Published on May 1, 2019
In a new documentary about gentrification in the Central District, “On the Brink,” an advocate of Seattle’s historically African American neighborhood talks about recent construction projects in the area digging the soul out of that community.
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The CD became a nearly 80% black neighborhood in the late 1960s and early ’70s because African Americans, regardless of income, had almost no other option, due to restrictive housing covenants in most parts of the Seattle metro area and redlining in the lending industry.
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I do see glimmers of hope in the work of groups like Africatown Community Land Trust to promote cultural preservation, affordable housing and business development for people of color — and in the determination of neighborhood old-timers and supporters featured in “On the Brink” to keep gentrification in the public discourse.
“[Gentrification] doesn’t concern Seattle enough,” Pastor Carl Livingston, Jr., also featured in “On the Brink,” told me. “We need to see something that’s in some relation to the scale of the loss.”
Jeff Shulman, a University of Washington Foster School of Business marketing professor and host of Seattle Growth Podcast, says he and Steven Fong, a UW Community, Environment & Planning alum, made the film “to acknowledge the pain of the people who are still there by showing them stories of people who feel the same way.”
Continue reading in the Seattle Times.
Originally written by Tyrone Beason for the Seattle Times.