CITY OF SEATTLE
RESOLUTION __________________
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A RESOLUTION regarding the impact of Seattle's Urban Renewal program in displacing Black community members from the Central Area; supporting community demands to fund quality affordable social housing to prevent and reverse displacement; and urging the Office of Housing to fund the affordable housing project proposed by New Hope Community Development Institute.
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WHEREAS, in May 1959, The City of Seattle passed Ordinance 88190 declaring a 340-acre region of Seattle's predominantly Black Central Area to be a "blighted area," authorizing an Urban Renewal project later known as the Yesler-Atlantic Neighborhood Improvement Project (Wash. R-5); and
WHEREAS, in February 1960, The City of Seattle passed Ordinance 89036 authorizing a contract with Seattle Urban Renewal Enterprise (SURE) for "professional services for education, organization and dissemination of information, all in connection with [the Yesler-Atlantic Neighborhood Improvement Project]"; and
WHEREAS, in 1961 SURE submitted to the City its Yesler-Atlantic Report and Summary in accordance with that contract which claimed that, "To preserve this community for "decent" folks and families three things are needed: (1) Assistance to those who need it in improving their way of life in every respect; (2) encouragement to middle and upper-income whites to move into the community; and (3) relocation of those undesirables - the purveyors of vice and crime, the chronic trouble-makers, the undeserving poor - who are the source of the most social blight in the area."; and
WHEREAS, throughout Seattle's Central Area in the 1960s, dozens of Black families were displaced, forced to sell their houses, small businesses, and church properties, under threat of eminent domain; and
WHEREAS, in May 1969 the City of Seattle informed the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church that the City would use eminent domain to require the sale of the church property in the current location of...
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