Category: Guest Contributor

Guest Contributor, housing

The City Council Should Restore Affordable Housing to the Stadium District 
Map of the stadium district
Map of the stadium district (outlined in thick black line)

By Joshua Curtis and John Marchione

In September 2022, after years of study, the City of Seattle finally released a much-anticipated Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) analysis of proposed changes to the City’s maritime and industrial strategy. That document, released  after years of discussion and consideration by the industrial lands task force convened by then-mayor Jenny Durkan, set forward a “Preferred Alternative” that called for allowing a limited amount of affordable workforce housing in the immediate vicinity of Lumen Field and T-Mobile Park.

But because of a behind-the-scenes lobbying push from the Port of Seattle and the Longshore Union, the City Council ended up adopting an industrial lands package that stripped out the housing from the Stadium District. That decision, driven largely by political calculus rather than sound policy, essentially killed a broadly endorsed vision for a vibrant “maker’s zone” in the immediate vicinity of the stadiums that would combine street-level light industrial and artisanal manufacturing uses—think breweries, distilleries, or a clothing manufacturer with a retail storefront—with that housing.

It’s time to correct that mistake.

Council President Sara Nelson introduced legislation last month that would restore the maker’s zone vision and add back the opportunity for about 1,000 mostly affordable housing units to be constructed in the north part of the SoDo neighborhood, providing a real opportunity to address our housing crisis. It would also take a big step toward reinvigorating small maker’s businesses that are slowly being pushed out of the city—like the 700 diverse urban manufacturers and producers represented by Seattle Made, one of the broad coalition of organizations supporting Nelson’s. And it will create greater vibrancy and improved public safety in an area directly adjacent to Pioneer Square and the Chinatown/International District (CID).

All of this can be accomplished while preserving our industrial economy and keeping well-paying blue-collar jobs in Seattle. As the Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development Director’s Report, transmitted to the council along with the industrial lands legislation, clearly stated: “OPCD’s independent analysis leads us to believes that some limited amount of housing would be compatible with the surrounding use pattern and would not cause additional adverse impacts on nearby industrial activities[.]”

The plain fact of the matter is that the transitional area immediately adjacent to the stadiums has changed so much that it no longer makes sense to consider it exclusively industrial. A significant portion of the area around the stadiums, primarily south of the ballpark, is characterized by deteriorating buildings and vacant lots. No actual industrial activity remains, nor will it ever return, because the high value of the land in that area makes industrial uses on those sites cost-prohibitive.

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The area around these public facilities is already zoned for commercial use, including bland mid-rise offices, which, if developed, will actually bring more traffic to the area than a mixed-use maker’s zone would. The area benefits from an expanding transit system: It is less than a mile from two light rail stations, which currently have the lowest and third-lowest ridership of the 19 stations on Sound Transit’s north-south 1 Line, largely because almost no one lives near them. And it directly abuts the Pioneer Square, Waterfront, and CID neighborhoods. As the environmental study concluded, the opportunity to create a mixed-use district around the public stadiums would ease the transition between Pioneer Square and the CID and the industrial areas to the south. These spaces can help to build employment and entrepreneurial opportunity within communities of color that often face intimidating barriers to entry.

To achieve all this, the inclusion of a threshold level of workforce housing is essential, both to help underwrite projects that include these maker’s spaces and to contribute to the city’s critical housing supply. We know this because an outside, expert analysis jointly commissioned by our two public boards in 2022 found that this sort of maker’s zone would not pencil and would not be developed unless a threshold level of housing was included.

Support for this plan is strong. In a 2021 poll, 87 percent of registered voters favored the inclusion of some residential uses in this area. Earlier this month, an impressive coalition of groups, including unions, small businesses, affordable housing developers, the Mariners, and many others joined with the two public boards stewarding the public ownership of the stadiums to urge the council to pass this important legislation.

There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity here. Reviving the maker’s zone idea would allow the Stadium District to accommodate light manufacturing along with a modest mix of affordable and market-rate housing. This would be a big step toward solving multiple problems, would make much better use of the underutilized land around the stadiums, and would transition well to the maritime and industrial areas of the waterfront.

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Joshua Curtis is the Executive Director of the Washington State Ballpark Public Facilities District. John Marchione is Executive Director of the Washington State Public Stadium Authority.

Elections, Guest Contributor, homelessness, housing

Social Housing Is a Homelessness Solution
Image via House Our Neighbors! website

By SHARE and WHEEL

Homelessness is a housing problem.

More affordable housing means less homelessness. It’s really that simple.

SHARE and WHEEL are grassroots organizing efforts of homeless and formerly homeless people. Social housing is in alignment with our values: Caring for each other, creating relationships across divisions, and self-governance.

Ending homelessness requires addressing the needs of our whole community. Working people become homeless every day, priced out of their housing by arbitrary rent hikes. Even middle-income people can become homeless after a major car accident or a catastrophic illness. A New York Times article showed that the housing crisis is impacting working people at all income levels, everywhere in the United States. As housing inaccessibility moves up the income ladder, more and more people at all income levels will become homeless—and homeless deaths will continue to rise.

Social housing is public housing for all income levels. It would remain affordable in perpetuity, with no risk of your building being sold off to market development and no penalty for success if your income becomes “too high to live here” while being still too low to live anywhere else. It will also be governed by the tenants. From our self-managed shelters and projects, we know that governing and making decisions together builds community.

Housing people with a range of incomes together builds community. A city segregated by income and class is a fractured community. We like building relationships across divisions like rich/poor, housed/homeless—in fact, we recommend it. Housing that includes a range of income levels facilitates that. It also stabilizes neighborhoods to prevent further displacement of low-income residents.

In February 2023, Seattle voters expressed their overwhelming support for social housing: 57 percent of Seattle—a majority in every district—supported Initiative 136, which created the social housing developer.  In 2024, 38,000 voters signed an initiative to fund that project with a progressive tax. Instead of increased property taxes, as most of Seattle’s affordable housing is financed, I-137 proposes a tax on businesses that pay any employee over a million dollars a year: 5 percent on every dollar over $1,000,000. The Seattle Social Housing Development Board (SHDB) can use this income as collateral for bonds that will fund housing construction and building acquisition.

A small faction is challenging this initiative, pushing for an alternative that narrowly focuses on low-income and homeless populations. Last year, the Seattle City Council refused to put the initiative on the November ballot, later voting to put Initiative 137, now Prop 1A, on the ballot in February, along with the council’s own alternative proposal, Prop 1B. The council proposal raids the JumpStart tax proceeds for $10 million a year and restricts the funded housing to 80 percent or less of Area Median Income.

We, actual homeless people, oppose raiding the JumpStart tax, which is intended for traditional low-income housing. We oppose strangling the new social housing developer by funding one fifth of what’s requested. And, most strongly, we oppose canceling the will of the voters who support mixed-income housing in which the rents from higher-income tenants will subsidize the rents of lower-income tenants.

We need solutions, not obstruction. Delay means higher rents, increased homelessness, displacement of marginalized communities, and pricing out low- and middle-income workers.

We are appalled that the Seattle City Council refused the will of Seattle voters by not putting I-137 on the November ballot. We need solutions, not obstruction. Delay means higher rents, increased homelessness, displacement of marginalized communities, and pricing out low- and middle-income workers.

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Who are we?

SHARE (Seattle Housing and Resource Effort) is a grassroots organizing effort of homeless and formerly homeless men and women. We facilitate six indoor shelters, two Tent Cities, lockers, a hygiene center, and a housing for work program, all self-managed by participants.

WHEEL (Women’s Housing, Equality and Enhancement League) is a grassroots organizing effort of homeless and formerly homeless women. We facilitate two staffed, low-barrier women’s shelters and we do Women in Black vigils whenever somebody homeless dies outside or by violence in King County.

Both of our organizations are homeless-led. Self governance and self-management are essential values to us. Participants, not staff, maintain and manage SHARE shelters and Tent Cities.

We advocate for systemic changes to end homelessness. It isn’t enough to get people out of homelessness. We want to stop people from becoming homeless.

Opponents say the Social Housing Development Board is too inexperienced to be in charge of a housing developer. But housing boards do not draw architectural designs. Boards set policy and practices. Existing low-income housing developers lack lived experience with poverty and homelessness, and their policies and practices are sometimes bad for their tenants. The SHDB includes seven members with lived experience, providing a real voice, which can complement existing efforts and provide valuable new perspectives on housing development.

The SHDB also has more members experienced in construction than the biggest existing low-income housing developer does. Its inaugural Chief Executive Officer, Roberto Jiménez, has an impressive background in affordable housing and community development.

Opponents also say we should only concentrate efforts on people who are currently homeless. “Prioritize those most in need” sounds sensible, even virtuous. What it means in practice is “Sacrifice vulnerable people for other vulnerable people, so that we don’t have to raise taxes on wealthy people.” Opponents are acting as if this is a zero-sum game. We need to both work upstream to STOP people from becoming homeless and also work to get those who are currently homeless back into housing.

Some opponents object to the tax not having an expiration date, after which it would have to be renewed. To be useful for ongoing construction, or as collateral for bonds, the funding stream has to be dependable, not subject to changes in political administrations. This is why property tax levies do not have an expiration date.

The alternative funding proposal, taking $10 million from the JumpStart fund, raids money set up by a progressive tax to avoid creating a new progressive tax.

In the midst of an escalating homelessness crisis, skyrocketing rents, and growing income inequality, social housing is more crucial than ever. SHARE and WHEEL stand firmly behind social housing initiatives, recognizing them as a vital tool in fostering equity, stability, and thriving communities.

Vote YES on Prop 1A.

 

 

Density, Development, Guest Contributor, housing, King County

Local Control Can Work to Solve Our Housing Crisis: Here’s How

By King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci

If we’ve learned nothing else from the last couple decades of explosive growth in King County, it’s that that past attempts to provide housing that’s affordable to everyone in our county have come up short. Really short. So short, in fact, that we need to create an additional 200,000 affordable homes by 2044 to ensure that low-income individuals, people on fixed incomes, and families throughout King County can afford a place to call home.

The results of our failure to provide adequate housing are visible everywhere: An ever-increasing number of people across King County are homeless. Young people leave the region because they don’t see a future they can afford. Racial disparities in our communities persist and grow, with Black, Indigenous and other people of color continuing to be disproportionately harmed by high housing prices.

If we don’t act now to build more housing of all types, including much-needed affordable housing, these gaps will just grow bigger. And while building the housing we need has for years felt like an intractable problem, there is hope on the horizon.

That hope comes in the form of a new and unique collaboration between King County and all 39 of our cities. As all of our cities and the county are making once-in-a-decade major updates to their comprehensive plans – which form the DNA of how a local government plans for growth – we can begin to turn the tide in a way that fits our communities while making them more inclusive and affordable.

In planning for future growth, city leaders have long pointed out the benefits of “local control” over land use planning and zoning, based on the principle that local government is closest to the people we serve, and thus is the right level of government to enact residents’ vision for the place they live. However, the concept of local control has some historical downsides – it has been used as an argument to block new housing, and thus has been a way to disenfranchise people and families of lower means, people of color and other marginalized groups.

So, what has changed? Taking the cue from House Bill 1220, a 2021 state law directing all jurisdictions to “plan for and accommodate” affordable housing at every level, representatives from cities and the county started collaborating on the issue. Together, they crafted and all jurisdictions unanimously agreed with recommendations from King County’s Affordable Housing Committee to amend county Comprehensive Planning Policies and set individualized housing affordability targets for each jurisdiction and hold each other accountable to meeting these local goals.

These targets are ambitious and bold. For example, my home city of Bellevue will need to plan for 35,000 net new housing units, 30,349 of which must be affordable to people making less than the area median income. Every city and the county have agreed to similar ambitious commitments.

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This means that cities will plan for new forms of housing that will incorporate the so-called “missing middle” of townhouses and other affordable housing types. It means cities will plan to take steps to intentionally address and undo the harms of racially restrictive housing policies of the past that continue to show up in segregated patterns of housing in the present. It means cities will plan to address displacement of existing communities and provide more places to live throughout their communities, not just in industrial areas or along highways. But the solutions in each city will be tailored to the conditions and vision of that city and its local representatives.

Recognizing we are all in this together, we also agreed to hold each other accountable. The Affordable Housing Committee will review the proposed housing-related parts of every comprehensive plan and provide feedback and recommendations for how each jurisdiction can better meet our ambitious and specific housing goals. Following adoption, the Affordable Housing Committee will monitor and track how well cities are implementing the plans on a regular basis.

Getting to this point was difficult work, and took a strong partnership of local government, private and nonprofit partners, and a dedicated group of representatives from key communities impacted by high housing costs. But we all came together because the data was so compelling, and we all know that behind the data are human beings who all need and deserve a safe, healthy place to live. They are nurses, teachers, and firefighters, our family, friends, and coworkers. They are seniors hoping to age in place and young families with dreams to raise their kids in safe communities where they have access to opportunity. They are why we are here, and our work is ultimately for them.

With this countywide housing agreement, we are empowering each city to do that in the way that works best for their residents while recognizing that every jurisdiction needs to step up to address our shared regional housing crisis. And I’m hopeful that with this effort, we can close the gap and make King County – and our whole region – a place where people can find housing and build a life filled with opportunity.

Claudia Balducci represents District 6 on the Metropolitan King County Council, which includes parts or all of Bellevue, Kirkland, Mercer Island, the Points Communities, and Redmond. She serves as chair of the King County Affordable Housing Committee and previously co-chaired the Regional Affordable Housing Taskforce (2017-18).

Affordability, Density, Guest Contributor, housing, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Throws in the Towel on Housing with a 20-Year Plan to Increase Housing Prices and Worsen Homelessness

By Ron Davis

Mayor Bruce Harrell just released a 20-year plan to give up on the housing crisis. With its proposed update to the city’s comprehensive plan, the administration plans a big slowdown in housing production, and over the course of 20 years, actually aims to make the housing deficit deeper.

This is a stunning surrender from someone who promised he would not play “small ball” and said he wants to embrace “Space Needle Thinking.” Unfortunately, the way state law and the process works, we will be stuck with this feeble framework for quite some time.

Right now, we are tens of thousands of housing units behind, and this plan will take twenty years to make it at least 12,000 units worse, and possibly much more so. It doesn’t improve the housing deficit, and it doesn’t even tread water.

It is literally a plan to fail.

What Is A Comprehensive Plan and Why Do We Have One?

State law requires cities and counties to release a 20-year “comprehensive plan” for how they are going to handle their growth. This includes how much growth, and where it goes. After this plan gets an extensive environmental review, it is much harder to challenge. This makes it expensive, time consuming, and sometimes legally risky to try to change course after the plan is approved. In other words, these plans are hard to unstick.

So the plan to fail will be with us for a while.

The Impact

Failing at housing means prices will climb higher and faster. So unless you have a few million to loan your kids before you die, or a very roomy basement, there is little chance they will be able to afford to live in Seattle. And unless you made around $400,000 a year in your twenties and thirties, people like you will not be able to start a career or raise a family in Seattle.

According to experts, higher housing prices also increase homelessness. This is because when people experience an economic or behavioral crisis in a city with affordable rent, they usually manage to stay housed. But expensive markets like Seattle’s are far less forgiving, so when someone gets into a bad situation, they are far more likely to end up without a roof over their head.

If this all sounds a bit like a certain city by the bay, that’s because it is. San Francisco’s refusal to keep up with housing demand has resulted in $3,200 median rents and people pooping on the sidewalk.

I don’t know about you, but I aspire for more in 2044.

The Numbers, if That’s Your Thing

For those who want to understand the numbers: The slowdown in housing growth relative to population growth over the last few decades created a massive housing debt. Most of the best figures are regional, and address the overall gaps in housing production, production relative to growth (page 20), gaps in affordable housing, even a growing mismatch in the number of jobs homes by one online commentator However you slice the data, the Seattle deficit is tens of thousands of homes, and the regional gap is much larger.

Harrell’s Bizarre Plan To Slow Down Construction

Because of high land prices, stringent zoning and other rules, our ability to add housing is dropping fast. We have built nearly 10,000 units per year in the last five years, but permitting is cratering. If we do nothing, housing production is going to fall off a cliff, to 4,000 units a year for the next 20 years. So the Harrell administration spent a year of staff time and millions of dollars and ignored the overwhelming documented supermajority of feedback they received, and only planned for a little life support to bring it just up to 5,000 units per year. That’s right—we’re going to reach for a sky that is half as high as where we are now.

This plan is likely to yield about 100,000 homes over 20 years, even though King County says Seattle needs 112,000 units just to keep up. The 112,000 unit number comes from the fact that an average rental household in Seattle has 1.85 people, including single family home rentals. Since most of this growth will be apartments, the number of people per unit will be just a bit lower (1.78), which leads to the need for 112,000 homes

In other words, we are planning to fall behind by at least 12,000 homes.

Lest you think no one has thought about sending folks to nearby cities–that’s already baked in. The plan suggests Seattle will add 159,000 jobs, which will support far more than 200,000 people. In other words, the 200,000 person growth target already assumes tens of thousands more commuters from out of town, choking our roads with traffic and paying property taxes somewhere else.

The city says that in the next 20 years, the Seattle population will grow by at least 200,000 people. But if we simply match the growth rates of 2000-2020, we’d grow by 240,000. If we grow at the rate of the 2010s, it will be 363,000 new people. So when they say, “at least” they really mean at least. Those higher rates would increase the housing hole by up an additional 22,000 to 91,000 units!

The plan manages to do all this in especially damaging and clumsy ways.

Racial Inequality

The plan shoehorns a lot of the growth into small areas of the city, an approach Seattle has long called the “urban village” strategy.

And yet the very office responsible for this document called the basic structure of their longstanding urban village strategy racist just a couple years ago. This plan pulls heavily from the same pernicious playbook.

Notably, the plan concentrates poverty, and pushes multifamily housing near large, dangerous, polluted roads. All the while, it shields Bruce Harrell’s neighborhood and other rich neighborhoods with water views, like Laurelhurst and Magnolia, from any real change. And the restricted growth everywhere means higher prices everywhere, which means more displacement for lower-income populations and people of color.

In other words, the city is planning to perpetuate much of the pattern of our openly racist housing history.

Sending Families Somewhere Else

The Harrell administration’s plan is hostile to families.

One of the reasons that family housing is so expensive is our housing deficit, but another is our infinitesimal growth in larger units. Harrell doubles down on this foolish approach, making it much less likely that family housing will be built. For some reason, Seattle seems determined to prevent people from raising kids here.

The state’s “missing middle housing” bill requires cities like Seattle to allow four to six units on normal residential lots. But the plan makes this functionally impossible, especially for family-sized units. If we followed the state’s model code, we could build four 2,000-square-foot homes or six 1,333 square foot homes on a standard lot.

But Seattle cut the square footage allowed by almost 40 percent. Forget decent-sized homes. And in fact, Seattle’s plan also ensures that many more projects won’t pencil out.

In other words, the design is deliberately set up so that that missing middle housing won’t get built at scale, and where it does, the units will be too small for families but still spread around the lot enough to require cutting down lots of trees.

If you think the schools can’t get enough enrollment to stay funded and open now, imagine a future where even fewer families can live here.

Transit, Affordable Housing

The Harrell plan treats taxpayer money with very little respect—notably generating a mere 2,700 units near two new light rail stations, frittering away a billion dollars in taxpayer investment in our regional transit system. It also ignores the overwhelming feedback favoring social housing, as well as the significant margin the social housing initiative passed with. Overall, it fails to tackle the even larger housing gap when it comes to affordable housing of all types.

It plans for less growth than much-smaller Bellevue, much weaker middle housing than Spokane and, and is so bad that state legislators are calling out the BS.

The legislator who led the effort to pass the missing middle housing bill noted that “it barely goes above what new housing production would have been if they did nothing.”

Harrell Gives Up

This is an absurd failure of leadership. Up until now, I’ve wanted to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt. He’s well meaning, and although we disagree about a great deal, he’s not a true conservative like Sara Nelson. He’s just afraid of big business.

But Bruce has lost his touch. Centrist leaders get this. President Joe Biden gets it. Governor Jay Inslee gets it. King County Executive Dow Constantine gets it. Thousands of Seattle residents get it.

Harrell does not.

This article is also available on Rondezvous, Ron Davis’s excellent free Substack newsletter, where you’ll also find details about how to weigh in on the proposed comp plan update.

Ron Davis is is an entrepreneur, policy wonk, and past candidate for Seattle City Council District 4. He lives in Northeast Seattle.

Guest Contributor, immigration, King County

Beyond the Border: Addressing the Asylum Seeker Surge in Our Own Backyard

By Palmira Figueroa and Ben Maritz

It was one of Pedro’s sons who gave him the idea. A friend of his made the trip earlier that year and experienced no issues getting across the border, posting about the entire journey on TikTok. Pedro, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, had been living in Colombia with his family of six for the past three years, doing odd jobs when he could find them, and decided to set out for a better life in the north.

Salvador, an Angolan from the embattled exclave of Kabinda, had been bouncing around various African countries, unable to return home. He learned from a friend that it was possible to buy a cheap ticket to Brazil, a country which doesn’t require a visa for entry. Once in São Paulo, he joined the stream of migrants from every part of the world heading to the United States for safety and economic opportunity.

A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

Pedro and Salvador both recently passed through an informal asylum-seeker encampment at the Riverton Park Church in Tukwila, a community-run facility that is now overwhelmed. Every week, 30 to 50 new asylum-seekers arrive, most with young children. The federal government has policies in place that allow people to cross our border, but has provided no resources to help provide them resettle. The church is woefully overcrowded and the vulnerable people staying there are getting desperate.

How we got here

Today, most people who reach the border seeking asylum—about 2.3 million a year—are processed and released, especially those who are traveling with children. They are assigned the next available court date, which the most recent arrivals have told us is currently sometime in 2029. Federal law makes asylum-seekers eligible to work six to eight months after they apply for asylum; in the meantime, they receive no assistance or accommodation.

Three-quarters of the migrants are from places further afield than Mexico, including South America and Africa. Some people cross 20 countries before they arrive in the United States. Because the migrant facilities at the southern border are completely overwhelmed, authorities are encouraging migrants to travel to other places within the United States, ideally where people have access to family or other resources. A lot has been written about Texas paying for buses to send migrants to New York and Chicago, but the federal government itself is also paying for people to travel away from overwhelmed shelters near the border—a policy that has impacts in unexpected places, like Seattle.

The local crisis

Both Salvador and Pedro passed through shelters near the border that had no capacity to accommodate them, and so paid for them to travel to Seattle—Salvador by plane, and Pedro and his family by bus. They arrived at the church just like the dozens that are still arriving each week – disoriented, penniless, and full of hope.

The Riverton Church, under the leadership of Pastor Jan Bolerjack, has long played a leading role in caring for our most disadvantaged neighbors. It was the site of a sanctioned homeless encampment until early 2023, when the Low Income Housing Institute built a tiny house village on the site. Seattle police officers and other law enforcement agents had been referring people to the Riverton Shelter ever since the first migrants started showing up in Seattle about a year ago. The officers knew Pastor Jan would welcome them.

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Today the church is a buzz of languages and chaos, with hundreds of people from around the world overflowing its fellowship hall, sanctuary, parking lot, and green spaces. It’s wet, muddy, and cold, but smiles abound and a spirit of optimism is palpable. Children play, families cook and sing, teens gossip. After a harrowing journey across South and Central America, the American dream is palpably just around the corner.

The people at the church, like those at similar overflowing facilities around the country, are here to seek safety and happiness. They are ready to learn, work and to fully take part in our society. But they still face tremendous short-term obstacles and have essentially no resources available to help them. Most are from countries without families or established communities in the region and so don’t have a natural network to turn to. Unlike refugees, a different category of migrants, they are not eligible for federal assistance.

The asylum-seekers in Tukwila and elsewhere need help filing their immigration cases. They need English language training. They need jobs. But most of all, in the immediate term, they need housing and basic sanitation so they can restart their lives.

What’s Needed

In December, King County allocated $3 million to rent 100 rooms in a hotel in SeaTac through June for some of the most vulnerable asylum-seekers. This is a costly, partial, and temporary solution. During our most recent cold weather emergency, many families living outside the church were moved to hotels by volunteers who used their own funds, but only for a few days.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

This group of people is very different from other homeless community members who are living unsheltered. While they certainly carry their share of trauma, they do not generally suffer from the issues that our urban unsheltered community goes through. They are ready, able, and eager to work and grow in their new community. A small amount of targeted assistance will get most asylum seekers into a place where they have work permits, a job, and stable housing.

We are calling on our local, county, and state government to step in and do what the federal government has failed to do: Care for the asylum-seekers and help them become a part of our community while they wait for their asylum cases to be adjudicated. Concerned citizens should write to their elected officials (a list of state local officials can be found on the new VoteWA Voter Portal) and let them know that helping this worthy group of new Americans should be a priority.

What is needed is a permanent resettlement center which can welcome the migrants and be a base from which local and state governments can provide assistance. Since there is no end in sight to the flow of migrants, this facility and its funding must be open-ended, not time-bound. It should be located near transit, services and amenities such as schools for the many children in the community.

Today, Salvador is living in the county-funded hotel and working as a translator and community organizer among the asylum seekers; he’s also enrolled at Seattle Central College, working toward his GED. Pedro and his sons are working in construction and building toward a life of independence in their new country.

Meanwhile, in December 2023, the most recent month for which data is available, 302,034 people were processed at the southern border, an annualized rate of 3.6 million and an increase of roughly 50 percent increase over the record-breaking rate of the most recent fiscal year.

Washington has long taken pride at being a Sanctuary State and rejecting xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment. Now is the time to invest in welcoming and embracing our new neighbors and letting them join our community with dignity.

Palmira Figueroa is an immigrant, a community organizer and long-time immigrant rights advocate. Ben Maritz is an affordable housing developer based in Seattle.

Guest Contributor, homelessness, Police

At the Black Lives Memorial Garden, 12/27/23
Photos by Elisa Chavez.

By Elisa Chavez

It’s before sunrise in Cal Anderson Park, and the place is buzzing with cops. Caution tape. Two excavators lumber like cretaceous beasts. (Google: The average daily price for Excavator rental in Seattle, WA is $1589, subject to availability.) The soil is foaming. Garden plots are being stabbed at with spades.<

I keep thinking, I was going to bring my favorite coffee creamer. I was going to make biscuits.

Rewind: yesterday. The sky is doing that delicate pastel thing. Here on earth, there’s a dozen or so of us—”us” being a fluid term that encapsulates a collection of gardening enthusiasts, anarchists, unhoused neighbors, queerdoes, and whatever the fuck I am. I am wearing a sweater with a fur collar and cuffs because you’ve got to dress up for occasions that matter. We wait for the cops, and when they don’t come, we celebrate with instant coffee, bagels, and potatoes fried on a communal skillet.

I look out at the winter sprigs of green. They’re hopeful. I read in a book about urban planning that it’s good for humans to look at plants. It soothes our brains, to say nothing of our lungs.

If you know what the Black Lives Memorial Garden is, and you’re not in favor, you’re probably thinking of filth. Disorder. Eyesores. You are a little bit right, but not for the reasons you think.

Rewind: 2020. The Black Lives Memorial Garden was, in my estimation, one of the only unalloyed goods to come from CHOP/CHAZ. When I think back to that summer, I see babies tear-gassed in their cribs. I see my friends suffering wounds at the hands of Seattle police that would take years to fully heal. I see Antonio Mays, Jr., the teenager from San Diego. He was shot in the head by CHOP security, to resounding silence from activists and much salivating from fascist trolls.

This, to me, is city magic. The bright, unstable alchemy of different people bumping up against each other. It’s not a safe magic, because every interaction with others opens us to violence and heartbreak. But the unbidden, the unlooked-for, the un-predictable–that can bring blessings into your life.

It’s an old story, when you think about it. Out of suffering, a seed. Swords to ploughshares. At a community song event in November or so, someone actually did present the group with the gift of a spade that had been forged from melted-down guns. This garden is lousy with metaphors. So okay, there’s the background. Police violence, autonomous zones, plants. The Seattle Parks Department alleges they conducted some community outreach concerning the garden in 2020 and 2021. They have not provided evidence of any outreach undertaken after 2021.

In the time since, two things have happened: The Black Lives Memorial Garden has hosted Juneteenth events, grieving circles, cooking lessons, pollinator appreciation days, and more. And Seattle’s homelessness crisis has deepened to a profound underworld of human misery.

Put simply, this area of Cal Anderson is gross.

You can go to Nextdoor if you’re hungry for details, or you can call it the natural result of human people with human bodies not having shelter. I’d guess folks congregate in this area because it’s got some of the city’s only public restrooms, as well as a bunch of underutilized spaces. There’s the totally empty wading pool, which I’ve never seen with water in it. There’s something called the “field house.” Sure, if you say so. Whatever the exact reason, the area around BLMG is a place where people feel (sort of) safe and (sort of) out of the way.

A shitty cauldron: The psychic wound of CHOP, the human-abject result of folks living unsheltered, a few plots of indigenous plants. For some of Seattle, BLMG became the scapegoat for everything wrong with the city.

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I watch a man stabbing away at the soil, trowel in hand. He’s surrounded by police, partly for the light their flashlights provide and partly, presumably, for protection against the scattering of BLMG supporters past the north end of the caution tape. As he hacks and digs, I’m reminded of my trashiest college hookup. The same frantic finger-jabs apply. “There’s not a prize in the cervix!” I told my friends later, to peals of scandalized laughter.

There’s not a prize under this earth. Not to the city. Gardeners yell, “At least let us come and help you remove the plants!” “Let someone who knows what they’re doing help!”

We yell a lot of other things too.

“Are you proud of your work?”

“You’re soulless, dishonorable people!”

“Way to uproot indigenous plants, you colonizing fucks!”

“I hope your mom leaves you for being such a bad child!”

Try to be kind: Heckling is the language of the unheard. Try to understand: It hurts when someone destroys what you’ve spent years creating. Physically.

Someone posted the deputy mayor’s phone number and said call, so I called. It was 8:37 am. I heard children in the background, the clattering of breakfast things.

Sorry dude. I didn’t want to do city stuff this early in the morning either.

The deputy mayor claimed that the mayor’s office attempted to negotiate, but “the group” that tends the garden said no. I asked him why one small group would have the final word on something that affects the rest of us. Why weren’t the residents of Capitol Hill asked what we want? He hustled me off the phone.

For what it’s worth, the gardeners didn’t say no. They said, “We can’t meet unless you promise to stop sweeping the people who are sheltering in Cal Anderson.” And that might sound unreasonable to you, but you haven’t broken bread with those folks. You haven’t heard them mourn their loved ones, or been told that the garden saved their lives. And you may not have considered that when the City of Seattle “sweeps,” they don’t measure their success in people connected to services, or length of time a public space has stayed unoccupied. They measure it in bodies moved.

Without the garden, I wouldn’t have learned that the Filson dumpsters are a great source of salvaged fabric, or signed up for a Luhshootseed newsletter, or done detective work through a man’s soggy EBT documents to help him connect to a case worker from his health insurance.

Believe me if you want, or disbelieve me. There used to be a garden. Now it’s gone.

I’d never set foot in a P-Patch. I don’t know what the P stands for. And my best friend has long since stopped asking me to water her plants when she’s out of town. Without the Black Lives Memorial Garden, I would never have learned a damn thing about indigenous plants.

Which is not the only virtuous knock-on effect the garden’s had for me. Without it, I wouldn’t have learned how to talk to strangers again. I wouldn’t have realized a long-cherished dream of acting as a personal stylist. (Seriously. I hosted a free community boutique during a Solstice party, and I swear, the clothes I fished from bins at the Goodwill Outlet came to life when the right person tried them on.) I wouldn’t have learned that the Filson dumpsters are a great source of salvaged fabric, or signed up for a Luhshootseed newsletter, or done detective work through a man’s soggy EBT documents to help him connect to a case worker from his health insurance.

Maybe I could have done these things some other way. But the fact is, I didn’t. Not until the garden.

This, to me, is city magic. The bright, unstable alchemy of different people bumping up against each other. It’s not a safe magic, because every interaction with others opens us to violence and heartbreak. But the unbidden, the unlooked-for, the un-predictable–that can bring blessings into your life.

Seattle has one less cathedral today. I hope not for forever.

Elisa Chavez has lived in Seattle for more than ten years, most of those in Capitol Hill. She is a poet who has been a Town Hall artist-in-residence and the Seattle Review of Books’ inaugural poet in residence. Her bilingual poetry project, Miss Translated, tackles identity, passing, and the things that get lost in translation.”

This post originally appeared on Medium.