The candidates sit at table with name tags in front.
Seven Seattle Mayor candidates faced off on June 4, 2025 at a forum in Beacon Hill. (Clara Cantor)

On Wednesday, Seattle municipal candidates squared off at a forum focused on housing and transportation issues. While candidates for Seattle Mayor and City Council generally espoused a broad consensus in favoring of boosting homebuilding, transit service, and road safety, key differences did emerge between the contenders on the finer details and policy approaches to get there.

Across the three Council races and the mayoral race, 18 candidates shared the stage at the Centilia Cultural Center at the El Centro de la Raza in Beacon Hill. Political consultant and Hacks and Wonks podcast host Crystal Fincher moderated the forum and The Urbanist was among a long list of cohosts. (Fincher also serves on The Urbanist’s board of directors).

The state of the mayoral race

Seeking his second term, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell faced off with six challengers Wednesday.

Former telecom executive Joe Mallahan is the most recent entrant, hopping in just before filing deadline in mid-May. Mallahan ran in 2009, finishing ahead of incumbent Greg Nickels in the primary but losing to Mike McGinn in the general election. In that race, Mallahan ran as a business-friendly, conservative-leaning Democrat, but this time around his positions appear a bit more all over the place. One common thread: Police are still front and center in Mallahan’s platform.

Even with Mallahan’s entry, prognosticators have largely predicted the race will boil down to a showdown between Harrell and Katie Wilson, the long-time Transit Riders Union general secretary and leader of numerous progressive coalitions. In fact, a poll commissioned by the Northwest Progressive Institute recently found Wilson leading Harrell slightly in a head-to-head matchup.

Harrell has made in-roads with some transportation advocacy groups, who mostly went for his opponent Lorena González in 2021. The dislike appeared to be mutual, with Harrell in 2021 quipping during a televised debate that he “won’t lead with bikes.” Washington Bikes and Transportation for Washington (which is the political arm of Transportation Choices Coalition) have endorsed Harrell this cycle. Washington Bikes dual-endorsed in 2021.

However, some other leading transportation advocates have argued that Wilson has the stronger vision, including Gordon Padelford, who is executive director of Seattle Neighborhood Greenways. (Seattle Greenways is a nonprofit and doesn’t endorse candidates.)

“This was a notable contrast tonight between Wilson and Harrell on Vision Zero. Harrell seemed to put more emphasis on education and enforcement strategies versus Wilson who put more of an emphasis on re-designing our most dangerous streets,” Padelford said in a Bluesky post.

Wilson also pitched housing advocates as an all of the above candidate, who is pushing market-rate and social housing, in addition to convention affordable housing models. She reminded attendees of her role in passing the Jumpstart corporate payroll tax, which has provided hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing. Wilson took an oblique dig at Harrell for swiping those affordable housing dollars and using them for his other priorities.

“I think housing affordability is probably the most fundamental problem facing our city right now, and the solutions are many,” Wilson said. “So number one, zoning. We need to go further than the current comprehensive plan proposal in allowing more housing to be built in our great neighborhoods throughout the city. Social housing: let’s build social housing. We also need to make sure that we are funding the other models of affordable housing we already have, and the Jumpstart tax, which I helped to design and build, should be a robust funding source for that. Unfortunately, a lot of the money has been taken out of that funding source for other things.”

Key mayoral takeaways

  • Pedestrianization is popular. Most candidates supported making Pike Place car-free, as Mayor Harrell recently enacted as a pilot project after years of advocacy pushing for it. Additionally, most candidate proposed pedestrianizing other streets, as well. The exception was Bliss, who worried about traffic.
  • Harrell emphasized pedestrian investments. The mayor said Seattle is one of the most pedestrian-friendly cities in the nation and credited the billion-dollar-plus transportation levy he proposed with further advancing that cause, given “more than $200 million” in new sidewalk investments.
  • Wilson stressed mode shift and reducing car dependency. “We need to make it efficient, reliable and safe for people to travel by other modes — by transit, by walking, by biking, by rolling,” Wilson said.
  • Mallahan was hesitant to take policy stands on some issues. He said his top transportation priorities were bus safety and transit-oriented development, skipping over a host of other issues, such as boosting transit service and street safety. “When I talk about safety, I’m primarily talking about bus safety — that people aren’t hesitating to ride the bus system because they feel unsafe,” Mallahan said. “And the second thing is facilitating and incentivizing investments in housing in transit centers. So to me, those are my two biggest issues.”
  • Ry Armstrong emphasized bus investments and the possibility of needing to backfill Sound Transit 3 (ST3) projects: “We want to make sure that we are on Sound Transit, to make sure that [ST3 projects are] moving forward as much as possible, or finding the progressive revenue to fill in when federal funding eventually gets pulled for those projects, if that does happen.
  • Jo Molloy argued adding more housing would not lower housing prices or help low-income people, positioning himself as a market skeptic and a socialist. Molloy argued the focus should be on housing the homeless and building low-income housing, fitting in a dig at Mayor Harrell: “There’s 2,500 shelter beds that you promised at the beginning of your first term that we’re still waiting on, right?”
  • Molloy’s transportation priority is free transit. He said only 8% of King County Metro’s budget comes from fare revenue, portrayed that as easily replaced — though he didn’t say how. That could prove difficult given Metro’s looming budget crisis.
  • Isaiah Willoughby proposed requiring Community Benefit Agreements on new developments. “I propose strengthening community benefit agreements and using public land for public good, like affordable housing, childcare and green space.” Willoughby said. “Every neighborhood deserves to thrive, not just survive.”
  • Clinton Bliss and a very big, windy mustache and wants traffic to go underground. At times, he also staked out some of the most conservative positions in the field. On the other hand, he wants to bury car traffic to open up space for pedestrian streets. “If I had my way, I think I would put all traffic underground,” Bliss said. If only money grew on trees.
Ry Armstrong gives an answer, while Clinton Bliss and his moustache look on. (Credit: Clara Cantor)
  • Mallahan basically wants to make a buddy cop movie. He pledged to do 50 ride-alongs with police officers: “We don’t have enough police officers, and we have a dysfunctional and demoralized police force who aren’t delivering what we want them to deliver,” Mallahan said. “I commit to do 50 ride-alongs with police, to reintegrate them with the community and to enforce and to establish community policing.”
  • Candidates voiced support for lidding I-5 and completing the Center City Streetcar, but funding remains a big hurdle. Harrell has voiced support for the streetcar before, but ultimately opted against funding it in his original $1.45 billion levy proposal or the $1.7 billion final version. That leaves the project, which Harrell’s predecessor Jenny Durkan shelved in 2018, in continued limbo with some federal support forfeited as City leaders have stalled.

We’ll summarize takeaways from the two separate council forums in a follow-up post.

The Urbanist co-hosted the forum along with a host of other transportation and housing groups. Those sponsoring organizations include Ampersand Bicycle Club, Beacon Hill Safe Streets, Be:Seattle, Bike Works, Cascade Bicycle Club, Disability Rights Washington, Feet First, Friends of Little Saigon, Futurewise, House Our Neighbors, Jackson Park 4 All, Lid I-5, People for Climate Action Seattle, Rainier Valley Greenways-Safe Streets, Real Change, Seattle Neighborhood Greenways, Seattle Subway, Soapbox Project, Transit Equity for All, Transit Riders Union, Transportation Choices Coalition, The Urbanist, Washington Bikes.

Here are the candidates that attended the forum:

Mayor

Seattle City Council District 2

Seattle City Council Citywide Position 8

Seattle City Council Citywide Position 9

Wilson Leads Harrell in Seattle Mayor Poll
Article Author
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Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.