Comments

1
Please excuse the crudity of the model. I didn’t have time to build it to scale or paint it.
2
I loved living at Yesler Terrace when I was a kid. I really hope they do a good job with this project, because we need low-income housing in the city, and lots of it.
3
man any of these would be better than what is there now. for sure.

i like lids, especailly for a place with so many residential units.
4
Forgive if this is a stupid question, but isn't the new wave to embed subsidized housing in the midst of non-subsidized housing? Rather than congregate it in one place and create slums?
5
@4, this plan is for a mix of low-income and market rate units.

I really, really hope they don't shortchange the shops. There MUST BE SHOPS. And yes, streets that go through, and are completely lined with shops.
6
@4,

As I understand it, a bunch of market rate development is being incorporated into the redevelopment plans - including stuff like office space and other non-housing uses.

Given the less than stellar history SHA has had in selling the market rate stuff in their Hope VI projects (New Holly/High Point/etc), this may not work out as well as they are assuming it will.

And Dominic, don't hold your breath waiting for SHA to include a net increase in very low-income housing on this site - they didn't do so at previous major redevelopment projects, and there is no indication that they intend to do so at Yesler Terrace.

In general, while I appreciate a lot of what SHA does, one ought to take a great deal of what they say and promise with more than a few grains of salt.

7
Thanks for point out the playing kids were black. The Stranger can always be depended on to report race when it makes no difference and adds nothing to the story. And then not report it when it is of paramount importance (like when describing the roving band of street rats in the U-District, assaulting women).
8
the roving bands appear to be different. i doubt race has much of a connection, meks. the guys were ostensibly caucasian, but in case you didn't notice, people are much more mixed than they used to be.
9
I'd sure like to see the First Hill streetcar line go through this new neighborhood, ideally on a new street with moderate/reasonable grades.

Current maps show it on Boren, a street inhospitable to pedestrians, jammed with traffic during rush hour, and a long walk from the west side of the YT neighborhood.

With a little creativity, the new streetcar can be a real peoplemover.
10
urban decay?! WTF? Dom you really ought to visit the places you write about. If this is what "urban decay" looks like then move me in STAT.
11
@ 10) I'm reading a report from the SHA that describes a tenant's apartment covered in "smelly brown water." The sewer line overflowed, and when plumbers sent a camera down to check out the problem, it showed "crushed cement pipe." Lots of the plumbing infrastructure is falling apart. I did go to the site on Wednesday night, despite your claim that I didn't, and I saw the retaining walls crumbling and the sidewalks splitting. Yesler Terrace is quite literally decaying.
12
@9

Great idea.
13
Dominic, I'm extremely surprised by how uncritical of SHA this post is. After you had the gall to call a Seattle Times reporter a "stupid fucking credulous hack," how on earth can you possibly justify "reporting" that doesn't involve talking to the residents' association, the Displacement Coalition, neighborhood organizations, or any civic leaders who have been working on this issue for YEARS?

Nothing on Hope VI. A waft of smells from residents' kitchens without bothering to actually talk to any? I guess there is no need to talk to people who live in a "DEAD ZONE"?
14
By the way, here's a history of Yesler Terrace I wrote 6 years ago just as SHA was beginning to direct Hope VI to YT:

http://www.historicseattle.org/preservat…
15
everybody loves trevor!
16
I have worked in Greenbridge, New Holly, Rainier Vista and High Point, and I think the mixed income plan has worked really quite well. Some (Holly Park, Rainier Vista) have done better than others (High Point) but overall, it seems like a good idea.

It will be interesting to see how Yesler Terrace pans out. I hate to see the low-rise "townhomes" go away, but the density is necessity, and will hopefully create a workable neighborhood for everyone involved.

On a side note, I always have to giggle when people talk about "the projects" in Seattle. All of them are more like a multi-cultural Mayberry than a Cabrini Green.

17
How much to live in one of the blue buildings?
18
As one who is both a planner and social justice advocate I am finding the process going quite well. SHA unlike the majority of housing authorities around the country, is maintaining it's housing stock. When people talk about increasing it, that requires money and Feds don't pay for new housing like they used to.

Local partnerships and creative financing are the key and until we push local developers to increase their participation, pass some incentives and mandates that have real teeth to build low-income and 50% AMI housing you can't really yell at SHA for being unable to build more with less.

This mixed income experiment is a good idea. It allows SHA to survive as an entity and since there is no HOPE VI or VII or VIII, then they have to find ways to do it on their own. Doubling the low income housing would be great, but each unit costs about 250,000 to build on average, same for parking costing about 30,000 per space. This money doesn't come from Obama's money tree (yet), maybe it will, but as it stands your vote didn't change the realities of federal housing policy.

A city wide housing levy that combines the efforts of SHA, Seattle Office of Housing, CHHIP, and private partners could make this work....again political will and policy wonks will have to get off of their hesitation train and make it happen.
19
This is the most amazing piece of crap written about public housing, I have seen in a long time. You smelled fried food and bouillon cubes? More like noodles, rice, seafood, chicken, mixed vegetables, lentils and enjira. You dropped by Yesler on Wednesday and found broken sidewalks and crumbling retaining walls? Try going to any neighborhood in Seattle and walk around a bit. You will find broken sidewalks and crumbling retaining walls. That happens in an Earthquake zone and where there are a lot of trees. It looks to me like you dropped by Yesler to confirm your biases and wrote your blog entry to confirm the biases of your readers. I had dinner with a member of the Yesler Terrace Leadership Team last night and you certainly didn't speak to her. The Stranger used to be better than this.

Hope VI has two goals: one unexpressed and one expressed. The unexpressed goal was to divest the federal government of Public Housing. It has been largely successful. The second goal, to create mixed income communities has been a failure.

According to a study through the UW, middle income, low income and work force housing residents really do not mix and mingle that much. There was an article in the P-I last May that said that middle income teens and low income teens were not mixing that much either.

Diverse New Holly still struggling to break down the cultural divide.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/362827_ne…

The High Point Blog has posted a number of highly inflammatory, racist and classist comments by home owners directed against low income residents.

Rainier Vista is only halfway rebuilt. The Housing Authority, is requesting a reduction of low income units to be built on the eastside of the community, breaking their promise to the residents. SHA seems to view it's promises to residents as fungible.

Does Greenbridge (King County Housing Authority) have any market rate homes available yet? If so, it is too soon to see how the Middle income residents will interact with workforce housing and low income housing residents.

On a nationwide basis Hope VI has done a much worse job of income mixing. Only a small number of low income residents are allowed back into those redeveloped communities. Other low income residents with section 8 vouchers move into neighborhoods with moderate levels of poverty and simply concentrate poverty elsewhere instead of truly creating mixed income communities.

Low income residents are still stigmatized. Obtaining needed services has become more difficult.

Much of the conversation at the Yesler Terrace Citizen Review Committee has centered around how lovely social equity is and just how gosh dern lovely it will be when it is rebuilt.


There were resident councils (Rainier Vista had a leadership team) in all three of the redeveloped communities prior to redevelopment. These councils have been replaced with home owner associations that do not include renters and Neighborhood Associations in Rainier Vista and High Point and a Neighborhood Council in New Holly. The original High Point Neighborhood Association bylaws didn't allow renters to vote. The home owners can address their specific concerns through the Home Owners association. However, renters no longer have a forum to address landlord-tenant issues as a group. So much for social equity. Anyone who is truly concerned about social justice ought to be concerned about that.

The Seattle Housing Authority has had to make many difficult decisions, since it's funding has been reduced. If they didn't make some of those decisions, there might not be any public housing at all. My gripe is not with them. It is with the program that puts SHA in the position of making Faustian bargains at the expense of low income residents. Hope VI was a necessary evil, but it diverts SHA away from it's mission of serving low income renters and moves it into a position of placating home owners, who themselves have legitimate concerns. They have made a big investment. But trying to satisfy them, is not SHA's mission.

It is time to stop cheerleading Hope VI a failed program (at least in terms of its expressed goals) and time to start supporting public housing programs and other services that assist low income people well without dragging the surrounding communities down.

Dominic, stop with the drive by blogging. The real story is deeper than you went. Talk to residents and not the ones that SHA refers you to. They are out there and they have some stories to tell. Do some research. Read the Rachel Kleit studies out of the UW (you will have to pay for some of them). There other studies out there too. And then there is the article in the Atlantic that came out in July, August 2008.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/me…

20
Dang, Former, that's quite a comment, and what an article you link to! It's old-school deep journalism. Thanks for both.

The bit that resonates the most for me around displacement concerns comes far into it. SHA's Yesler redevelopment website claims only that "it may be possible" residents won't have to relocate out of YT during the bulldozing, etc. However:

"HOPE VI stands as a bitter footnote to this story. What began as an “I Have a Dream” social crusade has turned into an urban-redevelopment project. Cities fell so hard for the idea of a new, spiffed-up, gentrified downtown that this vision came to crowd out other goals. “People ask me if HOPE VI was successful, and I have to say, ‘You mean the buildings or the people?’” said Laura Harris, a HOPE VI evaluator in Memphis. “It became seen as a way to get rid of eyesores and attract rich people downtown.” Phyllis Betts told me that when she was interviewing residents leaving the housing projects, “they were under the impression they could move into the new developments on site.” Residents were asked to help name the new developments and consult on the architectural plans. Yet to move back in, residents had to meet strict criteria: if they were not seniors, they had to be working, or in school, or on disability. Their children could not be delinquent in school. Most public-housing residents were scared off by the criteria, or couldn’t meet them, or else they’d already moved and didn’t want to move again. The new HOPE VI developments aimed to balance Section8 and market-rate residents, but this generally hasn’t happened. In Memphis, the rate of former public-housing residents moving back in is 5 percent."
21
I live in Yesler Terrace, and am a member of the Citizen's Review Committee and the Community Council Leadership Team.. As Trevor said, you seem to have relied -- a lot -- on the Housing Authority's rationale for demolishing the community, which was printed in the April issue of the VOICE, a newsletter which the Housing Authority funds.

After an ambitious plan in the late '60s (including mixed use, and yes, high-rises--) failed to attract investors, there was a second Yesler Terrace redevelopment plan, which was partially implemented in the mid to late '70s. As you walk through Yesler Terrace today, you can observe where the remodeling of the neighborhood began (poured concrete retaining walls, concrete sidewalks) where the mid-part of the remodeling took place --( reconstructed broken-concrete retaining walls, concrete sidewalks, gradually turning to patched sidewalks) and where it finished ( where the retaining walls and sidewalks were left in their original 1939 condition.) Much like today's Hope VI projects in Rainier Vista and High Point , SHA ran out of funding to do it right.

The Richardson Associates study recommended that the three-story buildings near Harborview (which were built in 1941 for temporary war worker housing and were not part of the original Yesler Terrace), not be remodeled because they were in poor condition. However, the units were reconfigured and updated in the early 80’s, and it is one of those buildings where the four apartments with sewer problems are located.

Are the original Yesler Terrace buildings, which were not intended to be temporary, in good enough condition to restore for an additional thirty-forty years of use? Probably yes, but the Housing Authority is not interested in finding out. They need the money they hope to get from selling the land.

We who live in Yesler Terrace are going to miss our low-rise town homes with private yards and gardens. We very much doubt that the new community will be a more pleasant place to live.

And furthermore 1. I don’t see rats in Yesler Terrace any more often than I see them when I’m walking near Lake Union or in Madison Park. 2. a couple dozen “Black six-year-olds” playing on the sidewalk sounds real grim and cool and and gonzo ghetto – but it sort of ignores the new Community Center AND the new playground and the kids (black and white and Hispanic and Asian) playing THERE. 3. Bouillon cubes??? Is that the only culinary smell Stranger writers recognize?

And yeah, I know you were in Yesler Terrace last week. I saw you. But you saw, and wrote about, what you expected to see.
22
Former, I believe that all the SFR's on the west side of Greenbridge are market rate, as well as a few of the apartment buildings. The stuff that is about to open up is a mix of subsidized and market rate, and they are just about to start building the east segment, which will be mostly market rate SFR's.

Park Lake Homes II is about to be torn down and replaced by another mixed project. The last time I saw the plans, they were going to be mostly townhomes, but they might have changed that.
23
Thank you Catalina. I have been through Greenbridge, but not recently. And because it is KCHA I haven't paid as close attention to it. Frankly, I find it the most attractive of the new developments. It seems to be built on more of a human scale, at least what I have seen so far.

High Point is pretty, but it has a lot of nooks and crannies where people can hide when they are up to no good. The first phase of New Holly does the best job of utilizing Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design strategies. But that falls apart in Phases 2 and 3.

Rainier Vista made the same mistake they made when they in the original design. Very narrow streets. Cars, some of them SHA vehicles, parked the wrong way and blocking wheelchair sidewalk cuts (or whatever they are called).

A nice design for Greenbridge does not mean that the home owners will get along well with the renters or even associate with them. It will take a lot of work to make that happen. I can't help but think that Middle Income Home Owners and Low Income Public Housing (LIPH) Residents are conflicting user groups with different needs. When that happens it is usually the needs of the LIPH renters who suffer to placate home owners. Home owners need their home owners association and renters need a forum to address their landlord tenant issues. Without that you can't have social equaity. If Greenbridge can make it truly work (Residents of all income levels intermingling, getting along, working together but leaving space for each to address their respective needs) then they will do better than any other Housing Authority, I have heard of including SHA.

I remain skeptical, but open minded. In the mean time I stand by what I said. Hope VI, as a program, has failed in acheiving it's expressed goal of creating mixed income communities.
24
We already have too much low-income housing in the city of Seattle. And not just by a little bit.

You can't walk half a block in downtown Seattle (let alone Capitol Hill or First Hill) without passing a low-income apartment building! It's actually quite bizarre.

We're cementing welfare culture into downtown Seattle and degrading the city because of it.
25
Where do expect people to live, Mike? Maybe, in a tent next door to your house or how about the door way of your business? Maybe, poor folks will evaporate into thin air. Maybe, you have a magic wand. God forbide under these economic conditions that you loose your job, business or housing. Boy howdy, you would be grateful for public housing then, huh? Better a roof over your head, that's different, you're different. Or maybe you think it would never happen to you.

Here are somethings for you to consider. The average stay in SHA family housing is about three years. Many of the people who live in public housing, work. They pay 30% of their income in rent. It isn't free. Many of the people who need long term housing are dealing with some kind of disability. People end up in public housing and in poverty for a variety of reasons. The only thing you know about someone living in public housing is that when they moved in, they met certain income guidelines. After a little while, it is anyone's guess. By then, many of them are on their way out.

Here is another thing to think about. No matter what solution we adopt, ignoring it (but we don't really), throwing people into jail (expensive), wet housing (jury is still out on that), traditional public housing (problematic, if the communities are too large),mixed income communities (don't really exist) or something new (we shall see), we pay for it. The question is, what are the most effective ways to address the issues the people in need face.

God forbid you will ever be in a position to find out. But you never know. If it does, believe me, there will be another "Mike" out there looking at YOU in disdain, wondering what the hell is wrong with YOU, why couldn't YOU pull YOURSELF up by the boot straps, thinking YOU have no place anywhere. And there will be advocates out there, advocating for the programs and services that you need to get back on your feet. There, but for the grace of God go you and me and everyone else.

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