Issues

I envision a Seattle that actively creates healthy neighborhoods, eliminates the racial wealth gap, and protects our clean air and water for our children’s children. This requires that we focus on prevention and harm reduction, that we acknowledge past government policies have caused harm, and that it is now our obligation as a local government to change our practices and fund the future we all deserve.

Let’s build that future together, where local businesses thrive, our neighbors can get around our community safely, and everyone has a home they can afford and healthy food to eat. 

As we roll out each policy, new sections will be added.

I’m fighting for our futures, but nothing worth fighting for comes easy. As your Councilwoman, I have been laying the groundwork for transformative change in our renters’, workers’, and small businesses’ rights, and in climate resilience. We have so much more work to do, and I’m not giving up.

Community Safety

Community safety is about creating vibrant places where our neighbors can flourish; where we are safe, healthy, and thriving. It’s about the conditions we create. For too long, community safety was understood and approached largely as a criminal justice issue, without attention to the underlying causes of violence. Data show us that the safest communities are the ones that are fully funded, not the ones with the most police. That’s why my focus has always been keeping people in their homes, ensuring access to healthy food and good-paying jobs, and empowering young people to be community leaders.

My track record shows that I live my values. In my first term, I kept the promises I made when I ran:

✔ Teach restorative justice: I secured funding for its programming in our public schools
✔ Push for gun responsibility: I lobbied in Olympia for our new bills that banned assault weapons and expanded background checks
✔ Support youth employment: I secured $1M for our Maritime Academy to connect young people to pre-apprenticeship opportunities
✔ Protect immigrant communities: I put $1M in the legal defense fund, created the CID Resource Guide and translated it into 7 languages, and restored all $333K for anti-Asian hate programming after it was cut in half
✔ Prioritize community solutions: I secured $440K to implement a Neighborhood Safety Model to increase street outreach
✔ Center Mobility: I secured funds for dozens of new sidewalks and pedestrian improvements; enacted traffic calming measures in D2

Reducing violence must begin with changing the community conditions that lead to violence in the first place. It is irrefutable that, from behavioral health to public service work, community and the relationships within them are what keep people safe.

  • Guns are a uniquely American problem. Shootings in Seattle have nearly doubled since 2019, from 197 shooting reports to 417 up to July of each year. Because of gun violence we have lost advocates, leaders, and family. Even when non-fatal, this violence traumatizes victims and their families. We do not have to live like this or die like this.

    • Gun violence is preventable. I will partner with the County to create a Regional Office of Violence Prevention—a partnership-based, data-driven violence reduction strategy. Let’s scale up violence intervention work WHILE coordinating municipal and county authorities. A similar program reduced gun injuries by 50%, and reduced the number of shooting victims by 63%. Comparison precincts without this program saw only 5% and 17% reductions, respectively.

    • Deploy the successes of street activation in more locations across our district. People want to enjoy space together and rebuild the social cohesion we lost from the pandemic. The SE Network SafetyNet’s “Be Safe Bros” and Rainier Beach Action Coalition’s “Corner Greeters” show how much connection makes a difference.

    • Teach families how to have gun responsibility conversations. Simply checking in before a playdate or sleepover can protect our children. Normalize asking if guns are locked away and unloaded. This is proven to prevent accidents from curious children, teens, and moments of anger or sadness. Seattle also saw a jump in suicides last year. Simple practices like this can prevent losing loved ones.

    • Violence interruption programs are proven to reduce fatalities and injuries, and we need more of them. Programs like Choose 180, SE Network SafetyNet, and Community Passageways offer a pathway out of violence, critical support to young people and their families, and more.

    • Establish treatment centers in every Seattle neighborhood, not just concentrated in a few.

    • Apply language justice across the board. It is unacceptable that those who don’t speak English or are an English-Second-Language speaker experience significant emergency response delays. Communication on investigations should be consistent and timely, no matter your language or address. SPD needs translators in-house for all matters.

    • Increase support for diversion programs like Choose 180 that connect young people to opportunities and resources that help them stay out of the criminal legal system and restore their connection to community. These programs also provide “after care” like counseling, housing assistance, and job-readiness training.

    • Support culturally appropriate models to violence interruption, like neighbors in the CID and New Holly request.

Reducing Gun Violence

  • Community safety includes means eliminating traffic fatalities and ensuring our children and elders can walk or roll around safely in all neighborhoods. Our district experiences the highest rate of deaths of pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. We need safety for all people, walking and rolling.

    • Add docking stations to our micro mobility programs. Our bike and scooter share programs are extremely popular. They offer a great way for people to make short trips without getting in a car. AND, we need to dock them to keep our sidewalks clear.

    • Create more safe and protected bike routes. Drivers and cyclists alike fear sharing space on the road because it’s scary. Nobody wants to be in a collision, have massive medical bills, kill somebody, or be killed.

    • Reduce deaths on our roads with traffic calming designs, like lower speeds and lifted crosswalks. Rainier Avenue is yet another location where we must prioritize safety so that nobody has far walking to school or the grocery store.

    • Fix accessibility at Mount Baker station. That means station plaza activation at the link station, updating the entire vision so that we can take advantage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act grants.

  • Increase street lighting, especially along walksheds from buses or light rail. This would help transit workers, nurses, janitors, and other third shift workers who clock out anywhere between 11PM and 2AM.

Reducing Traffic Violence

I focus a lot on prevention, because it’s our best shot at solving our problems. But we must also face the reality that we have folks who already fell through the cracks because our government failed them—there was no prevention done at the scale needed.

Helping Our Homeless

  • We can help stabilize the security that folks have left by allowing them a place to retain that security without fear of costly impounds, tickets, or fines. Safe lots are the fail-safe in the journey from unhoused to housed. And they are proven. Safe lots have community relationships, wrap-around services, a septic pump out program, and build trust and safety.

  • It takes a village, and these contain a stable, clean place with a lock and a community—all of the key ingredients missing in our congregate shelters. If we want to see better success rates (stability), then we must start here while supplying wrap-around services.

Many thanks to those who shared their expertise with us thus far: Choose 180, SE Network SafetyNet, Alliance for Gun Responsibility, Teamsters 763, Asian Pacific Islanders for Civic Engagement (APACE), Moms Demand Action, BE: Seattle, Seattle Student Union, The Urbanist, Washington Bikes, Transit Riders Union, and more to come.

Our communities are healthy when all of us have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and can get the care we need. This is also about fostering reliable, durable, sustainable networks for every child, elder, and neighbor. Vibrant neighborhoods center people—from livelihoods to relationships. It’s about inclusion.

In my first term, I kept the promises I made:

Healthy, Vibrant Communities

✔ Engage community: I provided $800K for the CID Visioning Project Advisory Group
✔ Create Seattle’s Green New Deal: I found a permanent source of funding to make this a reality
✔ Prepare for emergencies: I secured investments to turn half of our community centers into community resilience hubs
✔ Health rights for all: I protected access to reproductive and gender-affirming care, and bolstered funding for tribal mental and behavioral health services
✔ Grow recreation: I funded an arts hub led by Black and brown youth, preserved the Rainier Beach program’s A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth, and D2 sidewalk repairs and traffic calming.
✔ Protect small businesses: I secured commercial rent control and stabilization funding to help during the pandemic.

The places where we live, work, and play should be full of creativity, opportunity, and care. Let’s bring more beauty and joy to our public spaces.

  • The only place people can go without having to pay is usually a library, which isn’t always open. Having access to a clean, safe, reliable restroom is a basic and essential human need. No one, especially our most vulnerable communities, should have to pay to relieve themselves. It shouldn’t cost us to go to the bathroom.

  • Most of District 2’s local, small businesses are owned by people of color. These businesses support livelihoods, celebrate our district’s diversity, and keep our money local. That’s why I want to make the pandemic’s commercial rent control permanent. I’m excited to continue working with our Office of Economic Development to support the Business Community Ownership Fund.

  • I began this work in my first term and am still committed to building a "15-Minute City" of connected neighborhoods that have essential goods and services. For example, a grocery store, greenspaces, and bus stops all within a 15 minute walk, bus or bike ride. So far, I’ve collaborated with over two dozen organizations that work on various community development issues to make our neighborhoods more vibrant.

Livability

  • Work with the School Based Partnership Program at Public Health Seattle-King County to increase access to mental health services in schools.

  • Navigating life post-graduation can be daunting for some and inaccessible for others. Every teen deserves to choose their career path based on their passions and dreams, not just out of survival. I'm committed to ensuring our city's future workforce has access to good paying, union jobs, apprenticeship opportunities, and endless options to pursue their individual destiny.

  • Seattle Parks and Rec made significant changes over the years to how neighbors access fields and programming. We’re working to address the unintended consequences of that by reviewing fee structures and reservation systems to ensure our D2 neighborhood youth get priority access.

Youth Support

  • We have a chance to lead by setting real timelines to move Seattle’s biggest buildings off of fossil fuels. A strong Building Emissions Performance policy could tackle a major source of climate pollution, create thousands of green, union jobs, and bring life-saving cooling to homes across Seattle. This is an essential framework to end our climate pollution.

  • Seattle must recognize the increasing cost of fossil fuel extraction on often sovereign land in a volatile and greedy market. Right now, the city’s pension fund is a big player in fossil fuels but it doesn’t have to stay that way.

  • As we revitalize downtown, we must move toward a clean tourism industry. Living/Green Hotels can set environmental justice and workplace standards for new hotel development in Seattle. Right now, hotels have higher greenhouse gas emissions than office, apartment or school buildings. But we can improve and incentivize hotels to reduce emissions while investing in healthy communities. Let’s keep the emerald city green.

  • The Comprehensive Plan will shape Seattle for the next 20 years through transportation and building infrastructure (Seattle’s top polluting sectors). We can make sure our city is at its best by making every neighborhood green, well-resourced, affordable, and easy to get around.

Climate

  • One thing I hear often when visiting with folks in District 2 is that we’re all eager for more opportunities to gather together. We love our District and the businesses that showcase our diverse cultures and backgrounds. We want to walk to our favorite coffee shop, hear music outdoors, and watch our kids play safely at the local park. Healthy streets grow social cohesion and community—think more plazas, town squares, and street vendors. Every neighborhood should have a commercial district with a pedestrianized street.

  • In my first term, I added millions of dollars to the annual budget for D2 sidewalk improvements so we can safely navigate our neighborhoods, day and night. Now, I’m working to pass Complete Streets—legislation that requires a new sidewalk or repair for every project that the transportation department completes.

  • Fulfill Vision Zero—reaching zero traffic deaths—by 2030. Rather than pointing fingers and focusing on individual behaviors, we can save lives by designing a safer system. See more details in reducing traffic violence.

  • We should be doing everything we can to make getting out of our cars the easy choice. But all too often, this choice is only available to people who work downtown. So let’s add and retain bus lanes, transit signal priority, and queue jumps.

Complete Streets

Many thanks to those who shared their expertise with us thus far: 350Seattle, Sierra Club Washington State Chapter, The Urbanist, D2 primary candidate Margaret Elisabeth, Real Change News, Unite Here! Local 8, and more.

Affordability

We must retain both our working class and our locally-owned small businesses that foster a circular economy and are the livelihood of many families of color in District 2. Making life a little more affordable is critical—because neighborhood improvements mean nothing if we can’t afford to stay here and benefit from them. Imagine the vibrant neighborhoods we can create if we reduce social isolation, allow more types of homes throughout the city, and encourage small businesses to sprout up to serve nearby communities. Let’s make it so we can afford to live where we work.

In my first term, I kept the promises I made:

✔ Protect renters: I closed the “end-of-lease loophole” to prevent evictions, led the largest expansion of just cause eviction protection in the city’s history and enacted eviction moratoriums during the pandemic.
✔ Protect workers: I work with the Domestic Workers Coalition to realize portable benefits, passed hazard pay during the pandemic, and secured gig worker protections.
✔ Put services in D2: I created permanent source of funding for Equitable Development projects like the Filipino Village for seniors, Ethiopian Senior, El Centro de la Raza, and the Tubman Health Center. I also allocated $600K to protect critical homelessness services and programming.

People are what make up neighborhood character. The working class keeps everything running. Affordability is economic stabilization.

    • Support an array of home ownership models including condos, cooperative housing, social housing. We must move away from isolating low-income folks.

    • Keep our neighborhoods inclusive with aging-in-place programs, for those with fixed incomes.

  • I’ve already started to take city land off the market and lease it for permanent affordable housing, and we need to continue it. I’ve been creating opportunities to build community wealth and community ownership of our local economy with the Department of Neighborhoods and Office of Economic Development. This is explicitly why I supported small businesses with commercial leasing protections and stabilization funding!

  • We can achieve this by investing in public transit and housing infrastructure that meets the needs of working people while allowing for homeownership opportunities.

Housing access

  • Research shows that these programs support the long-term stability and profitability of local businesses and even do a better job boosting firm-level productivity than performance pay does for individual workers. We can replicate the success seen in Cleveland and New York.

  • Lending, investment, and endowment funds should democratize access and shift economic power to those normally excluded from such systems. That means these funds are owned, controlled by, and accountable to the marginalized communities that they serve. This would mirror programs like the Real People’s Fund and the Boston Ujima Project.

  • By owning together to pool resources, we can preserve affordability, build wealth, and harness the control of local assets. We need to reduce and stabilize the cost of housing. This is a proven way to do it. Even our small businesses can grow their income through this same tool. We’ve only just started this effort in Othello’s Affordable Housing Cooperative and have seen success in LA’s CORE (Community Owned Real Estate) Strategy.

  • Let’s break down structural barriers for business owners—especially owners of colors, women entrepreneurs, and low-income folks. Our locally-owned small businesses are treasures that we need to stay in our neighborhoods. By using ecosystems of local networks, we can generate the conditions and support necessary to launch, expand, and sustain them in D2. Examples: San Francisco’s Main Street and Brooklyn’s ACER (African, Career, Education, and Resource).

Community wealth

  • Our littlest residents have a right to the city too. And their parents shouldn’t have to choose between work and childcare because it’s so expensive. So let’s increase access and affordability for working families.

  • Let’s invest in what families need to see their opportunities grow, like job-training, apprenticeships, and access to essential goods and services in their neighborhoods.

  • That means, running at all times of day and prioritizing routes with high ridership—especially in areas with poorer air quality.

Stability for working families