Andrew Grant Houston (Ace for short) is running for Mayor of Seattle and he is our guest for our monthly meetup this Tuesday April 13th. Ace is a queer Black and Latino Passive House certified architect, a housing advocate, and interim policy manager with Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda’s office.
The Zoom call opens at 6:15pm and Ace’s presentation starts at 6:30pm. He’ll take your questions and lay out his vision for the city.
Unique among mayoral candidates, Houston remains committed to defunding the Seattle Police Department by 50% to invest in communities of color and community-based public safety. He has also emphasized enacting rent control, boosting social housing, passing environmental justice programs, and rededicating street space to ensure safety and accessibility for people walking, rolling, biking, and riding transit.
To learn more about Houston’s campaign ahead of the event, check out his campaign website and Ray Dubicki’s interview with Ace here, which has an urbanist bent. Houston has published a few op-eds with The Urbanist, including a piece promoting mass timber housing, and takes criticizing the climate note legislation and the Climate Commitment Act, which would establish a cap-and-trade system in Washington.
The Urbanist Election Committee will issue its primary endorsements this summer after reviewing questionnaires and interviewing candidates, but this is an early opportunity to hear more from a mayoral candidate ahead of those endorsements. In June, we’ll host Council President M. Lorena González, who is also running for mayor. We hosted Colleen Echohawk in March. I will also post written interviews with fellow mayoral candidates Bruce Harrell (former city councilmember) and Jessyn Farrell (former state representative) this week.
Video from our meetup with Andrew Grant Houston:
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.