-Hello.
My name is Margaret Elisabeth,
and I'm running for Seattle City Council in District 2.
I first visited Seattle during June of 1999,
and fell in love with the city.
I vividly remember sitting in a coffee shop in Kirkland,
and looking south towards Mount Rainier,
the sky an impossible blue where you can see for miles,
and Mount Rainier took my breath away.
I moved to Seattle in 2012,
into the Belltown neighborhood,
where I lived for five years.
In 2017, I moved to Rainier Beach,
where I've lived ever since.
South Seattle is a wonderfully rich and vibrant neighborhood,
and I'm happy to call it "home."
We have a lot of serious issues
facing us as citizens of Seattle,
and I'd like to mention three things we need
to directly address -- universal, citywide,
single-payer health care, the right to shelter,
and a real living wage.
Health care is a right,
and we need to enact legislation to make this right a reality.
Following the models of Healthy San Francisco
and NYC's Health and Hospitals,
the City of Seattle should establish a universal
health care access program to ensure all residents receive
free at point of service health care
without relying on employer-sponsored plans
or private insurance.
The City of Seattle should establish rent control
and renters' rights.
End exclusive single-family zoning,
ban new Airbnb developments,
establish high-density mixed-income housing
near transit centers,
and the city should expand cooperative housing,
expand social housing, and make it easier
to enter and sustain home ownership
for Seattle residents.
The city of Seattle should adopt a $25 an hour true living wage,
which is automatically adjusted
based on the cost of health care,
housing, food, transportation, and inflation.
I'm running for Seattle City Council in District 2
because I believe that we have a chance at an evergreen future
if we take bold action now.
Nobody else is going to help us.
We're all we've got.