Grandpa's last and current home in the South End neighborhood of Seattle was purchased in the 1980s when the community, formerly a lot of farmland, was developing. He'd met his third wife, Rosella, and they had built their lives in a shotgun house they built on.
My mom also purchased her home in 1988 for just over $50,000. After a few years of getting acclimated to Seattle and building up her career, purchasing a property as a single woman was a major feat. Her mother had never been able to do the same. The 1940s‐built home was just minutes away from my grandfather, in a neighborhood of mixed‐income, multiracial neighbors with whom I grew up from the time I was just three years old and until the time I left for college. Today, home prices in Seattle average $700,000.
My family, generationally, had moved from bouts of poverty and into the middle class through homeownership, state school education, and steady jobs that provided stability, health care benefits, and a little more access to opportunities they had not experienced growing up.
By the time I was taking the bus between school and my after‐school programs, gentrification had swept a great deal of the Central District community's flavor from the sidewalk. It began with Starbucks on Jackson and 23rd; then a few of the local mom‐and‐pop shops were no longer able to afford the rent. It spread like a virus, until every corner was infected with the promise of boxy and architecturally unattractive apartments.
As the condos went up, we saw the demise of local cultural icons and businesses: Black‐owned Liberty Bank on 24th and East Union Streets; Sammy's Best Burgers just two blocks north; Ms. Helene's Kitchen; Philly's Best Cheesesteak (now reclaimed as a weed shop); Catfish Corner; Carol's Gifts, and countless other enterprises that are now just names of the past.
Today, fewer than 18 percent of the CD's population is Black. Its white population, however, hovers over 60 percent. Do cities change and evolve? Yes. Do people and families sell their homes and move out and life moves on? Absolutely. But do all people have equitable access to the progress afforded to a select few? Not by a longshot.
Now, the community is a centerfold of high‐priced condos and multimillion‐dollar homes. It's a beautiful reality of progress that many of the neighborhood's Black inhabitants didn't get a chance to participate in as the city itself became a world‐renowned tech hub.
Who Gets to Participate in the Future?
While Seattle battled a horrific crack epidemic in the late 1980s, as many Black communities in America had, just 20 minutes east in a wealthy suburb called Bellevue, Microsoft was stretching its legs across the workforce. After setting up shop in its soon‐to‐be Redmond, Washington, campus in 1986, the company quickly grew to 1,400 employees over a two‐year span. There was very little mention in the Central District that the little‐known software company would serve as the hub for jobs, opportunity, and economic mobility.
Today, Microsoft employs over 160,000 people across its U.S. and global offices, with 60 percent of its workforce represented in the United States. Based on its 2020 diversity and inclusion report, just under 5 percent of its workforce is Black, 6.4 percent Hispanic or Latino, and .6 percent Native American or Alaskan. The largest representation, however, is white and Asian.
For Amazon, which employs over 800,000 people across its U.S. and global offices, 7.1 percent of employees are Black (this does not include warehouse workers); LatinX workers make up 7.5 percent.
A Forgotten Workforce
A 2021 study by consulting firm McKinsey revealed that nearly half of Black workers are concentrated in occupations like healthcare, retail, customer service, and food preparation industries—essentially the jobs that provide some of the lowest‐paying wages—and rarely within roles that are considered professional or managerial.
Reporting from the Brookings Institution also revealed that the highest proportions of low‐wage workers are female (54 percent of low‐wage workers, compared to 48 percent of the total workforce) and women of color. Hispanic and Black workers are overrepresented in low‐wage work and paid less for equivalent educational attainment. While the typical wage for U.S. workers is $42,000 per year, 43 percent of Black workers are earning less than $30,000 per year, and 52 percent of U.S.‐born Hispanic workers are earning the same. Those who migrated to the United States, earn a median income of $28,000.
The Central District, like many American neighborhoods occupied by Black and brown people, was not an assumed pipeline into college, or career opportunities in general for that matter, for the descendants of those people who had been subject to redlining rules, or who had felt the impacts of terrible policy like the War on Drugs in the 1980s, which turned petty drug crimes into lifelong sentences for marijuana dealers, and enterprising opportunists whose only outlet and mentorship was from those who had been devastated by mass incarceration and a lack of jobs.
As Amazon set up shop in Bellevue and eventually transitioned to South Lake Union in 2007, just another 12‐minute bus ride from the Central District, opportunity stretched again, skipping the Central District and any other local school system that had not already been a factory of talent in good neighborhoods with decent funding.
As the city built its reputation and prowess through the progress of its major technology companies, with Amazon boasting some of the largest square footage occupied by any company in the downtown community, it also increased its taste for concentrated poverty, pushing Black and brown residents out of the proximity of the more desirable area to jobs, and leaving many untrained, distant, and without the opportunity to build wealth or land the kinds of jobs that locals could have been onboarded into had opportunities for college and growth been part of the city's plan for workforce development and local investment.
Whereas my public high school had touted just a handful of Advanced Placement programs to help students earn college credit before graduation, the private schools in affluent communities where Bill Gates attended had already been well‐equipped with computers and technical programs and courses that served as an on‐ramp to jobs within the tech sector.
The majority of the CD's schools did not broadly offer honors or Advanced Placement courses in computer‐related skills. The neighborhood schools barely offered any computer training beyond basic typing and internet navigation classes.
My middle school, which boasted a partnership with companies like AT&T for magnet status, was more an introduction to gangs and drugs than about opportunities and options for life skills that would prepare us for the jobs that existed just a bus ride away. Recruiters for the military were often at our schools, but not the tech companies.
Seattle is a proxy for most of our coastal urban cities, which have seen deep investment in their business sector with very little investment in their surrounding communities, which have been defined more for their statistics on poverty and challenges than for their workforce growth opportunities.
It is a narrative that mirrors that of every other unfortunate story about gentrification, disinvestment, and lacking economic mobility within the very communities that were left for the poor, the immigrants, and people of color who had never been invited to join in the city's progress and certainly not within a job that would govern the future. Seattle is Oakland and San Francisco. It is New York City and Boston, Atlanta and Miami.
But how did one of the most promising cities skip over the talent pools and pipelines they claim to desperately say they value now 20 years after I left Meany Magnet Middle School in Seattle's Central District in the late 1990s?
As I recall my grandfather's story, my mom's deliberateness, and my proximity to some of the most formidable and influential technology companies in the world, I recognize how fortunate I was to have the right information at the right time to access the resources available to me.
Navigating available opportunities is not an easy task, especially when information is scattered, time is limited, or you simply don't know where to start.