Last month, actor and union representative Ry Armstrong rolled out a campaign challenging Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, who they argue has fallen well short of campaign promises made in 2021. The Urbanist recently sat down with Armstrong to find out what motivated them to run and what they are pushing to accomplish if elected.
“I’m just tired of the status quo,” Armstrong said. “I am tired of broken promises by people who are in the pockets of corporate interests.”
It’s a pattern that goes beyond Harrell, with Armstrong tracing the trail of broken promises back through Seattle’s last three mayors to Ed Murray, suggesting it explains the lack of progress on key issues. A queer trans person themself, Armstrong said members of the queer community asked them to run, since LGBTQ folks are especially at risk with many of the issues facing the city and country.
“My number one issue is housing and homelessness,” Armstrong said. “I remember when I was in college, Ed Murray calling an emergency on homelessness with a 10-year plan. Now it’s been 10 years, and homelessness is up 20% and specifically, I think youth, LGBTQ, homeless is up even more than that.”
Harrell pledged 2,000 additional homes for the homeless in his first year as mayor, piggybacking on Compassion Seattle, a ballot initiative that had strong business support but was struck down as illegal before it could appear on the ballot.
“I think [Harrell] offered 2,000 shelter beds in 2021 and never fulfilled that promise,” Armstrong said, boldly suggesting their administration could succeed where Harrell failed. “I want to do 1,000 shelter beds in the first 100 days.”
A campaign email from Armstrong underscored their shelter pledge and their hit on Harrell: the “current Mayor who promised 2,500 beds in their first term and has delivered 25 in 4 years.”
Armstrong was critical of Harrell’s statements that he would seek to collaborate with Trump and the praise he offered Trump’s tech billionaire inner circle as “smart innovators.”
“I will not compromise with Trump,” Armstrong said. “He does not believe that trans people like me exist. He wants to take us back to a time that never existed, because trans people have always existed in history.”
While Harrell has recently ramped up rhetoric against Trump, Armstrong was unequivocal that collaborating with Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) department was off the table. ICE is tasked with making Trump’s mass deportation promises come true.
“I don’t know what Bruce is gonna do in his actions, but I know what I would do,” Armstrong told The Urbanist. “You would have to put me in jail before I start letting ICE raid our citizens in this city. Like you would have to drag me kicking and screaming off to a concentration camp before I let anything happen to Seattle. I was born and raised here. This is my home. This is my place. So I hope it doesn’t get to that point, but I’m also prepared to fight.”
Armstrong’s 2023 run and resume of work
Armstrong ran for Seattle City Council’s District 3 seat in 2023, but finished seventh in that crowded primary to fill the seat Kshama Sawant vacated with her retirement. They also emphasized housing and homelessness in that race, going to far as to propose conscripting decommissioned naval vessels into service as homeless shelters, as noted in our 2023 interview.
The progressives that did advance in Seattle’s 2023 primary did not do well in the general election, with Tammy Morales the only councilmember to win on a progressive platform. Many observers (myself included) attributed the loss on progressive candidates being badly outspent and losing the messaging battle on key issues.
In response to 2023 losses, Armstrong banded together with other progressive candidates and operatives to found a new political action committee (PAC) called the Progressive People Power PAC. Armstrong served as the group’s board chair, until stepping aside to run for mayor. In 2024, People Power PAC raised $194,000 and spent it on behalf of Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a progressive who won election versus interim centrist councilmember Tanya Woo in a landslide. Rinck was still outspent, but not as badly as most 2023 progressive candidates.
Armstrong has also been working in union organizing and environmental advocacy: “As an elected National Councilor of AEA (AFL-CIO) and an MLK Labor Delegate of SAG-AFTRA, they have championed workers’ rights with integrity and purpose,” Armstrong’s campaign website states. “They not only serve on the Seattle LGBTQ Commission and Co-Chair the Board of Theatre Puget Sound, but they currently lead Sustainable Seattle (S2), one of our oldest environmental nonprofits, as their Co-Executive Director.”
Over the past year, Armstrong campaigned for social housing alongside House Our Neighbors, the nonprofit that engineered the 26-point victory for the Proposition 1A ballot measure in February, which will add more than $50 million in annual funding. In contrast, Mayor Harrell appeared on the campaign mailer for the effort to defeat Prop 1A. Meanwhile, Harrell’s approval rating — once vaunted — has tanked in recent polls.
“I think [Harrell’s] going to fight social housing tooth and nail, because it does not help the chamber, and it does not help the richest among us,” Armstrong said. “I think that social housing is that missing tool in the toolbox. […] If I’m elected mayor, I will represent and support social housing 100% through and through.”
Investing in the arts
Not enough of the Mayor’s Downtown Activation Plan (DAP) has focused on arts and culture, Armstrong argued.
“I co-chair the board of TPS, Theater Puget Sound, which almost went under due to his negligence,” Armstrong said. “So that hits home with me, because I grew up auditioning at TPS. It’s been around since 1997.”
Ultimately, Theater Puget Sound was able to strike a deal, but it took a year of negotiating, Armstrong said, crediting Joy Hollingsworth and Marshall Foster with seeing negotiations through. But the brinksmanship with a key resource for artists was troubling in their eyes.
“TPS is going to survive and be great, but those affordable rehearsal spaces would have gone away,” Armstrong said. “The investments we make are not actually in artists, they’re in consultants or a nonprofit industrial complex that doesn’t actually see that dropdown effect. So we need a bottom-up approach to the arts, and that looks like social housing for the arts.”
For Armstrong, a better program would involve more opportunities for artists and musicians just starting out to get access to public venues, a marketing boost, and earn a living wage doing it. The County’s arts levy will help considerably, they said, but the City can do a lot more.
“Parks has this busking program with terrible marketing,” Armstrong said. “No one actually knows who’s performing where in which parks, and they’re paying these buskers to go play a set for two people. That means, actually, creating performance venues in our parks, like, right now you can’t. If I had a theater company and we wanted to go perform in all the different parks, like Shakespeare in the park, you can’t charge tickets for those, and you can’t do more than six for that one show performances in all parks in Seattle. So, the bureaucratic nature does not create a mechanism for arts to thrive, except for in the institutional spaces of STG, Benaroya, SAM…”
Economic revitalization and good governance
Downtown activation plans should be thinking bigger about pedestrianizing spaces and placemaking, Armstrong argued. They support adding the Center City “Cultural Connector” Streetcar and pedestrianizing Pike Place, and even floated the idea of creating something like New York’s High Line elevated pedestrian path that would ferry pedestrians from the market toward the core of downtown. Seattle voters rejected the idea of creating an elevated park by repurposing the old Alaskan Way Viaduct in 2016, a move The Urbanist agreed with at the time.
“People are walking from maybe Pioneer Square through the waterfront, up the [pedestrian] overpass, right, they get to the market, then they’re just kind of like, let loose into the city,” Armstrong said. “I think we could connect a version of the High Line that then goes up and takes a little to Westlake or like, let’s keep expanding what that experience could look like and make more pedestrianized spaces that people want to be in and experience.”
Echoing Lorena Gonzalez, the former Seattle Council President who lost to Harrell in 2021, Armstrong wants to expand economic revitalization efforts to focus on the entire city, not just downtown, as has been the mayor’s focus.
“Holistically, a big mistake that’s been made is that this huge four-year focus on revitalizing downtown to send us back into the past and pre-pandemic times is neglecting the neighborhoods,” Armstrong said. “Yeah, I think if we actually invested in our neighborhoods again and made more density in those spaces. […] This is a young, vibrant, innovative city, and if we invest in those neighborhoods, maybe people could find pathways to permanent, affordable housing and or even homeownership someday.”
Seattle is likely to keep growing and booming economically, Armstrong said, but the question is whether it will invest in solving its biggest issues.
“The mountain is out right now; this is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and one of the richest cities in human history, and yet we can’t house 16,000 people, and we can’t solve these crises,” Armstrong said. “Why don’t we have the willpower? And I think that comes from a mayor-heavy City Hall, and I want to step up to challenge that.”
While Harrell’s administration had been light on scandals until recently, Armstrong argued a pattern of mismanagement has emerged, pointing to a lawsuit over wage theft from unions representing many of Seattle’s 13,000 public employees. The suit contends the City has botched the rollout of a new payroll system.
“You have seven unions suing the city for payroll issues,” Armstrong said. “Why can’t our city run payroll? I just think it needs a next generation of innovation and leadership that’s going to actually follow through and build out proper systems that support people over corporate interest.”
Despite throwing considerable money at the Seattle Police Department, Armstrong noted Harrell was only able to increase staffing by one net new police officer in 2024, staunching the bleeding from years of losses but just barely. They said they’d like to see the Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department expanded more aggressively than Harrell has managed, and referenced Rep. Shaun Scott’s bill to circumvent the block on expanding CARE that the Seattle Police Officers Guild was able to negotiate into their last contract with the Harrell Administration.
“We need to innovate public safety in a new way — I think investments in community safety officers, which became, eventually, apparently, the CARE team,” Armstrong said. “I want to invest in a medical approach, community approach, I think we will call 911 — I mean Shaun Scott has the bill on that state level this year — but people struggle choose who arrives.”
Can a theater kid take down the football star?
The last two mayors were athletes, with Jenny Durkan a college basketball player and Harrell a star football player at Garfield High School and at the University of Washington. Harrell will clearly be the jock in the race, but Armstrong thinks a theater kid can win.
“I think the arts can be so healing, and I think Seattle just needs some healing,” Armstrong said. “Can I beat him in football? Someone in their 30s, someone in their 60s? I could probably try to take them, but can I throw a spiral? I don’t know about that. I don’t know about that.”
But jock vs theater kid is not the main differentiator in Armstrong’s eyes, even if it makes for a great high school drama.
“I don’t really want to see it as going up against the jock,” Armstrong said. “I mean, I really just see him as a homegrown person who had some success, and I don’t know. I’m not worth $15 to $18 million. I make $80k a year. So I think that just represents a different side of the city. I’d be curious on the campaign trail what we end up aligning on, if anything at all.”
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.
