Bill Bradburd, on the far right, was part of a group that opposed a mall in Rainer Valley Mall in 2009.
  • Kelly O
  • Bill Bradburd, on the far right, was part of a group that opposed a mall in Rainer Valley in 2009.

Everyone's favorite on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand city council member, Sally Clark, has a new challenger for one of the two new at-large positions on the council.

But don't get too excited. It's not some radical ready to unseat Clark and push the council ever leftward. It's (reportedly) this guy: Bill Bradburd, a neighborhood activist who's gotten most of his attention in the last few years as an outspoken opponent of microhousing. (He was even barred from a workgroup about the issue.)

Bradburd has framed his microhousing opposition this way: "The concern is that the people coming will not be part of the community—they are not going to stay. If the units were larger, people could stay longer. But there is no room for anything, not even a bicycle. Where will they go? The bicycles will get chained up around signposts and to trees. The seats will be stolen and then there will be dead bicycles all over the place."

At a PubliCola forum back in 2013, he said: "Seattle unfortunately has kind of studiously avoided really kind of having these conversations about growth management. And I think what happens is a lot of neighbors get pissed off about that and I don't think anyone is saying don't let anyone—close the barn door... Most people understand that we have to grow. The question is just how are we doing it and are we doing it effectively? There's a sense that we're really not managing this growth."

But he was also an active opponent of a big-box mall at the site of Goodwill Industries International in Rainer Valley in 2009, and mostly avoided joining a chorus of NIMBYism back in 2011 when some in the Jackson Park neighborhood fought against a mental health crisis facility being located in the area (good job).

The only other person who's filed to take on Clark is David Ishii, who pinned his 2013 city council campaign on a plan that, as KUOW put it, "the city could solve its fiscal problems by developing its own google-like search engine." Yikes.

I reached out to Bradburd on Monday hoping to hear more about why he's running—even though he thinks we're a "great defender of the powers that be"—and I'll update this post when I hear back.