Councilmember Dionne Foster Pledges Focus on Housing, Racial Equity, and Combating ICE
Photo courtesy of Seattle City Council Communications.
By Mead Gill
After nearly one month representing the city-wide Position 9, Seattle City Councilmember Dionne Foster discussed her focus on affordable housing for Black families and homeowners, tackling homelessness, and protecting Seattleites from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Now chairing the Seattle City Council Housing, Arts, & Civil Rights committee, Foster joined Council President Joy Hollingsworth and City Attorney Erika Evans as a prominent Black woman in Seattle City leadership. While expressing the emotion and history behind this accomplishment, she recognized the weight of the work ahead.
“We are in this challenging moment as a city and as a country. And so balancing the excitement of being new and getting started with the ongoing horrors and frustration that are happening in our world is definitely something to hold,” she said.
Foster expressed a need to protect homeowners from predatory actions, prioritizing policy changes and city investments to combat the lag in area median income (AMI) for Black families. She said her focus is to direct funding to housing designed for Black families at or below 50% of AMI, also calling for more city investments in Black-led organizations in the economic development sector.
“What are our opportunities there to make sure we're protecting and minimizing displacement for people who have bought their homes and are trying to stay in them?” she said.
Connecting the housing crisis to cultural displacement in neighborhoods like the Central District, Foster broke her thought process in two.
“People create culture, and institutions also create culture,” she said. On institutions, she expressed hopes to use the city’s purchasing power toward cultural investment and placemaking, pointing to the city’s long-term partnership with Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute as a prime example.
Since her campaign for Position 9 last year, Foster has publicly condemned the previous administration’s encampment sweeps, acknowledging that the current administration has yet to move away from this strategy. Foster explained that part of the city’s budget is currently required to fund the Unified Care Team, restricting the administration from shifting strategies in addressing homeless encampments in public spaces at this time.
Foster backed Mayor Katie Wilson’s recent executive order that is set to rapidly increase shelter creation. While the order prioritizes getting people inside above all else, the councilmember built off this sentiment with a need for wraparound services to make substantial long-term progress.
“I'm a big believer that we actually need that full spectrum of options for people. What's really, really hard is to treat people when they don't have one consistent place,” she said, later quoting Chief Amy Barden of the Seattle CARE Department. “People aren’t service resistant, services are people resistant,” she said.
As tensions around ICE continue to grow, Foster assured that protecting Seattleites from ICE has and will remain a top priority for her. She confirmed the city is “not leaving a single stone unturned” on what local authority can do to protect residents from ICE.
“What is happening right now is indefensible. It is disgusting. It is illegal,” she said, hours after Seattle city council chair Bob Kettle called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt operations nationwide earlier this week.
Acknowledging both the fulfillment and difficulty of her first weeks in office, Foster left the conversation with a few words as to why Seattleites can trust her.
“My career has been about people. It's been about racial equity. It has been about moving progress forward on things that…I now represent [and] care deeply about. And that will never change,” she said.
