Schraer looks to have conversation with city during Council race


 David Schraer is the sole challenger to one-term incumbent Tim Burgess for Seattle City Council Position No. 7.

A true underdog, Schraer, an architect and 24-year Seattleite, he has spurned funding against an opponent with almost a quarter million dollars in funding and has said he is more interested in having a good conversation than running a traditional campaign. Expecting to lose, he is hoping for name recognition and is already planning a second council run in 2013. Johnathon Fitzpatrick spoke to Schraer for

What do you hope to accomplish besides just “having a good conversation” with your opponent?

Well, I hope to get a lot of votes. What happens in the election happens in the election. I will run twice, I’ve told everybody that. I wanted to have the four and a half months to make my case and to get elected or to be ready to get elected in two years. That’s the idea. I plan to be a one-term politician. Not picking to be a long-term politician I think makes it much easier for me to be frank. I’ve endorsed (Burgess, my opponent) and I haven’t taken it back, but politics changes.

There isn’t going to be an enormous gulf between Tim and I on most issues, but I think that there will be significant differences that will develop as the campaign goes on. I’m not as familiar with his issues as I would like to be. I’d rather wait to have issues come out than try to pre-identify which issues are going to be the issues. Right now I’m not going to go there. I’m going to be much more direct about what I want to do to change things at City Hall than most have been in the past.

What do you think makes you the better candidate?

I have a familiarity with the ‘built environment’ that no current councilperson has, meaning decades of looking at how people live and work in the city in terms of the physical infrastructure. I’m not a transportation planner, but I have a broad view of how the city works in that way and I think that in this time of rapid change it’s really needed.

What I feel like my role on the council would be to try to uncover some of the great things we could do that would both save money and would make the city far better. We need to refocus our energies on what’s in the city’s long-term strategic interest and then re-program our efforts to get there over a period of time but just making things incrementally better as we go along.

As a council member, where would your focus be?

The lens I’m going to be putting most things through is ‘what’s the long-term strategic interest of the city?’ A failure of the council and the mayor, not just here but mayors and governments everywhere, is that they decimated the building department. I’ve experienced this personally, where people at the desk can’t answer your questions anymore because the people who could answer the questions are gone. Of course then they closed the desk, which doesn’t help anything either.

A lot of people who had projects that were ready to go in every way except having a permit didn’t get helped getting that permit done before the opportunity to start the project for over the winter elapsed. That’s one area that I know about where the City actually impeded hiring, which is not the business the City should be in during a recession.

Where do you stand on the tunnel?

I’m pro-tunnel because I’m inherently predisposed to really good, high-quality infrastructure projects, as opposed to those lower-quality, shorter shelf-life projects that we have like building floating bridges. I know that tunnels are, in general, not a bad thing. They’re expensive, but they last a long time. You typically don’t see tunnels being…you see them sometimes repurposed, but when was the last time somebody said ‘oh, we’re gonna tear down a tunnel’?

There’s been a tremendous number of people in Seattle that have been working a very long to figure out how we can get a great waterfront. That’s a really important aspect of the future of the city, not just for tourism dollars, and park/people friendly spaces, which is very important, but because it will make the city indirectly important because they make the city much more livable, and therefore we’re more apt to attract more density downtown. If you look at any large city, Amsterdam, New York, any city that say Mike McGinn might admire, it’s gonna be riddled with tunnels. The reason is that in order to have these kinds of density you actually have to bypass things sometimes.

They want to spend a lot of money on I-5. People who have my background in architecture and planning don’t believe in open highways in the middle of cities that basically separate cities by a block. We believe that rapid automobile transportation should not be visible, should not tear the framework of the city apart.

How do you feel about Mayor Mike McGinn?

He and I are really after the same outcomes and environmental perspective, but I thought the way he ran his campaign was taking from the right-wing in terms of tactics, and I didn’t appreciate that. His general response to ‘how will you get what you want from the city?’ was ‘they’ll come around.’ It was an avoidance response. Then he maintained that through the campaign as well, really not answering any questions about how he was going to work with the State or the Council in terms of bringing people around to his way of thinking.

So it became more of a ‘Nickels’ kind of strategy with a different feel but the same strategy of ‘we’re just gonna mow you down or go through you.’ He tried to paint Nickels as not being an environmentalist. He was massaging issues in a way that really doesn’t educate the public or do any good; it’s just to polarize the electorate. I don’t like that.

Where do you take issue with the current City Council?

The focus on the tunnel has distracted the city away from other issues. Once McGinn and (Council Member) O’Brien were elected, I really expected a major shift in policy about transportation, much more radical than we’ve seen, because the remaining council members are not ill-disposed to doing green projects.

There’s a lack of imaginative thinking in terms of where we want the city to be in the distant future. One of the reasons people look at Vancouver and Portland is that they see these guys have a long-term vision and they’re executing it step-by-step. We tend to have a fairly timid short-term vision that we don’t execute very well.

Why do you compare building light rail on the floating bridges to “putting trains on boats”?

The tunnel is supposed to be a wasteful thing, but the tunnel is gonna last 300 years, that would be my guess, or more. When I first came here people were coming from all over the world to look at our floating bridges. To my knowledge, they haven’t been really duplicated in similar situations, very expensive, very long-span projects. I think the reason is because they don’t really have a long shelf-life.

If you look at the Brooklyn Bridge, built in 1872 and still going strong. That’s almost 150 years of use. There’s a lot of bridges like that all over the country. I think that when we do billion-dollar infrastructure projects we should be building for hundreds of years preferably, and not building something that we know is going to go away. Adding light rail to these kinds of bridges, while I can support that in the short-term, I don’t think it’s a good long-term decision.

What would be your approach to handling affordable housing and unemployment issues facing so many Seattle voters right now?

That’s a huge question. It’s not something the city can really solve by itself, it’s a multi-jurisdictional effort, so taking them separately, building the tunnel is the best thing that we can to inject money into the economy.  There’s this incredible recession going on and delaying rather than speeding up that work hurts us all. My joke is that we could build the tunnel by hand. I think we do need to look at how we instinctively reduce labor costs in every situation.

On affordable housing, I think the biggest question is what we can do to help people at the lower-to-no income level. I think we have to merge our low-income housing issue with our homeless issue. I’m not saying I have a solution for this issue, but we really need to figure out what resources we have and then spend them in a way that reaches as many people as possible. 

I believe we have an obligation to be more involved in providing some basic housing that’s available for homeless people who really want a place to sleep and won’t get kicked out every night, and whether this is a ‘tent city’ or a ‘Hooverville’, I’m not sure what form it might take, but homeless populations need to be visible and well-served.

Moms with children should not have to be looking around for housing. We need to solve that problem as soon as possible.  I’m not close to this issue right now, and I know the building changes 10-yr program to end homelessness has made some progress, but it doesn’t seem like that to me visually. I think it’s a huge issue, but I don’t have the solution, and I don’t think anybody does.

Tell us an original idea you have for Seattle.

In north Seattle they really want sidewalks. It’s a really big issue. But we have a lot of streets in north Seattle where they don’t have any sidewalks at all. How about we take some streets and close them off to non-local traffic except for pedestrians, bicycles and transit? These could parallel on each side of arterials where we have a lot of redundancy. We could have a street that was quieter, more pedestrian & bike friendly, and some people would love that.

We would save the cost of having to provide new sidewalks because we could use the existing freedom of wide pavement for a variety of purposes. I’m talking about miles, not blocks, and that will save people a lot of money. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars to put sidewalks everywhere in north Seattle and if we’re really confident that we’re not going to have as many cars and we’re really believing that more people are going to be biking and walking, we can lower the cost of the system by not providing car access everywhere for everybody. I’m thinking bigger picture. I don’t see any downside to having more quiet streets. You get a few more cars on the arterials, but people who cheat now, go through residential districts, that’s the only downside.