White Center Now: The blog about White Center

Big Brother Big Sister is having their “Big Night Out” Today.  Full Tilt is donating 30% of the days till to them. So are a number of other businesses in the area. Follow the link below to find some place that interests you.

http://www.bbbs.org/site/lookup.asp?c=guLUJbMRKtH&b=4696831

Many of the businesses will have represententive from Big Brother on hand to answer any questions that you may have.

The P-I analyzed driver-attack reports on Metro routes and came up with a “top 10” list that includes Route 120, which runs through White Center (here’s the map). Even one attack is too many, of course, but do take note that the number of attacks that landed Route 120 on this list is … 6 per year.

Interesting data on the North Highline Fire District website – a running total of how many calls NHFD has handled so far this year (updated less than two weeks ago): 828 fire calls, 3,716 aid calls, through 11/17/08. (That compares to 1,051 and 4,021 for all of 2007, so fire calls are running at a slower pace, aid calls at a faster pace.) Those numbers and a few more are on this webpage.

Beyond One Language – Más allá de una lengua

A literary event celebrating the Spanish language and Latino/a culture

The second in a series of popular literary readings will happen Friday, December 5, from 6 to 9 PM, at Taqueria del Rio, 10230 16th Avenue SW in Seattle’s White Center neighborhood.

The goal of these events is to promote the Spanish language – as well as native Latin American languages – via literary readings by Spanish language authors. For the December 5th event, local writers Javier Amaya and Paola Casla Taylor will be reading their work. Zita Paulino will also be there, and will read the poetry of Irma Pinedo Santiago in their native Zapotec language. English translations of the readings will be provided by House of Writers / Casa de Escritores, Inc., so that non-Spanish speakers can join the celebration.

The event is free to the public, and an outdoor setting resembling a Mexican town has been secured in order to enhance the experience. In addition to the readings, there will be a demonstration of traditional Jarabe dance, a book exchange, music, and food.

This event is sponsored by:

• The Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs

• House of Writers / Casa de Escritores, Inc.

• The Seattle Department of Neighborhoods

• Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior

• Hedgebrook

• Viva la Música

• 4Culture

• La Sala

• Mujeres of the Northwest

# # #

For more information about this event, or to schedule an interview with one of the featured readers, please call Laura González at 206-320-8780 or e-mail her at lago1212@msn.com.

Thanks to Shorewood Christian School for e-mailing to call our attention to that clip they posted on YouTube after 5th graders went to work at the Burien-Highline Food Bank; we told you earlier about the school’s food drive to help the White Center Food Bank (which you can help anytime by donating online; here’s the link). Here’s the full news release about their latest project: Read the rest of this entry »

From the White Center Now Events Calendar: After several weeks in “soft launch” mode, the White Center Swap Meet and Flea Market (in the remodeled ex-skating-rink building) celebrates its official “grand opening” this weekend, with hours changing to better accommodate early shoppers and sellers: It’ll now be open 8:30 am-4:30 pm, Saturdays and Sundays.

The modern debate on urban housing policy takes as its starting point the post-World War II period when the country invested heavily in developing cities and its suburbs.  An outgrowth of the New Deal was  the belief that government should ameliorate the problem of housing for those unable to afford the cost of commercial or private housing.   The response to the housing problem was a mixture of modernist thought, good intentions, government bureacracy, racial attitudes and local politics.   While this subject is vast and would require tomes to fully comprehend it, we are here most concerned with the present moment in Seattle’s urban design and specifically the philosophy behind the Greenbridge Project.

The model against which much of the current thinking pivots is the Chicago Housing Authority and its notorious housing projects such as the Cabrini-Green projects.  Witold Rybczynski is an architect and an astute observer, with a sweeping knowledge of urbanism and a very accessible writing style.  I was introduced to Rybczynski’s writing when I was designing a home about 15 years ago and happened upon his meditative tome, “The Most Beautiful House in the World.”  Rybczynski took Cabrini-Green as a paradigm for the development of urbanism for a 1993 article entitled, “Bauhaus blunders: architecture and public housing – 1950s public housing estates Cabrini-Green, Chicago, Illinois, US“:

Cabrini-Green is but one of the most notorious housing projects known for its drab and sterile concrete towers of festering poverty, rampant crime, trash-strewn stairwells and unmitigated squalor.  Most of the towers are now being torn down.

The oldest housing on the site dates from 1941, not long after the Housing Act of 1937 that signaled the first involvement of the federal government in funding housing for what there then called the deserving poor. Frances Cabrini Homes was named after a soon-to-be-canonized Chicago nun, famous for her charitable work, and it was built on the site of a notorious Italian-American slum kown as Little Hell. The new housing consisted of almost 600 dwellings in two- and three-story brick buildings; the total area of the project was relatively small: sixteen acres. The unassuming architecture of these row homes–every dwelling had its own front door on the street–was not substantially different from the popular urban housing then being built by the private sector in the surrounding city. The brick facades even incorporated some decorative elements. The overall design, like that of most prewar public housing projects, is modest but unremarkable; it was taken for granted that poor people would prefer to live lie everyone else.  (emphasis added)

Although Cabrini-Green has become synonymous with large government-run slums, they were not the largest or worst of its kind.  Hunt D. Bradford has written a concise piece on the Robert Taylor Homes, a larger Chicago Housing project in piece entitled, “What went wrong with public housing in Chicago? A history of the Robert Taylor homes.”

Cabrini-Green towers undergoing demolition.

Cabrini-Green Tower

Crime was rampant in Cabrini-Green

The consensus it that the project tended to congregate poverty and stigmatize the residents.  As articulated by Rybczynski:

Although Cabrini-Green occupies almost as much land as the Loop itself, it is not the biggest public housing project in Chicago–that dubious honor belongs to Robert Taylor Homes, said to be the largest public housing project in the world. But Cabrini-Green was the first of the big projects, and it did become a model for how municipal authorities would rehabilitate deteriorated inner-city real estate and provide large amounts of public housing. The solution–bulldoze existing houses and replace them with tall apartment slabs spaced far apart in open parkland (created byh closing off existing streets to make immense “supper-blocks”)–reflected the prevalent social and architectural thinking of the time. As Bauer pointed out, his was not how the majority of Americans really lived–or would choose to live–but the idealistic housing reformers felt that they knew best.

Architects and planners maintained that high-rise buildings were better because they occupied less land, and provided their occupants with sunlight and unobstructed views, but the Chicago Housing Authority was probably attracted to Modern architecture for the same reason that many commercial developers were partial to the designs of Mies van der Rohe–their cost. The truth is that standardized, stripped-down, and undecorated tall buildings can be erected quickly and inexpensively. It is also likely that the plain architecture suited the puritan view of many Americans–and certainly of the housing reformers–who felt that social housing should not be fancy. Soon, utilitarian high-rise apartment towers were accepted as the best solution for public housing.

High-rise slums

However, it was one thing to build apartment towers for the upper-middle-class, as Mies did, and quite another to adopt them as solutions for housing the poor. The well-off have doormen, janitors, repairmen, and baby-sitters; the poor have none of these things. Without restricted access, the lobbies and corridors were vandalized; without proper maintenance, elevators broke down, staircases became garbage dumps, roofs leaked, and broken windows remained unreplaced; without baby-sitters, single mothers were stranded in their apartments, and children roamed unsupervised sixteen floors below. In Cabrini-Green, there were problems with the design of the buildings: To save money, no private balconies or terraces were provided, access galleries and elevator lobbies were left open to the elements (in frigid Chicago!), and despite the lack of air-conditioning, the unshaded apartment windows of the tall buildings faced east and west.

Equally unsuccessful was the overall layout which dispensed with the familiar street and supplanted it with parkland, although what little landscaping there was quickly disappeared and was replaced by beaten dirt and asphalt parking lots. In any case, the open pedestrian spaces were problematic: windy, unappealing, and more crime-prone than conventional streets and sidewalks overlooked by individual homes. In the name of housing the poor, the well-meaning social reformers of the 1950s invented a new type of urbanism, quite foreign to any previous American ideal of city planning. It is hardly surprising that the projects acquired a social stigma. This, as well as crime, drugs, and poor management, explains why today one-third of the apartments at Cabrini-Green remain unoccupied [and are now being demolished].

The reaction to the failure of Cabrini-Green style projects was a return to a style termed, the New Urbanism.  Again,  Rybczynski:

Which brings us to the Greenbridge, High Point and Holly Park developments in Seattle.  Each of these projects reflects completely the philosophy of the New Urbanism and the rejection of the Cabrini-Green model.   The development are designed to mix inhabitants of different income levels.  As well, the housing is of a human scale with an emphasis on street life, walkability and sustainability.   Most critically, these developments aim to look like housing, that anyone, regardless of their station in life, would choose to live in.

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

– W.S. Merwin

Almost four months have gone by now since your contributor team started White Center Now to share the White Center (and vicinity) news, information, opinions, photos, and video that wasn’t turning up anywhere else. And we have only just begun. Your participation — with comments, tips, e-mail — is vital, and we are thankful for it. If anything major happens today, you can count on reading about it here, but in the meantime, let’s hope for a quiet and pleasant holiday; may yours be truly joyful.

We always find the cooking works much better when we’re caffeinated: Ricardo says Cafe Rozella will be open in the morning. And Salvadorean Bakery has a sign up saying they’ll be open 8 am-5 pm.

As posted on CL: White Center Jubilee Days needs “a new logo and an artist to create it.” Interested? gmc_tile@comcast.net; here’s the website from this past summer’s event.

If you are interested, we are covering tonight’s announcement of Seattle Public Schools closure/changes plans live at West Seattle Blog. Not far from White Center, it’s reported that Arbor Heights Elementary will be on the list (and one reader has said that in turn, another “program” may move into that building) – so there could be WC-vicinity effects. You can see our updates here.

We’ve also written about this on West Seattle Blog, but White Center businesses and others may also be interested in helping a school that’s about to move to WC — West Seattle Montessori. They’ve lost their longtime WS home because of a development project, and they’re renovating a building next to the King County Library’s White Center branch, in hopes they’ll be ready to move in during the winter break. First, they’ve got a fundraising auction coming up December 5th, and they’re looking for donations for the auction as well as some help for the move – here’s what Sandra Kutz-Russell told us:

As for the auction, we need anything and everything; we are grateful for each item we are given! We will have both a silent auction and live auction. Keep in mind that we are a little auction with big dreams! At other auctions I have attended, trips, condo weekends, behind the scenes tours, chef taught cooking classes, signed books, CDs and sports equipment are always top sellers. Dinners are popular and services too! Because our auction is so close to the many winter holidays, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and Eid Al-Adha related items would be well received. Anything handmade seems to sell very well!

We are a school in need of help, help with our auction, help with the move, help with new playground equipment and rubber playground surface. Heck, the fence alone cost $11,000! Can we ask for a donation of printing services or truck rentals and boxes? What about a moving company or even plants for the landscaping? We do need a tree moved! It is a Japanese cherry tree that was planted in memory of a 1st grader’s mother who passed away of cancer. That little girl started college this year!

I can be contacted by e-mail, or by calling the school at 206 935-0427 and leaving a message for anyone on the auction committee, Brenda, Renee and Sandra.

You can e-mail Sandra at: skutzrussell@yahoo.com

… 7 pm tonight, Highland Park Action Committee meeting, 11th/Holden. These are your neighbors and they have a lot going on – not just the fight against a city jail coming to this area – and could use your help. Fun bunch, too. Find out more in this West Seattle Blog Forum post; we’ll be at the meeting and will post to White Center Now and WSB.

Jim Diers and Barack Obama have a common link as successful community organizers. To check it out read the column by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times this summer.  The link is: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2004456334_danny04.html

Here’s a portion from Westneat’s column:

Galluzzo trained college-grad Diers in how to organize a fractious community. They formed SESCO, the South End Seattle Community Organization. It was a powerhouse, one of the most successful neighborhood groups in city history. It killed the incinerator.

Diers went on to head Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods and write a book on bottom-up organizing, called “Neighbor Power.”

Galluzzo stayed in Seattle for four years, then moved to Chicago. Not long after, he trained another raw college grad looking for a purpose, named Barack Obama.

After leaving the Department of Neighborhoods in 2002, Jim worked for a year as Interim Director of the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association and for three years as Executive Director of the South Downtown Foundation.

Currently, Jim spends most of his time at the University of Washington, where he teaches courses in architecture and social work and supports community initiatives with faculty and students across all disciplines. Jim also speaks frequently in other cities as a faculty member for the Asset-Based Community Development Institute and as the author of Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way. Jim is also a denizen of White Center and Cafe Rozella.

(Thanks to Ron Richardson for the link to Danny Westneat’s column.)

You can read more about Al here and here’s the book about the battle, written by Bobby Kennedy’s son.

Signed:  Ron Richardson

You have to hand it to Bush & Company, they were spot on when they proclaimed that the free market would most assuredly take care of such problems as affordable housing.  Who could have known, a mere three years ago, with housing prices skyrocketing and rents pricing out most renters, that a social revolution was brewing.  Social reformers and liberals cried out for government aid to build low income housing.  Who knew that the mind behind Bush had a smashing plan for bringing down the cost of housing across the board and across the nation?  Genius, pure genius!   Drive the economy into the ditch and pretty soon you are picking up quarter-million dollar homes for $100K in Florida and California.  Here in Seattle, rents have dropped dramatically and landlords are offering incentives to get their units occupied.  Problem is no one has the money to snatch the cheap real estate.  Ah, the magic of the free market at work.

What, you may well ask, does this have to do with the Greenbridge development?   Greenbridge is more than a housing project, it is a master plan for the community.  Greenbridge, and High Point, were developed with certain assumptions in mind.

The project, launched in 2001 with a grant from the federal Hope VI program — the same program that has contributed to the redevelopment of High Point and Holly Park — is supposed to include 1,025 living units. That’s a lot more housing than Park Lake held, but a lot less of it will be subsidized for the poor. The mix is supposed to include 300 rent-subsidized units, 353 workforce rental units, and 372 homes for sale at market rates. This represents a net loss of 269 rent-subsidized units. Instead of maintaining a large pocket of low-income housing in White Center, the county decided to disperse.

As well, the project was developed before the economy hit the squids and before the current real estate meltdown.  Hence, the criticism that some of the economic assumptions underlying the project were wrong.

The King County Housing Authority built the first part of Greenbridge at the height of the real estate boom, when prices for everything were sky-high. The sale of lots for market-rate housing was supposed to reimburse the county some of the cost. By the time the housing authority offered its first relatively small group of market-rate lots for sale, the market had plunged. Only one developer bid on the land, at a price way lower than expected. Having bought high, the county felt it couldn’t afford to sell low. It retracted its request for proposals. For now, the single-family portion of Greenbridge is on hold until the market picks up.

As well, some readers of this blog have expressed concern that the early learning center is a lot of wasted money, destined more for monuments than for education.   Needless to say, Greenbridge and its constituent parts have no shortage of critics.  This is so, despite the very involved political process used to  formulate its goals.  Unlike private developments, the development Greenbridge required input from a great many constituent groups.  As well, the philosophy behind Greenbridge incorporates the revolution in urban planning that did away with such government-manufactured ghettos such as Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green towers.  When all is said and done, Greenbridge is supposed to be a place that is safe, pleasant and attractive.  And it will be organically connected to the larger White Center Community.

More to come, but feel free to jump in with your observations and comments.    (As always, be civil, or your comment will be deleted.)  In the interim, here are some pictures taken on November 23^rd, showing the current progress.

Click pic to play video

What he had to say was almost as intriguing as what he had to play; maybe that’s why the show listing called it “White Center Weird Fest.” That’s Calvin Johnson, Saturday night at Full Tilt Ice Cream.

Greenbridge and High Point are major developments in the West Seattle and White Center communities.  Each is well in progress and the results are already changing the faces of the respective communities.  Emotions often run high when discussing the planning and execution of these mega-projects.  So join in a discussion of Greenbridge and the future of White Center.

First online report is from KOMO News – says one person’s been shot and is undergoing CPR. Deputies are searching the mall, according to the scanner. More as we get it. 4:31 PM UPDATE: We will post any major developments here when the info becomes clearer – but we will be tracking it more closely for now at partner site West Seattle Blog (here’s the post that’ll be updated) 4:53 PM UPDATE: Times says 2 victims, which is what we also heard on the scanner a few minutes ago. No word on conditions. 9 PM UPDATE: We know a lot more about the victims. A 16-year-old boy is dead, a 15-year-old boy in the hospital. No one under arrest yet. The WSB post linked earlier in this one has first-person stories from local people who were at the mall when it happened.