The Seattle City Council seat in District 3 has always been a hotly contested one. For almost a decade, that contest has been between outspoken socialist Kshama Sawant and whatever candidate (or recall effort) the city’s business lobby could throw at her. However, at long last, Sawant is stepping down.
Nine candidates jumped at the chance to take her job, making the primary an incredibly crowded affair. Almost all called themselves progressives.
The two candidates that emerged from the scrum do have some important differences, despite being aligned on a lot of things. The biggest one is that food justice activist and cannabis entrepreneur Joy Hollingsworth is backed by our very pro-business, pro-police mayor, while her opponent, transportation policy advocate and former news blogger Alex Hudson, is not.
That said, Hollingsworth stressed in our interview that it was her grandmother, a civil rights activist who participated in rallies until she was 99, who inspired her political ambitions, not the mayor. Mayor Bruce Harrell’s endorsement will certainly help her in her quest to beat Hudson, but she’s got plenty of her own policy ideas to run on. Read on to hear what they are.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Real Change: What motivated you to run for city council?
Joy Hollingsworth: The biggest thing that motivated me to run for city council was my grandmother. We marched down on 23rd [Avenue], after George Floyd unfortunately was murdered, and she was in a van driving down 23rd. And everyone thought how beautiful it was that this woman was riding down 23rd and supporting all the marches, which it was, but I thought on the flip side, 99 years old, marching for the same thing that she did in South Carolina in 1920, when she was born. She passed and it inspired me to really make change and understand that a voice is needed on the city council that has that lens of equity, diversity and inclusion.
What makes you better than your opponent, Alex Hudson?
Nothing better. I think it’s just a different perspective. [I’ve been] 39 years in the district so I’ve seen the communities that have fallen through the gap, all the policies that have been passed. We have been so hyper-focused on policy, we have not seen a lot of the impact, the people that are implementing it, and also the intentional programming that should be done. And I think that perspective is what differentiates me from Alex Hudson.
In your opinion, what are the biggest issues Seattle is facing right now?
Yeah, community safety is number one. Housing, which is directly linked to homelessness, and people experiencing homelessness. So housing affordability, abundance of housing. I want to be a champion of middle housing. I think that’s huge for people that want to still age in place, but can’t because of the rising costs, but we can figure out how we can help them add to affordability and live in their home. And third, but not least, our youth, which is included in our parks, our libraries, ensuring that the SVI building in the district comes back for job training. Ensuring that we’re working with our school board. There needs to be more cross collaboration.
Do you want to stop the sweeps? And if so, how would you make it happen? And if not, how do you justify continuing sweeps? Do you think sweeps work?
No, I don’t. I don’t believe that sweeps work. I would love for us to connect people to resources when we go into encampment. I know the King County Regional Homeless Authority calls them encampment resolutions. I would love for us to have resolutions where it links every single person to services or homes. I don’t think sweeping is appropriate. And it’s damaging, obviously.
Mayor Harrell has made it clear that any alternative crisis response to 911 calls must be with a co-responder model where it’s cops and other civilian responders. Do you agree with that? If yes, why? And if not, how would you convince the mayor to get on board with a fully non-police crisis team?
I think we have to start asking social workers [if] they feel safe with answering some phone calls, physically going there. I really think we need to ramp up our Health One funding with our fire department, which mitigates a lot of the calls from SPD. Over half of their calls are connecting people that are experiencing homelessness to services. So I would love funding to go there.
And then on the flip side, the question was about can we have social workers or a first responder that’s non-police, purely civilian to answer specific calls? I do believe that model exists, but I also know there’s a lot of social workers that want a police presence, not with them, but like in case something happens. So I would love to get to that point. Maybe the first step is this co-responder model, and then we can transition to that piece.
How would you characterize the changes you want to make to promote public safety?
The first one is more funding to our gun violence prevention people [and] organizations: Community Passageways, Marty with Southeast Network [SafetyNet]. Those programs do work. They need more funding and they also need technical assistance about how they scale up and ramp up their programming model.
The second thing is that I’ve gone on record with saying that I do support the mayor’s plan for more police officers that can respond to priority 1 calls. I think it’s a holistic approach where we have people doing prevention, people responding, people that do detective work. So I think it’s a delicate balance.
What do you see is the connection between gun violence and poverty?
I see everything connected to poverty. I see homelessness connected to poverty and racial inequities. 27% of Black people are homeless and we’re 10% of the population.
You got to go into the deeper [question] of why do people join gangs? Because connection, family, it offers them a sense of belonging. That’s where I think we failed our kids. I would love to fund Marty and all they do to prevent it. I’d also like to have community centers back where we have late night, where you can go shoot baskets 'til midnight, where we have programs, you have jobs.
How do you promote safety for homeless people?
I would love for a lot of encampments for us to have designated areas where we have water, sewer, garbage and safety things. Resources for people in certain areas where it can create safety areas, not with police, but with social workers and environments and lighting.
Do you support superblocks and pedestrianizing main streets in every urban village? And would you prioritize private vehicles or pedestrians, cyclists and transit?
The Pike-Pine corridor? Absolutely. I support a fully pedestrianized Pike Place Market. I think that it’s a travesty to let in vehicles. You can figure out time for deliveries, but for most part, it should be pedestrianized.
One of the things I know is that when we talk about pedestrianizing the South End and so forth, there’s just a lot of inequities that are already there. Like there’s only one food bank in the 98118 Zip code. The walkability, just infrastructure-wise in District 3, just, like, south of I-90, is terrible. So I’m all for it.
What are three things that you would do to immediately improve the lives of Real Change vendors?
One, obviously being the housing piece, I think that is very crucial. We take a long time building housing in this area, And I want us to have different models of housing opportunities: tiny homes, different shelters, car lots that allow people to be able to park their RV, like so many different ways in which people can have shelter and housing.
The second piece would be food accessibility. I don’t think a lot of people have adequate access to nutrition and food — we waste a lot of food. And third. I would like to hear from them what they want.
Do you know how many public 24 hour restrooms are in Seattle right now?
I do not. I was gonna say zero.
According to the Seattle Parks and Recreation website, there are 65 for the entire city, but only 11 are not porta potties. If you’re elected, what would you do to change this?
I would make it mandatory that all parks [have restrooms that are open] 24 hours. I’d have to talk to the Parks Department to figure out if we need to write policy, and then see where the majority of people that are experiencing homelessness [are] and ensure that we put a lot of those [there]. [Even] if there are porta-potties and we have to rock like that, to get those to encampments.
Do you know how hard it is for me to find a restroom when door knocking? So I can only imagine what it’s like if you’re experiencing homelessness, and you’re turned away from a business that’s like no, “paying customers only” or whatever.
Do you support or oppose the Seattle City Attorney’s efforts to prosecute drug possession and public use at the Seattle Municipal Court level? If yes, how do you address the disproportionate impact that criminalization has had on poor Black, Brown, Indigenous and homeless people? If you’re opposed to that ordinance? What’s your alternative plan?
I didn’t like the first version of it, like it was really trash. And then they come out and eliminate Community Court, so you have all these things coming down at one time, so I would have voted no on it. No, I don’t think we should be criminalizing people for using drugs. On the flip side, I’m also thinking about people that have to walk in public and experience potentially harmful chemicals that they could interact with.
We'd go through this with [my brother-in-law] Manny all the time — weed, heroin and then he’d get clean, go to jail, get clean, come out, get a job. In August he [got] hooked on clear and fentanyl and shit went fast. Leaves the house, he’s on Third and Pike in December, in and out of shelters with two suitcases and [we] did not even recognize him because he was really fucked up. I tried to get him help, got him into a hotel — King County Regional Homeless Authority [put him in a] Quality Inn in Kent. [He was part of a] drug deal gone wrong and gets shot in the head and murdered a month and a half after he was there. I’ve never seen anyone on fentanyl go that fast.
I want to support this ordinance, which makes it illegal, but also has services connected to it and funding and places for people to go and make methadone and [suboxone] be free everywhere. Like if we’re really serious about ending this drug war or fentanyl, it should be the easiest thing to access; I shouldn’t be able to access Narcan faster than I can these other drugs.
If elected, how would you work to repair the worst damages of gentrification in the Central Area? And do you support a reparations scheme for residents who have been impacted by residential discrimination?
Oh, for sure. [Chukundi Salisbury has] started an organization that promotes, obviously, like Black legacy homeowners and ensuring that people can stay in their homes. There’s a program with Homesite called “Hi Neighbor” with Sam Smith that creates down payment assistance. I think that would be huge. I would love for the money, specifically from cannabis tax dollars that has been poured into community reinvestment — which is 200 million for the next two years — to go towards people that have been gentrified out of the Central District to either go and either start a business in the Central District [or] come back to the CD in some way. I think it’s hard because houses [are] like a million dollars, which is ridiculous. So we have to build more first-time housing, like condos — just different ways in which we can get people back into the Central Area.
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is associate editor of Real Change. Guy Oron is a staff reporter.
Read more of the Sept. 6-12, 2023 issue.