Jessyn Farrell joined an increasingly crowded Seattle Mayoral race on Thursday, and she came out swinging.
“If you feel really great about how things are going, then definitely there are two candidates in this race who have been in city government, and they may be who you’re interested in,” Farrell told Crosscut‘s David Kroman.
Farrell referred to Council President M. Lorena González and former Council President Bruce Harrell, who are also vying to the next Mayor of Seattle. Farrell hasn’t revealed what she would do differently if she had been on the City Council dealing with Mayor Jenny Durkan, but she has argued she would bring a record of delivering results and a “fresh start” — hence the name of her announcement video.
Farrell also ran in 2017 and finished in fourth place with 12.5% of the vote, behind Nikkita Oliver and Cary Moon, who garnered The Urbanist’s endorsement. Oliver has opted to run for City Council in the seat that González has vacated.
With a background that includes running Transportation Choices Coalition from 2005 to 2008 and leading the Sound Transit 2 ballot campaign, Farrell garnered support from transit advocates, including Seattle Transit Blog, and unions, as demonstrated by her dual endorsement from the MLK Labor Council in her 2017 run. From 2013 to 2017, Farrell served in the state house representing the 46th Legislative District, which encompasses Northeast Seattle. After her unsuccessful mayoral bid, Farrell took a job as Senior Vice President at Civic Skunk Works, a progressive think tank founded by billionaire Nick Hanauer.
Affordable housing and 100 miles of open streets
Judging by her rollout, Farrell is stressing some urbanist themes in her second run. Affordable housing and childcare are two of her central themes so far, and grappling with restrictive and exclusionary single-family zoning blanketing the city also got a shoutout.
Farrell also wants to expand the City’s twenty-some miles of Stay Healthy Streets added on a temporary basis (with some hope of being made permanent) to 100 miles of permanent open streets, Rich Smith reported in The Stranger. This echoes a 130-mile proposal from Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, which The Urbanist has also endorsed.
“She conceives of her ‘complete communities housing initiative’ as ‘an ST3 for housing,’ but also as ‘an opportunity to ask communities what they need to be complete,'” Smith reported. Likewise, on homelessness, she emphasized a regional approach. That rhetoric is both encouraging and worrying: a moonshot on housing and homelessness is much needed, but pinning the program on wealthy neighborhoods and suburbs greenlighting that social housing in their midst could be a recipe for delay and potentially disaster.
