Ballots are mailed out Wednesday for the August 1st primary and it’s a critical election for Seattle’s future. Even though elections are probably far from your mind – only about 30-35% of you will take time to vote in an ‘off-year’ primary – Seattle is in a hotly contested race for Mayor and our remaining two ‘at large’ or citywide council races.

We’ve either interviewed or closely reviewed where candidates stand, especially front-runners, across the critical issues affecting our neighborhoods, and on racial and economic justice issues, housing and land use, homelessness, police accountability and ensuring equity and fairness for all in our city. Here are our endorsements.

(Following this column, we’ve posted Neil Power’s interview with Oliver and reprinted our earlier interview with Hasegewa.)

The Race for Mayor: Nikkita Oliver or Bob Hasegawa

Among the six frontrunners, only Bob Hasegawa and Nikkita Oliver measured up. Both were seriously willing to call for reassessment of the so-called Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA) upzones. Both backed increasing the developer’s mandatory affordable housing set-aside to 25% of new units rather than the current paltry 2-11%. They gave unqualified support for requiring developers to pay impact fees for a portion of the infrastructure demanded by their projects. And they would require developers to replace at comparable price any existing low-cost housing they remove.

Both Hasegawa and Oliver favored decisions derived from the bottom up over technocratic and elitist solutions. Both called for a re-establishment of the District Neighborhood Council system and pledged to make sure it was more broadly representative and racially diverse, not arrogantly eliminated. Both supported new measures to preserve tree canopy, and older historic and culturally significant buildings and places like Chinatown/International District and Little Saigon now in the wrecking ball’s crosshairs.

Both were critical of the Mayor’s insensitive sweeping of homeless encampments and understood the connection between the continuing loss of existing low-income housing to redevelopment and the rise of homelessness in our city. Both questioned the propriety of spending $200 million dollars for a new youth jail and called for a closer look at alternatives to incarceration. Both understood the treatment-first model and the importance of diversion programs over jail.

The other frontrunners, Jenny Durkan, Cary Moon, Mike McGinn, and Jessyn Farrell, all unreservedly support the HALA upzones. All are “supply siders” who believe that by adding to the supply of expensive housing, somehow affordable units will “trickle down” to the poor. As Joe Hill, the great labor organizer, said, “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die.”

None of these four candidates expressed any great concern about the continuing loss of existing low-cost housing to demolition. In their minds, displacement and gentrification are addressed by spending more tax dollars on low-income units while pressing the accelerator on more market-rate development.