Black wealth remains near zero due to centuries of systemic anti-Black racism and is on a trajectory to only worsen. In Seattle, white wealth is nearly 20x more than Black wealth. What specific actions will you take to close the Black-white wealth gap?
How much of the Black-white wealth gap will you close while in office?
Who are you working with in the Black community to close it?
How will you support investing federal funding directly and specifically into the Black community in the next two years?
Answer
To address the wealth gap, we must look first at the history of racist and anti-black housing policy that has been the driving factor of economic apartheid that is worsening in Seattle and King County and the reason why housing policy is central to the movements for Black Lives, Indigenous sovereignty and the efforts to repair the harm of systematic white supremacist violence and land, property, and wealth expropriation.
Unequal access to homeownership opportunities throughout the 20th century was created by both explicit government policies such as redlining, the restriction of FDA loans to white households, and exclusionary zoning. These government policies colluded with the racist practices of the private real estate industry in the goal of creating generational wealth for the white middle class. In this way housing is THE central factor in the racial wealth gap.
Additionally, rising rents and housing costs and scarcity of affordable housing in my South King County district are the number one concern I hear from constituents. Skyrocketing rents are the primary the driver of gentrification and displacement, and King County has not done nearly enough to use the powers and levers it has to provide sufficient affordable housing. Households of color are disproportionately rent-burdened, putting us in the position every month of making choices between paying the rent or buying food, paying the rent or visiting the doctor, paying the rent or making the car payment. I have known these struggles, and this will be one of my top goals as King County Councilmember.
We must also support black economic development and professional recruitment and development. With two Sound Transit stations coming online in District 5 in the near future, we must prioritize combating displacement and gentrification with BIPOC / WMBE-focused local-hire mandates for all public contracts, community ownership of public / surplus land, guaranteed local prioritization of affordable housing, and on-going impact mitigation analysis for communities of color.
While it will take years to combat the racial wealth gap, as we have as a region committed to ending carbon emissions, we can commit to ending the racial wealth gap. I will work to pass legislation in my first year that will develop a plan to closing the racial wealth gap by 2035 and will work with groups like King County Equity Now and BIPOC community members to ensure community accountability.
Question
There is a crisis in Black health in this region. In King County: Black babies are more 2x more likely to die before their first birthday than white babies; Black birthing people die 3x more than white birthing people; Black residents die of diabetes at 3x the rate of white residents; Nearly half of all Black adults in King County are food insecure; Black adults are 3x more likely to be living in poverty; Black adults are evicted at 6x the rate of white adults; Black people in King County contracted COVID-19 at 3x the rates of whites; and yet Black community received less than 2% of federal relief funding.
This region boasts some of the most sophisticated, renowned hospitals and medical facilities in the world. The disparities in medical treatment received by Black communities are appalling, with COVID-19 serving as just the most recent flashlight into this dark and disturbing reality. What are your specific plans to invest in Black community health?
In the entire Pacific Northwest (OR, WA, ID, MT, WY) there are zero Black community-owned, federally qualified health clinics. What are your specific plans to support base-building Black community-owned clinics? Specifically, the Tubman Center for Health and Freedom (TCHF), Somali Health Board (SHB), Surge Reproductive Justice (SRJ), African American Health Board and more?
Answer
As a former board member with the Somali Health Board, I have worked first hand with community to address health disparities by helping to identify ways to increase access to culturally relevant and competent care. In early February, as the COVID-19 vaccine began rolling out to the public, our campaign help an event attended by nearly 600 community members titled, ““Y’all getting vaccinated?: A talk about racism, medicine, COVID-19 vaccines, and the Black community,” to educate and hear from community members on their concerns about the vaccine during this public health crisis.
It is critical that we establish a Black community-owned clinic in Seattle / King County. We have seen the great work and care that International Community Health Services and the Seattle Indian Health Board have provided to the API and Native communities, respectively. We have also learned from community leaders such as Dr. Ben Danielson about how some of our biggest institutions are not serving black professional or black patients. I am committed to moving county funding towards The Tubman Center for Health and Freedom and hope to see it open by the end of my first term in 2025 as they have planned for.
Question
Equity means ownership. Thriving Black communities require control and agency over land. We prioritize Black land acquisition as a foundational pillar to our work. As demand for land grows at an unprecedented pace, the rapid gentrification, active divestment from, and exclusion of Blacks from Seattle and King County is important not merely due to the dismantling of historical Black cultural and societal spaces, but also the socio-economic, health, wealth, and education fallout resulting from Blacks being pushed out of the State’s largest economic and cultural engine. What is your specific short and long-term plan to rectify this region’s abysmal Black land ownership rates?
What is your plan to rapidly advance Black home ownership rates?
What is your plan to rapidly advance Black community land acquisition and restore historically Black cultural and societal spaces?
How much will you invest in the: (A) Keiro project - the first entirely Black community led and centered homelessness consortium with wraparound direct services; (B) Red (Black and Green) Barn Ranch - Black liberated farming and youth healing center; (C) Youth Achievement Center - a holistic co-housing complex that is designed to support homeless students, historically underserved students, system-involved youth?
What mechanisms will you put in place to halt gentrification across the state, specifically to stop corporate and private developers from buying up once affordable property and pricing out Black communities and families?
Answer
As mentioned above, skyrocketing rents are the primary the driver of gentrification and displacement, and King County has not done nearly enough to use the powers and levers it has to provide sufficient affordable housing. We must start talking about solutions that approach the scale of the problem, not piecemeal interventions that add a few units here and a few units there, while we wonder why the problem continues to get worse. For example, just a few years ago our region was able to come together across differences to fund Sound Transit expansion in the range of $70 billion dollars. If we did something comparable for housing, it would dramatically reduce homelessness and housing instability. Funding for projects such as the Keiro project, Red (Black and Green) Barn Ranch, and the Youth Achievement Center would be a fundamental part of a plan to approach the scale of our needs in this region.
In a region with a strong economic growth and a growing population we need housing supply to keep up with demand, otherwise the fundamental conditions of housing scarcity will worsen. In many ways the housing market is like a game of musical chairs, and when there aren’t enough overall housing units built, it makes housing harder for everyone to find, and this always will impact BIPOC and low-income people the most.
This means changing zoning and regulatory laws that add to the cost of housing and overly restrict where multi-family housing can be built and opening more communities to more affordable “missing middle” housing such as duplexes, triplexes, rowhouses, townhouses, and condos, to ensure BIPOC families have more options than just bidding on half-a-million dollar single family homes.
We also need to ensure we direct County funding into expanding programs such as Homestead Community Land Trust that work to keep homes affordable and in the hands of local community.
Question
The public education system is anti-Black. It uses harsh discipline policies that push Black students out of schools at disproportionate rates; denies Black students the right to learn about their culture and whitewashes the curriculum to exclude Black peoples' history, contributions, and accomplishments. It pushes Black teachers out of schools in Seattle-King County, and across the country, and spends entirely more money on imprisoning Black youth than on educating and healing them. How will you support pro-Black education?
How will you create and maintain Black community schools?
How will you establish and maintain restorative justice practices in schools to end the school-to-prison pipeline?
What will you do to ensure Black teachers are hired, that current educators receive anti-racist professional development, that schools implement Black studies curricula?
What will you do to ensure the Black community has control of schools that serve Black kids as well as education resources and levy funds that are meant for but rarely make it to Black youth?
Answer
South King County’s District 5 overlaps with a number of school districts, making the opportunities for partnership all the more important as BIPOC communities get pushed further south. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated just how important it is that public schools have the ability to recruit and retain quality, caring black and BIPOC educators and staff at all levels, and to have resources that meet the needs of diverse student populations.
Additionally, more students are coming to school with severe issues caused by trauma and/or other mental health needs. Creating a safe learning environment is a critical part of helping all students achieve their full potential as we move forward beyond this pandemic.
Additionally, in my current work with Best Starts for Kids Program Manager, I have advocated for firearm violence prevention and advocated for community efforts to address violence as a social disease. Further, through my engagement with local school district partners and supporting voter outreach efforts, I have mobilized community awareness to inform their local elected officials of resource gaps contributing to social determinants which cause violence and built the capacity of guardians to work with school partners to ensure the safety of young people in our community.
In my time working with Seattle Public Schools as the Schools and Community Partnerships Coordinator, I developed and managed processes to maintain strong, intentional, student-centered partnerships, including communication to students and families about available programs and services. Additionally, I organized community led groups focused on getting parents to understand and connect with their schools.
As a board member of Kent Youth and Family Services, I am continually amazed at our After School and Summer Programming which includes recreation and education activities and computer lab programs in each of the King County Housing Authority sites’ community recreation centers. Working with the Kent School District, a summer lunch program is offered to all kids under the age of 18 at all three of our sites. After School helps reduce juvenile crime by providing youth with helpful free-time alternatives with unconditional support of positive adult role models. Individual, family and group counseling is also available.
When it comes to school funding, we need to expand on what King County is doing right now with participatory budgeting for unincorporated areas by expanding partnerships to include school districts and increasing the amount of money that community directs.
Question
Already experiencing COVID-19’s economic fallout, conditions for Seattle’s Black community have worsened. Against that backdrop, KCEN and many others in the Black community mobilized to divest from policing and demanded correlating investment in pro-Black public safety solutions that work for us, for the first time in Seattle's history. This movement was driven by Black community and specifically called and continues to call for a reckoning with anti-Black racism (i.e., not a general “racial” reckoning, or a “BIPOC” movement).
Emboldened by the overwhelming support of thousands and thousands of community members, the Seattle City Council briefly upheld their pledge to divest from a percentage of the Seattle Police Department (SPD)'s bloated annual budget and invest modestly in Black communities. It should not have taken such prolonged, sustained community efforts for this change but we acknowledge the small percentage of divestment as a break from decades of votes to expand violent, anti-Black policing.
The work of reshaping this region into one that values all Black lives—and moves away from funding racist policing and towards resourcing true public safety—is overdue and not for non-Black folks, unaccountable gatekeepers or non-rooted folks to dictate. We advocated strongly for monies from the police budget to be invested directly into the Black community and are unmoved on that stance.
Last year’s accountability charter amendments demonstrate clearly the public’s demands that policing change at the County Level. What are your specific plans to divest from policing to invest in true public safety for Black communities for the first time in history? What are the tangible steps you will take?
What date will you close the Youth Jail in the first year of your term?
What specific steps will you take to shift investments from the criminal punishment system towards human services that are controlled, led and center Black community?
Answer
Above all, we must recognize that our criminal justice system is deeply racist and structurally inequitable. Our vision to reimagine public safety with a public health lens means leading with restorative models grounded in comprehensive wrap-around services, investing in our existing alternatives to incarceration, and creating priority wage, preferred investments for “By-Us/For-Us” in community jobs.
The solutions are already here in King County. We know that when we treat social determinants contributing to incarceration, we can sustainably dismantle the underlying root causes to legal involvement and intergenerational incarceration, rather than making surface level changes that do not lead to long-term reduction in disparities and race-based inequities. By divesting from harmful systems and re-investing in community-based systems and funding upstream services like Best Starts for Kids and Community Passageways, we can increase the impact of those and other initiatives that are doing liberation work on the ground in community every day.
Our campaign also understands that one of the biggest hurdles in holding the King County Sheriff’s office accountable (as well as the local police departments in the several cities in our district) is how we ensure that bargaining with law enforcement does not perpetuate or deepen the historic lack of accountability for officers that commit wrong and jeopardize community trust and safety.
We need to establish truly independent community oversight above and beyond the County’s Office of Law Enforcement Oversight (OLEO) which is a part of the negotiations process for the Collective Bargaining Agreement that governs labor policy with the Sheriff’s Office and King County Police Officers’ Guild.
Applying a racial justice lens in the bargaining process doesn’t mean giving law enforcement carte blanche to determine their own accountability structures, but it means demonstrating that our commitment to alternative investments means that our standards for policing and safety are increasing commensurately with our investments – and that community-based organizations with historic, direct experience in restorative justice will lead the conversation in determining what safety looks like in their communities, not officers.
