By Erica C. Barnett

This November, voters in District 2 will choose a replacement for Tammy Morales, the progressive councilmember who resigned in January and was replaced, on a short-term basis, by SPD crime prevention coordinator Mark Solomon, who has said he will not run for the position.

The election will mark the end of an unusually tumultuous time for the council, which consists overwhelmingly of first-time members, most of them elected in 2023. With first-term council president Sara Nelson on the ballot as well, it’s conceivable that by this time next year, the council will have only one member, Dan Strauss, serving a second term—an unprecedented situation, according to Seattle Municipal Archive records.

District 2’s new council member will have their work cut out for them. Many citywide problems, including displacement, a lack of affordable housing, gun violence, traffic deaths, disinvestment in social services, and inequitable access to amenities like grocery stores and parks, are magnified in Southeast Seattle. Rainier Avenue South, for example, has consistently been one of the two deadliest roads in the city for many years, yet efforts to slow traffic and decrease collisions on the busy arterial have been limited to gentrified neighborhoods, like Columbia City, or ineffective at reducing deaths and injuries.

Beyond these district-specific concerns, the new councilmember will have to address a looming budget crisis, vote on a new police contract that can and should fix accountability issues that the most recent contract ignored, and come up with solutions to the citywide housing shortage—all at a time when cuts to federal funding threaten to make every problem facing the city exponentially worse.

So far, four candidates have filed to run for Council District 2; more could join the race before the May 9 filing deadline.

Jamie Fackler, a building inspector with the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections and shop steward with the city’s largest union, PROTEC17, told PubliCola he decided to run for council after watching the appointment process to replace Morales and learning that every candidate said they were voting against Proposition 1A, the social housing tax measure that passed overwhelmingly in February.

During Fackler’s time living in and around Seattle, including a few months when he lived in his van to save money, the city has transformed from a city with affordable housing for artists and construction workers into a place where many working people can’t afford to live. “We desperately need affordable housing for everyone,” Fackler said. “We have it at the top already—the wealthy in this city have no problem buying and having whatever they want. We’ve built it at the lowest affordability levels. But we need to it for everyone.”

Fackler spoke to PubliCola last week; this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PubliCola (ECB): Let’s talk about housing affordability. What are some of the specific policies you’d support, if you’re elected, to make it easier to build housing?

Jamie Fackler (JF): Having gone through the last recession in ‘08 -’09, we saw a lot of our neighbors lose their homes. It just feels like we could be in a really bad place, so housing stability is really important. There’s a real solid argument that it’s cheaper to keep people housed than to try to get them rehoused. The impacts on people are really substantial once they lose their housing, as we’re seeing with this homelessness crisis.

I think we should look at issuing performance bonds to build more housing—borrowing money to build housing and then renting out the housing   to pay it back. There will probably still need to be some subsidies, and I’d say we could look at [taxing] compensation for CEOs making exorbitant amounts.

There’s zoning that could be changed. In the comp plan, what’s proposed for midrise doesn’t go nearly high enough. There’s no significant changes to lowrise zones. They’ve allowed apartments, but we haven’t seen any apartments going in [those areas].

There are other issues with the permitting process. To get water availability certificates, folks have to bounce around to different departments. There’s changes coming with the side sewer program that are not going to be good. I’ve dealt with it as a builder and inspector—we’ve seen those water availability certificates be an issue, and just the cost of putting this infrastructure in. Like, okay, development should pay for development, but at what cost? I was reading an article about somebody trying to put a [detached accessory dwelling unit] by their house, and it was going to cost them three quarters of a million dollars just to put the water main in there.

Our biggest need right now is housing, and that’s supply. And from a humanitarian perspective, it’s a crisis that we have so many wealthy people in the city and so many living on the streets. It’s so sad that the acceptable minimum housing in the city is a tent on the sidewalk.

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ECB: You mentioned being motivated by the passage of social housing and the lack of political will to actually help it happen. What do you think the council is failing to do on social housing, and what would you propose to make it happen faster?

JF: It doesn’t feel like they want it to succeed at all. They could have passed it, but they slow-rolled it and presented a second option. The current council has demonstrated they’re not in favor of it. But the public is. We should be reframing this argument and talking about how we all deserve this benefit—this is how we can care for each other as a community, how we can support each other as a community.

I’ve heard it’s being slow rolled—like, ‘We can’t implement the tax right away.’ If the will is there, we’re able to act quickly. We’ve seen this council be able to act quickly on things. So I’d be advocating for moving more quickly on this and then on expanding. Prop 1A [adds] a building a year—we’re going to need more than that if we really want to provide affordable housing.

ECB: What solutions would you propose to improve safety for everyone on Rainier and MLK Way South, given the city’s limited resources and the fact that light rail is going to continue to run at grade on MLK?

JF:  There’s inequality in our system, as people riding light rail can see every day. Just look at the stations at Rainier Beach, Othello, Columbia City—how does that compere to what’s being built in North Seattle, Bellevue, and Shoreline? We have an incredibly dangerous situation on MLK. We have people who’ve been killed by light rail. There’s people’s in wheelchairs that have been hit. We have crosswalks that are inaccessible on Rainier, and I’ve been hit as a pedestrian on Rainier. The stations aren’t in the neighborhood centers. It’s hard to pick up and drop off.

What can be done to make the crossings safer to stop trains from hitting pedestrians? Can we build bridges, can we build an elevator at the station where people can go up and over [the street]? There’s also the timing of signals. People taking left turns across MLK get jammed up by the trains all the time. And then providing barriers or looking at improving crosswalks or providing crosswalks. MLK is a real barrier to the community. It’s like a freeway, really, because it’s not accessible. You can walk across the train tracks and go up over the curb, but it’s not really accessible. MLK has divided that community from one side to the other.

Both times I was hit by a car, was the classic ‘someone’s looking left and turning right,’ so there’s the education piece and there’s changing some things, like not allowing right turns on red on arterials. In some of these areas, like Brighton, between Rainier Beach and Columbia City, there’s some businesses where they don’t have parking lots and they’ve lost their street parking, yet we have a turn lane and there’s nothing else going on there. People speed down that center turn lane, people so I’d advocate for adding some parking for some of those businesses, because people park on the sidewalk and other places. Our best intentions didn’t play out in some of those areas.

The city’s been spending a lot of money on ADA-accessible crossings because there’s a consent decree around that. They’ve been throwing a lot of money at it, but sometimes it makes things less safe. There’s an intersection—Roxbury and Renton Avenue South—where they put in ADA crossings and took a situation that was marginally safe and made it less safe, in a way. It’s really a confusing intersection. So I think some we needed some bigger picture thinking about what could have been done there to make it just a little bit safer.

ECB: What’s your plan to improve public safety in the district, particularly when it comes to gun violence?

JF: We need a comprehensive approach to this. My kid attends school at 12th and Jackson. He’s in that neighborhood every day and I’m in that neighborhood every day. We need to address root causes, invest in prevention, early childhood education, providing support to kids in high school, providing support to kids with dyslexia and other learning differences. I know folks who have sued public schools to honor individual education plans for kids with dyslexia. By some estimates, 30 percent of the prison population is dyslexic. That isn’t the whole reason, but people with learning differences, people with ADHD, are disposed to self-medicate, so we need to make investments into that kind of prevention.

Let’s talk about engaging the kids before they get into this stuff and getting the kids working with their hands and working toward good careers. The trades is a great way for people to get a lot of satisfaction in their work and make money and have good careers, and I think our schools have kind of failed in that because there’s not been a lot of hands-on education. Highline Public Schools ended up getting the Raisbeck aviation academy and Seattle Public Schools said, We don’t want that investment in apprenticeship programs.

We also need to stand up treatment in a big, big way, and expand access to treatment. The Harrell administration has spent $50 million on sweeps and we still have homelessness and this terrible drug crisis in the city. It doesn’t feel like it has been solved. The current policies are moving people from one neighborhood to the next.

Part of this is going to be standing up more investments in the CARE team and other alternatives. We need to fix it so they can go out to [more types of] calls. If the pushback is from the police department, then we should go to the negotiating table and figure out how to  get SPD to let CARE do that work. I don’t think the police want to go to these calls. There’s a place in society for police. We’ve put a lot on their shoulders, including additional duties, and we’re probably not best served by having them do a lot of that stuff.

I look at people on the streets, the homeless folks and the drug-addicted folks, and it’s not pleasant to look at, but I have empathy for those people because I know they’re someone’s son, daughter, sibling, grandchild. There’s less that separates me from these people than separates me from the billionaires in this city. I think if we invest in people, if we invest in community, and we invest in stuff that supports people, that’s certainly cheaper than dealing with it on the other end. The most expensive way to deal with these problems is with the police, courts, and incarceration, and so it think the best way to prevent that is on the front end and by investing in community.

ECB: The city is going to have to make some extremely difficult budget choices this year, including cuts. But one department that has historically been exempt from cuts, and has even grown when the city has cut social services, is the police department. Are you open to the idea of cutting the amount we spend on the police department, including the vacant positions the city funds year after year, or is SPD off-limits?

JF: If there’s a burglary in process, if there’s domestic violence happening, we need police to respond. But everybody should have to tighten their belt if there’s austerity. Certainly in the departments, there’s waste, there’s a lot of money that’s spent on consultants— to do what? To write studies that we never follow up with. There’s phone lines that don’t get used or technology that’s clunky that we can look at. But if if there’s pencil sharpening, if we’re in an austerity budget, just saying [SPD’s budget] is a sacred budget, we’re not going to touch this—that’s bad governance. Because there’s always room for efficiency and doing things better, and no department should be exempt from that. And if we’ve got public safety problems, we should add those problems upstream. It’s just like good parenting or good project management.

Property taxes went up like 40 percent during the pandemic. Some people’s went up and some people’s went down. The mayor’s went down. People of means are going to shelter their money and the rest of us don’t have the ability or the time to do that. Things are stacked against the residents of Southeast Seattle because we pay a higher effective tax rate than other parts of the city, so that inequality needs to be addressed. Let’s talk about creating a more fair tax structure in the city. It’s great that Amazon’s made a bunch of money, but they also displaced a lot of people in the city and disrupted other industries, and it would argue that there’s a responsibility to at least pay their share of taxes just to be a good citizen.