Gentrification is Warfare…and definitely racist (part 2)
Whites return to the Central District of Seattle scattering the remaining Black folks
If you’ve grown up in any place other than a certified Chocolate City — we’re talking Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, New Orleans, etc — if you’ve grown up any place else, the most asked question is, “they have Black people in — insert cities name here — ?”
In “Gentrification is Warfare… (part 1)” we talked about one of those cities, Denver, Colorado, a city that’s in the top ten of places gentrifying the quickest. The Mile High City comes in at a convincing numero 7 on that list. We also discussed Atlanta (#5) and New Orleans (not in the top 10 but gentrifying all the same). For this writing we’ll be tackling the fourth fastest gentrifying city on the list — Seattle, Washington.
Our statement is this: though people are quick to steer clear of anything that closely resembles “race politics,” we state that just as most Black communities were originally formed by racist policies and that Black people were held into those communities by discriminatory practices, that the predatory subprime loans that moved many Blacks into awful adjustable rate 30 year mortgages, and the starving of resources that made those mortgages appealing are most definitely racist.
Seattle, like the three cities that we named, is no different…despite Black people being the minority population of the city.
I’d be lying if I said that Seattle ever crosses my mind. Looking for regional acts to play on our Fun da Mentals show is how I stumbled on Seattle and it’s gentrification plight.
Generally speaking, for every popular rapper, there’s a carbon copy throughout America. So each city will have their own Future, their own Drake, ad infinitum. Many of them are mildly successful in their local markets.
Because of this, finding an original voice is difficult. But when you do find someone, it’s that much more of a treat. Porter Ray was such a treat.
After releasing three independent, ‘gold’ titled projects (Blk Gld, Wht Gld, & RS Gld), Ray signed to the legendary Seattle label, Sub Pop and (incidentally) dropped Fundamentals which is when I found out about him. I like to read everything I can about an artist and in that reading one article or another talked about Ray being a native of the Historically Black Central District. Knowing nothing about Black Seattle beyond Sir-Mix-A-Lot and his “Posse on Broadway,” I looked it up and it was as bothersome as any “Inner City” to gentrified city tale that I had researched.
Unlike most places, Seattle is so thorough with their history they can trace their Black population back to it’s first pioneer, however, we’re going to focus on the second, a one William Grose.
Grose moved to Seattle, then a part of the Washington territory with only 300 residents, at the age of 25 in the year 18 and 60. He took work as a cook and toiled away for sixteen years before he was able to open his own establishment, a restaurant named, “Our House.” Seven years later, Grose would open up a 3-story hotel and he would grow into being one of Seattle’s wealthiest citizens.
Grose became a developer, building his own home near 24th and Madison, in an area once dubbed, “Colored Colony.” The area flourished in the 1890s and at one point, according to historian Quintard Taylor:
By the 1890s, the handful of African-American entrepreneurs were far more integrated into the city’s economy than their counterparts would be a century later. Black businesses were located throughout the city and served a mostly white clientele. For one brief moment in the 1890s, Seattle had more black attorneys than ministers.
Blacks were spread out throughout the city at that time but the majority of the Black population of 400 Blacks lived in the area that Grose had sold off. That community soon merged with a smaller pocket of Black people to the south forming, by 1910, what is now known as the Central District or CD.
Having grown up in a city that’s somewhat similar, many of the patterns seem familiar: Blacks moved to the only place that they were able to, discrimination kept them in, they made the best of it and businesses flourished; in Denver it was Welton, in Seattle it was 23rd Avenue, Black students were bussed out of their district to mostly white neighborhoods, drugs decimated the community, so-called non-discriminatory laws were passed, those who could flee did, whites recognized the value of the homes and location and moved back driving prices and property value up…etc, etc.
The above map shows how by 1960 the majority of the then 26,908 Blacks lived tightly in the Central District. This is the neighborhood that Quincy Jones moved to in the mid-1940s and this is the neighborhood that produced Jimi Hendrix. Ironically, Hendrix’s home is symbollic to the changes that are taking place in the CD. The home, once located at 2603 S. Washington St had to be moved from the original site due to condo construction and was later demolished.
Everybody, like my grandparents, came up and lived in the projects, got jobs, and then the whole Central District, which ended up being the Black part of town, was basically built for the new affluence that Black people were achieving, working for the war effort and shit like that. So everybody started being able to buy houses, and that’s how the central district neighborhood got started, where I’m from. It was big, small — it was a city for sure, but it was a small one. Ishmael Butler
Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palace (and earlier Digable Planets) fame who is the same age as my older brother, Ade, recalls growing up in Seattle very much the same way we would have described growing up in Denver:
The hood was kind of like those California neighborhoods, where Black people live and it’s just nice — grass, houses — where the whole hood’s just Black, and everybody kind of knows each other, because they just got up here not too long ago… …It was big, small — it was a city for sure, but it was a small one. It was dangerous, but it was pretty safe, you know what I mean.
Similar to us, Seattle students were bused across town. We were bussed South…as far South as you could possibly go and still be in Denver. While that was arrived in Denver by a Judge ruling in 1969. Seattle arrived at their bussing quite differently. Fifty years ago, almost to the day of this writing, Seattle Civil Rights leaders organized a protest known as the Seattle School Boycott of 1966.
For two days in the Spring of 1966, students from K-12, “dropped out” of their regular schools and attended eight designated “Freedom Schools” where they learned about Black History and other things…like integration, that were not taught in their regular schools. Almost 4,000 students attended these “Freedom Schools” and 30% of the students that did were white. Brooke Clarke wrote an excellent piece about this protest that could be read here. Suffice it to say, students from the CP began getting bussed (albeit 12 years later in 1978). Unlike Denver, they were bussed North to Seattle’s North End.
While some people objected to the busing, others, like the aforementioned Sir Mix-A-Lot feel differently:
I didn’t have the luxury of living in a neighborhood where a good school was. We didn’t make that kind of money. My mom worked as an LPN at the King County Jail making 6 or 7 bucks an hour. So from my perspective, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.
I too recalling riding out of my tree and amenities challenged Park Hill neighborhood and watching as trees, grocery stores, big parks and new cars appeared. It was another world. You aspired to it…especially once drugs began to hit the “inner city.”
The cat is out the bag. Former Nixon Aid, John Ehrlichman, confirmed what Black folk have said for years, the same thing that had white media calling Minister Farrakhan “a conspiracy theorist:” the “War on Drugs” was a war on Black people.
You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. John Ehrlichman
Of course, no one is going on record (aside from the detracted San Jose Mercury Articles) and saying that the government flooded our communities with that heroin and later, crack…yet, but that disruption that Ehrlichman spoke of, growing up, we saw first hand. The community went from being safe, as Ishmael Butler stated above, to very dangerous and scary.
As we mentioned in Part 1, the slippery Clintons had a program “Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing” project introduced in 1994 that shepherded many Black folks into the suburbs. Well, SURPRISE, that program is quite similar to one introduced in 1992 by President George H. W. (Big) Bush dubbed the “Weed and Seed” program.
This program was supposed to “weed” out the bad criminal element and “seed” it with productive, social service programs for the youth. A $1.1 million dollar grant was given to the city, 2/3 of which went to law enforcement, and the third went to those social services.
Not so surprisingly, this was also beginning of the exodus South into King County for many Blacks who were long-time residents of the CD. These suburbs saw in increase in population, quite similar to the ones that we pointed in Part 1, that New Orlean suburbs saw; astounding increases like Federal Way (with a 144% increase) to astronomical like the Puyallup South Hill area (a whopping 566% increase) all between the years 1990 and 2000.
Meanwhile, whites began moving back into the city, repopulating the Central District to the point where, for the first time in 70 years, there’s no longer a Black majority in the area…kind of sounds like DC. These whites moving in needed housing. So room had to be made for the tons of multi-use spaces that would begin popping up in the mid-90s. The dilapidated areas…and it’s residence became an eye sore.
Stores like Deano’s were some of the last vestiges of the blight that came out of integration and the ruinous crack scourge. Located at 22nd and Madison, Deano’s was often known to be a place of drug activity and crime. It quickly became a sign of things long gone as development…to the tune of half a billion dollar popped up around it.
The black patrons of Deano’s seem to hang outside of the business as much as they hang inside of it. And it is this loitering about on the sidewalk and parking lot that most frustrates the bar’s new neighbors. These new neighbors, most of them white, fail to appreciate the true cultural significance of black loitering. Charles Mudede
Deano’s is gone now — demolished in 2006 — and plans for, you guessed it, for multi-family/multi-use properties are on the table. It’s an empty-lot now, but if you look at the photo below…
For the remaining Black people who wanted to leave the neighborhood but stay in the city, they didn’t have as many options. Once again, discriminatory practices increased the urge to move someplace else…in this case, out of the city. As recent as last year (2015), the Seattle Office of Civil Rights found that over 13 rental properties, many of which operate in the new “hot” areas, were treating prospective renters differently. 12 of these properties decided on a settlement before they were fully exposed to Human Rights Commissions made any findings.
The residence who stay don’t fare that much better. Many of the Black people remaining in the Central District are older people who have long ago paid off their mortgages and only have to pay property taxes. Wherein lies the rub — as property value increases, so do taxes which puts a serious burden on many of the older residents who are already living on a fixed income.
We saw the writing on the wall. As RTD began digging up chunks of the street up and down Welton back in 1994, we knew things would be changing drastically. Historically, Welton was where Denver’s Juneteenth Celebration, one of Black Denver’s most celebrated days, was held. The block would be cut off, vendors would come, we’d congregate — you know the deal. Then RTD proposed the light rail. And of course the first community affected was the Historic Five Points district. (The light rail has gone on to expand throughout Denver but Five Points remains the only community that has the rail slicing through the heart of its business district)
Seattle’s Central District escaped a Robert Moses like expansion once.
The highway would have roughly followed the route of Empire Way (renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Way in 1983), cutting a trench through the middle of the Central District. It would have occupied the block between 27th Ave and Empire Way along its entire length, destroying thousands of homes. And with freeway crossings only at the intersections with major arterials such as Cherry, Union, Yesler, and Jackson, it would have created a wall of traffic and concrete between the neighborhood and Lake Washington. scott
It was a highly contested plan…mostly because it would have went through the Washington Park Arboretum. Appalled Montlake (and bothered Central District) residents protested. But most importantly, Montlake homeowners filed suit. Thus, Seattle voters turned down that and a proposed 48 miles of Subway lines.
Critics of the decision often lament about the fact that turning away the money for this project led to the birth of Atlanta’s transit system, MARTA. But Seattle is a forward moving city and plans to expand transit over the next 25 years continue with the most recent proposal in March of this year (2016) being highly celebrated. It surely will benefit the new citizens of the Central District.
But in the meantime, local residents complain about the current work that SDOT is doing. SDOT has, in a spirit similar to Denver’s, ripped up the street as it decreases traffic lanes (think on that) from four to three. Business owners don’t know how long they’ll survive.
One of the first structures that Black people erected after slavery was the church. In Denver, Zion Baptist, the oldest Black church West of the Mississippi, was founded shortly after the Civil War. The first pastor of Zion was William Norrid who is said to have lead a slave rebellion. The church moved to it’s present location on 24th Ave in 1911 and has served the community since then…but what does that mean now?
First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Seattle, the first Black church in the state of Washington opened it’s doors in 1886 and built the present church in 1912 on 14th Ave and has served the community since then…but what does that mean now?
In both instances, these churches once operated and functioned in a community surrounded by it’s parishoners. Church members walked to services. They were neighbors and shared the same concerns. Now, young white couples push their strollers or walk their dogs by these buildings, buildings that they rarely enter or even consider the significance of. And the church members? Often times they commute in, very much in the same way that whites once commuted in to work. If the church is serving the community now, it is doing so in a sort of church-diaspora way because the community in which these churches stand don’t need and aren’t looking for any servicing.
Being a hold out in a highly gentrified community often times feels like living in an occupied territory. You watch as familiar areas quickly disappear and give way to places foreign to you, frequented by people who are unaccustomed to having to “tolerate” your presence.
Many of these new residence throw up the development that’s taking place as improvements, improvements that they believe are a benefit to longtime residence…but that’s not the case.
As stated above, as gentrification kicks in, property taxes increase causing a strain on many who have grown accustomed to paying a set rate. The new condos and apartments that form the new landscape of the community are normally out of the financial reach of older residence and many of the new businesses offer items that either the older residence don’t want or can’t afford.
An occupation indeed. A War, I say.
In Part 3, InshAllah, we’ll look at some of these suburbs and go into greater detail on how the suburbs are the new slums.
