Alexis Mercedes Rinck resoundingly won election to the Seattle City Council with 58% of the vote last November. Already in her first four months in office, she’s proven herself, and we want to see more. We endorsed Rinck last year, and we took the rare step (for us) of endorsing early this year to underscore the value of her leadership on Council and our alignment in both values and approach.
Rinck is clearly an urbanist. She bikes and rides transit to get around Seattle. She knows our biggest issues — housing, transportation, and safe streets — both at first-hand visceral level and an academic level. She doesn’t even own a car. And perhaps most notably, considering the challenges that lie ahead for our city, her questionnaire responses pledged work ahead to fight for housing abundance, safe streets, and high quality green spaces and public third places.
In fact, Rinck said her top priority for the next four years would be “reinvigorating our housing development pipeline to accelerate the creation of desperately needed housing.” This is a housing abundance candidate. She is a strong backer of social housing and, unlike most of her colleagues, endorsed Proposition 1A to fund the new Seattle Social Housing Developer, rather than the unsuccessful big-business-backed effort to derail it.
While the centrist wave of councilmembers elected in 2023 needed months to get up speed, delaying council meetings and major legislation, Rinck hit the ground running after winning a one-year term in a special election to fill out the remainder of Teresa Mosqueda’s term. Mosqueda left early after winning a seat on the King County Council.
From her inauguration, Rinck has stressed the need to fight the rise of authoritarianism and Trump’s attacks on civil rights and social investments. She didn’t just do this from behind a desk; Rinck showed up and gave an impassioned speech at the President’s Day protests in Seattle.
Rinck has followed through on pledges to fight back, pushing her colleagues to set up a committee to deal with federal threats and taking leadership of the group. The first panel gave voice to those most at risk from Trump-style fascism: immigrants, Black folks, the queer community — and especially trans people. Much work is ahead, but the first step is to commit to resistance, rather than capitulation and appeasement.
As the strongest voice for police reform on council, Rinck fought for accountability measures to mitigate its potential harm in recent legislation formally expanding permitted uses of crowd control weapons, partnering with Councilmember Cathy Moore. The rest of the council rejected that push and voted to allow blast balls and other dangerous weapons with little in the way of safeguards or civilian oversight.
Her recent vote against the council majority when it comes to removing a prohibition on housing near major truck streets in the stadium district may have raised some eyebrows among urbanists. We see a vote that shows Rinck is in alignment with our values around prioritizing abundant housing, but in areas of the city that have adequate amenities. While the proposal’s sponsor, Council President Sara Nelson, glossed over real issues with pedestrian safety in SoDo that would need solutions before it could truly be a welcoming neighborhood, Rinck clearly scrutinized the proposal on a deeper level.
We’re excited for what four more years of Rinck on Council could bring. She gets our issues. We see in her the moxie to fight, the savvy to collaborate, and the backbone to stand up to the powerful people getting in the way of progress. Vote Rinck.
Note on our process: The Urbanist Election Committee modified our rules to stipulate that incumbents running for reelection can seek an early endorsement. Our policy is to not consider early endorsements in other circumstances. Our normal endorsement process involves questionnaires in May, candidate interviews in June, and the publication of our Primary Endorsements in July. So non-incumbent candidates watch out for our questionnaire in May and return them to ensure your eligibility. We hope to talk with you soon!
The Urbanist Elections Committee consists of Angela Compton, Kacie Masten, Ryan Packer, Maya Ramakrishnan, Hannah Sabio-Howell, Jazmine Smith, Doug Trumm, and Kelsey Vanhee at time of post.
Elections Committee
The Urbanist was founded in 2014 to examine and influence urban policies. We believe cities provide unique opportunities for addressing many of the most challenging social, environmental, and economic problems. We serve as a resource for promoting urbanism, increasing political participation, and improving the places we live. The Elections Committee consists of community volunteers and staff members of The Urbanist and is a standing body representing the political values of our organization.