I just have one question: Is the guy in the tie-dye shirt a plant?

I am standing in front of the Anthem, a new workforce housing development at Yesler Terrace, with city council member Kshama Sawant, and a guy in a tie-dyed T-shirt is shouting at her from a car stopped at the light on 12th.

“Kshama!” he says. “Do you want some money?”

He’s in a boxy black car with one of those bumper stickers that says, “EARTH."

Sawant hesitates and offers a polite smile. He asks again.

“Are you not Kshama?”

“No, I am.”

He hands a $20 bill out the window.

“For the campaign!” he says. The light turns green and he’s gone.

At other points during the nearly three hours I spend with Sawant, two other passersby shout her name, and one guy we pass on the sidewalk just says, “I’m voting for you again!” as he walks by. (Sawant turns back and introduces herself; his name is Russell.)

Her campaign could not have orchestrated this better. I get it, truthers. "Maybe they did!" But Sawant acts genuinely surprised—and a little uncomfortable—every time this happens, so I go with it.

In the race for the newly created city council District 3, Sawant is a frontrunner for obvious reasons: She’s an incumbent, she has money, and her supporters are deeply devoted to her brand of change. But it’s also because her campaign is focused on the city’s single most urgent issue: housing affordability.

That’s why she wants to meet at the Lyric, a Capitol Hill building where 475-square-foot studios start at $1,789 a month. And it’s why we walk from there to the Anthem, a development that replaced some low-income public housing at Yesler Terrace with more expensive privately developed units.

The lack of affordable housing for both low- and middle-income Seattlites is a problem facing the whole city, but especially the rapidly changing Central District and Capitol Hill, which make up District 3.

Compared to citywide averages, more people in District 3 rent instead of own and take the bus or walk to work instead of drive. Capitol Hill has seen steep rent increases, and the Central District has seen significant gentrification and development of new housing. Capitol Hill, historically the city’s most gay-friendly neighborhood, is also facing a rise in hate crimes against LGBTQ people.

As Sawant and I wind through Cal Anderson Park on our walk toward the Anthem, she is reading from a printout of this excellent 2013 Charles Mudede story about Yesler Terrace. In it, Charles recounts taking a writer from New York to “Seattle’s oldest housing project” in 1994.

“Because I had spent some years of my childhood in Washington, DC,” Charles wrote, and Sawant is reading to me, “I knew what he was expecting to see when, shortly after dusk, I took him down to the 206's ghetto: broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs, junkies with baseball bats, dealers occupying every available shadow, abandoned buildings, crumbling buildings, and dark buildings. What Wood saw instead were unremarkable two-story town houses with no graffiti on their walls, fenced backyards, gardens in those yards, and even flowers in some of those gardens.”

It’s that kind of housing—city-owned, well-maintained, affordable for the lowest income bracket—that Sawant wants the city to get back in the business of providing. (The Anthem opened last month, two years after Charles's story. The building is one part of Yesler Terrace's controversial redevelopment, which came after concerns about poor conditions there.)

When we arrive at the Anthem, Sawant slips a different article out of her white binder. This one is from Crosscut. It explains the rents in this building: They’re capped at $1,523 a month for a one-bedroom—not exactly affordable. That’s because the development is so-called “workforce housing.” That means it’s not targeted at the extremely low-income, but at the middle class. The story goes on to explain that it pencils out for private developers to build this kind of housing, even if they’re not charging full market rate. That’s not the case with truly low-income housing, which the city also needs.

Sawant reads a Murray quote aloud:

“The challenge with the private model,” Murray says about low-income housing, “is how do you finance it?”

“That’s exactly what I say as a socialist!” she says.

Sawant wants to use the city’s bonding authority—and potentially new taxes on the wealthy—to build “thousands of units” of city-owned housing.

While her signature issue in this campaign is rent control*, this concept of city-owned low-income housing has broader support. Even the staunchest developer advocates can get on board. Developer lobbyist Roger Valdez told me Friday he sees “broad consensus” around the idea. (This makes sense; it doesn’t require developers to pay.) In addition, Sawant supports ideas Valdez types will fight, like making developers pay linkage fees to fund affordable housing and transportation impact fees to pay for road improvements around new development. Those are all ideas that often get lost when Sawant’s platform is reduced to just rent control.

Still, her campaign isn’t circulating posters that say, “Use the city’s bonding authority to pay for city-owned affordable housing!” or “Pass the maximum linkage fee!” Her campaign's posters say, “We need rent control!”

Much like “$15 Now,” rent control is a strategic rallying cry. It taps into the frustration voters feel about rising rents. It’s a complex policy but a simple demand. (And, for better or worse, people think they know what it means, which can’t always be said for other housing policies. At a recent District 3 forum, when candidates were asked a question about linkage fees, people in the audience wondered aloud, “What are linkage fees?”)

Rent control is also the kind of massive undertaking that can seem impossible to everyone except Sawant and her supporters.

As her colleague Mike O’Brien has said, explaining the Sawant effect to the Nation: “All these things we were comfortable saying, ‘Well, you can’t change, these things are just too hard to change,’ now you’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to go back and reevaluate all that stuff.’”

I meet Pamela Banks, Sawant’s biggest threat this election season, at a cozy cafe in the Central District. G.R.E.A.N. House Cafe is the project of Clean Greens, a nonprofit that runs a farm in Duvall and then sells produce at farm stands and through a CSA.

The Central District and parts of Southeast Seattle, the owner tells me, have been hemorrhaging black-owned restaurants in recent years. The loss of Catfish Corner and the Kingfish Cafe, among others, inspired her to open this place. Banks says she often comes here for breakfast meetings. She was really hoping I could try the peach cobbler, but they’re out.

“It’s important as a way to stave off gentrification that we support our small businesses,” Banks says.

Early in the campaign, it appeared Banks’s strongest critique of Sawant was that she’s not accessible enough.

Since then, she’s staked out some actual policy positions that set her in opposition to Sawant. Banks supports increasing renter protections and has expressed some support for using city money to build affordable housing, but she opposes linkage fees and rent control.

While Sawant calls for progressive taxation to pay for increased city services, Banks said at a recent forum she doesn’t support a city income tax. Sawant has been loudly opposed to Shell’s stop at the Port of Seattle on its way to drill in the Arctic. Banks says she is “torn.”

“That’s where you balance this ‘No’ to—how many jobs is that?” she asks. “They’re not just jobs, they’re union jobs… I do worry about oil spills… So it’s like how do you weigh that? We are a port city and that’s a big deal.”

(Sydney has written a bit about the jobs vs. environment debate.)

Banks has received campaign contributions from real-estate developers, the anti-$15 Washington Restaurant Association, and the police union. That last one has Sawant supports especially hot and bothered.

When questioned at a recent candidate forum about how she’d hold the police department accountable considering the police union's donation, Banks snapped back, “If you think $700 can prevent me from holding police accountable to my community, you’ve got another thing coming, sister, because it’s not that way."

She went on to tell the questioner, "I raised a black young man in this community with the police. I have great working relationships with some police and then there are some that don’t need to be in there.”

Banks comes from a background of work she says makes her uniquely in tune with the needs of this newly created district. She spent 30 years working for the city, including time in the Department of Neighborhoods. She is credited with helping to turn around the Urban League, of which she is president. Among the group’s projects: Career Bridge, a collaboration with the city that connects men of color with job training and services.

She rejects the idea that she was “handpicked” by the mayor, who’s often at odds with Sawant. Banks says she’s only met Murray a few times.

“I thought it was funny, too, that people were painting me as if I’m some downtowner,” she says. “When you look at my resume you can see I spent half my career working in Central and Southeast Seattle.”

Banks often comes back to job creation as an answer. On transportation and transit, for example, she says, “We are not Portland. We are not flat, we have water, we are landlocked, and we have hills. And we need to say that. We’re not Amsterdam.” Hearing complaints about traffic and poor transit, Banks says, “makes me want to figure out how to create jobs closer to people’s homes, where they live, because that would reduce congestion.”

Even as she's making her policy positions more clear, Banks isn’t moving away from the argument that Sawant is divisive.

She says she wants more cooperative conversations with developers and landlords about the city’s affordability problems instead of what she describes as “my way or the highway or we’re going to jack you up.”

“It takes all of us,” Banks says.

If money and endorsements are our primary indicators of which candidates to take seriously, this race is about Kshama Sawant and Pamela Banks. (Sawant has raised about $146,600, Banks about $101,200.)

In third is Rod Hearne, vice chair of the group Equal Rights Washington, who has raised $60,300. But his political savvy doesn’t seem to match that cash. Where Banks has revealed her substantive policy differences, Hearne continues to base his campaign largely on his ability to bring people together. That’s a common line of attack against Sawant, but I’m not sure it’s enough to propel Hearne past Banks and through the primary.

When asked about the affordable housing crisis, Hearne has said he’d like to encourage more mother-in-law apartments and support “community-based organizations” like Capitol Hill Housing. Like Banks, he's against rent control and waffles on linkage fees.

Over Molly Moon’s ice cream on a bench in Cal Anderson Park, he explains how, as a gay kid in junior high on Mercer Island, “the school was literally an unsafe place for me,” and getting involved in choir gave him “something to live for.” Because of that, expanding arts programs for kids has become a core promise of his campaign.

Just recently, he says, a group of “dudebros” called him a “fucking queer” on Capitol Hill. Yet, when I ask him what we can do to help address the rash of hate crimes in the district, his answers are vague.

“I think we’ve got a lot of newcomers who haven’t had a chance to figure out what community they belong to," he says. Hearne says we should "provide more neighborhood cultural opportunities so that people coming in have the opportunity to integrate better… We’re doing something wrong as a community by not providing some sort of… normative venue for adopting the values and the culture of the area.”

The longest-shot candidate in this race is Lee Carter, a former broadcaster and neighborhood advocate. Carter wouldn’t pitch me a “District Date” idea for this series because, “Although my name will appear on the ballot, I’m not competing for votes or endorsements.”

Okay?

Then there’s Morgan Beach. Up against powerhouses like Sawant and Banks, it's safe to say Beach and her $12,600 in campaign cash have no chance. But she’s still worth paying attention to.

She’s a young, energetic candidate. Like Sawant’s other challengers, she’s criticized the incumbent for being divisive and too focused on a “socialist revolution.”

Beyond that, though, she’s using her campaign to focus on an issue few other candidates are talking about: gender pay equity. As I've written before, Beach is lapping wage-gap-focused incumbent Jean Godden on specific ideas to address this problem. And it’s having an effect. Take, for example, Sawant’s opening statement at a recent candidate forum, which included this: “I am advocating for at least 12 weeks of paid parental leave for all of Seattle’s working people.”

Sawant supported the city’s ordinance to offer city employees four weeks of paid parental leave, but now she says she’s calling for 12 weeks for all employees—including the private sector. Sawant’s campaign says she’s been supportive of this all along, but it’s not something she’s been advocating for as stridently as her other issues. (She did fight the tip credit in the new minimum wage law based on a gender equity argument.)

So, even if Sawant really has supported 12 weeks paid parental leave all along, it’s hard to imagine Beach’s hammering on the issue didn’t contribute to Sawant pushing it to the forefront of her platform.

In these elections, candidates are sometimes asked how long they’ve lived in their district as a litmus test for how connected they are to their constituents. Beach is fine with admitting she hasn’t actually lived here that long. She moved to Seattle from her hometown of Colorado Springs three years ago because she was looking for a progressive city to match her values. In other words, she’s just like a lot of people in the district.

“This is a young city and there are no young people in government,” Beach, 29, tells me over cocktails at Oddfellows. (She picked this spot because it’s where she stood last year alongside US senator Patty Murray and Oddfellows owner Linda Derschang to talk about the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling and a Murray bill crafted in response.)

Beach is just the kind of candidate who wouldn’t have run in the citywide system (she says so herself), but can in the districted system. Even if that new system can't help her unseat a popular incumbent, it's giving her ideas a platform.

*This post is not a debate of the merits of rent control. Other people are already doing that.