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
The pandemic and the investments to stimulate our economic recovery should represent an opportunity to reverse decades of disinvestment from communities of color, not reinforce those trends. As mayor, I will fight for the transformative policies on housing affordability, childcare, environmental justice, education, and public safety that community leaders have already identified we need to dismantle systemic racism and close the wealth gap.
Policies like massive investments in housing affordability can and should be tools for creating a more equitable Seattle, as we would not have the white middle class of today without the public investments in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s that made homeownership possible for white families and created the intergenerational wealth that still drives today’s racial wealth gap. Just as we created the 30-year fixed mortgage to provide housing stability in the past, we can create public supports like social housing, infrastructure subsidies, new financing tools to improve affordability, and pathways to equitable ownership to enable those left out of decades of investment to build intergenerational wealth.
The other major driving force behind the racial wealth gap the City can address is the disparity in valuation for BIPOC-owned small businesses. In my work on the Governor’s COVID economic recovery taskforce last summer, I heard from countless BIPOC small business owners that federal PPP funds were simply inaccessible to people without prior banking relationships, which they were disproportionately likely to not have. In response to their need, I worked with the Governor’s team to create a $50 million Washington Recovery Fund to give larger initial loans with longer repayment terms as a stopgap measure -- but we needed to go bigger then, and I’m committed to scaling up those efforts as mayor.
It’s time to turn words into action, and I would work with community members to ensure my administration is held accountable for making meaningful, measurable progress on closing the racial wealth gap. That starts with involving organizations like the Africatown Community Land Trust, KCEN, and others to identify specific goals and metrics to measure our progress to meeting those goals. The communities City Hall has ignored for too long need more than promises; the next Mayor has to commit to real accountability on this issue to earn the trust of those who have been sidelined by the Seattle Process for years while progress continues to stall.
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 we saw throughout the pandemic, our failure to invest in public health infrastructure in every community in Seattle has dire consequences. Just as we should be focusing our recovery efforts on equitable development in communities of color who suffered the most from the pandemic, the inequities in public health infrastructure exposed by COVID-19 should spur urgent capacity-building in those same communities.
The inequity in community-owned clinics is directly tied to the unacceptable disparities in health outcomes driving the crisis in Black health in Seattle: Black community members have plenty of reasons to mistrust White-led healthcare institutions that have historically ignored or abused Black patients, but building capacity among community-owned providers can overcome that mistrust. Rather than let the infrastructure we’ve built in response to COVID-19 fall away as we return to in-person activities, we should maintain and expand it to address the rampant failures of our healthcare system to create equitable health outcomes for the everyday illnesses and conditions for which far too many Black patients do not receive adequate treatment. That means making significant investments in the TCHF, SHB, SRJ, and AAHB to demonstrate the positive impact on community health that an equitable healthcare system can make, and then building on that progress until every person in Seattle has access to world-class medical care.
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?
What specific policies will you pass to not only halt gentrification but re-invigorate the Central District as the hub of Black land ownership in Seattle?
Answer
I’m committed to building 70,000 new units of affordable housing across every neighborhood in Seattle, with strong anti-displacement protections included to ensure that development does not push out residents with deep roots in their communities. That process must begin with input from community members already living around our 54 transit hubs, and my administration will ensure they are at the table from the beginning of our station-area planning process.
We will work with communities to identify a vision around transit stations and centers that includes specific strategies connected to funding to minimize displacement of low-income and historically marginalized communities. Those strategies will take inventory of available land and set ownership goals for historically marginalized communities and specific programs to foster homeownership (such as community land trusts, equitable co-ops and affordability financing mechanisms). The plan will include strategies to build a robust mix of affordable and market rate housing within walking distance of public transportation and a variety of housing types ranging from mixed-use buildings with apartments and condominiums to townhouses, Accessory Dwelling Units, and options for family friendly units. We’ll reform design review, streamline permitting, and focus regulations on our shared values of affordability, equity and environmental stewardship — and that means ending exclusionary zoning.
I’m thrilled that community organizations are already having success in driving City and County leaders to support investments in the Keiro project and that community-based fundraising efforts are already underway to support the Youth Achievement Center. That being said, these are critical projects that should not require sustained activism to get funded -- they should be top priorities of the next mayor, and my administration will work with King County to make sure they get the funding necessary to become examples of how successful we can be in lifting people out of homelessness when community organizations are empowered with the resources to meet the needs of their members.
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
While the Mayor has limited jurisdiction over the Seattle Public School system, there is still plenty that my administration can do to support pro-Black education. Primarily, I will use the convening power of the office to bring SPD together with SPS leaders to end the use of School Resource Officers -- they do not actually keep our students safe, and perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately derails the lives of students of color. I’ll also use the bully pulpit of the Mayor’s office to encourage the inclusion of anti-racist professional development for SPS staff and push back on the national campaign by conservative organizers to oppose a curriculum that honestly grapples with America’s history of perpetuating systemic racism.
We cannot allow bad-faith dog-whistling to stall progress on reforming our education system to honor and include the contributions of Black people to the development of our society, including our local history of redlining the Central District and excluding Black people from government programs like FHA-backed mortgages that have resulted in the present-day racial wealth gap.
Finally, I’ll work to ensure that education resources and levy funds can be used to support programs that address the mental health challenges suffered by students of color whose communities suffer disproportionately from the epidemic of gun violence in our city. In addition to those programs offering trauma-informed services to our youth, I’ll work with SPS to identify specific strategies for bringing students who were on the wrong side of the digital divide during remote learning closer to educational justice.
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.
What percent of SPD’s budget will you divest from and invest specifically in Black community-led and -centered organizations? What date will you close the Youth Jail in the first year of your term?
Will you join the veto-proof majority of the city council who pledged to defund SPD by half and what will you do to accelerate that commitment becoming a reality?
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
Every single person in our community deserves to feel safe. To ensure this reality, we must build budgets to reflect our values. We know that true public safety means more than just a traditional policing response. It must include all of the cultural, social, and economic supports that help people thrive. We must re–envision crisis response to remove police when possible and stop negotiating away accountability in our contracts. At the same time, we must also ensure that critical divisions of the police department, such as the regional domestic violence firearms enforcement unit and the implementation of extreme risk protection orders to prevent gun violence, are adequately funded.
Communities of color have disproportionately borne the brunt of police violence, and have been expected to solve this problem on their own. It is time for everyone in our community to get off the sidelines and be a part of the solution. There are effective alternatives to police right here in our community that are working to keep us safe and reduce harm. Rather than pat ourselves on the back for incremental progress, let’s finally scale up these programs to ensure our community is supported and everyone is safe.
Finally, we must take accountability off the negotiation table for the next SPOG contract. We simply cannot compromise on the demand that SPD be held responsible for ensuring its officers do their jobs while respecting the humanity and constitutional rights of everyone in our city. Mayor Durkan and the City Council approved a SPOG contract in 2018 that unacceptably undermined the mechanisms for officer accountability that community advocates fought to pass in I-940 and have codified in city law. I will not accept a contract that attempts to bargain away accountability, period.
Specifically, we must return to the preponderance of evidence standard for evaluating officer misconduct that was undermined in the last contract, negotiate reasonable constraints to officer overtime hours, and prevent officers from avoiding discipline and decertification through early retirement. Furthermore, we must ensure that the new SPOG contract no longer hamstrings the Office of Police Accountability by unacceptably limiting staffing levels for investigators, improperly preventing community stakeholders from collecting or providing evidence during investigations, removing transparency for families, the public or tribal representatives, and imposing unreasonable time limits on investigations. SPD’s response to the protest movement last summer was wholly unacceptable, and the inability of OPA to adequately investigate and hold officers accountable is a direct result of city leadership ceding ground on accountability during the last SPOG contract negotiation.
