A Vision of Development Without Displacement in Seattle

#WeMakeThisCity Anniversary Series: Part 3

Community organizations from all across the country came together last year to launch #WeMakeThisCity — a campaign for infrastructure and public goods that increase community wealth, health and justice. With one year of campaigning behind us, we have a lot to celebrate!

This post is part two of a series about the vital work of #WeMakeThisCity organizers across the country. Their hard-fought wins prove that by building power locally, we can strengthen our cities and create a just future, together. Each part of the series highlights the work in a different city.

Seattle’s Graham Street Neighborhood is Planning for a Future that Supports the Entire Community

City-planning processes are often led by government, consultants, and private developers. It’s rare to see a planning process or development project designed and driven solely by the people who live there. In Seattle’s Graham Street neighborhood, however, thousands of residents are proving that it’s possible to plan differently. They are collectively designing a ten-year plan for their neighborhood, envisioning a future where current residents can thrive as Graham Street grows and adapts.

While much of Seattle has gentrified, Graham Street remains one of Seattle’s most diverse, resilient, and vibrant neighborhoods. People of all races, religions, and places of origin call the neighborhood home. Most residents speak two or more languages. Local community centers, refugee organizations, and places of worship welcome new Americans who have immigrated to Seattle from all over the world. The vast majority of Graham Street businesses are small and family owned.

It was this diversity and ingenuity that local organizers drew upon when the community fought for and won a new light rail station for the Graham Street neighborhood, to be built in 10 years.

As with most big infrastructure projects, the transit plan had a lot of upsides.

The station would connect the Graham Street neighborhood to opportunities across the region — including jobs, schools, goods, and services. Along with the new station would come a hub of new business space, new homes, and new infrastructure. It would support climate resiliency by helping mitigate climate change and allowing the community to adapt in years to come.

But the plan was also missing something crucial — the people of Graham Street.

Traditional city planning processes emphasize community input on physical improvements to a neighborhood, but often fail to address fundamental issues of ownership and control. With the new Graham Street station would come new people, many of whom could afford higher priced homes. Organizers in Seattle had seen the impacts on other neighborhoods after investments in things like new transit stations, new libraries, new community centers, new parks, and new schools: the people who had made a neighborhood home too often didn’t benefit from new infrastructure because rents and home prices rose as a result.

Instead of simply accepting the City’s plans or fighting against them, the neighborhood set out to plan differently.

Community members from all across the neighborhood banded together to design a vision of a just and sustainable future for the people of Graham Street.

Puget Sound Sage, a local racial justice and economic justice organization, worked alongside community groups in the Graham Street Neighborhood to engage and lift up the voices of communities that usually are left out of city planning and the politics of local decision making.

Together, they created a Community Action Team, which worked with the broader community to plan what development without displacement would look like after the new light rail station opened in 2031. They collaborated with hundreds of local residents and stakeholders to envision a future where both the existing community and new people could all benefit from the planned light rail station and other public investments.

As part of the planning process, they held community visioning meetings where residents designed the type of development they most wanted to see in a growing Graham Street neighborhood.

The Community Action Team explored the following essential questions for designing a community-driven development plan:

• Who calls our neighborhood home?
• What rules currently apply to how we use land and who is planning to build?
• What infrastructure supports our neighborhood?
• How healthy is our environment, now and in the face of climate change?
• What is the scale and character of our local business community?
• How stable or unstable are current residents in their homes?

The result of their year-long community process was a vision document that will inspire development and policy going forward.

Because of this visioning process, the community is ready to fight in unison for development projects that create the future they deserve:

• A beautiful, supported, and stable neighborhood.
• A place to find jobs and economic opportunity.
• Community-centered mobility that gives safe and simple access to what we need.
• An abundance of multigenerational and multicultural community spaces.
• A healthy environment that helps us thrive.

With a strong neighborhood vision as their foundation, the Community Action Team is moving on to the next step of the process. In the next two years, they will create a plan and a set of strategies to advance community ownership and community-driven development in Graham Street in the decade to come.

The first phase of plan implementation is to secure the land under community institutions with short term or unstable leases.

Here at the Partnership for Working Families, we’re invigorated and inspired by the forward-thinking activism coming out of Graham Street.

Their work is a testament to the future we can build when #WeMakeThisCity. This campaign is about fighting for community-controlled, publicly owned institutions, structures, and services, while standing up against corporate giveaway and privatization plans. Like Graham Street’s Community Action Team, we’re working to ensure all people have access to the systems and structures needed to live full and healthy lives. This includes transportation systems that connect us to work, schools and services, the ability to afford housing in the communities we love, access to clean water and energy and so much more. Public infrastructure connects us all and should serve the needs of the people, not the pockets of corporations.

Could your friends and neighbors benefit from a #WeMakeThisCity initiative in your town? Reach out and join us!

Puget Sound Sage has worked over the past 10 years to build a city where communities of color and low-income communities benefit directly from Seattle’s economic growth. We work to ensure that the families who power the city’s growth aren’t pushed out due to rising costs. We fundamentally believe that development without displacement is possible when communities of color and low-income communities are able to directly benefit from growth and direct major decisions about how development occurs.

Partnership for Working Families is a national network of 20 affiliate organizations driving a progressive agenda to harness the power of cities for change in our regions, and leverage that up to the state and national level. Our powerful coalitions of community groups, labor unions, faith networks and environmental organizations are building governing tables with a grassroots base of power to advance a vision of a just, sustainable, equitable and democratic communities.