“Cleaning up” Third Avenue: for whose benefit, and with what money?

by Nat Latos and Katie Wilson

On December 29 the Seattle Times featured an article entitled “Seattle looks to clean up Third Avenue transit corridor,” describing some of the obstacles facing the city’s plans to improve this section of downtown. Unfortunately, author Lynn Thompson both displays the Times’ usual editorial prejudice against poor people and fails to address the fundamental issues at play.

Violence is the article’s narrative thread, and the most apparent conclusion is that clearly we need more police. In describing the scene at Third and Pine the author says commuters encounter “a gantlet of open-air drug deals, the homeless, the mentally ill and crowds of loitering street kids.” The implication is that the homeless, mentally ill, and “street kids” don’t have as much a right as anyone else to be in the downtown core. More to the point, even though she aptly points out that the city and state are both broke she fails to appreciate that many people literally have nowhere else to be. As services are cut, those who are left behind cannot simply be pushed out of sight and should not be criminalized. While violence is unacceptable, to lump all poor people and ill people in to the same group as felons and thugs is irresponsible journalism. The latent assumption is that downtown exists for businesses, consumers, and tourists – not for all of us.

There is no doubt that the Third Avenue transit corridor is badly in need of physical improvements. But the suggestion of Jon Scholes, vice president for the Downtown Seattle Association, that the city should be solely on the hook for the cost of making this a “nice” (read gentrified) place is not only fanciful (the city is still broke) but ignores that many businesses directly benefit from the corridor. Simply taking the city to task for something it can’t do is not the answer. To make Third Avenue safer (more and better lighting) and to improve the experience of transit riders (better bus shelters, more seating, landscaping), one way or another the downtown businesses and property owners will have to pull their weight in funding them.

Otherwise, it will be business as usual and everyone will continue to wonder why no one in the city will address the Third Avenue problem.