“Disability is always an afterthought,” said Isabelle Spence, paralegal at Washington Civil & Disability Advocate. “People in positions of power do not tend to think of the disability community and build in accessibility to start with. And then they end up having to build it in on the back end if they do at all.”
Spence was speaking to a crowd gathered at the Centilia Cultural Center on Beacon Hill Monday evening for a City Council candidate forum focused on disability issues. Washington Civil & Disability Advocate co-organized the event with 15 other organizations that advocate for disability and elder rights and accessibility.
The event featured all four District 2 Council candidates — Jeanie Chunn, Adonis Ducksworth, Jamie Fackler and Eddie Lin — vying to represent southeast Seattle. It also included the frontrunners for citywide Position 8, Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Bishop Ray Rogers, and citywide Position 9, Council President Sara Nelson, Dionne Foster and Connor Nash.
The forum was intended to educate voters about where the candidates stand on key issues for their constituents with disabilities and to help educate the candidates themselves.
Emcee Barry Long, a real estate agent specializing in accessibility and a wheelchair user, began with a lightning round of Yes/No questions to establish central themes and issues including personal experience with disabilities, representation, infrastructure and housing.
For example, candidates were asked if they’d support policies to improve inclusivity at the city by recruiting individuals with disabilities and providing more on-the-job support; if they’d support installing more accessible pedestrian signals, which cost between $4,000 and $12,000; and if they’d pass a law requiring a certain percentage of new apartments to be fully accessible to people with mobility disabilities. Every candidate held up their Yes paddle for those questions.
The second half of each candidate panel featured questions from audience members. While questions differed between the D2 panel and the combined D8 and D9 panel, they centered on transportation, affordable housing and arts and culture accessibility.
Transportation
Audience member Kyle Matheson pointed out to candidates that people with disabilities face some of the greatest barriers to transportation. Fewer than two-thirds of U.S. residents with disabilities drive a car, infrastructure around transit stops and stations is often in disrepair and pedestrian deaths are on the rise.
Lin said Seattle needs to move away from its car dependency, arguing an overreliance on cars worsens the effects of climate change and reduces accessibility, affordability and safety. He wants to improve bike lanes, sidewalks, bus service and paratransit services.
Ducksworth said he’s happy Seattle’s $1.55 billion transportation levy includes funding for sidewalk construction and repairs, but wants to nearly double the amount of sidewalk construction in D2. He also wants to emulate Munich, which uses geofencing to regulate electric scooter and bikeshare parking on sidewalks, an answer that elicited cheers from the audience.
Chunn said she wants to implement a once studied but never utilized city plan to narrow Martin Luther King Jr. Way and install a bike lane, which she argued would slow traffic and make it safer and easier for pedestrians to cross the boulevard.
Fackler similarly said improving safety on MLK Way and Rainier Avenue are two of his top transportation priorities since they are among the city’s most dangerous streets. He also wants to protect bus service.
Position 9 Councilmember Nelson said she’s happy that the most recent transportation levy includes funding for sidewalk construction, but also wants the city to prioritize maintaining existing sidewalks since so many are in disrepair.
Nash wants to shift Seattleites away from car use and focus on buses and sidewalks so anyone can get around the city without a car.
From left to right: Pamela Williams, Mayor’s Council on African American Elders (MCAAE) Chair; District 2 Council candidates; Lucas Hanson and his father Burke Stansbury (Charissa Soriano for Cascade PBS)
Foster emphasized maintaining and building new sidewalks, ensuring the city has a reliable transit system and considering loading zones for cars so that wheelchair users or other people with disabilities can get in and out of vehicles.
Position 8 Councilmember Rinck reminded the audience that one in five Seattle households is car-free and that it’s important to maintain and improve non-car transportation systems. She pointed to the problems with the brand-new G Line Bus Rapid Transit stations, improperly designed for wheelchair access.
Rogers wants to improve the bus experience for people with visual impairment, noting that there’s not much Braille on Metro buses to help people navigate.
Affordable housing
Housing has become a challenging issue for many Seattleites, but for people with disabilities it can be particularly thorny. Americans with disabilities live in poverty at twice the rate of non-disabled Americans, making it difficult to afford rent or a mortgage. Very few apartments on the market are designed to meet accessibility standards for wheelchair users; even fewer single-family homes are.
Ducksworth said he wants to take advantage of the forthcoming Comprehensive Plan update to allow more housing of all types, including subsidized low-income and accessible housing. He also wants to use artificial intelligence to speed the permitting process, like a small city in British Columbia is working to do.
Chunn said she supports building more market-rate housing along with affordable housing and permanent supportive housing. She also wants to incentivize stacked flats, small apartment buildings with one unit per floor, though developers and architects have said it's unlikely the zoning updates currently proposed will produce many stacked flats.
Recognizing that mid-rise apartment buildings tend to be Seattle’s only accessible housing, Fackler said he supports expanding mid-rise zoning in Seattle and making sure the city allows more apartments near parks, schools and other civic amenities.
Lin similarly said Seattle needs more multifamily housing and to allow it to be built away from arterials. He also wants to eliminate parking requirements, which drive up the cost of housing construction.
Foster said stacked flats need to remain part of the Comprehensive Plan rezone conversation, since at least the first floor can be accessible for people with physical disabilities.
Nash said he wants to see the city support the Seattle Social Housing Developer. He also wants to revisit the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program, which requires developers to either build a certain number of affordable units or pay a fee to the city’s affordable-housing fund. Nash thinks more developers should be incentivized or required to build units rather than pay the fee.
Nelson said she has several forthcoming amendments for the Comprehensive Plan update to incentivize affordable “missing middle” housing construction in neighborhoods previously zoned for single-family dwellings.
Rogers, who himself experienced homelessness and found support in transitional housing, thinks the city should provide more incentives to developers to build affordable housing.
Rinck also wants more market-rate housing, investment in affordable housing and support for the social housing developer. She also said she wants to work on universal housing design standards that allow people to age in place. One example of this was supporting the elevator reform bill proposed in the Legislature that would’ve allowed smaller and less-expensive elevator construction if it had passed.
Arts and culture accessibility
One theme of the night, and a common saying in disability rights work, is “Nothing about us without us.” In one of the closing questions of the evening, Conrad Reynoldson, founder and lead attorney at Washington Civil & Disability Advocate, asked if candidates would support allowing caregivers to attend cultural events such as movies, sports or concerts for free when working.
The logic, he explained, is that for people with disabilities who require a caregiver, attending such events costs double when the caregiver needs a ticket, too.
In an illustrative moment, each Position 8 and 9 candidate admitted they hadn’t ever considered such a policy, but said it resonated with them and that they would support working with disability rights advocates to craft such a law.
A full video of the candidate forum is available on Washington Civil & Disability Advocate’s YouTube page.
