Meet Olympia City Council candidate Tyrone Dion Brown
Editor’s note: This is one in a series of interviews with candidates running for Olympia City Council. At the end of each interview, The Olympian asked every candidate two questions: what they pay for housing, and if they could correctly state the median home sale price in Olympia, which was $430,000 when this series began but has since climbed to $452,000.
Tyrone “Ty” Dion Brown estimates he became a housing activist around age 14. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, amidst the backdrop of an increasingly gentrified city that eventually pushed his family out when he was 17.
Roughly a decade of housing insecurity followed: He slept on friends’ couches, in shelters, and on the streets. About six years ago, Brown moved to Olympia, where a friend lived, attracted by the “small town vibes.”
Brown has worked as a cook, started a catering business and jewelry business, and made clothing and art. For the past several years, he has worked as a community and tenant organizer, first for Washington Community Action Network (WCAN) and now for the Tenants Union of Washington.
Brown said he got into tenant organizing after he and his three children were evicted without cause from an apartment they’d lived in for four years. After a neighbor contacted a tenants rights group, they were able to get some extra time to move.
“Being a single parent and working 2, 3 jobs, I didn’t have time to even look to see if this was legal,” Brown said. “I had no idea at the extent to which evictions follow [you] and how easy it is for anyone to get evicted, but especially BIPOC people, people with children, people who don’t have a whole lot of money.”
Brown said he was motivated to run in part to hold the city accountable to its stated commitment to equity. He described attending many city council meetings in his role as a tenant organizer and seeing a “lack of representation and lack of real understanding” on the current council.
“There always seems to be this disconnect between policy-making resources and the marginalized community, the BIPOC community. So bridging that gap, that would be definitely one way to bridge that gap is by electing BIPOC community members,” Brown said.
Brown is running for Position 7 against Spence Weigand and incumbent Jim Cooper. He said he chose that seat because Dontae Payne and Talauana Reed, who are both Black, had already registered to run for other seats.
While he said he doesn’t have anything against him specifically, Brown noted that Cooper has been in office for nine years and he believes in “getting fresh new faces in there and shifting the dynamics of power.”
Last October, Brown, who organizes with Black Leaders in Action and Solidarity in Thurston County (BLAST), was part of a coalition that pushed the city to pass emergency renter protections. That ordinance extended a ban on evictions for unpaid rent for as long as Gov. Inslee’s declared state of emergency continues, but not longer than October 2021. BLAST had previously called on the city to pass legislation preventing landlords from evicting tenants over COVID-era debt.
Brown wants the city to further protect renters by restricting application fees, creating a universal application process, strengthening “just cause” eviction protections beyond the recent changes to state law, and passing Tenant Opportunity to Purchase (TOPA) legislation on a local level.
“The [eviction] moratorium will be lifted on June 30, and although we do have policies set into place that we recently just won in the tenant advocacy world, such as just cause and (SB) 5160 (tenant right to counsel), there are still many loopholes and many resources that haven’t been put into place, so people are still going to be facing evictions and instability.”
What do you pay for housing?
His rent is $1,275.
What is the median home sale price in Olympia?
$430,000
This story was originally published June 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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