What’s on the Teresa To-Do List!
This year’s Teresa To-Do list is full of the ideas you have all shared with us. Making City Hall accessible to for all means bringing your ideas into City Hall and sharing and distributing power throughout the city. One piece of that is visiting with you all on our Teresa Tour days in community, with small businesses, non-profits, and neighborhood organizations. We are holding office hours at local coffee shops throughout Seattle. We are coming to you twice a month with our Team Teresa Community Tours (see below) and reporting out to you twice a month through these Teresa Tuesday alerts.
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Check out a preview of the issues we’re hearing from you for our 2019 to-do list: childcare, worker protections, affordable housing, and tenants’ rights!
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Come Join Us in Community!
This Friday, March 1st, we’re coming to Beacon Hill (I know it’s the first day of Month 3 and were still in District 2, but we are making up for a missed snow day!) We’ll be holding office hours from 9:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. at Fresh Flowers Bakery. We’re excited to meet with Beacon Hill residents and hear directly from community about their priorities for City Hall.
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Left to Right: D1 West Seattle Junction Association Lora Radford, tour of NuCOR Steel Facility; D2 tour of first Passivhaus building, RBAC members & new mural!
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Looking ahead to next month, we’ll be in District 3 on March 15th in the Central District and on March 27th in Capitol Hill to meet with community organizations like the Central Area Senior Center, Gay City, and we’ll also be holding Office Hours at Golden Wheat Bakery. Email Aretha.Basu@Seattle.gov to reserve some time!
On April 5th and April 12th, we’ll be up in District 4 for a tour of the historic Picardo Farm P-Patch and visits with small businesses in Fremont. Check out the rest of our planned dates, and let us know if you have a hot spot we should hit up.
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MHA is On Its Way
The finish line is in sight. Many of you have been working on passing Mandatory Housing Affordability for years, and I mean years! This week we passed the MHA bill out of the Select Committee and will be voting on the final package on March 18th at 2:00 p.m.
What do you think? We heard strong support from housing advocates, labor unions, businesses, environmental and transportation advocates, and residents from all over the city a call for passing the most robust proposal possible under the environmental review. Unfortunately, some amendments did pass into the final package that, while still upzoning neighborhoods, don’t fully upzone areas in Districts 1, 4, and 6. What are your thoughts on that?
Here is the type of housing that we are talking about – a difference of a lot with two 3 story units on it, or a lot with one small 3 story apartment. The difference is small, but I voted no on many of the amendments because the impact means fewer individuals and families will be able to live in the city limits.
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Examples of the types of buildings you can find in RSL zones on the left, and LR1 zones on the right.
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Time and again, community members have reinforced the message that we need more housing of all types for people of all incomes, and we need to act now to change zoning and start creating the income- and rent-restricted affordable housing that would be required to either fund or build on-site through MHA. I want to be clear: What we voted on will only change 6% of the single family-zoned land in Seattle, not by bulldozing existing homes, but just by making the creation of apartments, rowhouses, triplexes, or duplexes no longer illegal. What do I mean by illegal – check out these maps from Sightline where apartments (like the 4-story brick building I live in), townhouses, rowhouses, duplexes and triplexes were effectively made illegal to build in ALL of the red area currently zoned for detached single-family use.
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That’s not right. That’s not how we create a welcoming city. That’s not how we create equitable access to neighborhoods with parks, libraries, schools and community centers. So that’s why I voted no on the amendments that would scale back the proposed upzones (again in just 6% of the city). These maps that show downzones over the last century have exacerbated the consequences of exclusionary land use practices like racist redlining and segregationist lending practices, creating barriers to many neighborhoods for those who haven’t benefited from Seattle’s skyrocketing property values and are not able to afford a single-family home at a median price that’s currently hovering around $700,000.
As Seattle has grown, we have failed to allow for the creation of more housing—and we have seen our neighbors pushed out of Seattle and pushed into the street. This is about righting historic wrongs and building back opportunities for families and individuals to live in all of Seattle’s neighborhoods. People, not buildings, define neighborhood character. Check out the video of the press conference where we were joined by community, union, businesses and organizations calling for us pass the MHA legislation.
The Council is scheduled for a final vote on the MHA legislation on Monday, March 18th, at 2 p.m. Thank you to community members, advocates, and staff whose hard work has contributed to this policy over the years—I look forward to celebrating full implementation of MHA with you!
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Board of Health: Thanks Chair Dembowski, Welcome Chair Kohl-Welles!
It’s no secret I am a health policy fan and love serving on the Board of Health with our partners in the region and on the King County Council. It has been a true privilege to work with the outgoing Chair, Councilmember Dembowski, who has led the effort over the last year to ensure that our most vulnerable, including women and the immigrant community, get access to health care no matter the threats coming from the White House. Councilmember Dembowski and I have jointly committed to working to create a regional health plan (like Healthy SF and My Health LA) to cover all in our region. I look forward to continuing to work with you to make this plan a reality this year.
At the Board of Health meeting, we welcomed our new King County Board of Health Chair King County Councilmember Kohl-Welles as the new Chair. I look forward to continuing to work with the new Chair on stronger supports and services for our homeless populations, immigrants, and those who suffer from addiction. Congratulations Chair Kohl-Welles. |
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Teresa Mosqueda
Seattle City Council Councilmember, Position 8
teresa.mosqueda@seattle.gov
206-684-8806
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