequency and enough density of routes that it becomes viable for people to raise families, go to their jobs, drop their kids at school, entirely by public transit, or almost entirely by public transit. We in addition to fully expanding public transit in the region, we need to fully electrify all public transit and make it free at point of use. But to do any of this, we're going to need united mass movements on the ground that will have the courage to challenge the establishment and big oil and big corporations that will and have posed the main obstacle to any change of this kind. We're not going to be able to do that without mass movements, and those mass movements will need elected representatives who will represent the movement and not Big Business.
(MAN): Woo!
[audience applauds]
(LARRY): We have many good questions here, so we won't be able to get to all of them, unfortunately. But the last question is, and this is directed towards Zachary, how can we make Seattle streets, including sidewalks and intersections, safer and more accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities? Specifically, do you support installing automated traffic enforcement cameras, and implementing speed limit reductions, and banning rights on red?
PAT: I'm sorry, can you read that whole question again?
(LARRY): Sure. How can we make Seattle streets, including sidewalks and intersections, safer and more accessible for everyone, including people with disabilities? Specifically, do you support installing automated traffic enforcement cameras, implementing speed limit reductions, and banning rights on red?
ZACHARY: Thank you, great question. Zachary DeWolf here. I think I have mentioned a few things before, but one of the things that I've actually heard about, particularly as it pertains to safety on our street and our sidewalks, is that visibility and lighting are super crucial. I actually walk around with my husband on most nights with our dog, and often times, we'll come up to a street light that is out. And I have to find the Fix-It app on my phone and I send it out to the city, and hopefully, they take care of it. But frankly, with visibility, particularly as it pertains to lighting, but also on our sidewalks. So some of the sidewalks around my street have bushes over them, trees over them. We need to make sure that our neighbors are taking more responsibility to make sure that the visibility on the sidewalks is important. I think I mentioned a couple of really important things before which were just to make sure that our crosswalks last longer for folks as far as timing. But as it pertains to installing auto traffic cameras, I think you said banning right on red, yes. You said something?
(LARRY): Yes.
ZACHARY: I'm sorry. There was three there, and I want to make sure I get to those.
(LARRY): Sorry. Traffic enforcement with cameras, implementing speed limit reductions, and banning rights on red.
ZACHARY: Absolutely yes to all of those.
PAT: Pat Murakami. Well I already said I wanted to implement the speed limit reductions that we haven't done. Yes on traffic enforcement cameras for running red lights, and also create speed traps with cameras. I have no problem with that. We're doing the curb cuts now, slowly but surely. A shame we didn't do more much sooner. We have to move, make sure the share bikes aren't in the way of people on wheelchairs. I'm getting all kinds of complaints of people having, being impeded by that. We need better lit crosswalks in some places. They got rid of all the lit crosswalks on Rainier Avenue South and then wondered why we had fatalities, and still haven't put back all the crosswalks that we had years and years ago. With the right on red, it does help for cars to move and not have as much pollution as they're idling, but we could have a sign that flashes to warn people to look in the bike lane, look at pedestrians before you advance.
AMI: I would say yes to every situation. My name is Ami Nguyen. In being a public defender, I am concerned about people who cannot afford to pay for their tickets, so obviously that's something that our city has always constantly worked towards, making sure that low-income families are not long-term harmed by that. But in addition to that, I think that it's very important to start enforcing rules in terms of cars going over crosswalks. So sometimes you just want to squeeze your car in to possibly be next. It's very dangerous because if you were using a wheelchair or your family's trying to cross, a lot of times then you either go in front of the car, which is dangerous, or you go behind the car. So we need to ensure that we force that too, to make sure that cars do not drive over the crosswalk when they're trying to save five to 10 seconds from traffic.
EGAN: Egan Orion. I guess the question that I always ask myself, especially in my neighborhood, is what more can I be doing to make the sidewalks safer? What more can I be doing when I'm out driving in order to help keep people safer? I think that the homeowner and the apartment building where you live, I think that we all have a collective responsibility to keep those sidewalks safe. And this could be something as simple as when in the fall when there's wet leaves on the ground, that that's our collective responsibility, because someone with disabilities or a person, a senior may slip on those. So there's lots of ways that each of us can play a role in doing that. Another thing, when you see a bunch of junk strewn on the sidewalk, you know what you can use is your handy Find-It-Fix-It app. Go ahead and tell the city about it, and have them come up and pick up that trash, so that other people that can't navigate that sidewalk don't have to get over that. I'm all fine with all the other questions. I would want to explore the right on red to see. I'm a little shaky on that, but good idea.
KSHAMA: We all know pedestrians are the most vulnerable on the roads and on the sidewalks, especially disabled and other community members, and families with their children, so we have to do everything possible in terms of concrete policy measures in order to address these issues. And all of the things that were mentioned in the question in terms of speed bumps, crosswalks, and prioritizing signaling for pedestrians is very important. I'm open to all the options that were suggested in the question, but we also have to remember that we cannot rely on handing out tickets, because we know that the communities of color and low-income people, working class people, poor people, are hit extremely hard by the inability to pay these. They collect fines, and then they are taken to jail, and they are prosecuted, and this is a vicious cycle of poverty that they are subjected to. So we have to make sure that if you want to actually solve this problem and be equitable at the same time, we cannot rely on these measures alone. Ultimately, in order to address pedestrian safety, we will need a massive expansion of public transit to reduce vehicular traffic as a whole.
[audience applauds]
LOGAN: Logan Bowers. So this is an issue that is very personal for me. Block the box, that's the cameras that automatically ticket if you block on a red light, is absolutely critical, especially in our downtown streets where traffic is getting worse. It become unnavigable if you cannot walk all the way around a car and into traffic. So if you need accessibility and access to the ramp, it becomes unnavigable, and that's not fair. So we need those cameras so that we enforce that. Right on red, I was half a second away earlier today from getting hooked by a car making a free right, and then I wouldn't be here today. Speed limits, we absolutely need to lower the speed limits. If a car is going 20 miles an hour and hits you, you're almost certainly going to live. At 30 miles an hour, you have a 50/50 shot, and at 40 miles an hour, you're dead. So absolutely, we need to keep our speed limits low. It's very important. And I do agree that when we do have ticket revenue, we have to be careful about the equity of effects of who gets what tickets and how much they're paying.
(LARRY): Okay, before we move to the audience questions, we have some lightning round questions.
(HEIDI): So you're going to hold up a yes or no, and please keep them held up so that I can read out your answers for people who may not be able to see the cards. Do you support the proposed backyard cottage legislation? Everyone says yes, except for Pat Murakami says no. Do you support funding the Center City Connector street car? Everyone says yes. Do you support congestion pricing in the downtown core and using the money to fund transit bike and pedestrian infrastructure?
AMI: That's a compound question.
KSHAMA: It is a compound question.
(HEIDI): So no yes or no from Kshama Sawant or Egan Orion. Egan Orion says yes.
KSHAMA: If you ask just congestion for us, that would be fairer, I think.
(HEIDI): Okay, just congestion pricing? No discussion of where the money goes. Okay. Now you don't want to answer, Pat?
PAT: Okay.
(HEIDI): Okay, Kshama Sawant says no. Egan Orion says yes. Ami Nguyen says no. Pat Murakami says yes. Zachary DeWolf says yes. Logan Bowers says yes. Do you support electric scooter sharing in Seattle? Everyone says yes. Do you support impact fees on new developments to fund transportation improvements? Logan Bowers, no. Zachary DeWolf, Yes. Pat Murakami, yes. Ami Nguyen, no. Egan Orion, yes. Kshama Sawant, yes. Would you support requiring the city to install bike parking corrals on every block? Everyone says yes.
AMI: What?
(HEIDI): Bike racks. Sorry, I'm sorry. Would you support a city requirement that large employers subsidize transit passes for their employees? Everyone says yes. And a couple of audience questions we'll do as lightning round. Would you support the City of Seattle passing a rent control ordinance that would take effect if lawmakers in Olympia lifted the ban? Logan Bowers, no. Zachary DeWolf---
[audience laughs]
Pat Murakami, yes. Ami Nguyen, yes. Egan Orion, no. Kshama Sawant, yes. Zachary DeWolf, yes. And we got a couple of questions about the Chamber's PAC CASE, and so will you actively reject the support of CASE if they support you in this election? Kshama Sawant---
LOGAN: Wait, can you qualify that?
(HEIDI): So it's an independent expenditure, so you don't have any power over whether they do it or not, but if they come out and say, we love Logan Bowers, are you gonna say no thanks?
LOGAN: I'm going to think that's the definition of independent, right?
(HEIDI): But you can say publicly I don't want the support or what have you. Okay, Logan Bowers, no. Zachary DeWolf, yes. Pat Murakami, no. Ami Nguyen, yes. Egan Orion, no. Kshama Sawant, yes. And now we're going to go to audience questions.
(LARRY): Okay, we're gonna start this one with Pat Murakami. What grade would you give the current mayor on transportation policy and housing policy?
PAT: Of A, B, C, D?
(LARRY): Of A, B, C, D, yeah.
PAT: Okay. Housing and transit, huh?
(LARRY): Correct.
PAT: I'd give her maybe a C on transit. I don't think we've done enough and we could be more aggressive. And on housing, that's a tough one. I guess I'd give her a C. I think a lot of our housing problems and the fact that we don't have affordable housing is due to bad legislation, which is the byproduct of City Council decisions.
[audience applauds]
AMI: Unfortunately, I would give D in both situations. There's a lot of displacement happening, especially in communities of color. And also transportation, a lot of problems remain and we need a strong leader, so, unfortunately, it's a D.
EGAN: Egan Orion. I think it's a little too early in Mayor Durkan's term to be able to give her an honest grade. I'm just gonna say C for now. Housing takes a long time to develop, and I think the reason why I'm a little on the fence as far as transportation is concerned is I don't understand what her thing is about E-Scooters. Like she is just finding every excuse possible to not put them onto our city streets, and I'd love to be able to have an honest conversation about that because I think from an equity standpoint, the first and last mile, the technology where you can make it go slower in areas that are congested with lots of foot traffic, I think there's great opportunities for E-Scooters. So that's why she's not gettin' a A on that one.
KSHAMA: I'm not sure what grades you wanted from us, but I would give Mayor Durkan an F on both transit and housing. If you look at the lack of leadership, singular lack of leadership for any taxes on big business or the wealthy, or even having that conversation from the Mayor's office to expand public transit, if you look at the 35th Avenue bicycle lane, and the scary video that we have all seen now as to how the complete lack of safety with the middle lane, which was the claim that it would be safe, the question of E-Scooters, and as far as housing is concerned, look, the Mayor was a big force in the repeal of the Amazon tax, which was a completely progressive tax measure, which would of funded affordable housing, publicly owned affordable housing, and homeless services, which are also connected to housing, because lack of affordable rent is a pipeline in to homelessness, and ultimately, let's remember, none of this should be a surprise to us. Jenny Durkan got over $350,000 from Amazon in her campaign, she's Jeff Bezos' Mayor, she's Vulkans' Mayor. She's not our Mayor.
[audience applauds]
LOGAN: Logan Bowers. So on housing, I actually think it's unfair to pin it on Mayor Durkan, because the land use choices are really squarely with the Council. She can say whatever she wants, and honestly, I'm disappointed she recently said she did not like Minneapolis-style zoning that allows duplexes and triplexes, which I obviously support, but that's a Council choice. It doesn't really matter what she thinks. And the Council's definitely getting an F for that. We've had years of seeing how having job growth in this city and not having commensurate housing growth. It's irresponsible to be adding jobs without adding housing, and Councilmember Sawant has done nothing about that for the last six years. On transit, I think 35th Avenue shows a lack of leadership both from the Council and from the Mayor. The moment we restrike that without bike lanes, you can go online and you can see people's footage of being punishment-passed of dangerously high speeds, relative to bicycles. We need to do better. I pin that both on the current Council and on the Mayor.
[audience applauds]
ZACHARY: You know, I would give a D in both of these respects. I think certainly, there's some historical stuff, but what I thinks really important is that every election cycle, we get folks who have the privilege of making false promises, instead of actually creating the change we need to see. I'd give a D both to the Mayor and our current incumbent, because these are the crisis of our time. We need to act like we are just like the people at the center of these issues, and that's the important thing. Your councilmember, what they should do is they should center the people most affected by these issues into the solutions, and that is what I intend to do.
[audience applauds]
(LARRY): Okay, this question first goes to Ami. How many shootings have occurred within three blocks of your home this year? Systemic solutions are important, but until we get there, like fixing poverty, control, and guns, what would you do at the local level to address gun crime without compromising civil rights?
AMI: Within three blocks specifically where I live, I have not heard of any, but obviously, in the Capitol Hill Center of District Area, there's been several unfortunate shootings. And I think it's important, and I think we've discussed this once before, to make sure that we have programs for youth to make sure that they are not vulnerable to adults who will convince them to join gangs or to commit a life of unfortunate crime. And as my experience as a public defender, a lot of times the adults that I work with have been in the system for a long time, since they were children, and that's because unfortunately, a lot of them come from broken homes, and they were at one point victims themselves. So we need to make sure that we have youth programs so that kids can get the counseling and social services they need in addition to that, so that they can try to go away from a life of crime, and find alternatives, and also alternatives for vocational skills and jobs and training.
EGAN: Egan Orion. Yeah I think, just to piggyback on what Ami was saying, I think that focusing on when kids are in school, when they're young and they're vulnerable, and they have economic pressures on their families, and a lot of times that will lead down the road to them getting in trouble at school, or getting in trouble with the law. And I think that we have to stop locking up our young people when there's other solutions. I think that they need more opportunity. They need to be connected with apprenticeships. There's after-school programs to help keep kids engaged, but I think at the start of their life, it's really an economic opportunity question. I think that the other thing is we need more connected communities where we've got neighbors talking to each other. I think when I was - by the way, I've had three shootings just a block away from me. We just had a public safety meeting where we met with the City and with SPD, a bunch of neighbors. I think the community input is essential, and get to know your neighbors, because that's how we'll protect one another.
KSHAMA: I live in the CD Leschi neighborhood, and in fact, one of the recent shootings unfortunately took place just two blocks from where I live, and I personally understand and share the anxiety that we are all feeling for safe neighborhoods. And my deepest condolences to the family of Royale Lexing, the young 20-year-old black man who was gunned down in violence very recently, and share the grief of the black community as a whole. And I think first of all, we need common sense gun control measures, like banning semi-automatic weapons. The incident that I mentioned two blocks from my house actually happened with a semi-automatic weapon. We also have had many community members from the CD come to my committee on May 14th with a public space usage and vehicular traffic proposals, and because of them coming to our committee, the Mayor's office are finally responding to them, and they had a tour of the 21st Avenue block a couple of days ago alongside one of my staff members, but we also know that environmental design and gun control measures will not solve this problem. We need to address affordable housing crisis and public school funding with after-school programs, and we need programs like LEAD and Career YouthBuild that my office has fought for and won, but we need more of it.
[audience applauds] 
LOGAN: Logan Bowers. So on gun crime and civil rights. I do want to echo the need to fund programs for youth engagement, so that kids have something healthy to do with their time. And we actually already have those programs in the city, and they're just not funded by the current Council. So Detective Cookie at the SPD runs a Chess Club out of Rainier Valley, and she runs it out of the good of her heart. She doesn't get public dollars for it, and that's a travesty. We need to be funding the Chess Club Program that Detective Cookie runs. We also need to be expanding it to more locations and more places. I do think that we need to make changes in how we enforce laws in the community, but this is a perfect example where the people in this room are not gonna be representative of the people who are gonna feel the effects of those changes, and where we really need to center the community where those policing changes are made to determine exactly how we do them. Lastly, we do have a community service outreach program in our police. We need to be getting our police more involved in our community so that they are partners with their neighbors, everyone feels safe talking to each other.
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf. Particularly as it pertains to public safety, the answer can't just be more cops, particularly for black and brown LGBTQ communities. We have a troubled history with the police, so we have to be very careful. I think part of that means to go upstream. At public schools, we have a group that's called the NAACP Youth Coalition, and one of the things they talked about needing this year was more counselors and mentors, and the City can absolutely pay for more counselors and mentors. A really important approach, make sure they're specifically there for middle school and high school. The other thing is we need to invest in more community-based violence prevention programs. We need to make sure we're investing in programs for victims to make sure they won't be revictimized or retaliated against. We need to invest in youth employment opportunities. The other thing too, I was really proud in 2016 to expand lead up to the Capitol Hill neighborhood, as well as our partners in the Chinatown-International District, so continue to support those programs. Also, we need to make sure that the folks that are representing us, protecting and serving us, as the slogan is, is also make sure that they're representative of the community that they're serving. So we need to make sure that we have folks that look like they are from the community of the folks that they're trying to serve.
PAT: Pat Murakami. One, we don't have an adequate job opportunities for our youth, and I think that they get involved with gangs because they don't feel that they have alternatives. We have a problem of catch and release when youth commit a crime, and I don't want them to have a criminal record, and I don't want them to be going to prison, but we can have a community court. We used to have these. They had to face the community, understand the impact that their actions had, and then they did community service, so that there is some kind of a consequence instead of just this catch and release. I would like to see social workers at every one of our schools, because most teachers usually know who the troubled children are at a very young age, and we're not giving enough support to them. The City needs to fund that. And then I'd like to bring the SUN Program from Loma County to Seattle at every elementary school where community comes after school, multi-generational. You give tutoring help, or whatever, but when you build community, other people can help those children that are going down the wrong path.
(LARRY): As we transition to green transportation methods, how does a progressive candidate gain the confidence and votes of other progressive voters who will not willingly use public transportation as their main method of transportation?
LOGAN: Who's going first?
EGAN: Me. Egan Orion. So I think first of all, just on creating more of that green transportation, I think that one strategy is that we need to anticipate what technology is coming down the pike, set really aggressive timelines about how we're gonna achieve that, make that public, and be bold about the way that we pursue changes to our transportation, electrification especially, so that's one thing. To get to your actual question about how do you convince other people, I think that we should make it more difficult for people to drive in cars just by themselves, especially in the city. So I think at some point when public transportation is faster and it's cheaper, and it's more reliable and more convenient, I think that's when you're gonna start to get folks that are stuck in their cars by themselves to actually use public transportation.
KSHAMA: I'm not exactly sure what this question is premised on, because statistics show that actually the vast majority of people in Seattle, and regular working people in Seattle and the region, are extremely committed to using public transit and actually love their public transit ridership. Numbers have steadily gone up at the same period that Metro has experienced cuts over the years to services, and in fact, some routes have experienced real problems, and in fact, we not only see people within Seattle using public transit and showing a real commitment to it, we see people who have been pushed out because of housing prices, pushed out to cities like Kent and Puyallup also showing commitment to public transit, and taking on longer commute times just because they're so committed to fighting climate change. So we have to make sure that we understand that the real obstacle is not real ordinary people's lack of commitment. I'm sure some don't, but the vast majority absolutely love public transit. The real obstacle is the lack of funding for and by taxing Big Business and the lack of political will. We're not short on political will from ordinary people. We're short on political will from political officials, both at the city and the county and the state level, to actually fund transit to make it viable for more people to use it.
[audience applauds]
LOGAN: So I think this is an interesting question when asking what will people do that refuse to use public transportation or land use or what have you? We fall into this trap where we all feel like the environment of Seattle as it is today is just like natural and that's how it is, and so you're like, oh, I need my car to get around and that's necessary. But it's actually an explicit planning choice by our transportation agencies and by our cities of whether or not you need your car to get around. People will make the right choice when they are given good options. You can point to New York City or Paris, or other cities that are very walkable, and everyone loves walking and using mass transit, but like Calgary, Alberta actually has really good transit and people use it a lot even though it has cold winters, and you wouldn't think of it as a transit-rich city, because they plan their system well, and I think as we make changes, we can get there too in our city.
ZACHARY: Zachary DeWolf. The question again?
(LARRY): Yes, where is it? Sorry. As we transition to green transportation methods, how does a progressive candidate gain the confidence and votes of other progressive voters who will not willingly use public transportation as their main method of travel?
ZACHARY: Great. Well I actually agree with the incumbent, because actually Commute Seattle put out a report that suggests that 25% of the folks that get into downtown Seattle are using single-occupancy vehicles. So the vast majority of folks are getting downtown by public transit, walking, biking, so I actually do agree. I think that a lot of folks really are committed to our green goals, particularly around transportation. I think what's important is that we need to quit delaying projects. Move Seattle Levy happened. We have a Rapid Ride project here on Madison, and the fact of the matter is we are waiting for the perfect - the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good situation. We need to build the infrastructure now, no matter what the trolley looks like, we need to make sure we are building that infrastructure now, so folks in our community know that we prioritize public transportation and transit. What is also really important is places like Paris, those are the types of cities that on their streets, they have an actual infrastructure and protected bike lanes, where you can tell that there is an equality between the folks that drive cars and the folks that are on bikes, and that is deeply important. And I think folks really need to commit to our goals.
PAT: Pat Murakami. I think the biggest problem is we have a completely inadequate public transportation system for the city. Our population has grown significantly, and we don't have enough buses. I mean even something as simple as a bus. So I know people that live in Eastlake are queued up watching three or four of their buses go by too full to go on to get home in the evening, so we need to increase the number of bus routes, and we need to have more connector buses, small buses. We never got the ribs to the spine, which was light rail. In fact, when light rail came in, they cut some major bus lines and really impacted especially low-income people in the community. I personally can walk from my house to Georgetown faster than I could get there on public transit. So if I and other people could get from point A to point B faster, more people would use public transportation.
AMI: Thank you. Ami Nguyen. I am excited to hear that 75% of our community is using, and talking about the other 25%, why are they not? And in campaigning, I did speak to a constituent in District Three that said she used to take the bus routes because it was convenient to get from work to home. Unfortunately, that route was taken away, and so now she was left to purchasing a car to make sure that she gets to the places that she needs to be. And I think that's the conversations that we need to have. If we're having, as the question asked, progressive communities that are open to it then we need to ask why they are not using it. Is it because of the cost? Is it because of convenience? And after surveying, we need to provide responses and also not responses, but we need to solve that, and make sure that we solve it in a way that's going to get that remaining community to also use public transportation walk, or bikes - bicycle. Thank you. Sorry I stuttered.
[laughs]
(LARRY): Okay, this is gonna be the last question from the audience, and you only get 30 seconds for this one and it'll be followed up by one-minute closing statements by each candidate. For the question.
(HEIDI): Closing statements.
(LARRY): Oh, they're probably fine.
[laughs] Okay.
KSHAMA: Wait, 30 seconds for this one, and one for closing?
(LARRY): Yeah, we're debating whether for closing statements or not, but what do you consider the most important transportation project in this district?
LOGAN: Who's goin'?
KSHAMA: I think what this district needs is more bus routes and making sure that sidewalks, especially crosswalks and pedestrian safety around elementary schools is one of the most urgent necessities. If you look at the problems that our neighborhoods are facing around elementary schools, we have an urgent necessity as I said before, of walkable safety and we also need to make sure that we have enough crossing guards. There's a stunning shortage of crossing guards, so I think prioritizing safety of children is important.
LOGAN: Logan Bowers. I think there's two things. One is the Madison Rapid Ride. We have to get that project moving. The other is we need fully connected bike lanes in this district. So we're so close to getting all the way to downtown safely on a bicycle, and we're not quite there yet. We need to be prioritizing end to end bike lanes that are safe enough for a child, and we're not there yet. Also, quick shoutout to the 43. We need to bring back a full 43 all day route.
[audience applauds]
ZACHARY: I actually agree with the Madison Rapid Ride, as well as an actual connected bike infrastructure. But what is really important to note is that every year the Seattle public schools face a crisis at the beginning of the year because our public schools are late, and it's because we have so much traffic congestion, and that congestion grows each year. I agree we need to prioritize our students and the ways they get to school. Not only just the sidewalks, but actually looking at the roads and which roads we're prioritizing those bus routes on, and maybe actually in the mornings either making sure that we can use the bus-only lanes that our Metro's using, or make some of our roads bus-only too.
PAT: I'm Pat Murakami. I'd like to see a connector trolley virtual track that completes the trolley all the way up Jackson to Frank Park. That was what was promised years ago and it never happened. There's a lot of density going in along Jackson, which is a great place for density, and I think that there's totally inadequate transit for those new residents.
AMI: I agree with some of the other candidates too in terms of making sure that our bike systems are well connected so that, I think I discussed this earlier, when you're merging, it's very dangerous to go from a protected bike section merging into a driven lane. I'm sorry, that's my answer. Thank you.
EGAN: Yeah, the Rapid Ride on Madison. Woo hoo, almost here. The protected bike lane on Union. I know what we really need to do is make sure to balance the needs of the community and the businesses with the need to have those bikes lanes, and make sure that those bike lanes also are connected to low-income communities and the communities of color. It's just an equity issue. I also want to see 23rd, which is sometimes called the 23rd Avenue Speedway, I think we need some more controls because it's dangerous for those of us that are crossing the streets on a regular basis and for our kids.
(LARRY): We're running a bit late, so we're cutting back your closing statement from one minute to 30 seconds. So try to be as concise as you can.
[audience laughs]
Yes.
LOGAN: All right. I'm Logan Bowers. Thank you so much for coming out today. Thank you for having me. I think this race really just comes down to a choice which is, are we gonna solve these critical housing, affordability, environmental, and homelessness issues that we're having in our city with more of the same that we've been trying for the last years, or do we want to try something different? I bring a different perspective to the council. I bring a problem-solving, a result-oriented, pragmatic approach that I've learned and honed over two decades career as a small business owner.
ZACHARY: Name is Zachary DeWolf, and I just want to thank everybody up here, 'cause if you don't know, we work our tails off to knock doors and meet people, and to do these forums. Everybody up here, I'm just really grateful for the time we've had together. I want to just say I want to finish with a story. I've gotten to talk a lot. I work in homelessness, and I work in their public schools, and those are my priorities. There's 4,280 students experiencing homelessness. That's the lens and those are the folks that I'm specifically working for. Where they live, how they get around, it absolutely affects public education. I want to finish with a quick story which is to say that I visited my grandmother a few weeks ago to say goodbye to her in Montana on the reservation, and we were in a sweat lodge, and I earned my Cree name which is Basinga Neegamode, and I'm not gonna stop just for a second. It means Young Buffalo Leader and I intend to live up to that name, so thanks for being here tonight. Thanks everybody up here.
PAT: Pat Murakami. I want to explain some of my fast questions. Backyard cottages if, I said no, but if we do Portland's legislation rather than our poorly written, I would support it. Rent control, I would want to bring both parties together, landlords and tenants. And I prefer that the City own the scooters. I do not want a corporation owning more things, such as the bikes. We should own our own transit system.
AMI: When the City Council says we don't have funding to provide safety, I don't buy it. Because if there was litigation, we spend, once again, millions of dollars, paying the other attorneys to make sure, and not only that, but we are also talking about loss of life here. So we need to make sure that we continue putting pressure on the City Councilmember and I would love to sit in a seat as a City Councilmember because the projects that I have researched and all the organizations on here are wonderful, but we need to make sure that we provide the funding and the right combination of votes on the City Council to make sure that we get the five votes to move forward.
EGAN: I started two small businesses and a nonprofit from the community. I really see myself as a community builder, and I think that in one of the most innovative places in the world that anything is possible. Unfortunately, the current Council and the incumbent in this race has failed to tap into that great potential that we have in this city. She has proven that she can talk a good game, but when it comes to putting together a coalition and a cogent plan that can actually get something done, she's not been successful at that. Do we want another four years of inaction from the current Councilmember? I think we could do better than that.
[audience applauds]
KSHAMA: To avoid climate catastrophe, we will need mass movements to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and fight for a Green New Deal and radical change. We cannot afford to put our faith in business as usual. Politicians who will say things like, "I will listen to all sides." We can't afford to go nowhere fast with peaceful solutions based on what's acceptable to Big Business. We need elected representatives who would unapologetically fight for our needs and the planet, and that is exactly the strategy with which we have won $15 an hour minimum wage, landmark renters' rights, and many other victories. I hope you'll join me in the movement for rent control, social housing, and a Green New Deal for working people.
(AUDIENCE): Woo hoo!
[audience applauds]
LOGAN: Also, if you want a solo ride lesson, find me after the event.
[audience laughs]
(LARRY): We have a last few words here by Patience Malaba of the Housing Development Consortium.
PATIENCE: Well, we made it! Thank you.
[audience applauds]
So I just want to take a few seconds and thank the candidates for a wonderful job answering the questions today. I know there's so much that you're doing. So let's join hands and give them a round of applauds.
[audience applauds]
PAT: I have a quick question.
PATIENCE: Yes.
PAT: Why do we have styrofoam cups here?
[audience laughs]
PATIENCE: That's a good question. I just want to also take a few seconds and thank the MC's, Dr. Hubbell and Heidi, for a great job in moving us along in this conversation. Thank you. 
[audience applauds]
And last but not least, thanks to HDC staff Dan Cantrell for a wonderful job keeping the time.
[audience applauds]
And most importantly, thank you to all of you for showing up today, and I hope that you continue to show up, and be the people that are there standing up for bold action as we build a city that is equitable, livable, and inclusive of all, so thank you.
[audience applauds, people talking loudly]