Gentrifying White Center
White Center is an unincorporated neighborhood and cultural melting pot, sandwiched between Seattle proper and the suburb of Highline. Despite grappling with urban crime and the difficulties of providing subsidized housing for low income residents, both Seattle and Burien believe there is hope. Part 1
First of two parts
Young girls in traditional Cambodian costumes — the sheen of bright cloth, the glitter of gold appliqué, off-the-shoulder in the tradition of a much warmer place — shiver in the unseasonable April chill. Spectators sit on folding chairs under a big canopy in the middle of 98th Street, which has been blocked off between 15th and 16th Avenues for the occasion. In front of the audience, a thick blue mat covers the pavement, making it hard for the girls in their elaborate costumes to balance in the movements of Cambodian classical dance.
Up the street, past canopied booths manned by representatives of various social service agencies, health care organizations, and real estate firms, men are grilling thin strips of meat over a fire in a cut-down oil drum. Across from the New Angkor Market stands a halal butcher shop. Around the corner by the bus stop on 15th stands a Mexican carniceria.
This place is White Center, just across Roxbury Street from incorporated Seattle. These people are celebrating last month's Cambodian New Year festival. If you walk around White Center, you see signs in Spanish, Vietnamese, and Khmer. The Salvadorian Bakery stands just down Roxbury from tile-roofed Holy Family Catholic Church. Other cafes sell pho and Mexican food, and the Heng Heng supermarket appeals to customers with signs in multiple languages. The old Chubby and Tubby discount store has closed, replaced by a Latin dance club. The old gray Quonset hut that housed the now defunct Southgate Skate Center is set back off 17th Street, where the Rat City Rollergirls roller derby league originated. In the 1920s and ‘30s, the building functioned as a boxing arena, run in classic old immigrant style, by a Jew and an Italian. The building later became a dance hall, then a roller rink. Driving around, you still find ravines harboring wetlands; once, the whole Seattle area was full of places like this. White Center has developed more slowly than many other Seattle neighborhoods and still retains suggestions of a previous time.
On 16th Street, in broad daylight, two drunks, one white and one black, stand on the sidewalk outside a tavern. "It's White Center," yells the white man. "No," the black man replies. "It's Black Center." Actually, "black center" was never in the cards, but the White Center moniker was far from a sure thing. As the story goes, two early developers of the neighborhood, Mr. White and Mr. Green, flipped a coin to see whose name would title the area. Mr. White won, and the rest is history.
A classic urban melting pot without a city, White Center is merely a part of unincorporated King County. The County wants some city — any city — to annex White Center and the rest of the sprawling North Highline area, as well as nine other unincorporated areas with urban densities. The Growth Management Act says that development in urban densities should take place only within incorporated areas. The County would just as soon unload White Center's expensive problems on someone else. However, both Seattle and Burien may be more than willing to oblige.
Some White Center residents prefer joining Seattle in the belief that it would bring more social services and more money to the area. Others favor joining Burien because it would let the area keep more of its character and more local control. One woman active in White Center affairs says that some Burien residents aren't eager to take in White Center's immigrants and their expensive social problems. Some residents told pollsters that they didn't want Seattle's density or its slow police response times. Most residents most likely favor staying unincorporated from either city. State Representative Sharon Nelson, whose district includes White Center, suggests that while Seattle and Burien negotiate and squabble, White Center's "residents don't even have a seat at the table." A woman who works in the fated neighborhood looks at White Center's would-be annexers and observes, "Everybody wants a piece of the cookie, but nobody wants to help with the baking."
But that's not to say that no one cares. On the morning of this year's Cambodian New Year festival, King County renamed the County park on 102nd Street for Steve Cox, a King County Sheriff's deputy who was shot and killed here two years ago when questioning a gang member and convicted felon about an assault. Cox, who had worked as a deputy prosecutor in several counties, had abandoned his law career and joined the police in order to help the community in which he had grown up.
On the day of his funeral, KOMO-TV reported that Cox's former partner "said that patrolling the community with Steve was like riding around with a rock star. People would yell his name at the car and wave, and when we got out, people would crowd around because they wanted to talk to him." Cox's widow, Maria, said the officer "had a mission. He wanted White Center to become a decent area. He [said] ‘it's going to be clean, it's going to be fixed and we are going to make that happen.'"
