Alexis Mercedes Rinck resoundingly won election to the Seattle City Council with 58% of the vote last November. Already in her first four months in office, she’s proven herself, and we want to see more. We endorsed Rinck last year, and we took the rare step (for us) of endorsing early this year to underscore the value of her leadership on Council and our alignment in both values and approach.
Rinck is clearly an urbanist. She bikes and rides transit to get around Seattle. She knows our biggest issues — housing, transportation, and safe streets — both at first-hand visceral level and an academic level. She doesn’t even own a car. And perhaps most notably, considering the challenges that lie ahead for our city, her questionnaire responses pledged work ahead to fight for housing abundance, safe streets, and high quality green spaces and public third places.
In fact, Rinck said her top priority for the next four years would be “reinvigorating our housing development pipeline to accelerate the creation of desperately needed housing.” This is a housing abundance candidate. She is a strong backer of social housing and, unlike most of her colleagues, endorsed Proposition 1A to fund the new Seattle Social Housing Developer, rather than the unsuccessful big-business-backed effort to derail it.
While the centrist wave of councilmembers elected in 2023 needed months to get up speed, delaying council meetings and major legislation, Rinck hit the ground running after winning a one-year term in a special election to fill out the remainder of Teresa Mosqueda’s term. Mosqueda left early after winning a seat on the King County Council.
From her inauguration, Rinck has stressed the need to fight the rise of authoritarianism and Trump’s attacks on civil rights and social investments. She didn’t just do this from behind a desk; Rinck showed up and gave an impassioned speech at the President’s Day protests in Seattle.
