Category: Equity

Affordability, City Council, Development, Equity

Last-Minute Proposal Could Gut City’s Largest Anti-Displacement Program

By Erica C. Barnett

An anti-displacement program designed to help BIPOC-led community groups develop housing and other projects is on the chopping block.

Late last Friday afternoon, Seattle City Councilmember Maritza Rivera proposed a budget proviso—a restriction on funding—that would prevent the city’s Office of Community Planning and Development (OPCD) from spending $25.3 million allocated for the Equitable Development Initiative in 2024 unless it allocates all the funds that are currently available for the program, around $53.5 million, by September, and provides the council with a detailed analysis of every project funded through EDI.

If those two things don’t happen by the September deadline, the money—most of it ($19.8 million) from the JumpStart payroll tax—would go back into the general fund and could be used to address the projected $250 million 2025 budget shortfall. About 9 percent of JumpStart—a tax on paid by the city’s largest companies on the salaries of their highest-compensated employees—is allocated by law to EDI.

Because it is unlikely that OPCD can allocate all the funds to dozens of projects in various stages of development over the next few months, Rivera’s proviso would effectively gut the program.

The EDI program provides funds to help community groups that have little or no capital development experience with site acquisition or other capital costs that are part of the larger “capital stack” used to fund complex projects, including affordable housing, child care, and community centers; in some cases, the funds help organizations that don’t have a permanent home build capacity and stability so they can grow. If the EDI funds go away, dozens of projects could collapse.

Tammy Morales, who heads the council’s land use committee and , said supporters of EDI were “surprised that there would be such a potentially huge impact on dozens of organizations and projects without notification to anybody. … I don’t know what’s motivating this. All I know is that this would be hugely destabilizing for dozens of projects.”

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Advocates for the anti-displacement initiative have noted that development projects don’t happen in a year; particularly for community groups that may be developing projects for the first time, they can take months or years, which is why the funding for EDI carries forward from year to year. “The nature of development is that sometimes it takes two or three years to get all the financing together,” Morales said.

It’s probably unreasonable, in other words, to expect a community group with no history developing major capital projects–like the Ethiopian Community in Seattle, which has been working for years to develop senior housing on the site of its existing community center on Rainier Ave. S.—to spend its entire EDI allocation right away.

At a meeting of the council’s budget committee earlier this month, Rivera characterized EDI projects as “one-time funding” that might pay for programs that need ongoing funds in future years, creating a funding cliff. “I have questions about what this one-time funding will cover and whether there were any programs being contemplated  this money that would need ongoing funding,” Rivera said.

However, a detailed EDI project list shows that these are generally capital projects, and that the initiative pays for things like site acquisition, planning for capital projects, and construction, as opposed to ongoing programs that require annual funding.

Because EDI is designed to fund projects that address displacement in communities of color, the vast majority of the projects are in Morales’ District 2, which includes all of Southeast Seattle, the most diverse part of the city. There are also a large number of projects in Joy Hollingsworth’s District 3, which includes the historically Black Central District, and Rob Saka’s District 1, which includes all of West Seattle.

Rivera’s district is one of just two council districts (the other is Bob Kettle’s District 1, which includes downtown, Magnolia, and Queen Anne), that does not include a single EDI project.

During the same budget meeting, Rivera complained that OPCD had “consistently rescheduled and delayed” meeting with her to explain EDI. In fact, OPCD director Rico Quirindongo briefed Rivera on EDI individually in her council office on at least two occasions in May, council sign-in sheets confirm. The department also did a full briefing on EDI for the the council’s land use committee, on which Rivera sits, in March. All three of these briefings occurred before last Friday, when Rivera introduced her proviso.

Earlier this year, the council killed another program designed to help community groups prevent displacement by providing density incentives for community groups that develop affordable housing. At the time, Rivera said the city should not provide new housing incentives until the city adopts a final comprehensive plan in the coming year, and suggested (incorrectly) that the city does not know what’s in the housing levy Seattle voters adopted earlier this year.

Mayor Bruce Harrell has been supportive of the EDI program in the past, saying last year that the program “embodies our One Seattle vision, bringing to the forefront innovative community-based programs that increase affordable housing and economic opportunity, and ensure vibrant cultural spaces find permanence in our city.” PubliCola has reached out to the mayor’s office for comment and will update this post if we hear back.

The council is scheduled to vote on Rivera’s amendment at its meeting at 2:00 this afternoon.

Density, Development, Equity, housing, Mayor Harrell

Planning Commission: Harrell’s Growth Plan Will Worsen Inequities and Keep Housing Unaffordable
Diagram by Matt Hutchins, from Planning Commission letter

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Planning Commission, which advises the mayor and City Council on policies related to Seattle’s growth, sent a point-by-point critique of Mayor Bruce Harrell’s proposed 20-year Comprehensive Plan Update to Harrell and Office of Planning and Community Development (OPCD) director Rico Quirondongo last week, echoing many of the issues PubliCola has identified with the status-quo proposal.

As we’ve reported, OPCD originally proposed a plan that would have included significantly more density throughout the city than the anemic version Harrell ultimately introduced, along with an “anti-displacement framework” that deleted dozens of proposals aimed at addressing ongoing harms caused by city policies, like zoning and development rules that prohibit most housing in single-family neighborhoods.

“The [Anti-Displacement] Framework, as drafted, is a list of what the City is already doing to address displacement, yet displacement has already impacted many people and continues to happen,” the commission wrote.

By failing to provide enough housing of all types, especially apartments, in more parts of the city, Harrell’s proposal perpetuates the existing “urban village” strategy, which preserves most of the city for single-family homeowners while concentrating apartments on major arterials and highways. “Upholding this pattern of economic and racial exclusion will do little to reduce disparities in housing affordability, access, and choice,” the commission wrote.

Instead of remedying the existing housing shortage and planning for continued growth in the future, the proposal assumes housing growth will slow down dramatically over the next 20 years, from about 8,000 units a year to just 5,000.

“In order to ensure everyone has a home they can afford in the neighborhood of their choice, we need to plan to increase, not reduce, our current rate of housing production” to allow  “five to eight story multifamily housing in many more areas of the city.” Specifically, the commission recommends expanding “neighborhood centers”—small, isolated where Harrell’s plan would allow three-t0-five-story apartment buildings—to include high-end neighborhoods like Laurelhurst and Seward Park, and allowing higher-density housing further away from “high-volume, high-speed” arterials, so that renters could more easily access amenities like “large parks and quiet streets for recreation” that single-family homeowners enjoy.

“The current housing market locks the most affordable homes, multifamily apartment buildings, into small areas of the city that are often along noisy and polluting major highway corridors or in areas that historically faced disinvestment,” the commissioners wrote. “If the City continues to concentrate affordable housing types like multifamily apartments in the same areas of the city, these long-term patterns of inequity will not change.”

While Harrell’s proposal technically complies with state law by allowing four housing units on all residential lots, the city envisions these units as tall, narrow townhouses, not apartments or “stacked flats,” which are generally more affordable (and accessible to people who can’t climb multiple flights of stairs.) Increasing density in formerly exclusive single-family neighborhoods to allow  small apartment buildings would make it more likely that people with modest incomes could live in these units, the commissioners wrote.

In addition to growth, the comprehensive plan includes strategies related to transportation and parking; these, too, fail to acknowledge 21st-century reality, the Planning Commission argues. Like Harrell’s back-to-office mandate for city of Seattle workers, the plan “overemphasizes centralized employment in Downtown and other Regional Centers,” despite the fact that “daily life and commuting patterns have shifted significantly with many more daily needs being met closer to home.” Acknowledging this reality would mean allowing more neighborhood businesses (not just corner stores on literal corners) and “incorporat[ing] flexibility into land use policies associated with residential and commercial uses,” the commission wrote.

As PubliCola reported, Harrell’s office deleted an OPCD recommendation to get rid of minimum parking requirements throughout the city, a decision the commission recommended reversing “to reduce housing costs and encourage alternative transportation modes.” In addition, the commissioners noted, Harrell’s plan focuses on private vehicle electrification to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—a future in which Teslas, rather than gas-fueled vehicles, clog city streets every morning and afternoon. With Seattle already “leading its peer cities in the number of cars owned per capita,” the commission argued, the city should focus on reducing vehicle trips by investing in alternatives to driving. 

It isn’t too late to weigh in on Harrell’s vision for growth, housing, and transportation in Seattle, but the deadline is approaching. The city will hold its final in-person open house on the comprehensive plan from 6 to 7:30 pm on Tuesday, April 30, at McClure Middle School on Queen Anne, followed by a virtual open house starting at 6:00 on Thursday, May 2. The public has until 5 pm on Monday, May 6, to submit comments on the proposal.

Equity, Guest Contributor, Transit

What’s So Scary About Transit Riders? 

By Anna Zivarts

“I have to ride the bus. I have to deal with the scheduling, the condition of the street, getting to and from the bus. Does the schedule work with common arrival times for work, or are you gonna be stuck somewhere an hour before? Is there somewhere you can take shelter in the case of bad weather? All that stuff that if you’re not a regular bus rider, you’re not aware of.”

  • Aileen Kane, Washington nondriver

“Because many on [transit] boards tend to be car drivers, they really haven’t internalized what it means to be a transit rider. Those decisions determine whether you as a transit rider are going to be able to keep a job, going to be able to continue to be a caregiver, going to be able to continue to go to school.”

  • Judy Jones, Washington nondriver

In the spring of 2022, I can remember sitting on a bus, attempting to keep a five-year old entertained while I dialed in to give public comment at a Ben Franklin Transit board meeting. 

That spring, the board at Ben Franklin Transit (which provides transit in the Tri-Cities region) began discussing a plan to cut the sales tax that funds transit. The resulting revenue loss would necessitate cuts to transit service, including the likely elimination of Sunday service. 

In response to this proposal, Disability Rights Washington joined with labor, local advocates and staff from Transportation Choices Coalition to fight back. We reached out to the nondrivers we knew in the region and asked them to share their stories with the media and in public testimony.

Thankfully, after a series of high-stakes meetings, the board voted against the proposed tax cuts and transit service reductions. But that day in April, as I sat on the bus listening to the first of these meetings, I got angrier and angrier. It was very clear that the transit board members proposing the tax cuts and service reductions didn’t rely on transit themselves, nor had many of them ridden a bus in recent memory.

I thought back to how I’d heard many stories like this from the other nondriver advocates I organized with, advocates who for years had been attending transit board meetings and pushing for service that worked better for the people who needed it the most. 

In the fall of 2020, Disability Rights Washington launched the Disability Mobility Initiative to start organizing nondrivers across our state. We started by trying to interview nondrivers from every legislative district about how they get around, the barriers they face, and what they would change to make their communities more accessible. To date, we have 275 stories that are documented in our nondriver storymap, the visible part of our organizing work that eventually led to state-funded research showing that nondrivers make up 30 percent of our state population.

Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’” 

In these interviews, I kept hearing anecdotes—especially from the older nondrivers who had gotten frustrated and decided to show up at a transit board meeting—about how frustrating it was to discover that transit boards were made up of elected officials who themselves didn’t rely on transit, and in many cases, thought they were too busy or their time was too valuable to use the service they managed.

Vivian Conger, a blind nondriver from Walla Walla, shared that when she attended her local transit board meeting, she was shocked to learn that one of the board members had ridden transit for the first time that very day. Blind advocate and Kitsap County resident Kris Colcock recalled: “It was suggested that the commissioners of Kitsap Transit take a day and just use the bus system. The immediate response was, ‘Well, we don’t have time to do that.’” 

In Washington State, a Public Transit Benefit Area (PTBA) is a governing body established by state code to create and run a transit agency. Current Washington state laws dictate the composition of PTBA boards, which include local elected officials from the area plus a nonvoting labor seat.

After hearing so much frustration from nondriver advocates, and after the experience with the Ben Franklin board, we collaborated with other advocates prior to the 2023 legislative session on a bill that would have added a voting seat for transit riders on these PTBA boards. Unfortunately, although the bill was drafted, opposition from transit agency lobbyists killed it before it was filed.

It’s unclear why having a voice for transit riders is so threatening. Perhaps it’s because labor has also been asking for a voting seat. Last year, they were successful in getting legislation introduced and will be working to get it passed again during the 2024 session. 

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Ensuring bus drivers have a voting seat on transit boards is critically important too, especially considering how much agencies across the state have struggled with staffing. In their 2022 report, “Bus Operators in Crisis” the national transportation think tank TransitCenter notes: “The disconnect in who holds central office and leadership positions (majority white and male) and frontline staff (majority people of color), can impact people’s commitment to the job, their perception of advancement opportunities, and overall frustrations. … Frontline workers, who are demographically more reflective of riders, have particular expertise about day-to-day operations and regularly interact with the public, yet are typically not included in decision-making.” 

There’s a similar divide between the daily experience of transit riders and transit boards. TransitCenter’s 2022 “Who Rules Transit” report notes: “Most transit agency boards in the U.S. operate without much public attention, and many are unrepresentative of the public they serve, composed of people unfamiliar with transit itself or the communities and people transit serves.”

The path to becoming an elected leader and therefore being eligible to serve on a transit board is extremely difficult for most nondrivers. After participating in the Week Without Driving, Councilmember Neal Black from Kirkland reflected, “It’s kind of hard to imagine how someone who didn’t have access to a car could do the job of a city council member. Our expectations are to be in a lot of different places, and a lot of different times. In a suburban city like ours, it’s a challenge to do that without driving, and that means there’s a large segment of our population excluded from serving in this role.” 

At the same time, many transit boards across the state struggle to get engagement and attendance from elected leaders who have many other responsibilities and priorities outside of serving on transit boards as one of their many committee assignments.

Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook.

“Most of our board members are not frequent transit riders. We recognize the direct stake that riders have in public transit, and Clallam Transit’s board discussed adding rider representation but decided against it because current Washington State law isn’t clear about whether this would be a properly constituted transit board,” said Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a Clallam Transit board member and Port Angeles City Councilmember since 2018. “We need clear state statutes that make for better representation on transit boards especially by non-drivers. This is a simple policy that ensures ‘nothing about us without us,’” he added.

Intercity Transit in Thurston County has rewritten its bylaws to include community members in their board as voting members. In fact, they have three voting community representatives, and their current chair is a community representative. Since the seats were added, every time the board composition has come up for a vote, they voted to retain these voting seats. 

Nobody wants transit to succeed more than the people who rely on it day in and day out, which is why we hope that legislation to add a voting seat for transit-dependent community members moves forward in the 2024 session. And we hope that labor also gets a voting seat, because the expertise of bus drivers is too valuable to overlook. 

Of note, not every transit agency in our state is authorized through PTBAs, although many are. King County Metro and Sound Transit both have different board structures. We hope that the change in the PTBA structure is the first step in more universal representation across all transit boards. For example, we are eager to support King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci’s suggestion that Sound Transit’s board should include rider representation.

For people who can grab their keys and drive where they need to go, transportation isn’t a major concern. But for those of use who can’t drive or can’t afford to, transportation access is something we think about for hours a day: As we’re waiting in the rain for a delayed bus, as we’re trying to figure out the schedules to transfer between one county’s system and another, as we’re mapping the least stressful, best lit, and least hilly route to an unfamiliar bus stop.

We care deeply about how transit works because it is such a major part of our every day and can make the difference between getting to do the things that connect us to our communities—things like running errands, seeing a friend, or getting to an appointment. Without functional transit, we can be stuck at home—or, if we’re lucky, reliant on a friend or family member having time to drive us. 

Instead of fighting us, transit agencies should harness this passion, this commitment, and our years of expertise to make transit better. 

Anna Zivarts is a low-vision mom and nondriver who was born with the neurological condition nystagmus. She directs the Disability Mobility Initiative at DIsability Rights Washington and launched the #WeekWithoutDriving challenge. Zivarts serves on the boards of Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium, League of American Cyclists, and Commute Seattle. In 2024, her book When Driving Isn’t an Option: Steering Us Away from Car-Dependency will be published by Island Press. 

Courts, criminal justice, Equity, King County

King County Jail Director Asks Court to Rescind Rule That Limits Youth Detention
Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention Director Allen Nance (background: King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall)
Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention Director Allen Nance (background: King County Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall)

By Erica C. Barnett

The director of King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention (DADJ), Allen Nance, has asked the state supreme court to rescind a rule barring local courts from issuing warrants against and jailing young people who violate court orders or fail to appear in court, unless the child poses a “serious threat to public safety.”

The court issued the rule in 2020 to reduce crowding in youth jails and made it permanent in 2021, sparking immediate pushback from judges and juvenile court administrators, who argued that judges need discretion to jail young people for their own good and so that they won’t commit more crimes in their communities.

In a letter to the court in April, Nance argued that judges are “uniquely situated to make informed decisions regarding the need for temporary custody of a youth following the issuance of a bench warrant and once a youth is brought before the court to have the warrant served or quashed, because they “often know the youth, their family, and social histories or have the expertise to obtain the information they need to help determine the presence of urgent and immediate necessity for a custodial response.”

For example, Nance continued, a young person may need to be held in jail because their parents “do not know where their son or daughter has been living or what challenges they face outside the home”—challenges that could include “the deadly effects of substances [such as fentanyl] that are readily accessible to youth and permeate our communities.” Although “most youth do not require custodial supervision and incarceration,” Nance wrote, “for a subset of the youth who come before juvenile court judges, a decision to issue a bench warrant or order custody may mean the difference between life and death.”

A spokesman for the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention said the department “does not track data specific to how young people who are released in their communities while awaiting resolution of their court issues may end up harming themselves or their community.”

However, the spokesman continued, the views Nance expressed in his letter “are about doing what is in the best interest of young people and what also promotes community safety. Proper judicial oversight is required to ensure that both the best interest of young people as well as the community are taken into consideration.” The letter, he added, is limited to the court rule restricting warrants for failure to appear and violating court orders. “We continue to advance our commitment to find alternatives to incarceration whenever possible, in the least restrictive environment that achieves the safety goals for youth and the community,” the spokesman said.

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Anita Khandelwal, who directs the county’s Department of Public Defense, says if the court gets rid of the rule restricting warrants for youth who don’t pose an imminent threat, the most likely outcome is a return to pre-COVID policy, in which judges issued warrants “without examining whether the youth posed a serious threat to public safety,” including situations where “a youth didn’t come to court or wasn’t at home when they were supposed to be.”

The result, she says, will be a spike in warrants and youth incarceration, especially for young people of color; in 2019, before the court issued the rule, between 82 and 84 percent of warrants issued by King County Juvenile Court judges in 2019 were for youth of color, according to Khandelwal.

In a letter asking state Supreme Court Chief Justice Steven González to maintain the rule, dozens of advocates and defense attorneys argued that incarcerating young people harms their physical and mental health, disrupts their education, and worsens the racial disproportionality of the entire criminal legal system. “Because the juvenile legal system is entangled with many other institutions that have perpetuated racist practices like policing, housing, education, and employment discrimination, limiting the circumstances under which a youth can be incarcerated due to a warrant in a juvenile offense proceeding protects our youth and enables a more racially just future,” the letter says.

King County, under County Executive Dow Constantine, has vowed to shut down the youth jail by 2025, although that pledge has been coupled with an increase in youth incarceration and worsening conditions at the facility. So far this year, an average of 34 kids are incarcerated at the Clark Children and Family Justice Center in Seattle every day, an increase of almost 20 percent over  .

In a letter to Khandelwal, Constantine’s labor relations director, Megan Pedersen, said the county executive “has always empowered county leaders to weigh in on policy matters based on their operational vantage point and subject matter expertise. … This issue highlights the complexity we navigate with criminal justice issues within the Executive Branch given competing policy objectives.”

Khandelwal has asked to add Nance’s letter to the agenda for the next meeting of the county’s Care and Closure Advisory Committee, which makes recommendations on a path to closing down the youth jail; that meeting will be on Monday, June 24 at 4pm.

Equity, King County, Mayor Harrell, Transit

Sound Transit Board Adopts Major Last-Minute Changes to 2016 Light Rail Plan, Skipping Chinatown and First Hill

By Erica C. Barnett

After five hours of public testimony and a lengthy, often contentious debate, the Sound Transit board voted Thursday to adopt as its “preferred option” for the light rail extension through downtown Seattle a last-minute, back-of-the-napkin alternative that eliminates two long-planned stations serving the Chinatown-International District (CID) and First Hill neighborhoods in favor of new stations at Pioneer Square and just north of the current Stadium Station. The plan represents a stark departure from the Sound Transit 3 package voters approved in 2016, which included both the CID and “Midtown” stations.

The board also voted to keep a Fourth Avenue “shallower” station option on the table for further study.

King County Executive Dow Constantine, who promoted the new “north-south” option in his recent State of the County speech, said keeping Fourth on the table would give people “false hope” about the possibility of a future station in Chinatown, while arguing, along with Harrell, that skipping the CID entirely was what “the community” wanted.

But the meeting, which I covered in real time on Twitter, starkly illustrated what should have been obvious to Sound Transit board members all along: Far from being a monolith united in opposition to a station in Chinatown, the CID community is starkly divided, with a large contingent favoring a station that actually serves the neighborhood, even if it means ten years or more of construction on Fourth Avenue.

Advocates for both alternatives sorted themselves, over the course of the meeting, into two sign-waving groups on either side of the meeting room—black T-shirts and white signs against the CID station on the left, and a larger group of red T-shirts and signs supporting the station on the right. Each group clapped and hollered when someone testified in favor of their position—a clear sign, if the board needed one, that the prevailing narrative about a single “community” opposed to the CID station had always been reductive and condescending.

This wasn’t what County Executive Dow Constantine and Mayor Bruce Harrell had in mind when they introduced the new  “north-south” alternative just two months ago. Both men have argued that skipping over the CID is the best way to avoid harming a vulnerable community. Constantine has also portrayed a second Pioneer Square station as an opportunity to develop a whole “new neighborhood” where the King County Administration Building and downtown jail currently stand, part of what he’s calling his “Civic Campus Initiative.”

“Quite candidly, [the new option] came organically from the community. There are no backroom deals being made. We’ve been trying to be transparent. We’re trying to work openly and thinking out loud as things evolve.” —Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell

Harrell, who attended the meeting virtually from out of town, has argued that moving the station out of Chinatown is the only option that prevents Sound Transit from repeating the region’s legacy of disinvestment, redlining, and harmful development in the neighborhood, which was divided by I-5 in the 1960s.

“A construction period for 10 to 12 years could cause irreparable harm,” Harrell said. “And this is a treasure; this is a gem.” Suggesting repeatedly that Fourth Avenue supporters were looking at the issue from a  “pure transit plane,” Harrell said equity was more important than what makes sense for transit riders who may just be passing through the neighborhood.

“Quite candidly, [the new option] came organically from the community,” Harrell said. As someone on the pro-CID station side of the room yelled, “Not true!” Harrell continued, “There are no backroom deals being made. We’ve been trying to be transparent. We’re trying to work openly and thinking out loud as things evolve.”

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Many community members who testified—including the leaders of the Seattle CID Preservation and Development Authority (SCIPDA) and Uwajimaya—argued that the majority of people in the CID actually support keeping the station in the neighborhood, as long as Sound Transit provides mitigation for construction impacts. “Simply put, this is the best choice for the future of our community,” said Jared Johnson, the co-executive director of SCIPDA. “To have a world-class transit hub at the doorstep of the CID means a future full of opportunity and connectivity for our residents and businesses.”

King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove, who cast the lone “no” vote on the new north-south option, said, “Construction impacts are temporary. The benefits of transit in a community are permanent.”

Not only will eliminating the CID station kill all future hope of a single Seattle transit hub where people can transfer between Sounder, Amtrak, light rail, and buses, it will cut off access to the neighborhood from Southeast Seattle, another community that has been neglected and poorly served by major infrastructure projects, like Sound Transit’s current at-grade light rail line. Under the preferred alternative, future riders between the south end and the CID will have to transfer between two stations at SoDo or go to Pioneer Square, transfer, and head back in the direction they came from.

Additionally, riders from the CID who want to access the new lines will have to either walk north to a new station near City Hall, at Fifth and James, or travel north several blocks from a station at the current site of a Salvation Army shelter in a forbidding, industrial part of south downtown crisscrossed by multi-lane arterial roads and bordered on the south by the elevated I-90 on-ramps, as the Urbanist has documented.

“It’s powerful to look out over the hearing room and see seniors, people of color, calling on us to support the Fourth Avenue option. Construction impacts are temporary. The benefits of transit in a community are permanent.”—King County Councilmember Dave Upthegrove

As public commenters with limited mobility noted Thursday, walking long distances, especially up steep hills like the one on James St., isn’t an option for everybody; in practice, the new “north” and “south” stations will be inaccessible to them and many other people, particularly elders, living in the area.

Although Constantine said continuing to study the Fourth Avenue option would create “false hope” for those who support it, both he and Harrell joined a strong board majority in voting for an amendment by King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci and Washington State Department of Transportation director Roger Millar to continue studying that alternative.

Balducci was less successful, however, with another amendment (also co-sponsored by Millar) that would re-connect the “spine” of the system—which will be split into segments when expansion lines to Ballard and West Seattle open —preserving the existing connection between South Seattle and the CID and keeping a one-seat ride from Lynnwood to Tacoma.

Constantine, in a back-and-forth with Sound Transit planning director Don Billen, argued that the board rejected a similar plan in 2015 for reasons that still apply today. “We have to stop going back and reconsidering everything we’ve ever decided,” he concluded.

Balducci, exasperated, responded that the only reason she proposed her alternative in the first place was because Constantine just put two brand-new, never-before-considered stations on the table. “The reason I bring this up now is not just because I want to re-litigate things we thought about eight years ago, but because there’s a significant new proposal on the table that changes the way the system works,” Balducci said.

The cost and feasibility of the new stations and the tunnel that would connect them is unknown, as is the cost of mitigation the agency may have to provide for eliminating the Midtown Station, which would have served First Hill. If the north-south option goes forward, it will be the second time Sound Transit has cut First Hill out of its plans; when the agency eliminated the original First Hill station in 2005, it ended up having to pay for a new First Hill streetcar.

Although Seattle City Councilmember Debora Juarez said eliminating a station in First Hill would not raise the same equity concerns as building a light rail station in the CID, the Transportation Choices Coalition has noted that thousands of the 15,500 riders who would commute to that station are hospital workers who commute from outside the city, including Pierce and South King County.

Several Sound Transit board members raised concerns not merely about the details of the new station proposal, but about the implications of moving forward so decisively on station options that have barely been studied, have no engineering behind them, and whose true costs are still unknown. Although current cost estimates put the Fourth Avenue “shallower” option as much as $800 million more expensive than the “baseline” alternative, that baseline—a hub at Fifth Avenue that would have provided the most direct access to existing transit lines—was rejected long ago because of equity concerns, and should probably be retired as a point of comparison. In addition, much of the additional cost would come from replacing a City of Seattle-owned viaduct near Union Station—a disruptive project that will need to be completed eventually, whether the light rail station happens or not.

A small contingent of advocates showed up yesterday to make the case for station options at the other end of the downtown segment in South Lake Union, where the board is considering two alternative sites along Denny Way—a preferred alternative at Westlake Avenue, and a second option at Terry Ave. N. Harrell proposed keeping the Terry option on the table because of construction impacts at Westlake.

Equity, Guest Contributor, Transit

From the Other Side of I-5: Little Saigon Weighs In On Sound Transit’s Light Rail Expansion In the CID

Sound Transit's shallow Fourth Avenue Station option, one of several alternatives the agency is considering for light-rail expansionBy Friends of Little Sài Gòn

Sound Transit has the power to shape equitable development in neighborhoods south of Seattle’s downtown for generations. The political discourse over where to site a station essential for light rail expansion and potentially other non-car modes of transportation has become another existential battleground, falsely pitting our community’s fears of displacement, gentrification, and desire for transit equity in a city of hyper wealth inequality against the simultaneous and very urgent need for connected, reliable, efficient transportation options as a means to climate resilience. 

Based on the limited information we have about the newly proposed North and/or South of Chinatown/International District options introduced less than three months ago, we urge Sound Transit to select the 4th Avenue Station option with upfront mitigation commitments informed by small businesses, residents, and community members throughout the construction phase. In our review, the North/South options have similar risks of displacement and disruption as the 4th Ave. alternative, with few of the potential improvements, such as expanded accessibility, ease of use, and residential and commercial reinvestment.  

We believe the 4th Ave alternative(s) will deliver the greatest long-term benefit to our communities, including our families and neighbors who come from the south end or west side via transit. And it will shift our transit system toward more accessibility and one that takes our climate crisis seriously. 

To hold public officials accountable, we must commit to ongoing multi-year organizing, together, in order to advocate for legislation that will codify mitigation commitments to increase cultural place-keeping and affordable housing in the CID. This includes securing necessary budget allocations that resource efforts like the Little Saigon Landmark Project, which will include affordable housing, including family-sized units, and micro retail spaces. 

We believe the 4th Ave alternative(s) will deliver the greatest long-term benefit to our communities, including our families and neighbors who come from the south end or west side via transit. And it will shift our transit system toward more accessibility and one that takes our climate crisis seriously. 

The ongoing attention to racial justice in climate justice is coincidentally a reminder about the legacy of the decision to  build I-5 freeway. The consequences of this are still felt today, in a cordoned-off Little Saigon bisected from the rest of the CID.

Regardless of the alignment Sound Transit chooses, without proactive mitigation commitments for the CID, we foresee further destabilization and displacement, isolation, and loss of culture and identity that has already occurred in this historic neighborhood for multiple generations. We must organize together to ensure this does not happen. Before Little Saigon was home to the Vietnamese community, it was considered “Indian country” and it was also home to Black Seattleites. We reject the idea that we must choose between a connected neighborhood that will bring new developments at the risk of displacing those who currently call the CID home—or a splintered neighborhood resistant to change. It is not either-or. Nor are our communities a monolith. 

When Friends of Little Sài Gòn (FLS) was established in 2011, our mission was centered in preserving  and enhancing Little Saigon’s cultural, economic, and historic vitality. We envision Seattle’s Little Saigon as the hub of our Vietnamese American community, where families and businesses are thriving. Twelve years later, that mission has not changed. When the pandemic struck and Little Saigon was hit especially hard by public health measures and anti-Asian bias, many businesses shut their doors, not knowing if or when they would re-open. We worked with small businesses to connect them to resources or translate information essential to staying safe while staying open. 

Taking away an option that Sound Transit arrived at that is endorsed by thousands of community members and many anchoring nonprofit and business groups in the eleventh hour will erode trust and goodwill, and be a tremendous waste of taxpayer resources.

Friends of Little Sài Gòn is comprised of small business owners, artists and culture workers, educators, and advocates, most of us first-generation Americans with the shared commonality that we all love this neighborhood and what it means to us and our city. Many of us have worked here day-in and day-out, some of us for decades, and watched the neighborhood change—while others sought work in Seattle specifically because of its concentration of Asian Americans and their ethnic enclaves. 

And in service to this community, we remember the half-measures taken by the local government. The First Hill Streetcar—a project that was supposed to connect the CID to downtown and SLU—was scrapped after years of construction and disruption to the neighborhood, leaving a disconnected line with limited range. Just as connection and infrastructure have failed to materialize, so, too, have the benefits that it was supposed to bring. As our neighborhood is still recovering from three years of pandemic impacts, and decades of uncoordinated transportation planning without us, we are seeing higher residential rental and commercial vacancy rates when culturally relevant small businesses are essential in keeping our neighborhood vibrant, accessible, and safe.

We stand by the recent productive discourse between Sound Transit, elected officials, and the community members toward finding the most beneficial ways to implement a 4th Avenue option that will meaningfully connect the CID to other neighborhoods, to connect our elders, aunties, uncles, and cousins who live elsewhere but still consider the neighborhood ‘home’ and rely on transit to get here.

Taking away an option that Sound Transit arrived at that is endorsed by thousands of community members and many anchoring nonprofit and business groups in the eleventh hour will erode trust and goodwill, and be a tremendous waste of taxpayer resources. We urge Sound Transit, King County, and the City of Seattle to make the right decision in this once-in-a-century opportunity. 

Tam Dinh—Board President; Josh Brevoort; Hong Chhuor; Vy Nguyen; Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar; Huy Pham; Steve Scheele; Leeching Tran

Friends of Little Sài Gòn, Board of Directors