PubliCola Questions: Ry Armstrong

The LGBTQ Commission member and Sustainable Seattle leader says they represent a "new generation of leadership" for Seattle.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell has been an elected official for 16 of the last 18 years, and is now trying to become the first two-term mayor in Seattle since Greg Nickels was knocked out in the primary in 2009. Several candidates are hoping to keep him from achieving that goal. Ry Armstrong, the co-executive director of Sustainable Seattle as well as an actor and member of the city's LGBTQ Commission, says they represent a "new generation of leadership" for Seattle.

Armstrong grew up in Kenmore and Bothell before going to school at Central Washington University, where they say they were "politicized" by a proposal to establish a fee to fund the arts on campus, equivalent to an existing sports fee, and ran for student body president on a platform supporting the fee.

After moving to New York after school ("I looked around" at the cultural zeitgeist in Ellensburg in 2016 and "said, 'fuck this'"), Armstrong returned to Seattle during the pandemic, deciding to run for City Council in 2023 because "I was living in District 3 and saw that no democratic socialist was running.

This time, they said they saw a mayoral field that didn't feature any young LGBTQ+ candidates. "When I didn’t see anyone stepping up, there were queer folks asking me to run," Armstrong said.

PubliCola spoke with Armstrong earlier this month; this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

PubliCola (ECB): What are some ways in which your political agenda differs from Katie Wilson’s, the progressive frontrunner in the race against Harrell, and what's the case for progressives to vote for you over her?

Ry Armstrong (RA): I think people are really open to change. They feel disconnected from a City Hall that doesn’t necessarily listen. I think Katie’s one of the most brilliant policy wonks I’ve ever met. I think she’s done some amazing organizing. I would love to see where she stands on Israel and Gaza. I’d love to see her come out against sweeps. Because I know Bruce is going to sweep. I really worry about where we’re headed in the city over the next three years and the bloated city government that has become ineffective under his leadership.

ECB: How do you think Harrell has made the city bloated or inefficient?

RA: I served on the LGBTQ Commission for the city, and for the two years I served on that commission, I never was set up on Outlook or Teams, and we’re supposed to have access to those systems. I think Seattle as a city has a fear-of-failure complex, where we don’t move fast enough to address the crises. Instead, we set up a task force to hire a consultant. I look at city unions suing for wage theft. We can’t even run payroll well. [Harrell] says he wants to hire the best talent, then we have Pedro Gomez happen.

I would be having town halls across the city to see how we can respond to the Trump administration. I would like to see a customer service help desk where people can come in and ask, is this [a] county [problem], is this city, is a this state? I’d love to leverage technology to streamline that. There are so many different ways we could have the city function so much better.

ECB: Are there any areas where you think Harrell is doing a decent job?

RA: I would say the only thing I agree with him on is the pedestrianization of Pike Place and this new tax from [Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck’s] office. In terms of failures, I think one of the large items that really angered me was seeing JumpStart be changed from what its intended purposes were. It is not a stable income source for the city. I understand that that there was a deficit and that was the easiest path, but sometimes we can choose a harder path.

And just the way Denny Blaine was handled. I was also at Cal Anderson when the Mayday protest happened. These people were speaking in tongues all day, saying I shouldn’t exist. Sure, free speech, but why Cal Anderson? Why wasn’t there infrastructure built out for counterprotests?

ECB: Give me your critique of the mayor’s handling of social housing so far. What steps would you take to ensure that the launch of social housing is a success?

RA: I think social housing is the coolest tool we have in the toolbox. The voters very clearly wanted it. [A local] capital gains [tax] is going to only raise 30, maybe 40 million dollars. I would love to see an earmarked expansion of taxes going toward social housing. I think it could be the way we get out of this mess. We need to come together with a strategic plan and we need a leader who will sit down and figure out what that’s going to look like.

And the $2 million loan is not enough to get something off the ground that’s going to be substantial. I would love to see using our bonding capacity beyond that $2 million loan to leverage a social housing capital gains tax to support them.

ECB: You recently told the Urbanist you would build 1,000 shelter beds in the first 100 days. How would you go about doing that?

RA: During the pandemic we literally built hospitals overnight. Why can’t we take the 200 tiny homes from SoDo and move them somewhere? I think we have to do it to scale and do it fast enough to meet the moment. I think there are a lot of spaces we can acquire in the city and have it be temporary shelter housing. In the pandemic, when the virus affected everyone, we moved fast enough for that moment.

I want to see real progressive revenue for that. I would be open to expansion of JumpStart, looking at the richest corporations among us. I think we have triple the amount of millionaires than unhoused people—the money is there, we just have to grab it and go. And I want to be the kind of mayor that is down in that space, using a hammer, getting it done—actually building the damn things and not just saying stuff, because talk is cheap.

ECB: Do you agree with other candidates in the race, including Katie Wilson, that we should be hiring more police, and why or why not? Tell me more about your public safety plan.

RA: I don’t know if we need more police. The marketing war against defund—I think progressives lost that war, and I think that’s okay to let that go and move on. The CARE Team [of civilian first responders] is really interesting. There are so many cities that are doing better than us on public safety. There’s so many duplicative systems.

So I think my answer is, let’s put police back on emergency response and put CARE on unarmed response [CARE Department chief] Amy Barden should have more more sway over her department. We’re not meeting the crisis with a human, medical approach. Let’s give the CARE Team an actual shot. Let’s move it from being a pilot program. Twenty-four people citywide is not enough to meet the moment. Throwing money into a bucket with a bunch of holes in it is not going to solve our problems long-term.

ECB: A big reason you don’t see that happen, I think, is that the police union has been successful at getting favorable contracts without new accountability concessions year after year after year.

RA: I think we need someone [as mayor] who’s going to go in and negotiate against the Seattle Police Officers Guild and get that [collective bargaining agreement] negotiated. A [memorandum of understanding] is not as legally binding as I’d like it to be, but I do think we have to have some stronger provisions for transparency. Records requests taking months or years—we don’t actually know what’s going on in the city.

ECB: How would you change the mayor’s "downtown activation plan," and is the city putting too much emphasis on downtown at the expense of other areas?

RA: We’ve been activating downtown for four years but we now have the highest vacancy rate that the city has seen—30, 36 percent. Adding twinkly lights is one thing, but what if we actually had services for people? I look at the pit next to City Hall and I’m like, that could be a great overdose prevention center with microstudios above it. Looking at 12th and Jackson, where they’re pushing everyone to, and the [Chinatown International District]—small businesses are struggling over there as well.

In terms of downtown activation, I think we have lost a little bit of the culture of Seattle. I think we have let the largest tech corporations redefine our city. Obviously, the waterfront overlook is going to be a tourist attraction, but working artists, teachers, health care workers can’t afford to live in the city. I think to solve downtown activation, you have to solve some equality [issues] also.

My top thing I keep harking back to is child care reform. The Working Families Party says that what actually affects young people most is the cost of child care. We have not build new child care centers because a majority of the zoning regulations haven’t been updated since the 1970s, when we had to put them a certain distance away from liquor stores. The scarcity of those centers makes it super burdensome for people to raise kids in the city, so they go outside the city. That’s a huge priority for me.

First-time homebuyers’ grants are so hard to negotiate. When I bought my tiny little condo I had to put $500 down but I had to become more poor to qualify for a first-time homebuyer’s grant through BECU. If we actually want people to live in Seattle, we have to make it easier for people to buy homes.

ECB: If you weren’t in the race, would you vote for Katie Wilson?

RA: Absolutely. I wish we had ranked-choice voting so it could be a Brad Lander-Mamdani moment. I’ve unfortunately seen a lot of hate from people who have enthusiasm for her—people saying I’m just a cisgendered gay LARPing as a trans person.

A lot of people in this city have treated me with a pretty harsh silent treatment just for standing for something different and trying to be [part of] a next generation of leadership in the city—whether that’s people who think Katie is the only person they can support or whether that’s people who are scared of Bruce Harrell, from Democrats to labor to business. If we want to affect change in this city, we have to start listening to a younger generation.

I want to get really crystal clear on her plans and policies and how she plans to win the general [election], because if it’s me or Katie, there’s going to be millions of dollars spent against us.