With love for a home neighborhood at the core of the decision to enter the race, First Hill resident and Transportation Choices Coalition executive director Alex Hudson is running for the District 3 seat on the Seattle City Council.

“When I say that’s the vision for the City of Seattle that my leadership has produced and will continue to produce, I’m not saying that because it’s an urbanist fantasy,” Hudson says of her home turf and its almost one of a kind in Seattle mix of housing types from old mansions to affordable skyscrapers. “I’m saying that because I live in that neighborhood, and I see it, and I’ve helped to build it.”

The leader of the transit policy and advocacy organization and former head of the First Hill Improvement Association says she believes her progressive record of accomplishments in diverse policy areas and ability to build coalitions and find common ground across divides is what the district needs to rebuild hope after years of political battles under Kshama Sawant and in a city facing significant challenges in housing affordability, homelessness, public safety, and the health and vitality of small business districts.

“It is not naive to believe that Seattle’s best days are still in front of us and that there are solutions to these problems that are at our fingers,” Hudson says. “All of this stuff, it feels really hard. It feels really intractable. We can have it and we will have it if we come together, roll up our sleeves, listen to each other, and have a real solution space… we can fix these things and we’re going to.”

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Hudson says she plans to advocate for creative policy solutions to address the city’s challenges including an expansion of the current tax exemption given to landlords of multi-family buildings who set aside 25% of the units at affordable rents, which is estimated to create 3,000 units of new affordable housing in 10 years at a cost of about $12 a year per resident. On homelessness, she plans to work to expand shelter options like tiny homes as well as permanent housing, so residents of encampments can be offered a safer, better alternative place to go.

With respect to small business, Hudson plans to develop policies to incentivize the creation of new startup neighborhood businesses to replace those lost during the COVID downturn, and says she will work with small business owners to address issues around street disorder that are harming their ability to operate.

Hudson also plans to prioritize transportation infrastructure and transit planning. She’ll focus on delivering the Center City Connector Streetcar, developing a Move Seattle Levy that advances a sustainable, safe, multimodal transportation system, and aggressively pursue Vision Zero implementation and work to shape and harness the benefits of the West Seattle and Ballard light rail lines.

Hudson tells CHS she had already decided to enter the race before Sawant stepped aside last week and announced she will not seek reelection. The field will likely be even more crowded with the incumbent’s departure. Others joining the race include Ry Armstrong, a first time candidate with connections to the arts and LGBTQ communities, and Joy Hollingsworth, a more formidable first timer with a deeper bench thanks to her strong connections to the Central District and Black communities as well as the city’s cannabis industry.

Incumbent Sawant will sit the race out as her political group Socialist Alternative will set its work in District 3 aside to focus on the creation of a new national party to take on the “Democratic establishment” including the growing ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Hudson enters now as the candidate most experienced with city government and its mechanics. She will also, she says, wear the “u word” label proudly.

“I’m definitely an urbanist at heart,” Hudson said. “And I think that for me, what that word means is that I just love the vitality of places that bring people together. And I believe that a city is the thing that does that.”

She calls herself “a professional coalition builder” who will bring “a better conversation to Seattle City Hall.

Hudson has led TCC for the last four plus years and claims victories in investments in transportation and transit in the 2022 Legislature and helping to lead the 2020 Seattle transit ballot measure campaign that funded increased transit service and funded free transit for Seattle youth.

Prior to becoming executive director of TCC, Hudson led the First Hill Improvement Association and counts the affordable housing being built on Sound Transit’s surplus property on Madison as one of her key victories.

Her work will also be felt on the streets of Pike/Pine after leading the coalition formed to forge a $93 million community benefits package as part of the downtown convention center expansion that included “substantial funding” for affordable housing, parks and open spaces, improvements to Pike/Pine between downtown, and new bike lanes to Capitol Hill. Much of that work is slated to begin in early 2023. The $2 billion convention center expansion, by the way, debuts this week after years of planning and construction.

But First Hill is where her heart is. She lives in the neighborhood with her partner and is the legal guardian of an 8th grader. Many of her visions for the city are shaped by this home turf.

“I moved to First Hill in 2009 because I got a job working at Town Hall and I wanted to be able to walk to work because I didn’t have a car,” Hudson said. “And I was like, sweet, this is awesome. And frankly, against the advisement of my family members, I moved to an apartment next to Harborview Hospital and just never looked back.”

She won’t say First Hill is a model, exactly, for her vision for Seattle and D3. But she thinks the city can learn a lot from the neighborhood.

“I think it’s great. I think the people who live there are great. I think the organizations that make it that place are awesome. It’s interesting because it’s got major employers, it’s got small businesses, it’s got arts and cultural institutions. It’s got very wealthy people. It’s got very, very poor people and all living around each other,” she says. “My favorite block is Spring and Minor because when you’re standing there, you’re at the corner and able to look at the living dream of what it means to be a mixed income opportunity neighborhood rich with opportunity.”

When she joined the First Hill Improvement Association, she began her work to shape the community and make a deeper mark in her home neighborhood, a “mission to create a new high watermark for what it meant to be an inclusive and affordable neighborhood and an organization that stood up for inclusion,” she says.

The annual First Hill Fidos events would probably be enough of a platform to win a bunch of D3 votes on its own but Hudson can also point to work like shepherding the process to redesign First Hill Park and adding new homeless shelters on underutilized properties as First Hill accomplishments she hopes are models for what she can bring to the rest of District 3.

“I do believe that you need to be associated with place,” Hudson said. “That’s part of what a district representative is, and that’s my understanding of what place-based leadership is — is that you like, love a place, that you’re of a place, that you’re embedded in a place. That’s what community is, right?”

You can learn more at alexforseattle.com.

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