Ron Davis is running for the Seattle City Council in District 4 on a progressive urbanist platform. Hear more about Davis’s positions on transportation, housing, and other issues at The Urbanist’s lunch and learn event this Thursday, July 6th, at noon. RSVP below for the Zoom link or watch for the video to get posted to our site and YouTube page after the fact.
Davis has pulled in an impressive set of progressive endorsements including that of King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay and State Senator Joe Nguyen. In The Urbanist‘s rundown of the D4 race, I wrote: “At first glance his Harvard-educated tech entrepreneur pedigree might seem upper crust, but Davis’s rags to riches story and passion for pursuing housing abundance and lessening wealth inequality could convince progressive voters he’s a worthy antidote for Alex Pedersen’s tenure on the city council. He’s penned op-eds for The Urbanist and other publications and is a board member at sustainability-focused nonprofit Futurewise, honing his chops as a wonk not afraid to wade into policy details. His housing platform is meaty with clear priorities like “eliminate bans on missing-middle housing” and “make Alternative 6 part of our Comprehensive Plan,” as he opined in The Urbanist. On transportation, Davis’s priorities include rededicating road space to bus lanes to speed up high frequency buses and ungapping the map of safe bike facilities.”
Read our interview with Davis for more on what inspired him to run and what he hopes to accomplish. We’ll go deeper on his mobility platform on Thursday. The Urbanist was part of a coalition of transportation groups that hosted a “Mobility Forum” series. After rescheduling the initial date, ultimately, we had to cancel the D4 mobility forum due to a lack of interest from other candidates. Our lunch and learn with Davis will help replace that event.
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.