(Image: Jessyn for Mayor)
When Jessyn Farrell first ran for mayor in 2017, Seattle was facing many of the core issues it struggles with today: homelessness and housing affordability, public safety and policing.
But the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these problems since Farrell, a former state lawmaker and public transit champion, finished a distant fourth in the mayoral primary four years ago. With that in mind, Farrell is making another run for the office.
“People are really suffering in so many different ways, whether it is economic hardship, racial injustice, isolation, the challenges of remote learning,” Farrell told CHS Thursday afternoon, citing her own experience as a parent. “Times are really, really hard and city leadership has really lacked the creativity and the scale around responding to these multiple crises.”
She breaks all of this down to two questions: “Is this going to be a city that people want and can afford to live in?”
Farrell, 47, represented the U-District and North Seattle in the state House from 2013 until 2017, when she resigned to focus on her first mayoral run. In high school, she was voted most likely to become a politician and went on to graduate from the University of Washington and Boston College Law School.
She was the executive director of the Transportation Choices Coalition, leading charges to fund an expanded light rail system. Since her previous run, she’s worked at Civic Ventures, the think tank headed by progressive taxation advocate Nick Hanauer.
Jenny Durkan’s announcement that she will not seek reelection after finishing her first — and only — term this year has led to a surge of candidates making moves to win the office.
The primary is still five months away and more than a dozen candidates have already filed to run for mayor, according to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, including Chief Seattle Club executive director Colleen Echohawk, who would be the city’s first Native mayor, city council president Lorena González, former council president Bruce Harrell, and Capitol Hill architect Andrew Grant Houston.
SEED Seattle’s interim director Lance Randall also announced his candidacy last year.
Another factor helping to power the 2021 race is the Seattle’s Democracy Voucher program which, for the first time, has been extended to include mayoral candidates. Farrell said Thursday that she is participating in the “innovative policy to keep big money out of our politics.”
In trying to delineate herself among the other candidates vying for the job, Farrell not only separated her opponents between progressive and moderate, but between insider and relative outsider, tacitly calling out González and Harrell, the early frontrunners in the race.
“There is a real hunger for problem solving and someone who has a track record of problem solving and I think that I fit that bill,” she said. “If you’re happy with the status quo, there are candidates who are currently and have been before in city government, then those are your candidates. I think though that most people are not satisfied with how things are going.”
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Farrell says her top priorities as mayor would be addressing affordability crises in housing and childcare. For example, she wants to institute free universal childcare from birth to five-years-old to give Seattle “the best childcare in the country.”
She also said the government should be playing a much larger role to get people housed, whether it be through robust regional investments, scaling up community land trusts, publicly-owned social housing, city-backed financing for backyard cottages, or renter stability measures like encouraging longer leases.
More immediately, the city needs a lot more permanent supportive housing, tiny house villages, and to partner with the federal government to increase hotel options as a form of stable shelter, Farrell says.
“We just have to be very honest that we are going to have to make significant interim investments as well as significant permanent investments in housing,” she said, adding that Seattle needs to work on a regional basis on homelessness. “We can’t solve these problems alone and we really have to take a leadership role in doing so.”
Farrell said that parks need to be accessible for people of all ages and abilities, but that sweeping homeless encampments at parks without anywhere for individuals to go doesn’t work.
This is an issue currently playing out at 19th Ave’s Miller Playfield, where an encampment has sprouted in recent months. With a return to school on the horizon, some want the playfield cleared and for the people living there to be given shelter, but officials note they are in a bind with such little shelter availability.
“Sweeps don’t work,” Farrell said. “People don’t have a viable alternative and it’s inhumane to take someone’s tent when that’s all they have.”
So how would the city fund housing alternatives in a Farrell administration? She decried the state’s “complete backwards” tax system, adding that the city needs to be realistic about the scale of the problem.
“Developing funding plans that have a variety of streams that include sources from Seattle and it may very well include new taxing sources to get in front of this crisis,” Farrell said.
On policing, she highlighted work the Seattle Police Department does in domestic violence investigations and enforcing extreme risk protection orders that keep guns out of the hands of potentially harmful individuals, but argued that officers are not always the best responders to some crises.
She skirted a specific question on the battle over police funding, but argued the city needs to scale up alternatives like the fire department’s Health One program that helps people in need of medical care, mental health care, or social services.
“Every single person in our community, regardless of their race, should be able to go about their day-to-day activities and not fear harm from the police,” Farrell said. “For too many particularly Black and Brown people, interactions with the police can lead to harm or death and that has to change and we need to really focus on that with a great deal of urgency.”
Those answers might sound the same as those other candidates Farrell paints as city insiders. But her entry into the race presents a new option to Seattle voters who like the answers but want a new voice in City Hall’s highest office.
You can learn more at jessynformayor.com.
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