The Wrong Side of MLK: A Dispatch from the Nation's Most Diverse Zip Code

I.

When my neighbors two blocks up Beacon Hill on the west side of 32nd Ave South look through their front windows, they gaze upon the inhabitants of the most diverse zip code in these United States of America. I've never asked one of them what they make of us and, passing by, they betray no awe or undue suspicion. Even so, contemplating all the pent-up curiosity out there spurs me to action. From the frontier of 98118, Washington State's mythic jewel of diversity, I offer the following orientation.

My little house faces east, overlooking the light rail track on a triangular block that juts from Martin Luther King Junior Way South. At one end is a Vietnamese wedding house; at the other, the long-abandoned Dos Amigos Tavern. 

Abu-Bakr mosque just south of us is a reliable magnet, drawing to it at midday the elder statesmen of the neighborhood with their henna-dyed beards. Another block down at Orcas and MLK is Katherine's Place, whose four startlingly blue stories of transitional housing rise from the spot where the old Empire Way Tavern once stood.   

Walk the alley that runs behind my house before dawn and you might see an ancient looking woman toiling under a plastic-covered lean-to, baking dozens of tiny cookies. You may think to ask her what they're for, but the scene plays out at an hour too early for strangers to speak comfortably. The guy who lives at the mouth of the alley works private event security on the East Side and wears a gun on his hip sometimes when he walks out to get the mail.

On the back side of the block is an auto shop with no name that's manned by a devoted young crew of tinkerers and their friends, the customers. The one time I talked to the owner of the building, who had pulled up in a polished black Escalade, he gestured at the bustling garage and offered me the mysterious assurance, "This is going away soon. It's not a real business."

II.

Just before Christmas, my family bundled up and made our way to the other side of MLK to catch a bus downtown. Having done so, we crossed from the Greater Duwamish to the Southeast District, from Beacon Hill to Columbia City, and from census tract 104 to 103. Martin Luther King, you see is one of the great divisions in a community defined by its divisions.

That thick line running down the middle of MLK on so many maps persistently upsets my sense of place. Though we're across the street, my household looks toward Columbia City. On sunny weekends we walk over to the bakery and shop around a little. My kid's daycare is there and so is the business we owned a few years back. If I go to a neighborhood meeting, as likely as not it will be in Columbia City. Despite all these credentials (and the fact that my house is as much in the trough of the Valley as anybody's down in Rainier Beach), maps consign us to Beacon Hill. I shamelessly pass myself off as a Columbia City resident.

But the difference between the west and east side of the street translates into real-world distinctions. From census tract 104, where I live, to 103 on the other side of the tracks, reported crime jumps by around 50 percent. Year after year, they have us solidly beat in vandalism, drug abuse violations, crimes against families and children, and the murky offenses police don't care to separate into categories. Talking to residents over there, tales of gunshots and broken passenger side windows and their air of grim determination bear out the numbers.

Census data reveals that tract 103, where last spring a woman repeatedly stabbed a visitor to her apartment with a paring knife for talking loudly during an episode of "America's Next Top Model", has a markedly lower median household income and a higher percentage of residents living below the poverty line than 104. It's tempting to conclude from facts like these that income accounts for the difference, but the census data is 10 years old by now and the neighborhood has changed in untold ways.

Six years ago when I was shopping for my first house, I was priced out of the swath of Columbia City between Rainier and MLK. Being that much closer to the business district, crime-ridden census tract 103 looked like the province of people better off than I. For those taking notes, this counts as one of the persistent themes of life in southeast Seattle: lived experience often trumps the hard boundaries and numbers.

III.

The area west of Lake Washington, north of Renton and Tukwila, and east of Beacon Hill, is carved up a half dozen different ways to express geographic, political, historical, or demographic difference. Call it southeast Seattle, the Rainier Valley, or the south end. Some wised-up souls shorten it up to "the Southeast" or, safe within its boundaries, just say "down here". People who don't get down here much knowingly refer to it as "the hood" or "the ghetto". What name or slice you choose depends on how urbane, poor, diverse, affordable, or dangerous you want it to be.

To see what I mean, look no further than the Seattle Housing Authority's Rainier Vista development, which falls on either side of MLK. The City Clerk's map has the boundary of Rainier Valley jogging across the street to encompass all of Rainier Vista; the Southeast District's boundary cuts straight up MLK, leaving the west half orphaned across the tracks. The Columbia City Community Council's neighborhood boundary veers inward excluding both the west and east sides of the development.

NewHolly, another SHA development a mile down the street, is by any neighbor's definition part of southeast Seattle. But like my house, it's on the wrong side of Martin Luther King and just outside the Southeast District. Though the Mt. Baker neighborhood is securely in the Southeast District, its northern half bobs up out of the Nation's most diverse zip code.

The Rainier Valley is southeast Seattle boiled to the bone. It's the historic center of the place and spot on the map people wag a finger at when they speak of gangs, the plight of the inner city, or, in the human interest vein, "vibrant" culture.

It has 6% more immigrants, $5,913 less in median household income, and a poverty rate 8.7% higher than southeast Seattle as a whole (which is to say, including such really upscale neighborhoods such as Lakewood and Seward Park). Any visitor who mistakes the several blocks of Columbia City for Wallingford and then continues down Rainier Avenue toward Renton can see that the Valley contains all of our contradictions.

Pause for a moment and observe within the swollen boundary of the Seattle Police Department's South Precinct the urgency of lived experience colliding with official piety. For residents of the Rainier Valley, the teens gunned down and the muggings are inescapable realities. As is the fact that the Department hasn't committed the manpower to staff the Precinct, which bulged westward in 2008 to include the Sodo District and Georgetown, let alone keep the peace in the existing area.

Meanwhile, Police Chief Kerlikowske and Mayor Nickels, who seem to count optimism as a crime fighting tactic, sleep the sleep of the just, knowing that everywhere in their domain crime is at its forty-year low.

Or witness the history of diversity in the making as the boundary of the 37th legislative district balloons over time, gerrymandered ever southward to maximize its minority voting population. Until 1957, it was only a wee triangle up north covering the Central District and part of Capitol Hill. Since the last round of redistricting in 2001, it has metamorphosed into a fat caterpillar which extends from Magnolia to north Renton, including Pioneer Square downtown, a speck of Tukwila, and all of the Rainier Valley.

98118's claim to the crown of diversity is shared by two zip codes in New York and another in Chicago. I say "shared" instead of "disputed" because none of them bother to substantiate, let alone defend the title. Around here, it's part of the common folklore and is spread as a fact because it feels true. Albany Park, Chicago, with admirable modesty (and precision!), bills itself "the third most diverse zip code in the United States."

Most diverse zip code! It's repeated with such uncritical enthusiasm that you could fairly substitute "diverse" with any number of exemplary adjectives like say, "glorious."

IV.

The hundred and fifty years of southeast Seattle's recorded history has been a story of newcomers arriving and adapting the neighborhood to their needs, a state of affairs viewed alternately as an opportunity and a great misfortune by the people who came before. Consequently, local politics has always been a struggle over who are the legitimate, typical residents.

What is left behind by successive waves of settlement and exodus is an indefinite place that defies the common names and boundaries. Certain outposts are as closely linked with distant neighborhoods and cities -- Mogadishu, High Point, Renton -- as they are to their immediate surroundings. These exist next to settlements fixed in our geography by deep, stubborn historical roots. The churn of population coming and going persists.

Around every corner, it seems, is another institution that caters to the sensibilities or beliefs of a narrow slice of residents. Overwhelmingly significant locales like the Cham mosque tucked in a residential street behind the Brighton playfield. Like that temple of cultivated consumption down in Seward Park, the PCC market, or the open air gun market that materializes some days at the southeast corner of Henderson and Rainier. Such places, which most of us barely see and whose significance we'll never feel, are tokens of dramatically different lived experience in geographic proximity, but isolated in practice.

Most often, to speak on behalf of such a disparate place in the sweeping, authoritative way people do is to speak out of turn. Whether it's a local political candidate who asks her audience to vote for "people who look like you," a Mt. Baker resident with a commanding view of the lake kibitzing about gentrification, an activist accusing the school district of systematic racism, or a developer hawking condos in a newly "walkable" neighborhood, the question of who is doing the talking is begged.

Where do the interests of Vietnamese refugees, middle class white homeowners, the well-to-do by the water, new-to-the-neighborhood renters, and African American families who have been in the Valley for generations converge? There always lurks the depressing possibility that they don't, that compared with all the other things that make us who we are and bind us to others, geography is circumstantial.

Who am I? Where do I belong? Freedom from the indignity of figuring out such things is one of those rarely examined perquisites of adulthood. Accepting as given some basics allows us to face the vicissitudes of work and family life with purpose and conviction. But in a community as divided as this one, personal virtue easily translates to civic vice.

Today in southeast Seattle there reins a very grown-up surety about the story of who "we" are, what's at stake in neighborhood politics, how one gets a seat at the table, and who has acted correctly. As if by reflex, some of us trot around to the opposing sides of whatever issue is hot. Many more, not seeing their interests reflected in the civic dialog, opt out of participation altogether. What is called for is an individual and collective reversion to that time before such things were settled.

Here in the home of divergent assumptions, existing as a true community and uniting around anything worthwhile is an enterprise worthy of a seventeen year old, with all the social awkwardness, self-doubt, and risk of embarrassment that implies. I admit that the idea, in its similarity to the platitude "can't we all just get along?" sounds trite, but the presumption that we know what's what is exactly the problem.

Whether 98118 is the second- or tenth-most diverse zip code in the United States, and whichever boundary you happen to stand inside, in southeast Seattle getting to know your neighbors is a potent political act. Finding common cause with them counts as radical.