In The Name Of Progress, Tacoma Said

If you regularly follow our city’s economic development you’ve heard the accusations that our city’s progress in the form of condos, expensive homes, and (hopefully) more commercial development is running over Tacoma’s working class and leaving them behind.  An article by L.D. Kirshenbaum in the Seattle Times today, and reprinted here with the writer’s permission, suggests that Tacoma’s working class isn’t simply being left behind, but is sytematically being removed in the name of crime-fighting to make way for some new vision of Tacoma.

Hilltop Blues
by L.D. Kirshenbaum

TACOMA — Mr. Mac’s shop in this city’s Hilltop neighborhood draws style-conscious men from all over the Pacific Northwest. They seek items like the $40 artificial alligator shoes in pink, orange or beige. Special customers get a fluffy, white, faux-fur coat for only $100, though the price tag says $299.

“I’m a destination,” explained the dapper Morris McCollum, 79, known affectionately as “Mr. Mac” after his decades in the Hilltop. That’s his secret to staying in business, even as foot traffic has slowed on what was once the busy main drag, Martin Luther King Jr. Way.

Fewer customers than ever come by, and business in the historically low-income Hilltop is way down, especially since the city forced Browne’s Star Grill to close more than a year ago, just one block from McCollum’s store.

Browne’s counter and neon signs had been fixtures of the neighborhood since 1967. Now it sits empty, stripped of its fittings and gathering dust. “We’d been working hard to close it,” said City Councilman Thomas R. Stenger. “We have no tolerance for crime, prostitution and drug dealing.”

Indeed, the intimidating loiterers outside Browne’s have disappeared. Marieva Riche has worked at the tidy Johnson’s Candy Co. two blocks away for 25 years, and recalled “bad guys” urinating in the bushes and dealing drugs. “I don’t generally believe in closing down a business, but this is a wonderful place again since they closed Browne’s.”

Nobody misses the open drug dealing that once took place on MLK Way. But not everyone feels that next-to-no business is good business. This once-vibrant street, just up the hill from downtown, is all too quiet. Customers who frequented Browne’s, many of them African-American retirees looking for a quick meal, some conversation and maybe a drink and a game of dominos, have disappeared, and nobody is sure where they’ve gone to. Property up and down the street is empty, fenced or locked. A beauty-supply shop advertised human hair for sale at 30 percent off.

Tacoma isn’t the only older city lurching toward economic revitalization by repopulating its downtown and providing business incentives. The issue of which types of people and activities are desirable is a treacherous one anywhere. But Tacoma is using a troubling method to speed gentrification, one with a fair amount of human cost: It shuts down and muscles out businesses altogether.

Tacoma has been arm-wrestling with its own identity since its early days in the mid-19th century. With a population currently near 200,000, it claims to be comfortable with its working-class roots. “Tacoma always has been and always will be a blue-collar town,” said Roxanne Murphy of the city’s Economic Development Department, with a touch of pride.

But it looks like that sentiment isn’t sticking. Eric Anderson, the city manager, noted that Tacoma’s low-income households, as defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, now represent only 47 percent of the city’s population, down from 76 percent five years ago. “What that’s doing is changing the demographic,” he said. “The market is driving the development.”

Clearly, the city’s leaders are urging the civic upheaval along. At this pace, it’s more of a city-sized personality transplant. The once-gritty town has sprouted new condominiums and apartments along a still-working but much-sanitized waterway. Visitors outside the gleaming Museum of Glass must look past rows of pleasure boats to see a real barge loaded with genuine gravel. Where downtown meets water, weeds once flourished on rutted turf near rotting pilings. Now, there is a tailored lawn and a graceful esplanade.

The city government encourages this change by deftly leveraging pots of money. “The public sector had to take the lead,” said Martha Anderson, assistant director of the Department of Economic Development, who is not related to Eric Anderson. The waterway was declared a Superfund site, drawing federal aid. With revolving loans and public-private partnerships, Tacoma attracted yet more projects and a branch campus of the University of Washington. “The next development will be all condos,” said Martha Anderson, “and also a boutique hotel.”

It’s easy to dismiss the impact of all this change. “People just want it to happen faster,” said Murphy. The blue-collar citizens she spoke of proudly do not all agree, especially the business and property owners of the Hilltop whose livelihoods were forcibly — if legally — cast out.

The last owner of Browne’s Star Grill, Tyrone Furgeson, 50, has gone so far as to sue the city of Tacoma for illegal search and seizure and discrimination in taking his business away. A military veteran, he felt he knew what he was getting into when he bought the business in 1996. He admitted that Browne’s was a “greasy spoon,” but the many regular customers were his main source of income. Furgeson says he was motivated to stop criminals from entering, or loitering in front. He made sure calls for help to the police from Browne’s went down every year.

Where Furgeson, and eventually Browne’s, had more trouble was in keeping the street itself free of nefarious activities. The police told him the drug dealers and gang members on the block were his to deal with, not theirs. Even with his law-and-order background, Furgeson couldn’t comply, and with that, the city moved to buy the building and shutter the restaurant. As a result, Furgeson says he is still fighting off bankruptcy.

As he spoke in front of his now-closed establishment, a patrol car slowly passed by, the officer inside looking straight ahead. This, Furgeson said, illustrated his argument that police and city authorities deliberately avoided dealing with crime on the sidewalk, that they were focused only on getting him out. The vacant building now awaits a zoning change to allow taller construction.

Officer Greg Hopkins, who patrols the area, flatly denied that police services were withheld, but offered few details to counter so serious an accusation. He noted that the judge in Furgeson’s lawsuit found everything to be legal, and that he himself uses unconventional police methods in his pursuit of “cleaning up places that look like garbage.” Hopkins’ supervisor, Lt. Corey Darlington, refused to consider any notion whatsoever of heavy-handedness, and pointed out the decline in crime statistics.

As coordinator of the Drug House Elimination Task Force, Hopkins uses his ability to draw a team of fire, electrical and building inspectors to a property deemed unworthy, and finds the violations necessary to demand vacation and closure. The effect ruins and even traumatizes struggling business owners, and decimates the community. A few examples:

• Parker Pickens, who ran Ikan Auto Repair, said he was taunted by the police before the task force “came in with the whole gestapo” and searched for the violations to close him down a few years ago. He lists other auto-repair shops on the Hilltop that were also forcibly shut down. Now that new zoning doesn’t allow his kind of business, he isn’t sure what to do with the building.

• Webb Bowie of Bellevue invested $100,000 and renovated the boarded-up Liberty Apartments, seeing promise in the Hilltop’s bright views and con-venient location. He recounted failed attempts to work with the police in dealing with the neighborhood’s criminal element before the task force arrived and demanded immediate departure of the building’s tenants. Bowie recalls watching helplessly as the electrical technician snipped the power line to his building. He remains bitter about the treatment he received, and the loss of the fortune he hoped to make. Bowie’s investment partner went on to sell all of his Tacoma properties.

• Janice Johnson’s family has run the Pegasus restaurant for 30 years. They’re not in the Hilltop, but they have met with the Tacoma police about the crime nearby and the prostitution in the motel next door. The Tacoma police, said Johnson, suggested putting up a fence around the restaurant. She prefers to work with the tribal police from the nearby Puyallup Casino; after what Tacoma did to Browne’s, what if the task force decides to target her business next and shut down the Pegasus, too?

Gentrification is supposed to be a market-driven process, where more and more well-heeled and educated citizens move in to shop or dine after they have acquired renovated real estate. Previous residents are expected to gracefully and gradually move their bad habits and chronic problems out to the less-desirable areas they can afford.

But Tacoma seems to be in such a mad rush to speed up the process that it tramples on its own citizenry and even its own character as it cleans up those “places that look like garbage,” as Hopkins put it.

“Everybody’s on this bandwagon, talking about this ‘revitalization,’ “ said Bowie, the investor. Pickens, the auto-repair expert, said, “Their idea of cleaning things up is to push all the businesses out that were trying to make it.” And Johnson of the Pegasus said, “We’re a little disheartened.”

The city also risks charges of racism, as when police officers in the Drug House Elimination Task Force tell Hilltop businesses not to play rap music. (Ty Furgeson of Browne’s, who is white, said he complied. Laura Malone, who opened the nearby Monsoon Room lounge, is African American, and said she was a diplomat on the subject, as support of the local police is vital.)

What’s happening in the Hilltop and in Tacoma should be a warning for any metropolis that strives for adjectives like “world-class” and “tourist destination.” The danger in moving so fast to improve a city is a lot like overdoing plastic surgery: The wrinkles and problems might have vanished, but the result is unnatural and irreversible, and ultimately, somewhat ghastly. The down-to-Earth appeal of Tacoma and its neighborhoods is greatly in danger when crime can’t be contained without ousting the small businesses that are its lifeblood.

Tacoma now ponders the unsettled futures of the iconic Winthrop Hotel and the recently burned Fawcett House. Ironically, the city’s precious built character has been safe for so long precisely because there wasn’t any big money available to raze and replace its old vaudeville theaters and modest Craftsman houses. Like the brownstones of Harlem or — yes — the buildings of Pioneer Square and Pike Place Market in Seattle, the area’s decline was also its salvation. The communities there hung together because of the absence of outside economic forces, and eventually became something special enough to draw visitors.

How sad it would be if the Hilltop, or Tacoma, or even Seattle or any other city, were to improve and gentrify so drastically they became something else entirely, and hurt their own businesses and citizenry in the process.

L.D. Kirshenbaum is a freelance writer now living in Seattle that has written from the New York Times, San Francisco Chronical, the Fog City Journal, and other publications.  This article first appeared in the Seattle Times on February 4th, 2007 and is provided to Exit133 with the permission of the writer.