Seattle and the Roots of Urban Sustainability: Inventing Ecotopia

2. Neighborhood

65 2 Neighborhood While developers and their critics battled over the future of the Pike Place Market in 1969, less than three miles away, in Seattle’s Central District, an integrated team of neighborhood organizers set out on their first annual “Fall Drive on Rats.” The group, including white college students, African American residents, and Asian American activists from the city’s International District, reportedly inspected 10,090 manholes and used over 500 pounds of poison bait in their effort to rid the area of rodents. The city government had neglected the problem for years, but that fall citizen-activists reinstated a “rodent proofing” program in the Central District as part of a new plan to improve health and other environmental conditions.1 By 1970 the volunteer rat counters had created a baseline survey of the neighborhood , examining over 12,000 homes and vacant lots and “measuring 57 variables for each property.”2 By the end of the 1960s, the sight of activists walking down the neighborhood’s alleys with clipboards in hand seemed normal. Central District residents watched from their windows as newly trained “environmental aides” combed 661 city blocks and 104.2 miles of alleys to assess everything from “refuse storage, rodents,” and other “vectors ” to “exterior building conditions, safety hazards, air pollution, noise, odors, alleys, sidewalks, natural deficiencies and abandoned houses.”3 In addition to holding press conferences at the time and inviting some local news coverage of their efforts, the group erected imposing billboards N e ig h b o r h o o d 66 in the neighborhood depicting the rat problem. “Can Rats Get Into Your House?” one of the billboards asked.4 In bold block letters at the bottom of the attention-grabbing image appeared a phone number for the ubiquitous Model Cities (MC) Environmental Health Project. In the following years, as part of the comprehensive Model Cities program in Seattle, the Environmental Health Project, along with other efforts to improve the physical environment of the neighborhood, did far more than count rats. The Model Cities program (originally the Demonstration Cities program) was President Lyndon Johnson’s last-gasp attempt to expand and reinvigorate the War on Poverty against the backdrop of riots, Billboard advertising Model Cities Rat Project, July 1, 1970–Sept. 30, 1970. Model Cities Program Environmental Health Project Records, Photograph Collection, item no. 69314. Courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives. N e ig h b o r h o o d 67 stark failures of urban renewal, and a growing public perception of an urban crisis in American cities.5 Model Cities’ basic goals were to better coordinate federal, state, and local resources to fight the roots of poverty; to develop innovative and responsive local programs; and above all, to require the direct involvement of local residents in the planning process.6 The short-lived program, lasting from 1967 to 1974, when President Richard Nixon canceled it, left a profound and lasting influence in Seattle’s neighborhoods, for it gave them the power and tools to define locally relevant and successful projects at a time when the U.S. government’s credibility was in question among conservatives in Congress, many urban activists , and especially African Americans. People living in Seattle’s Central District had particular reasons to mistrust federal and local officials in the early 1960s. City planners and the mayor expended tremendous political energy and money on grandiose downtown redevelopment plans, such as the proposed redevelopment of the Pike Place Market. They emphasized modernization to create a consumer utopia for white, middle-class shoppers while actively beating back civil rights activists’ efforts to pass open-housing initiatives in the city. Although the Central District never matched the profile of other large ghettoes in the United States, because of its higher rates of homeownership and single-family dwellings, the area still suffered from the worst problems associated with segregation and the negative consequences of metropolitanization , which redirected money toward urban renewal and suburban development and away from the city’s older neighborhoods. One contemporary assessment noted that there was “far more deterioration, poverty, and deprivation in the Central Area” than first met the eye and that conditions had been “growing worse.”7 As the overall population of Seattle and King County grew between 1940 and the 1960s, high numbers of African Americans joined the growing population moving to the urban West in search of higher-paying jobs.8 In Seattle...