My Goals for SeaTac
Increasing Housing Affordability
Our city has seen tremendous growth in recent years and has not been able to keep up with the increasing demand for affordable housing. The city has begun housing projects in partnership with organizations, but expanding opportunities for public and private partnership to support housing is critical. Housing is the highest single cost in a person's life. Living in SeaTac needs to be affordable for our families, seniors, and the workers who power our economy. SeaTac needs a councilmember who knows how to bring resources to SeaTac to support housing across the spectrum, including opportunities for home ownership.
Investing in the Local Economy
Our city relies heavily on parking and tourism dollars to fund projects. We must use these funds wisely, and diversify our local economy to include more opportunity for small and disadvantaged businesses while creating additional revenue streams for city use.
Our city has a growing number of immigrant-owned restaurants and retailers who want to contribute to our economy, and respect and collaboration with these businesses will help all of SeaTac to grow and thrive.
Through my work, I support a social enterprise cafe that not only serves one-of-a-kind indigenous foods, but also faces the day-to-day challenges that many of our restaurants and cafes face. I will bring this experience to your council to ensure businesses and workers thrive.
Improving Safety and Walkability
All of our residents - and especially our elders and children - deserve safe streets and walkways. Too often, our public works projects leave SeaTac residents without safe walkable routes. The lack of sidewalks near elementary schools in our city is unacceptable, and we need safe streets for moving residents, visitors, and commerce through our city.
It is critical that we act with urgency in making our communities more walkable. Our city has undertaken numerous public works projects through newly available dollars and we need to maintain this progress.
Bringing People Inside
Our region is dealing with a complete homelessness emergency. SeaTac is no exception, and we can't solve this alone. Our unhoused neighbors need to be brought inside and transitioned into permanent housing now. I bring a strong set of skills in leveraging resources at the County, State, and Federal level to do this work. We need to help unsheltered folks get the resources they need to find housing and begin healing. I'm eager to bring that experience to the policymaking level so that our city can be a leader in solving this crisis.