3 posts tagged “seattle”

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.

When I attended my first Columbia City Community Council (CCCC) meeting last December, I was naive and unschooled in the tender mercies of neighborhood politics. Since then, I've been to meetings all around the Southeast District and made myself a student of the values, grievances, and vendettas that animate the committed core of residents who always show up.

I have been surprised and troubled to find that, in a community famed for its ethnic, racial, and income diversity, one narrow worldview prevails among the small group of people who represent themselves as the leaders of South Seattle. Do you know what your local neighborhood activist is saying about you?

* * *

The people that showed up at CCCC meetings were an impressive bunch, articulate and informed about the neighborhood. It was the first time I had observed Robert's Rules, with its motions and points of order, in the wild. Zoning regulations and other arcana were quoted chapter and verse. The nuggets of intelligence I picked up about local goings-on alone seemed worth the price of admission. And the price of admission, I found, was reconciling myself to the peculiar sensibility I found there.

When I joined up, the exhausting chore of creating bylaws left time for little else on the agenda. The evident love some members had for the artifice of meetings and parliamentary procedure accounts for some of this, but mainly our discussion of bylaws centered around the need to protect the group from being taken over by hostile outside forces.

At my second meeting it was ominously asserted that somewhere in the darkness of that winter night, there were people plotting to launch a rival group -- people whose very absence from the meeting signaled bad intentions.  A new community group with a handful of regular attendees, no budget, and no standing with the City was beset on all sides by enemies. This was a little rich even for a newbie like me, and it made me want to meet the people who had dropped out, whom it turns out are numerous.

And when we weren't defending ourselves from being co-opted, we talked about crime -- break-ins in the neighborhood and muggings and the gunshots heard the other night. Everything else -- transportation, real estate development in the neighborhood, city government -- was viewed through the lens of co-optation or crime.

In the end, the defensiveness, apparent lack of interest in turning out more of the community, and single-minded commitment to one contentious view of the neighborhood led me to quit. Yet the sensibility I found at the Columbia City Community Council perplexed and fascinated me. The more I looked, the more places I found it. The more closely I examined it, the clearer it became that the sensibility in question is a deep, cryptic strain of NIMBYism in the Southeast.

During my time at the CCCC, I naturally got wind of the drama at the Southeast District Council (SEDC), which featured some of the people I knew from the community council. The conflict at the Southeast District's "council of councils" stands out for being particularly, embarrassingly tawdry. Character assassination, open confrontation, and public grandstanding were the order of the day when the feud was hot last year. It seems the factions shared no sense of larger purpose that drove toward consensus, let alone restraint.

The fight is ostensibly about process -- critics of the district council want the group to abide by its own bylaws, which they say have been flouted by allowing groups to participate that don't have open membership or have paid representatives rather than volunteers. But if it were a book club or a knitting circle that had been allowed voting membership on the SEDC, we wouldn't be where we're at today. In reality, its substantive policy differences -- specifically about the place social services are to have on the council and in the neighborhoods -- that split the group.

As Mariana Quarnstrom, the president of the South Seattle Crime Prevention Council, has written, the community "has lost its voice to non profits that are not truly invested in the community and could be gone tomorrow and we must live with the consequences of their decisions." Dolores Ranhofer, president of the Lakewood/Seward Park Community Association, drives home the point in a letter to Mayor Nickels:

Social service organizations are dependent on the city of Seattle for their funding, and their representatives on the SEDC do not own homes or businesses in the Lakewood/Seward Park community, I question their interest in voting for issues that benefit the Lakewood/Seward Park community.

The argument is that since social service providers are funded by the City, it's in their interests to be the City's stooges. As such, social service providers herd the poor, the addicted, and the criminal away from more desirable parts of the city and into the Southeast.

Ultimately, "social services" are proxy for all kinds of interlopers and the problems they bring with them -- each understood to be a product of the City's negligent meddling, and each representing a kind of intolerable compulsion. The City tries to force the poor to move to South Seattle, commuters to use the light rail, and drivers to give their cars the summer off. And meanwhile, the complaint goes, the neighborhoods are expected to display a meek acceptance: acceptance of views blocked by six-story buildings; of their accustomed parking spots hogged by new renters; of an inadequately staffed police precinct; of the crime they say comes with increased population density.

Social services haven't always been such a flash point in the Southeast. Jim Diers, former director of Seattle's Department of Neighborhoods, says in his book Neighbor Power that, "Today, subsidized housing is being developed in Southeast Seattle by community-based organizations." He singles out SEED and Homesight as prime examples of organizations that have been nurtured by and committed to their communities. "Not a word," he writes, "has been heard from the NIMBYs."

So much has happened since the "today" Diers refers to. Now SEED and Homesight, which were center stage in the SEDC drama, are preferred targets for the Southeast's NIMBYs.

The new leadership of the SEDC has answered their critics by arguing that they are strictly an advisory body and consequently do not have the power to directly affect policy (nothing to see here folks, move along). Short of bending the council to their way of thinking, an SEDC neutralized as an activist body probably looks like a victory to the people who started the fight.

But success left the victors with no formal relationship to the City -- a problem solved by the creation of the new South East Neighborhood District Council (SENDC), an explicitly activist organization. Their schtick, aside from having an extra word in their name, is that they don't need to write any bylaws because they're simply abiding by the SEDC's original, legitimate ones that exclude social service organizations from membership.

Knowing what I do now, I think of the Columbia City Community Council as a groomed charter member of the SENDC. In all the meetings I attended, there was never talk of seeking a seat or even attending a SEDC meeting, a natural step for a new community group. The CCCC's bylaws, especially its voting and membership criteria, were formed in response to the perceived illegitimacy of the SEDC's. The lack of interest in increasing meeting attendance and distrust of low-income residents came with the torch NIMBYs carried back from the SEDC fight. It's a sad irony that the fear of co-optation I found at the CCCC came from those who were busy co-opting the group.

NIMBYs argue that whatever initiative they've set their sites on cannot reasonably go down in their neighborhood, but crucially, they do so without honestly engaging the larger needs that inspired it. The label is always political -- I say "NIMBY," you say "community advocate." In offering that South Seattle is a hotbed of NIMBYism, I'm letting on that I've got a problem with the way certain folks down here engage with the problems of the community.

There are no reticent NIMBYs -- it's by virtue of their public statements that pissed off residents get to be NIMBYs. Our NIMBYs bring a Barnum-esque flair to framing the issues of the day, and consequently have become favored media representatives for South Seattle.

As best as I can tell, today's NIMBYism first cropped in the late Nineties. At the end of 1999, Sound Transit finalized the route for a light rail system that would run from SeaTac airport through the Rainier Valley, ending at the University District. Resistance to the project, under the banner of Save Our Valley (SOV), focused on the fact that the 4.6 miles of track running through the Valley would run at surface level. SOV demanded that the rail line run underground instead to minimize impact on the surrounding communities. Looking back at the public statements of the project's detractors, all the essential ingredients of today's NIMBY arguments are there.

A successful NIMBY campaign transcends the neighborhood, making the case that the opposed project would be a detriment to society as a whole. Cost is the obvious starting point for any critique of a large public infrastructure project. The inevitable competition to get a finger in the pie makes any such project vulnerable to overruns and inefficiency, which is justly a concern to taxpayers. But no self-respecting NIMBY would rest with this argument, and the Southeast's NIMBYs are anything if not self-respecting.

Attempting to appeal to every possible audience, NIMBYs reserve the right to take contradictory positions. According to the SOV's website, gentrification, the phenomenon of rising property values and increasing cost of living in a neighborhood, will result from the rail project. But in the next sentence, the scourge of lowered property values is invoked.  When it was proposed that more money be spent on neighborhood improvements in the Southeast to mitigate project impacts, SOV champions assumed it would never reach the neighborhoods. But just in case it did, Ray Akers, then an SOV board member, offered that no amount of money could address the real issues of the above-ground trains -- safety, noise and vibration.

NIMBYs hang their hats on false choices, most often claiming that the alternative to meeting their every demand is actively destroying their community. When Sound Transit moved to restrict new auto-oriented business around future station sites until planning was complete, SOV hysterically accused the agency of "wiping out any possibility of business coming out here." Another SOV spokesman echoes the charge: "This project would destroy all the economic development that we've built for the last 20 years."

NIMBYs are their brother's keepers. The leadership of Save Our Valley eventually decided that they were above all crusaders for racial and economic justice. Their last, best chance at scuttling the project was the complaint filed in federal court against Sound Transit and the Federal Transit Authority, contending that the light rail project was "discriminatory in its intent and impact in Rainier Valley." Or, if you prefer, that Sound Transit is "raping minority neighborhoods." Three of SOV's four claims were thrown out by a federal judge and the project proceeded.

Politically adroit NIMBYs never actually say "not in my back yard" -- they say "yes", but with impossible conditions. The notion that South Seattle would accept light rail underground or no light rail at all was their ultimate false choice, and one SOV never had the standing to demand. It's clear to me that the most active members of Save Our Valley never wanted light rail in Rainier Valley. Today, the same people who tried to kill light rail in the Southeast lead the fight against every initiative that could make it a success and they are still doing it in the name of the poor and the minorities of South Seattle.

NIMBYs always plead the special case -- there is something about our neighborhood, they say, which makes the opposed project particularly inappropriate. Down here in the Southeast, we say we're already the worst off, don't add insult to injury. You say we're doing better? We say don't mess with a good thing.

To a person, our NIMBYs align themselves with the poor. Paradoxically, they argue that our communities are too poor to accommodate more social services aimed at supporting the poor and too "fragile" to weather the upheaval caused by light rail and the increasing population density it will bring.

On behalf of the South end's poor and minorities, Beacon Hill dentist Fred Quarnstrom accuses the Mayor of "social redlining", referring to the bygone practice of enforcing segregation by refusing home loans to minorities in majority white areas. Because we are so ethnically diverse and "our residents are modest to low income," he argues, "the Mayor and the City Council have their paintbrushes and cans of red paint," sabotaging our schools, job market, and business climate as they leave us to deal with the City's larger problems. Then he predictably reels out the "dumping ground" thesis that all the Southeast's NIMBYs hold dear:

The [property] values are kept artificially low by locating more and more social service projects here. We get what no other area of Seattle will tolerate.

The opposition to social services in the Southeast is categorical -- the mission, organizational history, and performance of any particular organization are irrelevant. In a recent Stranger piece on the opening of a new nonprofit near Columbia City which serves the recently incarcerated, South Seattle Crime Prevention Council board member Ray Akers puts a fine point on the issue:

It's been like the floodgates have opened down here. These are organizations we embrace, but... is there no other neighborhood that needs a Union Gospel Mission or homeless facility? A thrift shop would appeal to a lot of other communities.

It's telling that the beef over who is eligible for voting membership at the SEDC was with organizations like the Tenant's Union, which organizes Section 8 households into tenant councils to ensure that their voices are heard in the community. The woman one of the SENDC activists calls a "carpetbagger" and a "fucking bitch" similarly represents low-income SHA residents.

The very idea that a nonprofit might be a legitimate and useful representative for poor residents who don't have the leisure and resources to organize on their own is inimical to the NIMBYs of the Southeast. In a letter to the Mayor on behalf of the Mt. Baker Community Club, Pat Murakami, the group's president, writes:

The only authentic voice of any community is that which comes from, of and by those who reside or have a financial investment in that community. All residents of Southeast Seattle are capable of representing themselves. They do not need to be spoken for through a third party. It is the responsibility of the City, through the Department of Neighborhoods, to ensure that cultural and language barriers are minimized or completely eliminated.

My experience with the CCCC bears out the anti-renter, anti-low income bias of South End NIMBYs -- per the group's bylaws, the geographic area the group represents follows the generally accepted boundaries of Columbia City, except in the northwest corner, where it veers dramatically inward to exclude the SHA's mixed income Rainier Vista development.

The group was very keen to speak on behalf of all of Columbia City, but loathe to spend time advertising the meetings or otherwise making them an attractive place for people to be. The notion seemed to be “Hey, if you want your voice heard, come out to the meeting. If not, well you had your chance.”

I'm lucky that my wife is patient and my job affords me the flexibility to attend the meetings I do. What if I were poor or a single parent, or both? It's easy enough to imagine the priority I'd give attending CCCC meetings, especially if I got there and found overt suspicion of the poor. For many reasons, cultural and economic, it's difficult for conventional neighborhood organizations to reach low income households -- that the SENDC has made cutting off "third party" representation for the poor their signature issue brings into question just whose interests they represent.

For all the effort they put into limiting and undermining the existing channels low income residents have to participate in neighborhood politics, the NIMBYs don't offer compelling alternatives. What little they have to say publicly about how the lot of the Southeast's poor may be improved is safely beyond their control.

In the Beacon Hill News & South District Journal, Ann Sheeran, a board member of the SSCPC, asserts that the recent violence we've seen on our streets is the product of "the city of Seattle's economic and development policies for the South End." She asks:

Why aren't people saying let's get some economic development down here, let's get some jobs to help these kids.. Reaching out is a given, but we need to put it in context with the systematic discriminatory economic development policies and the open door policy to social services with fragile populations. The poorest area of the city gets the most social services.

In this way of thinking, an intuitive equation -- most poverty and crime in a neighborhood equals most social services -- is twisted into an outrage.  The NIMBYs have made such a habit of demonizing social services that they've come to believe they cause poverty, crime, and low property values.

Above all, it's this abdication of responsibility for the problem of poverty in the Southeast that makes our NIMBYs NIMBYs. The City must overcome language and cultural barriers and the City must bring economic development. And what passes for leadership is bemoaning the fate of the poor while actively foiling the groups in our community that serve them.

Viewed from a certain angle, the clash of interests is the inevitable consequence of our housing patterns and changing demographics. In addition to having the largest concentration of Section 8 households, as of 2000, according to census data, the Southeast has the highest proportion of owner-occupied housing units of any of the thirteen district areas in Seattle (61% of all households).

The fear that propels NIMBYism in our community is that the historic influence of the single-family homeowner is threatened and that the tide is shifting toward the interests of renters, low-income households, and the denizens of all kinds of multifamily dwellings. Light rail and social services are the two fronts where they've chosen to stand and fight.

The one phrase from the Columbia City Community Council's mission statement that departs from platitudes is decisive: "...seeing that visions for a future community do not displace the rights of the people in our present community." It's the visions of a densely populated, transit-oriented South Seattle dancing in the heads of the Mayor, the City, real estate developers, and social service agencies that spur our NIMBYs to action. And the ultimate displacement of their rights is eminent domain -- the threat to rob homeowners of the source of their standing in the community.

The e-mail reprinted in this blog post, from a member of the CCCC, the SSCPC, and now the SENDC, encapsulates the NIMBY worldview and the nature of their fight. Knowing that it will arrest the attention of the faithful, the author begins by ritually invoking eminent domain, calling a potential up-zone "the son of CRA."

The would-be Paul Revere summarizes the threat posed by more multifamily housing around light rail stations incisively: "...encroachment on the single-family neighborhoods is going to be more than significant." Counter-intuitively, the author then calls the City's invitation for public input "the tactic of divide and conquer." To combat this imposition, he challenges his readers to "overwhelm the meetings and let their outrage be heard."

And overwhelm the meetings they have. The SEDC was overwhelmed, and the Columbia City Business Association only saved itself from the same fate by suspending its membership in the SEDC. The CCCC, which started out as a large, diverse group, has been so overwhelmed that few bother to show up anymore.

There is no minimizing the importance of homeowners -- since we own a piece of it, we are literally invested in the fate of a community. Woe to the developer or city official who doesn't heed our concerns. Yet, in its excess, this defense of "the rights of our present community" looks a little like the defense of "states' rights" in the civil rights era. Local participation, whether at the state or neighborhood level, is a win for democracy, except when the rights being defended represent the narrow interests of a few.

The story of the dysfunctional relationship between city government and the neighborhoods can be found in miniature in the unfolding of the Mayor's Car Free Days. Planning for the events, which closed thoroughfares to cars, was haphazard and far too little effort was made to get buy-in from affected residents and businesses. To the criticism he got for the lack of coordination, Nickels responded "It's just for one day, just chill. Get out of the car and walk."

The view from the neighborhoods was of a potentate proudly conferring on his subjects the gift of a major street closure. At the last SENDC meeting, apropos of nothing, one attendee offered that she'd "like to see the Mayor try a 'give your car the Winter off' campaign. I'd like to see how people do with that in the wind and rain." Another attendee chimed in sarcastically, "Yeah, because the last one was such a success," referring to the recent Rainier Avenue car free day.

The Columbia City event actually was a success, but the community members who pulled it together were effectively erased from the story. (A Google News search reveals not a single account of Columbia City's successful event, but several of the rained-out Capitol Hill one and of local residents' complaints.)

So it is with South Seattle politics. The same handful of activists are always front and center, ready to disparage anything perceived to come from city government, regardless of its merits. The Mayor or whatever department of local government ends up in the activists' sights shrugs and digs in their heels because they've heard it all before. And the many people who busy themselves serving the community and making the best of the resources at hand get left out of the story.

NIMBYs do violence to their own cause with the incessant grandstanding and exaggeration because it deafens residents of the Southeast to their frequently valid concerns. Our social service providers are flawed. However noble his aims, our mayor is arrogant and remote from the neighborhoods. City planners and developers too often share in that arrogance, viewing engagement with the neighborhoods as an unnecessary hassle. Worse, the contempt for the Mayor and "The City" the leaders of the SENDC flaunt at every opportunity calls into question their credibility as a group, since their only prayer of accomplishing something positive is working with local government.

I moved to South Seattle six years ago knowing full well that two-thirds of my front yard would be purchased by the city and that my neighborhood would be bogged down in construction for years to come. From my front porch, I will feel the breeze when the light rail passes by. I guess you could say that I'm predisposed to a different view. Short of the Mayor sending down some henchmen with bags of cash, I personally can't imagine a better government-driven bid for economic development in the Southeast than building light rail.

Neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.

                                    -- Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

In all our visits, my three-year-old son and I have never seen more than a couple of other people at Dearborn park. Just four blocks from my house, it's convenient but feels shunned by the neighborhood for no obvious reason. Over time, I've come to discount it as a "bad park," and on sunny days tend to venture further afield to ones we enjoy like Powell Barnett or Mt. Baker.

When I heard that a week ago a man abducted a women in Renton, and drove her there to sexually assault her, I began to wonder why a rapist might consider Dearborn park a destination worth a half hour drive when so few local residents choose to walk there.

The prominence of the play equipment and soccer field suggest that children accompanied by adults are the primary intended users. When I ask my boy if he wants to go to the park, the answer is always a resounding yes, but Dearborn doesn't really count in his book. The park means open-ended play -- running from one interesting diversion to another, mixing it up with other kids, navigating varied terrain, excitement!

A funny thing I've found about standard children's park equipment -- the swing and Jungle Gym-style play set -- they have little interest in themselves. Kids know that they are for sliding and swinging and monkeying around, but they will use them only as enthusiastically as the surroundings merit. For lack of excitement, our play sessions at Dearborn are halting, and quick to end. If I don't guide each bit of the action, my son might actually request to go home -- something that has happened at no other park.

But enough of my kid, already -- what about me? The park has little to offer adult tag-alongs in the way of views or other areas where a person might pleasurably linger (unless you're the lurking sort, but more on that below). The walking path around the lower soccer field is only good for a five minute circuit and, as visually uninteresting as it is, only bears a single go round. There are no restrooms on site, which can also make lingering unattractive for families.

Thinking through the overall plan of Dearborn park, I came to the strange conclusion that privacy was the over-arching design consideration for this public facility. It's impossible to get a sense of who is there or what there is to do from the street entrance because the interior is blocked by a large mound. Walking through the park, the view into each successive area is partially or completely obscured by trees.

The path that runs down from the playground is completely secluded in the trees until it pops out into the lower field after some twenty-five yards. It continues on, encircling the play field (which I've only seen used in the fall for soccer) and leads back out to the entrance for a stretch, shaded by more trees. I was bemused when I saw "hiking trails" among the park's features on the city's web listing for Dearborn. I remember seeing what looked like a couple of overgrown deer paths and confirmed by a satellite view that there is a goodly splotch of woods. I never thought of the wooded area as even being part of the park!

Lonely, shaded, and secluded, Dearborn park is ideal for the kind of public activity that is best shielded from the general public view. Come at the right time and you'll see the evidence -- the condoms, the beer bottles, the gang graffiti. It's hard to imagine a better setting for lurking, hooking up, hiding, or indulging in your favorite controlled substance.

Wanting to get to the bottom of this "hiking trails" business, I dug a little deeper and found this enthusiastic review of the park, which declares it a "pleasant pocket of nature in the city."  It further explains that the park "was developed by schoolchildren and staff from adjacent Dearborn Elementary School, and Seattle Parks and Recreation, the Trust for Public Land, EarthCorps and other groups."   

The private setting that makes the park seem forlorn at best and menacing at worst during off hours, makes perfect sense if you consider it as an adjunct to Dearborn Park Elementary's grounds. Indeed, according to Dearborn Park Elementary's website, their teachers are "specially trained in Project Wild environmental curriculum to use the woods and wetlands as a classroom."

It is designed for school use, with all the built-in supervision and regimentation that implies. Of course there's no restroom -- there are plenty of them inside the school! Private grounds disconnected from the surrounding streets make city schools feel secure. But when the kids and staff go home, so does all the structure and supporting facilities and liveliness that make it a good place to be.

Without the school, the park is an empty shell and the neighborhood treats it accordingly, abandoning it to "users" like the one who made his way there from Renton last Sunday night.