Union representative and City of Seattle building inspector Jamie Fackler, 52, is running for Seattle City Council District 2.

Fackler is the fourth candidate to throw their hat in the right for the D2 seat after Tammy Morales stepped down last year. In January, council appointed Seattle Police Department crime prevention coordinator and long-time City Council hopeful Mark Solomon, and so far, Eddie Lin, Adonis Ducksworth, and Takayo Minakami Ederer have officially launched their run. The filing deadline is May 9.

When The Stranger sat down with Fackler to hear about his platform, he arrived at our interview on his lime green Kawasaki KLR650 dual-sport motorcycle. He slung his leather jacket over the back of a chair and placed his motorcycle helmet on a shelf.

Fackler would bring a wholly unique perspective to the council if elected. Having spent his career first as a carpenter, then as a general contractor, Fackler learned the trades instead of going to college. He has a high school education.

As he puts it, Fackler is “in the left lane” politically. In a city stuck in an affordable housing crisis, Fackler thinks we should build, build, build. And, as a strong proponent of Seattle’s new Social Housing Developer and Prop 1A which secured a funding mechanism for the developer, Fackler’s got a lot of thoughts on how to do so and how to do so progressively. As for the other issues, well, they’re not as fully baked as the building stuff.

Build, Baby, Build

It’s no secret Seattle hasn’t been building enough housing to accommodate its population. According to an investigation by the Seattle Times, housing construction stagnated after the 2008 financial crisis, and never caught up to the population boom from Amazon. Last year—a year when a record-breaking 16,000 people were sleeping outside—Seattle issued permits for only 6,170 units. And worse, the share of that housing that’s accessible to people who make less than 50 percent of the area median income has been consistently shrinking since 2010.That’s not enough, especially as the aftershocks from the fresh hell Donald Trump has unleashed on the global economy hit Seattleites.

“We need affordable housing across the spectrum,” Fackler said. This is one of the reasons he’s been so disappointed with the mayor’s comprehensive plan—which removed neighborhood centers, drastically narrowed the areas that apartments could be built near transit hubs, and prioritizes townhomes and detached housing over apartments.

Fackler says that he supports the Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSH) that was established when I-135 passed 2023. (Prop 1A, which passed this year, established a progressive tax to fund their work.)  SSH requires new developments to be made with union labor, and Fackler thinks the city should follow suit on other projects—as a net-positive community good. “We've seen a lot of small apartments built in the city with non-union labor and then purchased with city funds in partnership with nonprofits,” Fackler said. “We can do better than that. We can provide union jobs in building this stuff. As a city, we can invest our money in the construction of these projects and remove some of the profit-motive out of there.”

Fackler—who was starting to sound like a hyperlocal Franklin D. Roosevelt—believes that these union jobs could provide the ultimate kind of economic stimulus. “Public sector jobs can be of tremendous benefit to the community because they can provide living-wage, union jobs to people,” Fackler said. “That spreads the money around.” As we stare down the barrel of another recession, Fackler thinks this kind of thinking is imperative for insulating Seattle against economic woe. “We need to be investing in our community by doing big public building projects that will stimulate our local economy and keep people working,” he said.

He’d accomplish this by issuing performance bonds, he says, though the plan would still need “some subsidies,” he said.

On the Other Issues

Fackler’s other main priorities for District 2 is road safety. Like fellow D2 candidate Adonis Ducksworth, he’d like to make Rainier Avenue safer by slowing speeders down and preventing people from driving in the center turn lane. But he was unclear about how he would fix these problems.

Like candidate Eddie Lin, he supports progressive revenue and specifically cited the excess compensation tax, otherwise known as the Jumpstart Tax, as one of the taxes he likes. When asked what other taxes he would support, though—especially in light of Jumpstart’s volatility in uncertain economic times—Fackler did not name any other specific taxes.

Acknowledging the conditions at 12th and Jackson, Fackler called out that the crime and increasing homeless population at the intersection was a result of politicians pushing a problem somewhere else and calling it solved. He likened Harrell’s downtown sweeps—which led to worsening conditions in the International District—to telling a kid to clean their room and the kid pushing all of the clothes under the bed.

“Your room's not clean because the problem is still there,” Fackler said. “That's really frustrating that politicians make these sorts of decisions for political reasons that really don't solve the problem.”

He did not say how he would solve the problem.

On policing, Fackler says he supports negotiating a Seattle Police Officers Guild contract that allows more non-emergency calls to be handled by the CARE team, a team of non-police responders. However, he would only push for it if the police were okay losing that work—which they haven’t been. (As a lifelong union guy, Fackler is sympathetic to police officers and the fact that they cannot strike when bargaining for compensation or workplace protections.)

Fackler, like Lin and Ducksworth, is  primary concern about policing is that police are not recruiting enough new officers. Contrary to that narrative, the Seattle Police Department recruited 84 new officers in 2024, the highest number since 2019.

For the most part, Fackler seems raring to tackle what is truly one of the biggest issues facing the city: affordable housing. He would complement the newly-set-up Social Housing Developer, and I’m curious to see how he could lead in that space while on the council. However, the rest of his policies aren’t well-formed enough yet for us to have a true sense of what kind of council member Fackler would be.