Light Rail and Equity in Seattle

I just got back from Seattle, where we visited my spouse’s West Coast work domain, as well as his stepmom Judi, brother Alex, and soon-to-be sister-in-law Rose. I had been planning an errand to research King County’s famous equity policies, but the rental car was just enough to get the spouse to work and back in excruciating rush hour traffic.
So instead, I found myself learning a lot about segregation, light rail transit, and the immigrant experience.
With regard to light rail: I don’t know how a city like Seattle—concentrated on a narrow strip of land, with so maritime commerce and large companies like Microsoft—would ever get along without it. They already had the express lanes, the high-occupancy lanes, and an incredible bus system (complete with electric busses downtown), and it just wasn’t enough. People wanted to arrive home at night in time to see their kids, and living close to any major economic hub costs a fortune. Still, every new addition of LRT is fraught with conflict, and the major line extends only between the airport and downtown. Future plans include a northward extension and a university extension.
Which brings us to inequity and the hope for something better.
What I noticed about Seattle is its incredible segregation. Rose’s family lives in a part of town in which local schools are majority low-income, and minority white. The high school is one of the worst in the state, and Seattle just passed a rule that public school students must attend their local school. When Alex first met Rose’s family, he claimed that he had rarely seen a person of color in Seattle, and was surprised at the concentration of marginalized folks in one small area.
In 2009, however, the LRT was built near their home. I’m going to take a wild, but fairly educated guess that the property takes and traffic disruption it caused were concentrated in the poorest areas of town, with the hopes of increasing economic development and—more cynically on my part—to minimize the number of voices opposing the project.
One might expect that the LRT would bring gentrification to the areas around the route. That it would force out families like Rose’s. But I noticed the still-high concentration of light-industrial and minority-niche shops along the route. A lonely high-rise condo sat on a key corner, with empty retail space on its fancy first floor. A local flea market took up a huge warehouse nearby, promising secondhand clothing and DVDs. The local playground was full of non-native English speakers and other people of color, gleefully enjoying the updated equipment and well-manicured grass. Meanwhile, Rose takes the LRT daily to her job downtown, allowing her to live at home with her family rather than pay the exorbitant rents elsewhere.
I dreamed of this for Dayton’s Bluff. How might our renters and low-income folks be connected to jobs downtown and in Woodbury if the Gateway LRT/BRT were built? And how might we ensure that such a project would bring in capital without pricing people out of their homes? In short, how does government stabilize the community even as it improves it? It’s my hope that such infrastructure projects on the Bluff would continue to encourage its diversity and lift everyone’s prospects.
I reflected on these “big ideas” most of my trip. But these abstractions were no match for the concrete experience of meeting Rose’s family, all filtered through my first-gen middle-class white female perspective. (But that’s for another day.)