Is White Center really part of Seattle?
Legislative tinkering is making annexation of the North Highline/White Center area slightly more attractive, but the City Council is not buying Mayor Nickels' numbers. If Seattle helps thy neighbor might it also beggar thy neighborhoods?
Joe Mabel, Wikimedia Commons
“White Center is southeast Spokane,” says former King County Executive Ron Sims, speaking of the eastern Washington neighborhood where he grew up. “And I can tell you, nobody gave a rat about southeast Spokane.”
White Center, just across Roxbury Street from West Seattle, may be, as Sims suggests, the most "urban" area in the entire state. It has a wide assortment of ethnic groups, and many recent immigrants. Appreciable numbers of residents speak Spanish, Chinese, African languages, and Tagalog. Nearly 6 percent of the population speaks Mon-Khmer, or Cambodian, and 9.2 percent speaks Vietnamese. The web site for the Greenbridge public housing project, which stands on a hill above the White Center business district, notes that “Family Services staff have the capacity to serve residents who speak Vietnamese, Cambodian, Somali, Khmu, and English.”
White Center's shopping area certainly includes some of the metropolitan area's more interesting blocks — the halal butcher shop, the carniceria, the Salvadorean Bakery — but the accompanying problems are hard to miss. Census numbers show a median household income more than 20 percent below King County's, and a percentage of adults with bachelors' degrees less than one-third the county level. An estimated 13.7 percent of households are ”linguistically isolated.” King County's Office of Business Relations and Economic Development says: “White Center is characterized by a crumbling infrastructure and a myriad of social and economic issues."
White Center's diversity and urban problems reside in a peculiar governmental limbo: unincorporated King County. The blocks north and south of the Seattle city limit form parts of the same urban fabric, and King County Council Council chair Dow Constantine, whose district includes both, says some of his White Center constituents don't even realize they're not in Seattle. Nevertheless, no one even pretends that King County has provided an urban level of services. Constantine, a candidate to succeed Sims as King County Executive, points to sidewalks he got installed in the White Center business district, but he says bluntly that King County “has not kept up with the infrastructure needs.”
One close observer suggests that despite Sims' personal appreciation of its urbanness, the county officials over whom he presided and the regulations they enforced tended to treat White Center — inappropriately — as just another suburb.
State Representative Ross Hunter, another candidate to succeed Sims, says that providing services to White Center and other unincorporated urban areas has created one-third of the county's enormous budget gap.
That may all be about to change. Or it may not.
Seattle mayor Greg Nickels has wanted to annex at least parts of “North Highline" — White Center and neighboring Boulevard Park, just east of it — for years, as have some Burien officials. This would be an expensive proposition for either city. To improve the numbers, the state Legislature enacted a statute that would allow a city annexing an unincorporated area to keep an extra .2 percent of the sales tax collected within that area for the next 10 years — unless that city was Seattle. (Seattle City Councilmember Jean Godden notes that in Olympia even legislators from Seattle often seem hostile to the city.) The sales tax break would probably provide an extra $5 million a year to help Seattle defray the social service and infrastructure costs of annexation. The city failed twice to get legislation allowing it to collect the extra sales tax.
Last year, after the city's second defeat, Aimee Curl wrote in Seattle Weekly that in 2007, “the proposal to extend the credit to Seattle passed the House, but died in the Senate when Sen. Margarita Prentice, D-Renton, wouldn't hear it in her Ways and Means Committee. The House approved the bill again this year, and Prentice made good on her promise to Nickels to hold a hearing — but declined to schedule a subsequent vote on the measure, which once again assured its death. Nickels' office vows to continue the fight. "It's not over," says Kenny Pittman, a senior policy analyst who's been coordinating the effort. But it's not going to be easy. “
And it wasn't over. Late last year, King County, Seattle, Burien, and local fire and water districts signed a memorandum of understanding under which Burien could annex the southern part of North Highline, which includes more established single-family neighborhoods and fewer poor people. Seattle could annex the northern part. Next month, Burien will put annexation up to a vote of the potential annexees. But there's no annexation vote in the northern half of North Highline.
And so the plot continued to thicken. Not long after Seattle signed the MOA, the Seattle City Council voted 8-1 against annexation, fearing it would cost the City money and that Seattle still had a lot of catching up to do for earlier annexed areas still waiting on pledges to build sidewalks and the like. Constantine suggests that the vote was “based on, to put it charitably, a lack of information.”
Subsequently, the Legislature gave Seattle the tax break it wanted. Pittman explains that the legislation finally passed largely because of efforts by Rep. Hunter, who was eager to get the cost of urban services off the county's back. (Hunter himself observes that a City Council statement that if the legislation passed, the City would annex North Highline is probably “worth a bucket of warm spit.”)
After the tax-break legislation died last year, Curl reported that the outcome had made “winners out of...White Center card room owners. Seattle doesn't allow card rooms, but King County does. Doug Harrell, who owns a pair of White Center bowling alley/card room hybrids, Magic Lanes and Roxbury Lanes, testified against the legislation. ''If we were annexed [by Seattle today], my two places would shut down. That's 250 good jobs," Harrell says. "Having the traffic to survive on bowling alone is getting tougher and tougher. My centers wouldn't survive without their card rooms. Right or wrong, that's the fact.'"
This time, however, everybody wins. The card rooms have been transformed from sacrificial lambs to cash cows, since the legislation lets them stay open if White Center is annexed. And it lets Seattle tax them. Pittman suggests that a tax on the casinos' net receipts will close most of the gap between the annual cost of annexation and the revenue that the extra sales tax will provide.
What's in it for Seattle? That depends on whom you talk to. The city has “an opportunity to incorporate some great neighborhoods .. . jewels,” Pitman says. Besides, “we believe in the goals of growth management"; counties shouldn't be in the business of governing urban densities.
Three years ago, Angela Galloway reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that “some Seattle City Council members are skeptical that it's a good deal for Seattle, despite assurances from Mayor Greg Nickels that the city has an opportunity and a responsibility to annex the area dubbed North Highline, which is home to more than 32,000. 'Initially, I was in favor of it, quite honestly,' said [then] Council President Nick Licata. 'Now I'm leaning against it.' When he asked the mayor's office why Seattle should take in the area, Licata said he was told simply it's 'the right thing to do.'”
“'Being a liberal, I said, yeah, sounds good. But then, you know, you look at the numbers,' Licata said. 'To do the right thing is very costly to the City on an ongoing basis.'"
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Comments:
Posted Thu, Jul 23, 9:24 a.m. Inappropriate
Sidewalks get mentioned a couple times in the article (by the way, thank you Mr. C., good piece) and it raises the question of who is responsible for sidewalk construction as a matter of law and tradition. When the sidewalk in front of my house needs repair I pay for it. When new driveways are required, when new houses are built, the developer pays for the sidwalk and curbs.
So, where does the notion come from that Seattle as a government should build sidwalks in what is now White Center or north of 85th in Seattle? just curious.
Posted Thu, Jul 23, 9:35 a.m. Inappropriate
Best read on this is that having failed to implement the urban 'control' agenda in the Rainier Valley the powers that be are looking for another area to exercise their 'vision'.
The sad fact is that poorer areas are a product of this power structure - solving these problems is simply not repeating the mistakes of 'dense' gang ridden Eastern 'projects'.
The incorporated City of Tacoma faces many of these same issues, though our 'nice' neighborhoods are much bigger than folks in Seattle are aware of. FWIW, I think we will likely do better on our own, soon as the State stops subsidizing the urban control freaks of downtown Seattle.
That is what a constitutional free market is all about, no?
I guess save for in the minds of the typical corporate welfare sucking 'moderate' republican and their lackeys from Gregoire on down.
-Douglas Tooley
http://motleytools.com/blog
Posted Thu, Jul 23, 10:01 a.m. Inappropriate
Sidewalks are a core infrastructural responsibility of any city--and especially of a walkable, environemntally friendly city as Nickels claims Seattle is or aspires to be. Although Seattle does, unwisely, defer sidewalk maintenance costs to residents under certain circumstances (unlike most other cities, actually), the vast majority of sidewalk installation and maintenance is paid for by the city. Seattle underfunds this compared to other cities.
But just as you have keep snow and ice off your sidewalks--something Seattleites often don't do--it's also reasonable to expect residents to correct tree root problems under sidewalks and all that. It's part of living in a city, and it's a part of your responsibility to your neighbors in a civil society.
The requirement for developers to install new sidewalks, or to reinstall or repair existing sidewalks, is a no-brainer policy that almost any other city also requires. It increases the value of the developments, anyway.
When Seattle annexed areas north of 85th in the 1950s, the city had promised residents in then-unincorporated areas it would install sidewalks as an incentive to get people to approve the annexation. Some sidewalks were installed, but in general only minimal pedestrian infrastructure work was done between the 1950s and 1990s.
With an eye on obesity and greenhouse gasses, if we want to encourage people to walk or bike to bus stations and light rail stations and to visit local stores rather than driving, then there has to be safe infrastructure to do this. Safe sidewalks and crosswalks are ESSENTIAL to this. There are many areas in North Seattle where taking a walk with a dog or going for a bike ride are genuinely hazardous enterprises because of lacking pedestrian infrastructure.
It's so bad in some neighborhoods, e.g. Maple Leaf, Victory Heights, etc., that kids can't really safely walk to their elementary schools. Driving kids to nearby schools is about the stupidest thing in terms of obesity and greenhouse gasses...yet it's the only safe option for a lot of families.
Currently if you want sidewalks put in when the city isn't otherwise planning on it, they will charge you about $7,000-$14,000 per lot to do that. That is ridiculous, and the city should revisit why that cost is so high and what they can do to lower it to encourage more sidewalks.
Posted Thu, Jul 23, 11:53 a.m. Inappropriate
Constantine, here is some information for you: Haller Lake was annexed more than 50 years ago with the promise of sidewalks.
White Center, vote no until the state treats all of you fairly.
Constantine, you have lost my vote, thanks for helping me with that choice.
Why is it that one city gets the .2, but not another in the same county you want to run as executive?
(Well, it is between Hunter and Jarrett for me now.)
Posted Thu, Jul 23, 12:25 p.m. Inappropriate
The warm spit crack is a selling point for Ross.
Posted Fri, Jul 24, 8:01 a.m. Inappropriate
The article has some inacurate information. The tax rebate discussed is not based on sales taxes from the area annexed, but on sales taxes in the entire city. The original legislation was intended to help smaller cities cope with the cost of annexation, not to give Seattle a windfall. With an annexation of 10,000 or more people, Burien would get about $600,000, Seattle would get about $5,000,000 (it would be more but the legislature capped it at $5M). Seattle opposed legislation that would give it the same amount of money as Burien ($600,000 for 10,000-20,000 people, or $1,200,000 for 20,000 or more), in favor of the present scheme that gives Seattle $5,000,000 for annexation of 10,000 or more, but gives Burien the same amount only if it annexes all of NH. Under the present partial annexation, intended as a first step toward annexing all of NH, Burien will only get about $600,000 from the state.
Another point, the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) (not MOA), that was negotiated between Seattle and Burien was approved by the Burien City Council before being rejected by the Seattle City Council. The Seattle Mayor's office, which had pushed for the MOU, backed away from the MOU after Burien insisted that any annexation pursuant to the MOU must be done by a vote of the people being annexed. It is my belief that the language of the MOU as it was proposed by Seattle, would have allowed Seattle to annex White Center (actually all of North Highline not included in Burien's current annexation proposal) without an election. It seems that the Mayor was hoping to avoid an election in North Highline and backed off when Burien refused to go along with that plan.
Finally, White Center and North Highline have higher rates of poverty, lower incomes and lower educational levels because of King County's policy of concentrating low income housing in this area. Even though White Center has less than 4% of the population of the area served by the King County Housing Authority (KCHA), it contains more than 25% of the low income housing operated by KCHA, and KCHA is in the process of adding more. Low income housing operated by other providers is similarly concentrated in this area. KCHA has created a spiral in which it created a concentration of lower income families in this area, then is using that concentration to justify the further concentration of lower income families here. Everything I have seen indicates that Seattle will seek to accelerate that process.
Posted Fri, Jul 24, 9:20 a.m. Inappropriate
As a White Center resident who has followed (and led)annexation issues and discussions very closely for over four years, the desk-side blog comment above is unfair and shallow in both its thinking and its claims. The state, through the GMA, pushed for unincorporated areas like White Center to be annexed and then does not provide the funding to cover the full costs of annexation. Seattle was smarter than Burien, plain and simple, and pushed for the money needed to pay for services for our diverse population. Burien did not even see that potential and spent its time claiming that Seattle was unfair and fighting against additional funding. And Burien has not been willing at all to discuss the vast difference in services and programs that are available to Seattle residents that are not available to Burien residents.
Government in Seattle is about neighborhoods and I feel sorry for those who do not see this reality. Seattle will never keep everyone happy, but I sure see the Seattle City Council spending a hell of a lot of time in neighborhoods listening and trying to do the right thing. And the Mayor too. What I wonder about is the anger that permeates so many of the blog comments these days. Seattle is a great city with challenges that any city its size has, but I am honored to live here and chose to live here.
I am starting to realize that the anger that many bloggers and others carry in their comments is due to other "stuff" in their lives and they are tranferring it to other issues such as Seattle, or the Mayor, or the police, or whatever.
And the comment "oh my God, Seattle will dump subsidized housing on White Center" is fear mongering. Why do we speak 56 languages on White Center streets? Why are our families larger, lower income and economically challenged? Why do we have one of the largest concentrations of ethnic entreprenaurs in the state? White Center is so interesting, so unique, so challenged because of our housing diversity. So, bring on the diversity, that is why White Center is such a great place to live and eat. I just want more police officers that Seattle provides to its residents, I want much stronger fire and medical services Seattle provides to its residents. I want three first time home buyer programs, traffic circles, park investments, a department of neighborhoods, peer review, a professional city council who work every day to make our lives better, a mayor who actually understands that our long term viability as a species is threathened with global warming and environmental degradation. I want Seattle water, some of the cleanest water available on earth. And I want Seattle property taxes (that are the same as Burien by the way) but where we just get more.
And finally, anyone who blogs or posts comments and does not use their full name is intellectually and spiritually dishonest. Shame on people for hiding their misallocated anger behind the atonomy of a user name. Get counseling for your anger, volunteer at a local food bank and learn what you should really be complaining about. Seattle is one of the best places to live in, in this country. I am sorry that some poeple have yet to discover this.
Mark Ufkes (Eagle Scout)
White Center
And I am available to debate anyone on any of these issues.
(206) 595-7124
What bothers me most is that Burien city officials have never, after dozens of meetngs, stated any real interest in annexation. For Burien it is all about protecting its turf, it's lower level fire department and its subsidized sheriff's contract. For Burien, annexation is not about White Center, it is about Burien. And that is the problem. No, actually, Seattle was smart.
Go read the Crosscut article again, and then tell me that it is good government to push our beautiful but complex population onto Burien for conveinance sake. I have watched Burien city government closely for years now, and I will take the professional, accessable city of Seattle over Burien any day. In my view that is what smart government is all about. Making sure that the resources are there
Posted Fri, Jul 24, 5:59 p.m. Inappropriate
markufkes, I'm glad you mentioned the food bank. If you think Seattle will be so wonderful for the people of White Center, maybe you can explain this. Currently, one-third of the clients of the White Center Food Bank (WCFB) live in the city limits of Seattle, yet the City of Seattle provides no funding to the WCFB. Another third of the clients live in the unicorporated White Center, but the other third live in the city limits of Burien. The City of Burien does provide funding to the WCFB.
The City of Seattle evidently thinks that branding of the White Center business district is far more important than feeding hungry people since Mayor Nickels recently gave a $5,000 grant to the White Center Community Development Association for that purpose. http://tinyurl.com/kq6ud6 That $5,000 could have fed a lot of hungry families during these difficult economic times. I think this speaks volumes about the priorities of the two cities and the annexation of White Center and the rest of North Highline and what the future may hold for the people who live there.
Posted Fri, Jul 24, 7:25 p.m. Inappropriate
As a resident of North Highline, I have looked at whether I would choose to be annexed by Seattle or Burien. I can say without a doubt that Burien is the much wiser choice. As I listen Mr. Ufkes go into his usual rant against Burien I find it very amusing. The first thing I found amusing was signing it Mark Ufkes, (Eagle Scout). I too am an eagle scout and I am about the same age as Mr. Ufkes. I stopped listing Eagle Scout as part of my job resume 30 years ago. What does Eagle Scout have anything to do with annexation? Need I digress?
The citizens of North Highline, when surveyed, chose to go to Burien over Seattle. They feel that they will have a much stronger voice in Burien over Seattle. Do you really think the Seattle city council will listen to the 33,000 people of North Highline when they don't listen to the 600,000 people who live in their own town? Unless it has to do with saving the enviroment you might as well forget it. Do we want Seattle police protecting us? King County does a great job in the North Highline area and when we are annexed to Burien we will have the same cops doing the same job. It will be a seamless transition. Do you want to be at the will of every nutty law that Seattle passes? I don't want to pay 20 cents for plastic bags. Do you want Mayor Nichols and the Seattle City Council passing laws that affect you? I will take Mike Martin and the Burien City Council any day of the week. Do you think that your house will be worth more if you live in the Seattle city limits. As any realtor and he will tell you its the location of your home and not the city that matters.
Most of the people that I have heard that don't want Burien for thier city fall into to basic catagories 1. Those that want to stay as we are and that just is not going to happen and 2. Those that want to sell their houses or properties and feel that they will get more being in Seattle.
I am a proud resident of North Highline and after the vote will be a proud resident of Burien.
This opinions expressed in this blog are my own and have nothing to do with the North Highline Unincorporated Area Council.
Thank you
Greg Duff
President
North Highline Unincorporated Area Council
Posted Sat, Jul 25, 1:13 a.m. Inappropriate
I am a Burien resident and am proud of the level of service that Burien provides to its residents. In particular, I am proud of the commitment that our city is showing towards good environmental stewardship. We have developed, basically from scratch (the "scratch" being infrastructural neglect from the County during the time before we incorporated), a vibrant, walkable, dense, small business-oriented downtown. Burien is a member of the Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement, is seeking LEED certification for our new city hall/library, and is moving ahead on implementing our forward-thinking bicycle and pedestrian plan (at the same time that Seattle is cutting the main funding source for implementing its own bicycle and pedestrian plans). Burien has come a lot further since incorporating in 1993 than neighborhoods that Seattle annexed decades ago (North Seattle, South Park) and are still waiting for the infrastructural improvements, like sidewalks, promised to them at the time of annexation.
North Highline is not being "pushed" towards one city or another and the voters will have the final say on which city they join, starting with the 14,000 residents of the southern area proposed for annexation next month. I suspect that the accessibility, community-oriented nature of Burien's government is an attractive element for the residents of that area, in contrast with the entrenched interests that too often hold sway in Seattle City Hall.
Posted Sun, Jul 26, 9:03 a.m. Inappropriate
Eagle Scout said: I am starting to realize that the anger that many bloggers and others carry in their comments is due to other "stuff" in their lives and they are tranferring it to other issues such as Seattle, or the Mayor, or the police, or whatever.
And I am telling you that the open drainage ditches and the invisible sidewalks here in the "other" Seattle were to be resolved, promised, as a condition of annexation, a 50-years-ago should serve as a warning to the unincorp-ed. Your taxes will go up and you should see some services get better, but the promises are made by people that will leave office, and maybe they will be fulfilled, maybe they will not.
Think about it while riding an empty trolley.
Posted Sun, Jul 26, 9:24 a.m. Inappropriate
As a 22 year resident of White Center I always wonder if anyone who writes the articles have ever been in my commmunity? Maybe from what you read from the other articles you feel the need to be fully armed to walk the community since we are always profiled as poor, uneducated, needy and crime ridden. Let me take you down my street. None of these people fit your ethnic groups, all have educations, all have jobs and do not depend on Social Services. Our commmunity may have diversity, but does not Seattle and Burien? I don't know of a neighborhood in any community that doesn't have that or have people that don't need Social Services. I am tired of the comments I hear when I say I live in White Center. Why the people of The North Highline Area want everything to stay the same is they are afraid of what will become of their commmunity if they annexed. What we have out here is Heart. We know our neighbors, we watch out for each other.
It is pretty much written on the wall what will happen to area in the hands of Seattle, who don't care of the feeling of the residents and will give them no voice, as for Burien, all the meetings I have attended regarding the annexation, I have been able to talk to the City Manager and the Burien City Council members face to face. Seattle has sent representatives of the Council members and the only time I have seen them is for photo ops and when the media is present, and then they don't allow time to talk to the residents. Who would you choose?
Rebecca Lopes
Posted Mon, Jul 27, 11:57 p.m. Inappropriate
As a 27 year resident of the Top Hat area in unincorporated North Highline, I think that Burien makes the most sense. My particular concern is that the White Center library stay open.
If Seattle annexes the area, then the library would likely close. You may have noticed that King County libraries will be staying open while Seattle libraries will be closing for a couple of weeks. This illustrates the advantage of having taxing districts for specific public services over having those services fight with each other every year for a share of the Seattle budget. KIng County libraries are better run simply because they have more predictable budgets coming from library taxing districts. Water, sewer, and fire protection have similar districts.
That is why North Highline would be better served by keeping those districts. Not to mention the fact that we would have more political power as 40% of Burien, compared to being 5% of Seattle. I'm not much concerned with property values, as I regard my home as a place to live, and not an ATM substitute.
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