Racial housing segregation has left deep scars on Seattle’s communities. What will it take to heal?
For much of the 20th century, the Seattle region was defined by a sprawling system of public and private housing segregation. The ripple effects of racial apartheid in Washington state and across the U.S. remain with us today in the form of massive chasms of inequality in health, wealth and quality of life. After decades of protests and reforms, what can be done to repair the harms?
From its inception, Seattle and the surrounding region was built to be explicitly exclusionary. One of the Seattle City Council’s inaugural acts was to expel Duwamish people from the fledgling town’s borders, while still continuing to exploit their labor. For the city’s first decades, Black people, Asians and other people of color were marginalized and remained a small minority. Whenever racialized communities were perceived to amass too much wealth or stability, this informal boundary would be policed with terror, such as in the case of the 1886 Seattle anti-Chinese riot or the 1907 expulsion of South Asian migrants from Bellingham.
After the turn of the century, increasing numbers of Black and Asian people began migrating to Seattle, and by the 1920s a more formal version of racial segregation was cemented, known as racially restrictive covenants. These contractual agreements banned people of color from living in, renting or purchasing homes outside of a few narrowly defined places: the Chinatown-International District and the Central Area.
Racially restrictive covenants could take the form of clauses written into the individual deed of a house or neighborhood homeowner association agreements and were legally enforceable. These documents often named explicit restrictions against Black, Asian, Indigenous, Mexican and Jewish people. Additionally, neighborhoods north of the Ship Canal were known as “sundown towns,” where white vigilantes frequently committed violence against racial minorities.
“There are several sets of maps currently available that show the areas where most of these restrictions existed, and it pretty much rings the Central District — it was called the L-shaped ghetto because the shape of it ran [around] the Jackson Street corridor and the 23rd Avenue corridor,” said James Gregory, a history professor at the University of Washington. “And that was pretty much the only place where people of color could find either rental [housing] or properties to buy, as late as the 1970s.”
Gregory is the director of the Racial Restrictive Covenants Project (RRCP), which has unearthed more than 50,000 racially restrictive covenants in western Washington. The research effort, which started in 2004, has received funding from the Washington Legislature to study the effects of residential segregation across the state.
In addition to restrictive covenants on the local level, Black and Asian people also faced discrimination from national housing policies in the form of redlining. This practice refers to areas that were designated as “hazardous” by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a New Deal era federal agency that alleviated the debt of struggling homeowners. The agency assigned neighborhoods with large Black populations like the Central Area as having elevated risk — marking them red on maps — leading banks to refuse Black and Brown communities mortgages. A 1975 report by the Central Seattle Community Council Federation found Central Area residents only received 24 cents in bank loans for every dollar they deposited.
In 1921, the Washington Legislature passed the Alien Land Law, which severely limited homeownership among Japanese Americans and other Asian communities. It was repealed in 1965.
Seattle City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth still lives in the same part of the northern Central Area where her grandmother Dorothy Hollingsworth bought a home in 1949. She recalls hearing about the discrimination her grandmother faced.
“I remember her telling us stories about how she wanted to purchase a home on McGilvra Boulevard, which is in Washington Park right next to Denny Blaine, and the realtor said, ‘I can sell it to you, but you can’t live in it,’” Hollingsworth said. “And you look at … where people could have potentially bought homes north of where the red line was, and how much those homes are worth now, that is a bunch of generational wealth that has been unfortunately excluded from a certain demographic in our history.”
Communities of color resisted residential housing segregation in various ways, including collecting petitions, filing lawsuits and organizing protests. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that racially restrictive covenants could not be enforced in court, but this did not prevent extralegal exclusion. In 1964, Seattle voters rejected by a margin of two to one an open housing initiative that would have banned racial discrimination. It wasn’t until 1968, when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act and Seattle finally enacted the open housing ordinance following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that racially restrictive covenants and redlining were made illegal.
Enduring impacts
Decades after the end of housing segregation, deep racial inequalities remain in the Seattle area. The Washington Department of Health environmental health disparities map shows a stark difference in health risks. While the formerly redlined Central Area ranks a nine or 10 on health disparity risks, nearby Broadmoor — a historically exclusionary neighborhood which was governed by covenants — is a one. The two bordering neighborhoods have a life expectancy difference of more than 11 years.
Even as housing segregation has abated, other oppressive policies like the War on Drugs and mass incarceration have devastated Black and Brown communities, mapping onto the same racialized geographies. In 2020, Seattle City Council Districts 2 and 3 — which contain Southeast Seattle and the Central Area — had 356 and 376 people incarcerated per 100,000 residents, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. This is seven times more than District 4, which encompasses Northeast Seattle just north of the Ship Canal and had 49 people imprisoned per 100,000.
Beginning in the 1990s, the same communities who were redlined started facing gentrification and displacement as their property values, which were historically depressed, skyrocketed. Demographic data reveals the dramatic change: In 1970, census tracts comprising the Central Area were between 40% to 90% Black; in 2020, only 7% to 17% of tract residents were Black.
Chukundi Salisbury, a community organizer and nonprofit leader, founded Black Legacy Homeowners in 2019 to provide support for Black people who were increasingly at risk of being displaced from the Central Area.
“My family, we moved here in 1975,” Salisbury said. “Oftentimes, we had friends and family that just disappeared, and then you’d see them later, and now they’re living in Covington or Federal Way or Tacoma because of all types of gentrification. I saw my community shrink around me — people that look like me [leave] over time.”
In Seattle, the racial wealth gap remains stark. According to a 2019 report in the Seattle Times, white households’ median net worth was $456,000, while Black households had a net worth of $23,000 and Latino households had a net worth of $90,000. Asian households had a median net worth of $446,000, although Isabel Smith, a student researcher with RRCP, says this figure hides internal class divides within Asian communities.
“If you also take a look at the Asian American rate, it’s much higher,” Smith said. “But that’s deceptive because a lot of the Asian American households in the suburbs and such are families who have immigrated here recently. The Asian families that have been here for generations were disadvantaged by all these covenants.”
A 2023 study commissioned by the King County Wastewater Treatment Division estimated Black, Indigenous and people of color in the county have lost out on $12 billion to $34 billion as a result of housing segregation policies.
Homeownership rates also mirror this trend, with 62% of white households in King County owning their home, while only 28% of Black households own their homes. In 1970, the Black homeownership rate in King County was 50%.
The real estate market also continues to cause harm to Black people. In 2022, King 5 reported that a Black family in Columbia City received an appraisal $259,000 higher when they had a white neighbor stand in for them compared to when the family was alone with the appraiser. Approximately 96% of U.S. real estate appraisers are white.
Seattle’s land use policies still bear the fingerprints of racially restrictive covenants. Today, historically exclusionary neighborhoods are disproportionately zoned for single-family homes, which drives up the cost of housing. These zoning policies effectively shut out lower-income families. Because race and class are inextricably linked in the U.S., this has led to the maintenance of whiter, wealthier neighborhoods.
Path to repair
Over the last decade, as the Black Lives Matter movement once again brought to the fore America’s ongoing racial inequities despite laws mandating formal equality, the question of reparations has become increasingly salient.
In 2020, California convened a task force to study reparations for Black California residents who are descendants of slavery. The group released a report calculating that housing segregation led to an average loss of wealth of more than $160,000 for Black Californians and recommended compensation to redress the harms.
Starting in 2021, the city of Evanston, Illinois, began offering $25,000 to people affected by residential segregation and their descendants. The reparations are funded by a cannabis sales tax and can be used on home improvements, purchases of a new house or payments on an existing mortgage.
In part due to the work of the RRCP, the Washington Legislature passed a law in 2023 authorizing compensation to residents and their descendants who were harmed by racially restrictive covenants. The legislation imposes a $100 increase in the state’s deed recording fee, which will net about $100 million annually to the reparations program.
In order to overcome Washington’s prohibition on race-based affirmative action, the program is narrowly tailored to be based on specific harms against individuals as opposed to the collective. It will grant $30,000 in down payment assistance to about 2,000 to 3,000 families to go toward the purchase of a first home.
“Homeownership was suppressed, not just back in 1968, but all the way [to] today through all the mechanisms of generational wealth,” Gregory said. “That was a generational system of harm that is still suppressing homeownership.”
This covenant housing reparations policy is the first statewide initiative of its kind, and if it survives potential legal challenges, it could set a precedent for similar efforts across the country, Gregory said. The program is expected to start disbursing funds in summer 2024.
Still, the law isn’t without its limitations. Not all people who were affected by housing segregation care to or are in a position to buy a house. It also only applies to people who earn 100% or less of the area median income.
Salisbury said that while he appreciates the law, because property values have increased so much, it is not enough money for people who were displaced from the Central Area to return. Rather, the covenant compensation program will mainly help people who are looking for housing in the suburbs.
“I’m not downing the program; it’s a great step. But for example, $30,000 on a million-dollar house is nothing; 10% would be $100,000,” he said. “If your credit is bad, you’re looking at 20%.”
Salisbury also said other policies, like property tax relief for seniors who experienced housing segregation, could go a long way to alleviating the harms facing Black homeowners.
In an email to Real Change, Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development spokesperson Seferiana Day wrote that since the city founded its Equitable Development Initiative (EDI) in 2018, it has allocated $120 million toward projects aimed at addressing displacement and the legacies of housing segregation. The city council is currently considering new legislation that could reduce land use regulations for EDI-eligible developments.
Hollingsworth said she wants to support the statewide covenant compensation program, as well as explore what else Seattle can do on a municipal level to bring about reparations.
“When I was doorknocking, I ran into people that had three or four generations that lived in their home, that were Black in the Central District, struggling to keep their home,” she said. “And so that’s something the city needs to look at.”
For Salisbury, repairing the damage caused by housing segregation and other racist policies must entail restoring the entire community.
“A true reparations program is one that allows us to make people whole,” Salisbury said.
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the Feb. 28–March 5, 2023 issue.