Update: Since this article was initially published, Councilmember Kshama Sawant has formally submitted a resolution calling on the City to “support community demands to fund quality affordable social housing to prevent and reverse displacement” and “urge the Office of Housing to fund the affordable housing project proposed by New Hope
The 1968 and 1970 Forward Thrust campaign was a slate of 13 ballot initiatives, put before voters in Seattle and King County to correct the harmful excesses of the area’s post-WWII, car-centric, consumer-focused rise. The heart of the Forward Thrust capital improvement projects—twelve funded by bond debt, one
The disappointment that urbanists feel about Seattle’s failure to obtain a subway system in 1968 (see part one and part two of the Forward Thrust series) reminds me of… professional sports: the aspirations and the disappointment; the recrimination and lost opportunities; the parsing over stats and precinct data for
The Forward Thrust bond initiatives of 1968 and 1970 were a success because of their ambition. They were also failures because of their myopia. In this essay—the second installment of a four-part series I’m proud to have published here in The Urbanist—I want to take a look
In December 2017 I had the fortune to pen, in my capacity as a columnist for City Arts Magazine, a retrospective essay about the impact of the Forward Thrust ballot initiatives. I looked backwards to Forward Thrust because I thought history could provide political answers that the self-proclaimed “progressive” present