Seattle City Council candidates Teresa Mosqueda and Jon Grant will expound on their platform will special attention to housing at a forum organized by Welcoming Wallingford. Paul Chapman will moderate and field some questions from the audience.
Welcoming Wallingford–of which I’m a founding member–is a group launched early this year to proactively engage in the planning around the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) within the leafy confines of Wallingford. As anti-HALA lawn sign emblazoned with bulldozers went up around neighborhood, some Wallingford residents felt their views were not being represented. To get our views out there, we’ve written articles and letters, hosted meetups and showed up at public hearings. Though a fledgling effort, it’s inspired similar collaboratives to form in neighborhoods across Seattle.
You can expect the forum to tackle the nitty gritty of implementing HALA policy from the Grand Bargain (the compromise pairing upzones with inclusionary zoning) to some more forgotten recommendations that could also have a big impact on affordability.
The forum will take place 7:30pm to 9:30pm on Thursday, September 14th at Wallingford Presbyterian Church (1414 N 42nd St). While this forum is hosted in and focused on Wallingford, people from across the city are welcome to attend. Please RSVP on Facebook if you’re able to attend. The event is free, but we encourage attendees to donate to Family Works, our local food bank and family support center. They tell us the need is particularly great for hygiene products.
Mosqueda is also the guest speaker at The Urbanist meetup on September 12th if you’d like an even bigger political fix. For those interested in brushing up for the forum, read Mosqueda’s responses here and Grant’s responses here to The Urbanist’s questionnaire.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.