By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
Seattle City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth recently sat down with the Seattle Medium to reflect on her first year in office and share her insight on her goals, aspirations, and priorities for the year ahead. As she enters her second year, Hollingsworth, who represents council district 3, remains focused on the foundational issues that matter most to Seattle residents—affordable housing, public safety, economic mobility, and access to essential city services.
Hollingsworth recalled the extensive work it took for her and her staff to understand how to effectively navigate city and county services—a process that highlighted just how complicated the system can be.
“Navigating city and county services can be a maze. Trust me, it took us over a year just to map out where folks can actually get help,” she said. “That’s why we created this newsletter: your one-stop guide to the departments, resources, and people who can actually get things done.”
That experience led to one of Hollingsworth’s top priorities: making city services more accessible and easier for residents to navigate. In her view, local government should work for the people, not against them.
“We’ve put together helpful guides and resources to better navigate city departments,” she said. “You’ve been hunting for weeks—wondering who to contact at Parks or how to get SDOT to fill that pothole.”
According to Hollingworth, her first year in office was about reconnecting with constituents and being a visible presence in neighborhoods across her district.
“The first year was a lot of listening and just reconnecting people to City Hall,” she said. “I felt like I tried to give the district a big hug, just like some love. Just be like, hey, here’s some love, here’s a hug. I just wanted to be present with people in the neighborhoods and community and folks, so that was big.”
Now, as her second year gets underway, she’s turning toward long-term planning while still addressing daily constituent concerns.
“Year 2, that was just making sure things were functional for people,” she said. “It could be addressing constituent stuff from a crosswalk to a broken streetlight to the cleanliness of a park, for someone to figure out some permitting process, the basic stuff.”
She’s also diving into Seattle’s 20-year Comprehensive Plan, which she says will play a defining role in shaping the city’s identity for generations to come.
“I decided to take on the comprehensive plan for the planning of our city for the next 20 years. That’s kind of what I’m super focused on. We’re still doing constituent stuff, but it is about more of the planning piece for the city and the identity of who we want to be for the next 20 years.”
Public safety, affordability, family resources, and support for small businesses continue to dominate conversations with residents, she said.
“It’s always public safety, right? Like that’s kind of your underlying thing. But it is also making Seattle a place for families again, where they can afford to stay here and live here, to make sure that they have all the resources they need through the park system, the community centers as well,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s also to support small businesses and that economic mobility piece, which I think we have just not been such a good place for small businesses.”
She believes Seattle has all the components to become more functional but needs to improve how it delivers on them.
“We have all the pieces, but I think just functionally we could be a lot better as a city. Those are kind of like the main priority pieces that I have, for the district.”
When it comes to housing, Hollingsworth said the term “affordable housing” has taken on a narrow, policy-driven meaning—one that sometimes overlooks the broader spectrum of residents who need help.
“I think here’s the deal, I don’t want to say disconnect, but I think here’s where we have kind of lost a little sight on stuff. I think the words ‘affordable housing’ has become such a policy term in terms of who are the affordable housing providers, and what does that look like,” she said. “I remember when the whole city was an affordable housing piece. And so, I’m trying to pull away from the policy piece… I think we’ve really missed the boat.”
Hollingsworth wants to reframe the conversation to include alternative models of affordability. She pointed to homeowners converting garages into units, adding accessory dwelling units, and creating duplexes and triplexes as examples of grassroots affordability already taking shape.
“The folks that are literally trying to age in place. The people that are small landlords who are renting out a basement. I walk in the neighborhood every day. I usually walk to and from work,” she said. “I see more people converting their garages into a unit, their backyards into an ADU, converting their home into a duplex or a triplex. Literally all in the district.”
She believes these organic housing solutions offer a practical path forward.
“I think that is also an affordable housing option for Seattle, where we can densify neighborhoods and make it this affordable housing piece cause you’re building more abundantly,” she said. “It’s less on a policy focus and more on implementation. Anyways, I just would like us to think of affordable housing in more of a broader term and not just by the certain big providers.”
Reflecting on her accomplishments, Hollingsworth said she’s most proud of being a responsive, hands-on councilmember and championing participatory budget funding with an equity lens.
“If you are looking at it from a perspective of someone who’s present, who’s been accessible, available, meeting with people, connecting them to the proper resource to have them, figuring out how to make their life a little better, six government touch points that people come most in contact with are streets, the Park Department, Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle Police, Seattle Fire, and then also Seattle City Light,” she said.
She pointed to participatory budgeting as one initiative with transformative potential.
“The one thing that I’m really most proud about was the participatory budget funding that we were able to kind of re-steer with a Black lens on it. Arts for Black, legacy home ownership, and some other programs that I think came out of the George Floyd experience and all those things,” she said. “And just really try to steer it—I don’t want to say steer it back to Black people—but kind of just make sure that it has the intended outcomes that it should.”
Still, Hollingsworth acknowledged the challenges of making progress within a slow-moving government structure.
“The most challenging piece, honestly, is the rate in which government moves,” she said. “Government has been slow since the beginning of time. And, government should be, right? Like when you’re changing people’s lives, like it should be slow.”
Yet, she’s also pushing for urgency, arguing that today’s world demands it.
“We need to be intentional, you’re impacting and changing people’s lives, but the issue is we have become so convenient in the world. You can order anything on Amazon, Uber Eats, just convenient,” she said. “The government must shift into having more of a sense of urgency about things and to me that’s the most important piece. I’m not going to resolve to be well that’s just the way it is, we’re just slow like that. No, we got to have more of a sense of urgency to certain things with government.”
