On Jan. 6, the City's Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan, chaired by Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth, held its first meeting on Mayor Bruce Harrell's proposed "One Seattle" 2025 Comprehensive Plan. The plan's most recent draft, released in March 2024, has been accused of watering down the anti-displacement measures that were introduced in a previous draft released in August 2023. Regardless, Black homeowners are continuing their fight for a comprehensive plan that would include real anti-displacement measures to protect homeownership within Seattle's Black community.
When Ruby Holland left Seattle's Central District for Atlanta in 1984, she had no idea that when she would return, her childhood neighborhood would look so different.
"When I moved back to Seattle … in 2015, I was looking for the Black people, and I couldn't see any," said Holland.
In 1970, the Central District was 73.4% Black. In 2014, the year before Holland moved back to Seattle, the Central District was just 18% Black, according to the Systemic Justice Program.
Holland started going to neighborhood meetings to try to find some of her old neighbors. At one neighborhood meeting, Holland says she learned she was at risk of being displaced from her home.
"I had heard about the [Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) program] coming to town — which was upzoning — and I was told that [I] was at risk of being displaced [from my home]. I heard this at my neighborhood meeting and my ears stood up, and I was like, 'I just moved here from Atlanta. I sold my house. It took me five years to downsize and save up enough money to relocate to Seattle, bring all my belongings and my dog. I ain't going nowhere.'"
Callie Craighead, press secretary for the Mayor's Office, described the MHA in a statement: "Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) is a City of Seattle policy designed to support affordable housing needs in Seattle. It requires developers of new commercial or multifamily housing to provide affordable housing units on-site as part of the development or to pay a fee in-lieu of to support more affordable housing production in Seattle, including in the Central District."
But while the MHA program was marketed to Black Central District residents as affordable housing, Holland argues that the program's price was at the cost of Black homeowners. Holland says that after the MHA program went into effect, developers began to visit her and her neighbors. "In 2019, when the law passed, developers came to our homes, knocked on our doors, and told us we had to leave for affordable housing. It was just horrible," she said. "It seemed like the whole city had got together and decided, 'Yeah, we're getting rid of all of them.' … So they were actually redlining us too. They were doing things and discriminating against us. And it was really hard."
Aggressive tactics by developers to buy up land in the neighborhood and increased property taxes from a rise in property values in the neighborhood have also made it difficult for families to stay.
Further, in Seattle and other major cities across the country, Black families have faced a history of discriminatory practices that have locked them out of homeownership.
One is redlining, which refers to the act of drawing red lines on a map to indicate within which neighborhoods banks would approve a home loan. Neighborhoods cut off by redlining were marked by banks as risky investments, refusing to approve loans for clients looking to buy in those neighborhoods. Seattle's Central District was redlined. Mortgage companies charged higher rates for loans for clients looking to buy within the Central District, while plat mats labeled the area as a "no-investment zone" or "high risk." Seattle outlawed redlining in June of 1977.
Another legal practice to limit Black homebuying was racially restrictive covenants, or legally binding clauses within property deeds that prohibited sale of the property to a non-white buyer. In Seattle, the Central District was one of the only neighborhoods in which Black people could live.
In May of 1926, the Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive covenants were constitutional in Corrigan v. Buckley. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer stated that racially restrictive covenants were unenforceable, but it wasn't until 20 years later, in 1968, that racially restrictive covenants were made illegal with the passage of the Fair Housing Act. This act declared that discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity in the sale or rental of housing is unlawful.
For Holland, the MHA program was a continuation of this discriminatory history. "I really went on a rampage at first and was telling everybody I knew how they were trying to get us out of here. Finally, the tax assessor heard our plea and he spoke to the governor, and the next thing I knew, it was 2023 and Gov. Inslee said, 'No more displacement for people in formerly redlined communities,' and that we need to have an anti-displacement plan for former redlined communities to go along with the comp plan," said Holland.
According to RCW 36.70A.070(2)(e)-(h), a comprehensive plan that ensures "the vitality and character of established residential neighborhoods" must include specific policy that aims to undo the negative impacts of previous discriminatory policies. It would identify "local policies and regulations that result in racially disparate impacts, displacement, and exclusion in housing," and establish new "anti-displacement policies, with consideration given to the preservation of historical and cultural communities as well as investments in low, very low, extremely low, and moderate-income housing; equitable development initiatives; inclusionary zoning; community planning requirements; tenant protections; land disposition policies; and consideration of land that may be used for affordable housing."
According to Holland, the current draft of the comp plan will not protect the South End homeowners from potentially being displaced. "The mayor on the new comp plan still wants to put all of Seattle's growth in the [Central District], South End, and other areas of the urban villages, so we're fighting that," said Holland.
Holland is also part of a team of organizers working to create a tax fund program for Black homeowners falling behind on property taxes as part of a solution to the revision of the anti-displacement measures within the comprehensive plan.
Chukundi Salisbury of the Black Legacy Homeowners Network, an organization of Black homeowners that strives to promote and protect Black homeownership in Seattle and King County, is also a part of that fight. Black Legacy Homeowners was one of a coalition of organizations that sent recommendations to the Mayor's Office for how the anti-displacement measures could be written.
"We've given a bunch of recommendations for things that could happen immediately," said Salisbury.
According to Salisbury, founder and executive director of Black Legacy Homeowners Network, one of the reasons people may lose their homes is rising property taxes, causing homeowners to fall behind on payments. Developers looking to buy homes to flip for profit seek out the people in these homes, sometimes using fear tactics to harass them to sell. Salisbury says some of the work his organization does to undercut this is to reach out to people behind on their property taxes to let them know to not be harassed into selling their homes.
"That tax list comes out in the Daily Journal of Commerce, and [though] it's hard to discern, we most certainly want to try to reach distressed households," said Salisbury. "Somebody needs to go to those people on the flip side and say, 'Well, guess what? You don't have to lose your house.' And that's what we do at Black Legacy Homeowners."
Inye Wokoma, co-founder of Wa Na Wari, is also advocating for the reinforcement of anti-displacement measures within the upcoming comprehensive plan.
"The comp plan fails to materially address the issue of displacement in any substantial way," Wokoma said. "One of the most important elements is that we have to create some resiliency for Black families that already own homes. And if you don't do that, then you're really not going to have the underpinnings for a healthy Black community, if everybody gets transformed into renters."
According to its website, Wa Na Wari is "an immersive community art project that reclaims Black cultural space and makes a statement about the importance of Black land ownership in gentrified communities." Its mission is to "create space for Black ownership, possibility, and belonging through art, historic preservation, and connection." One of the ways in which Wa Na Wari follows its mission is through its Central Area Cultural EcoSystem, 21st Century (CACE 21) initiative, which seeks to build capacity among Black Central District homeowners to advocate for land use policies that lower the barriers to creating more cultural spaces. CACE 21 organizes with Black homeowners and Black cultural workers to fight displacement by making recommendations to City officials to address the housing policies that drive displacement, creating community systems for mutual aid and peer support, and fostering community expertise around housing and urban development issues.
"We've been thinking about it together, but we've also been progressively acting together. We haven't gotten to the point where we formed a bona fide coalition, but we do stay in regular communication about these issues," explained Wokoma.
Alongside Holland and Salisbury, Wokoma and other organizers within CACE 21 submitted a document of recommendations to improve upon the anti-displacement measures that were removed with the second draft of the comprehensive plan.
"We put together a formal set of recommendations as it relates to the anti-displacement component of the comp plan," Wokoma said. "We got together and we collectively put together what we considered our best ideas, and we just submitted it. We put together a document, then we [included] a summary that we could drop into the public comment online portal with a link to the actual document that has our full set of recommendations."
Some examples of recommendations put forward in the document were to expand the Seattle Office of Housing's Community Preference Framework and to "maintain the integrity of traditional Central District and South Seattle boundaries."
The next Select Committee on the Comprehensive Plan is scheduled for Jan. 29.
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