February 10-16, 2016 | VOLUME 41 | NUMBER 6
PAGE 14
Your
’Hood’s Gonna
Be OK
Kathy Nyland still thinks we can talk this all out. BY DANIEL PERSON
T
wo items stuck out for me when I visited Kathy Nyland’s fifth-story corner office at City Hall. One, on a shelf devoted mostly to nameless binders and reports, was Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath (“That’s my story!”) The other was a sticker on her door that read #HALAyes (“I didn’t put that there!”) As Seattle’s so-called “neighborhood czar,” Nyland is tasked with helping all those would-be Davids in Seattle go up against the Philistines of Fourth Avenue—as she once did as a neighborhood activist in Georgetown. And yet as a member of the Murray administration (official title: Director of the Department of Neighborhoods), she sometimes can be cast in with all the other city leaders whose plans for growth—among them, yes, the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda (HALA)—stick in the craw of many self-appointed “neighborhood preservationists.” With residents in Magnolia and Ballard claiming anew that their neighborhoods are under attack, and Saturday being Seattle Neighbor Appreciation Day, Nyland chatted with Seattle Weekly about the power of dialogue and why she hates the term “NIMBY.”
CLIMATE ACTIVISM
SPROUTING RESISTANCE
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How activist kids are changing the debate over climate change.
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COURTESY CITY OF SEATTLE
BARRY BLANKENSHIP
BY SARA BERNARD
It’s a Friday night at the Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford, and Joey and Grace, ages 9 and 11—tiny, wiry, and ebony-haired—are tumbling over each other to tell me what they know about climate change.Their introduction to the concept is pretty difficult to pinpoint, though, since it’s always been there, “like all those other facts,” says Grace. “It’s just, like, a regular thing,” adds Joey.