This Giving Tuesday we’re asking you to contribute to The Urbanist. Our writers and organizers pour thousands of hours of volunteer labor into our journalism and advocacy. We’re proud of our work, but we’re also looking to expand our operation and add more paid staff so we can cover more stories, advocate on more issues, and ensure our nonprofit is built to last.
Our achievements this year include advocating alongside the Move All Seattle Substainably (MASS) coalition to get much of our MASS Transportation Package into the recently passed 2020 budget. Our elections board vetted a huge slate of candidates with seven Seattle City Council seats up–four of them open seats–and issued endorsements with six of seven winning. We’ve continued to grow our readership and cover topics like traffic safety, lidding I-5, high-speed rail, transit-oriented development, and inclusionary zoning more closely than just about any other Seattle publication out there.
We’ve hosted a great series of speakers, including Seattle Department of Transportation Director Sam Zimbabwe, the Seattle Renters Commission, Maiko Winkler-Chin of the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority, and D4 candidate Shaun Scott.
Speaking of Scott, we covered his run closely and backed his campaign, which combined the best of socialism, urbanism, and climate action in one exciting platform. Scott came up just short in his bid against Alex Pedersen, a former legislative aide to Councilmember Tim Burgess and Sound Transit 3 skeptic. Nonetheless, Scott’s campaign did raise awareness of progressive urbanism across the city and inspire advocates across the country.
We hope that having an apparatus like The Urbanist will help the next candidate to follow in Scott’s footsteps to advance the cause of urbanism and social change even in seemingly inhospitable climes. We’re planning another big year of advocacy, endorsements, and the journalism you count on. Please help grow The Urbanist by giving today.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.