Hey, welcome to this new thing we’re doing! We’re calling it “District Date.” I know that name is a little girl-reporter-ish, but we can’t think of anything better to call it, and, to be honest, talking about city politics is something I wish happened on more of the actual dates I go on. Maybe I need to add that to my Tinder profile? 

Anyway, last time Seattleites voted for their city council members, the candidates were all running to represent the whole damn city. Now we have districts, and all nine seats on the council are up at once. The idea of these "District Dates" is to get to know those newly created districts, and the candidates who want to represent them, by sending me to hang out with those candidates in their natural environments.

So we’ll be rolling out these stories—one for each district and one for each of the two citywide seats—between now and the August 4 primary. Let’s get to it!

DISTRICT 6
Green Lake to Golden Gardens, including Ballard, Fremont, and Phinney Ridge

It was the late 1890s, and things were going to hell in Ballard. Sure, the economy was good, but new residents were flooding the little city so quickly that the population more than tripled in seven years, which meant life was changing fast. When town leaders passed a law restricting where cattle could graze, Ballard residents split. The old guard argued for the way things had always been; others urged the place to become more urban, complaining about cows in their front yards and "herdboys" using "all kinds of profane and obscene language in the presence of women."

Over a hundred years later, I’m in Ballard riding bikes with city council member Mike O’Brien and talking about how much this area is changing all over again.

When he was 26, O'Brien tells me as we pedal, he and his wife bought their three-bedroom house in Fremont while he was working as a bookkeeper at a construction company.

“Today, bookkeepers at construction companies are not buying houses,” O'Brien says.

Just like Ballard back in the day, Ballard today—and all of Seattle, for that matter—is changing at a pace that is freaking people out. The city is becoming less affordable. The development never stops (and Jesus, a lot of it's ugly). You know the story.

The 89,000 people who now live in District 6 are slightly wealthier, whiter, and more likely to own a home than the city’s overall population, according to Nielsen data compiled by the Seattle Times. (Stranger food writer Angela Garbes, who's riding with O'Brien and me, says she spotted just four people of color during our nearly two hours of District 6 wandering.) And they're well aware that they're one of the city's epicenters for off-the-charts growth. O’Brien says he’s talked with Angela Stowell, the prolific restaurateur, who, along with her husband, Ethan, plans to open three new restaurants this year—who, in other words, is making money off all this growth—and even she thinks growth and change in District 6 are happening too fast.

Mike O’Brien and I are riding bikes because that’s what Mike O’Brien does. He’s the council’s most environmentally focused member, cast from the same mold as former mayor Mike McGinn and responsible for the city’s plastic-bag ban and phone-book opt-out registry.

So, of course, when I asked him to show me and Angela around the newly created District 6, which he’s running to represent, O'Brien told us to bring our bikes.

It's a sunny Saturday afternoon, and we check out his wife’s fermenting business in a little industrial pocket of the neighborhood (they make mostly kraut and kimchi; full disclosure: it's delicious). Angela points out that this area has become Ballard's brewing district, with at least seven breweries opening recently. We cross the Ballard Bridge and, as O'Brien puts it, “try not to get killed.” Then O’Brien pops in Peddler Brewing to check out their new patio and introduce us to co-owner Haley Woods, who made the recent video in which she shows how impossible it is to cross the Ballard Bridge safely as a pedestrian or cyclist. 

The Seattle Department of Transportation is reluctant to spend money on fixes to the Ballard Bridge since they’re likely to replace the whole 97-year-old structure at some point in the future, O’Brien says, so he’s trying to figure out how much widening the sidewalk would actually cost in hopes of persuading the city to do something sooner than a full bridge replacement. (Much more about this from Seattle Bike Blog here.)

As we pedal, O'Brien points out sawdust-covered developments of condos and townhomes clustered on lots between single-family homes, highlighting a fight he’s in right now with developer lobbyist Roger Valdez and company about whether builders should be limited to three units per lot instead of four. (At this point, we stop to wander around and do something we've done at several points during the afternoon: leave all of our bikes unlocked. What! Mike! My bike is a total piece of shit and I still never, ever do this. I trust no one. Slowly I realize how much better this story will be if a bike gets stolen thanks to O’Brien’s laid-back-cool-guy vibe, and I start to kind of hope for a mishap. I wonder: Is O'Brien trying to send a message here about how safe this neighborhood is? How in District 6, yours definitely won't become one of the three-a-day-ish bikes stolen in Seattle? I'm not sure, but unfortunately for the narrative, the bikes are still there when we return.)

When we ride past a park, O’Brien makes a weird argument before moving on like he hadn't said anything notable at all. It goes like this: People are always encouraging the city to build affordable housing in southeast Seattle where the light rail goes, O’Brien says, but he wants affordable housing and transit in Ballard. This neighborhood already has a bunch of good schools and nice parks, he reasons. “Everybody should live in Ballard!”

As one of the council's bleeding-est hearts, I don't think O'Brien meant this in the way it came off—that the city should starve investment in the poorer southeast because Ballard is better, or something—but this is the kind of district cheerleading this new system tends to encourage. O'Brien's a longtime Fremont resident, but with most of his council record focused on citywide issues, he may be trying to bolster his district cred with statements like this.

When I ask O’Brien’s challenger, Catherine Weatbrook, to show me around, she tells me to meet her at what might be one of the noisiest corners in the district: 15th and Market.

“Yeah, welcome to Ballard,” she says sarcastically as cars and freight trucks whiz by.

My bus is late getting here, which she says she knew would happen. Was it intentional, then? To make me late in order to make some larger point about how we really need to improve transit in this city, especially to District 6? She says it wasn't. I'm suspicious.

Weatbrook points across the street and complains that the “street furniture”—newspaper boxes, a bus-fare pay station, a bus shelter—at the RapidRide stop make the sidewalk feel choked. We walk around the neighborhood, stopping to talk about uneven sidewalks, oppressive-looking developments, why the city keeps planting street trees directly under power lines, and the effort from a community group to turn a portion of a street into a park.

“It seems like the balance between big-picture ideas and paying attention to the small things that confront people every day isn’t where I think it should be,” Weatbrook says of the current city council as she stands outside the Greenfire Campus, a sustainably built apartment/office/retail space. “In my mind, most people—that doesn’t mean 90 percent, [but] more than half—aren’t following the big picture: $15 an hour, Shell Oil, Trans-Pacific Partnership, you name it… They’re like, ‘That same pothole is still there. That curb is still broken.’”

Huh. For the record, according to a University of Washington study, nearly 102,000 people in Seattle make less than $15 an hour, and at least 38,000 of them got a raise on April 1 when the minimum wage increased to $11 an hour. Here’s what will happen to Seattle if we ignore climate change—including by allowing the city to become a gateway for Arctic oil exploration by companies like Shell—and here are some of the local effects of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

I ask O'Brien's other two challengers what they'd pitch for a date in the district, but I do not actually do these things because both challengers are total long shots who filed at the last possible second. Jon Lisbin suggests we ride one of those pub crawl bike trollies (there's also a boat version!?) and Stan Shaufler, who barely exists on the internet, suggests "picking up some food 'to go' from one or two of our dozens of local choices here in the 6th District" and then going to Golden Gardens Park, "where most evenings, you can simply drop in on a campfire with people you have never met." Ummm.

District 6’s biggest issues—growth, affordability, transit—aren’t unique. They’re playing out in every other district, too. Voters’ approval of district elections was a direct response to a feeling of voicelessness amid all the change the city's experiencing, especially those changes that are in the hands of people with deep pockets come campaign season, like developers.

With its independent streak and its physical isolation from the downtown core, Ballard—and the rest of District 6—seem like they have the ingredients for becoming a district that embraces the kind of protectionist thinking Weatbrook and other hyper-local candidates embody.

But today, about two months out from the primary, that doesn't appear to be happening. An EMC research poll from last fall showed that 60 percent of likely voters said they couldn’t rate or had never heard of O’Brien—a higher portion than any of the other council members the poll asked about—yet he’s still out-fundraising Weatbrook more than two-to-one. He's picked up endorsements from district Democrat groups, unions, and the state chapter of the Sierra Club.

For our last stop, O'Brien, Angela, and I get lunch at Drunky's Two Shoe BBQ. He orders a Manny's and a Drunky’s Deluxe (pork loin and pork belly).

The decor is kitschy, the food is mediocre ("nothing more than “'fine,'” Angela confirms), and the gossip is off-the-record.

If this wasn't enough for you, there's a District 6 candidate forum—the first one in this race!—Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Phinney Neighborhood Center.