White supremacy in liberal Seattle? "It's baked into the design of the city." [View all]

[pnwmom]

This is what the BLM protesters knew. Despite its progressive image, Seattle has a segregated past.

When we first moved to Seattle about thirty years ago, we were surprised to see that many of the house deeds contained racial covenants – promises not to sell a house to non-white people. We were told not to worry because the clauses were unenforceable. So Seattle didn’t have segregation imposed by the city. Our segregation was enforced by a network of housing associations with racial covenants.

http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2015/7/20/no-single-family-zoning-isn-t-racist-but-many-single-family-neighborhoods-historically-were

The mayor put the notion front and center during the release of the official HALA report. “We are dealing not just with the national crisis of income inequality in our city,” he told reporters at city hall last Monday. “In Seattle, we’re also dealing with a pretty horrific history of zoning based on race, and there’s residue of that still in place.”

To back up their talk, the HALA committee points to a massive historical project put together by researchers at the University of Washington in 2006 called the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project. In particular, the committee cites—on pages 5 and 25—Seattle’s grim history of racially discriminatory covenants: amendments to property deeds that forbid minorities from purchasing, renting, or occupying property in a given neighborhood. At the time (between the 1920s and ’60s), this was perfectly legal. Despite a Supreme Court ruling in 1917 that declared segregationist city zoning unconstitutional, private sector covenants were still in the clear in the eyes of the law. Some covenants designated properties as white-only, while others explicitly barred certain races and ethnicities. Here’s a racial covenant from Capitol Hill: “No part of said premises shall ever be used or occupied by or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to negroes or any person or persons of negro blood.” And another from Green Lake: “Said tract shall not be sold, leased, or rented to any person or persons other than of white race nor shall any person or persons other than of white race use or occupy said tract.” (All emphasis ours.)

According to Alan Durning, Executive Director of Sightline (a green city agenda think tank) and a member of HALA, members of the mayor’s task force (from both social justice and urbanist backgrounds) experienced a break-through moment during a presentation given by a representative from the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative on redlining in Seattle. “The presenter throws a map up on the screen of the historic red lining in the city of Seattle. And then a map of current population by race and ethnicity. And it’s the same thing,” says Durning. “[the committee was like] ‘oh, right. It’s [segregation] baked into the design of the city.’”


SNIP