Last summer when Councilmember Kshama Sawant stood on the steps of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Seattle’s Central District, she called on the City to fund 1,000 new affordable housing units over three years for “historic residents and those displaced” from the neighborhood, which for decades was home to the largest Black community in the Pacific Northwest.

At that time Councilmember Sawant and advocates from the community stopped short of explicitly calling for reparations for Black Seattleites, who statistically have largely been left out of the economic growth accompanying the city’s most recent period of population expansion. Now a year later, the demands have shifted. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, Sawant and an expansive coalition of nonprofit organizations, faith-based institutions, and affordable housing providers held a rally for “reparations, unity, and affordable housing” held near the same site. The rally included live music and impassioned speakers.

“We are asking you, we are pleading for you to give reparations back, to give back what’s been stolen and taken,” said Pastor Lawrence Willis of True Vine of Holiness Missionary Baptist Church at a press conference Wednesday promoting the rally and cause.

Reparations, which are defined in the dictionary as “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged,” have been a sensitive topic in the U.S. ever since the American government failed to pay reparations to freed slaves after the end of the Civil War. The idea to redistribute some 400,000 acres of Confederate land among the 3.9 million newly liberated slaves was developed by a group of twenty Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia, eleven of whom had been born free in slave states and thus would not have benefited from the action — though they faced racism and prejudice throughout their lives. Their petitioning resulted in Special Order #15, which was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. Sadly, the act was overturned after Lincoln’s death by Andrew Johnson, setting into motion a pattern of ignoring or breaking promises made to Black Americans and advancing discriminatory policies favoring wealthy, mostly White landowners, some of which like exclusionary zoning and the mortgage interest tax deduction persist to this day.

After decades of stagnation in the Federal government, could cities lead the way for reparations for Black Americans?

As gentrification continues to tighten its grip on Seattle, it is unsurprising that Black residents and allies are stepping up calls for reparations for harms that have been done, but the evolution in rhetoric can also be linked to changes in national discourse around reparations. This spring the U.S. House of Representatives voted out of committee for the first time ever HB 40, a bill requiring the Federal government to study how it could undertake reparations for descendants of enslaved Americans.

At around the same time, Evanston, Illinois attracted national headlines when it passed its Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program granting qualifying households up to $25,000 for housing down payments or home repairs. According to the City of Evanston, in order to be eligible for the program, individuals must have lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 or be a direct descendant of someone harmed by discriminatory housing policies or practices during this time period. People who have lived in Evanston after 1969 and can demonstrate discriminatory housing practices by the City may also be eligible.

Seattle also has a history of discriminatory housing policies harming residents who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). The recently rally for “reparations, unity, and affordable housing” was spurred by an op-ed published in the Seattle Times by Reverend Robert Jeffrey Sr. of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church.

The op-ed makes the accusation that in 1969 the City of Seattle “forcibly took ownership” of two church properties “under the threat eminent domain and condemnation” to create Spruce Mini Park. Other Black property owners sold their land to create the park as well. Rev. Jeffrey is now calling for the City to return the land to the church or pay reparations for what was taken. In addition, he is demanding that City commit to $10.7 million of funding for the New Hope Family Housing Project, an 87 unit affordable housing development planned on land held by the church that is intended to provide housing to former residents of the Central District who has been displaced. Should the city opt not to return the land itself to the church, Jeffrey is currently pursuing an appraisal of the park’s land value for compensation.

“Why shouldn’t we quantify the pain?” Rev. Jeffrey asked. “We are tired of people estimating our pain and then throwing chump change at us.”

Councilmember Sawant has promised to put legislation in front of the City Council naming both of New Hope Missionary Baptist Church’s demands for reparations and additionally committing the City to paying compensation to “others who suffered under the racist urban renewal programs of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s.”

Like many American cities, Seattle engaged in urban renewal efforts with the financial backing of the Federal government between 1950 and 1966. According to research completed by the University of Richmond’s Renewing Inequality website, approximately $12.4 million was spent by the Federal government on three urban renewal projects in Seattle. These projects resulted in the displacement of 491 families, 73% of whom were people of color. The Yesler-Atlantic urban renewal project was by far the largest, spanning 340 acres in the present day Judkins Park, Mount Baker, and Central District neighborhoods. 416 families were displaced from the Yesler-Atlantic area alone, 84% of whom were people of color. Because of the disproportionate burden it placed on Black Americans, critics of the era referred to the practice of urban renewal as “negro removal,” a moniker that endures today.

Hammering out the details for reparations is not an easy task, yet the moral argument remains strong

Evanston became a pioneer when it created its reparations policy; yet, the city has faced criticism from some residents, with the lone vote against the initiative coming a Black city councilmember who felt that eligible recipients should receive the $25,000 as a cash grant to be used as they see fit instead of for costs related to home ownership. Such thorny debates around eligibility and compensation have always accompanied reparations efforts, but they have not lessened the moral case for making reparations when harm has been done.

Rev. Jeffrey has called for the City to begin by the returning the church’s land. However, it seems unlikely that such an action could be completed in isolation, and even if it were to be, it would incite questions of fairness over why an individual institution should receive reparations while many more BIPOC residents of Seattle have faced discrimination from the City.

It is also important to point out there are some potential weaknesses in their specific claim for reparations. According to Rev. Jeffrey, the case for reparations for the church stems from the fact that by selling the land to the City, the church lost out on the opportunity to acquire wealth as land values rose in the Central District in the decades that followed the sale.

However, records from Seattle’s Municipal Archives show that when the church was compensated $34,000 for the land used to create Spruce Mini Park, it also acquired land on the same block for $11,500 to create the parking lot it desired. In recent years, the church developed townhouses on some of that land which were sold for market value. Additional land held by the church on two parcels on opposite sides the same street (21st Street) are slated for the development of affordable housing according to Seattle in Progress, a website that tracks development activity.

To provide a bit more context, the acquisition of Spruce Mini-Park was financed by the Forward Thrust series of bond initiatives that were approved by voters. According to author, historian, and political activist Shaun Scott’s series of essays on Forward Thrust for The Urbanist, “in the 1968 election, Forward Thrust outperformed among Black Seattleites relative to Seattleites as a whole on every individual measure, and by an overall mean of 8.4%.”

But Forward Thrust’s popularity among Black Seattleites does not mean that their concerns were front and center to what the initiatives entailed. In one of his essays, Scott quotes Dick Page of Forward Thrust’s campaign staff who confessed to Seattle Magazine “our organization never once [asked] ‘what are we going to do for the Negro?’ For every person suggesting we give special preference to the Central District, we had two others claiming that the major problem area was the Green River Valley.” 

It is impossible to create a time capsule to go back and examine all of the circumstances that influenced New Hope Missionary Baptist Church to sell its land to the City in 1969, or to create an alternate timeline in which the church held on to the land and did not purchase the other parcel. However, the claim that this particular institution was shut out from the economic growth of the surrounding neighborhood invites questions.

Yet, when you look at the factors that led to the displacement of BIPOC communities in Seattle, it is undeniable that disturbing patterns appear. From the initial seizure of the land on which Seattle sits from the Duwamish, who are still federally unrecognized as a tribe despite having signed the treaty of Point Elliott in 1855, to the forced removal and internment of Japanese Seattleites during World War II, to the construction of both I-5 and the Kingdome in the International District which displaced homes and businesses, to redlining and racist covenants which restricted Jewish and BIPOC Seattleites from living in much of the city for decades, to the aforementioned urban renewal of the 1950’s and 60’s, and finally to Weed and Seed, the destructive anti-crime initiative of 1990’s that resulted in the asset forfeiture of people’s homes, notably Black Seattleites in the Central District, many examples exist. This list is long, but it is also incomplete.

Some injustices are writ-large, like the case of the Yesler-Atlantic urban renewal project which displaced hundreds of families. Yet, sometimes it is the small examples that bring most vividly to life the hardships people have faced. Take for example, the case of Spruce Mini Park. About half of the park’s land is below street level, serving to help drain rainwater runoff away from the surrounding area, which includes a childcare center that has been in operation since 1963 and is separated from the park by a cement retaining wall. However, although never an ideal spot for buildings, before the land became a park, it was the site of people’s homes. One of the letters of acquisition from the City provides insight into past inhabitants, an “actively engaged” foster family, Richard and Nellie Jackson.

When approached by the City to sell the land, could the Jacksons have felt relieved to receive compensation for land in a low lying area? Or did they feel coerced to give up their home and cheated by the payment they received? Were they able to find another home to continue fostering youth in?

Understanding and quantifying these damages is a tall order. But if Seattle and countless other American cities want to write a new, more socially just chapter of their history, it is work that needs to be done. During a speech, Rev. Jeffrey put it well when he explained why the City needs to invest in paying reparations to Seattle residents that have faced discrimination. “You cannot build a stable future on a crooked foundation,” he said. “Just as we are here today asking to correct the wrongs that happened in 1969, there will be others here, standing in this place, standing in other places, to correct the injustices that are not corrected today.”

The post Sawant, Black Faith Leaders Call for Reparations to Rectify Seattle’s Racist Housing Practices first appeared on The Urbanist.

In a 1966 speech given a few years before the Forward Thrust measures hit ballots, bond attorney Jim Ellis called for an “area-wide capital improvement program” to “demand the full range of urban amenities.” “If love of the city were not a sufficient spur,” said Ellis of the rapidly growing Puget Sound area, “self-protection now compels the opening of a wide front of public construction and conservation.” Ellis was the mastermind behind the Forward Thrust bond initiatives, intending them as a series of projects that would prepare the Seattle-area for the future to come.

Thanks to Town Hall Seattle’s “Inside/Out” residency, I had the opportunity to crisscross the city of Seattle to speak with Seattleites about the Forward Thrust ballot initiatives in May and June of this year. In the four neighborhood conversations that I held with Town Hall’s support, one question was invariably asked by the audience: what would Forward Thrust, or something like it, look like in the present? In this last installation of the Forward Thrust essay series (first published in The Urbanist in May), I want to attempt an answer. I want to think out loud about what a similar slate of ballot initiatives, put before King County and Seattle voters, would look like today.

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The late 1960s were a time when the American electorate was at a crossroads; the intersections of race and gender. The groundswell of civil rights legislation in the decade pointed to the brewing permanency of minority participation in electoral politics. Meanwhile in New York City, inspired by the words and organizing of Jane Jacobs, women-led neighborhood groups successfully resisted the decimation of the city’s urban core by highway-hungry city planner Robert Moses.

As I illustrated in Part 2 of this essay series, these developments suggested that women and people of color could be appealed to as such; not merely lumped in with the general electorate, but catered to as a distinct demographic force that could sway the region’s future. Black Seattleite voters were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the Forward Thrust’s measures, particularly transit and public housing; and a poll conducted in the late 60s by the Central Association of Seattle (the ancestor of the Downtown Seattle Association) indicated that women had higher opinions of public transit and public parks than their male counterparts.

The Forward Thrust committee—composed mostly or rich, white businessmen—did not do enough to ensure that the Forward Thrust campaign robustly incorporated the concerns of Black people and women. Just as the Forward Thrust campaign took place as the Black Panther party and other radical groups provided a strike contrast to the buttoned-down official types who stewarded Forward Thrust, the energy galvanized by Nikkita Oliver’s 2017 mayoral bid indicated dissatisfaction with the slow-moving, establishmentarian approach to social change in the present. A 21st century version of Forward Thrust would have to correct these mistakes by steering clear of the colorblind, gender deaf, upper-class urbanist vision of the initial 1968 attempt.

Proposition #1: Land Bank

This first suggestion is a redux of an original Forward Thrust initiative: it’s the idea that Seattle or King County should earmark finances to purchase land that comes available, then redistribute that land at a dramatic discount to non-profit housing developers to build affordable housing. 50 years after the first Forward Thrust election, this idea reappeared in Seattle’s 2017 election cycle, with mayoral candidate Jessyn Farrell and city council hopeful Jon Grant both stumping for it. In its initial incarnation in 1968, the land bank was funded by a property tax, making it the only Forward Thrust initiative to not be financed by civic debt.

Proposition #2: Progressive Taxation Package

A tax on vacant dwellings. A financial services tax. A tax on real estate speculation. A raised marginal tax rate. Given the illegality of an income tax at the state level in Washington, using these means to raise revenue at the county and city levels needs to be taken seriously if Seattle is to rebalance the most regressive tax structure of any major metropolitan area in the country. The initial Forward Thrust campaign was too influenced by the King County business community to ever explore progressive revenue options. But to build needed capital improvement projects for housing and transit, we can’t continue to be confined to regressive taxation.

Proposition #3: Environmental Impact Preparation

With large swaths of Seattle summers rendered unbreathable by forest fire smoke and the looming threat of a massive earthquake, what is the area doing to prepare for the ravages of climate change? Currently, the city provides Earthquake Home Retrofit Permits to homeowners, and free weatherization services to low income homeowners. But what about the 42% of Seattleites who are renters, to say nothing of migrant workers and houseless residents who are especially vulnerable to extreme weather events?

Studies already link climate change to the proliferation of earthquakes and Tsunamis. Following its August 2017 study “Preparing for Climate Change,” elected officials can partner with the Seattle Office of Sustainability & Environment to assess the shape of the city’s public spaces and buildings, and arrive at firm estimates for what a comprehensive public plan would look like to ensure the city is doing everything it can to mitigate the damage and bolster public safety. The city should then put its money where its environmentalist reputation is, and fund those suggestions as robustly as possible.

Proposition #4: Municipal Broadband

Access to the “information superhighway” is as fundamental a civic need in 2018 as access to rapid transit was in 1968. Unfortunately, it is a plan that has not materialized, even in tech-friendly Seattle, because corporate giants like Comcast and CenturyLink influence many “progressive” elected officials with generous campaign contributions. In the generation since the coup of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, utilities companies have organized to keep the public sector from being a service provider.

A $930 million levy seems like a small price to pay for the promise of reliable, uncompromised internet service, particularly as the conglomeration of corporate forces and conservative government threaten net neutrality at the federal level. Additionally, poor internet service is a problem that disproportionately plagues citizens in Seattle’s south end, making this exactly the kind of economic justice and racial justice issue that the original Forward Thrust of 1968 whiffed on. This is a no-brainer. And with Upgrade Seattle building the political will to make it happen, it could materialize sooner than anybody thought possible.

Proposition #5: Public Ownership of Sports Teams

What professional sports give with one hand—civic rituals of community and camaraderie—they take with other: capital that could be used to fund much needed services. The Forward Thrust bond initiatives should be celebrated for bringing the Mariners and Seahawks here; they should be judged harshly for initiating an era in Seattle politics where the peripheral amenity of professional sports takes precedence over basic needs like housing and climate preparedness.

Earlier this summer, management of the Seattle Mariners bullied the King County electorate into diverting hundreds of millions of dollars that could have been used for affordable housing into a frivolous upgrade of Safeco Field. As the Green Bay Packers have shown since 1923, things don’t have to be this way. The Packers are the only publicly owned team in major American sports; while the bylaws of the NFL and NBA both prohibit public ownership of their franchises (the Packers are grandfathered in), the NHL charter contains no such restriction. This leaves the door open for a future pathway to at least partial public ownership of a major professional sports franchise. A share of profits generated from such an entity could be redistributed other capital improvement projects around the county and city.

Proposition #6: A Countywide Bike Network

The Forward Thrust elections of 1968 and 1970 took place as Interstate 5 reached completion in the late 1960s. A half century later, the links between carbon emissions, automobile usage, poor air quality, and regional forest fires has been substantiated in a phenomenon climate scientists know as “the climate loop.” Just as Jim Ellis intended rapid rail transit to be a solution to the problem of pollution, we can imagine alternatives to automobiles in the present. As detailed in Knute Berger’s Roots of Tomorrow: Tales of Early Seattle Urbanism, Seattle was once home to an extensive biking network that could be recreated in the present. Currently, the city has a “Bicycle Master Plan” in place that the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) estimates would take between $390 million and $524 million to fully fund.

Proposition #7: A Public Bank

When a city’s finances are wrapped up in the vicissitudes of global capital, the fallout can have devastating results of citizens of all class strata: students and homeowners in search of loans; environmentalists looking to disinvest from the fossil fuel industry; people of color and the working poor looking to build a positive credit history. Cities themselves are limited in the capital improvement projects they can pursue by the bond ratings and borrowing limits of major credit firms. The landmark 1981 text City Limits codified a conservative view of city budgeting; in it, author Paul Peterson advanced the argument that the best a large municipality can do to manage its finances in the face of business backlash against local taxes is appeal to the federal government for help, and implement regressive taxes for nip-and-tuck revenue solutions.

As explained by the Seattle Public Bank Coalition, a citywide public bank would break this chain by giving Seattle a degree of financial latitude not typically seen in major American cities. The basic idea of a public bank is that the institution’s financial operations are meant to serve the social good rather than accrue private profit, and that its board of directors would be elected officials who are accountable to the public. Such a bank could lend money for capital improvement projects for city agencies, transit, and schools, and could eventually retire Seattle’s debt, the service costs of which currently account for 9% of the city’s annual budget. The City of Seattle requested proposals for a public bank feasibility study, indicating that the idea of publicly direct finances—once seen as somewhat fringe when advanced 2017 mayoral candidate Bob Hasegawa—has real currency.

Conclusion: A Break from Neoliberalism

More than anything, a public bank would embody a philosophical shift away from one of the major shortcomings of the original Forward Thrust. As I detail in Part 3 of this essay series, the initial Forward Thrust effort of 50 years ago was decidedly neoliberal before the term “neoliberal” was ever coined to define the disappearance of the public trust and the primacy of a pro-business logic in civic life.

Several of the Forward Thrust projects were designed to make public dollars subsidize private wealth, as with the domed stadium initiative that gave a government-funded arena to corporate sports teams that shared no profits with the public; additionally, the very means of debt financing the Forward Thrust capital improvement projects privately benefited the electoral slate’s visionary founder, Jim Ellis, who was a bond attorney at the same firm that would have arbitrated the Forward Thrust bond initiatives. A 21st century Forward Thrust would have to include a package of progressive funding mechanisms, particularly for projects that somehow enrich private actors.

I first came aware of the Forward Thrust bond initiatives as a result of a series of documentary films I made for the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project. Far beyond any individual policy proposal, I believe the source of Forward Thrust’s enduring value to our region is as a fount of inspiration for the ability to imagine something greater than what currently exists. This aspiration is ultimately the wellspring of all progressive social change. Fifty years, Forward Thrust invented a way of thinking about the future. For that reason, we are forever in debt to the past.  

The post Forward Thrust Part 4: Carrying Forward Thrust’s Ambition Into 2018 and Beyond first appeared on The Urbanist.

Under normal circumstances, a parallel like this would be crass. Insulting, even. Rapid transit impacts neighborhoods, jobs, health outcomes…lives. Professional sports are largely an escapist fantasy. But in the case of the 1968 Forward Thrust bond initiatives, the comparison is warranted. Because while civic mastermind Jim Ellis and the Forward Thrust committee failed to pass a $2.8 billion (adjusted for inflation) transportation levy that would have left the region with 47 miles of mass transit, they succeeded in getting King County voters to bight on the $293 million (inflation adjusted) multi-purpose arena known as the Kingdome. The 62-38 vote on “County Proposition 2” of Forward Thrust paved the way for the arrival of the Seattle Seahawks (1976) and Seattle Mariners (1977), who both played in the Kingdome for the next quarter century.

The demise of Forward Thrust’s transit initiatives in 1968 and 1970 meant that Seattle’s transit history lags behind the standard set in the 1960s by cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Washington D.C. Between 1966 and 1969, each of these cities posited rapid transit as an answer to questions posed by the explosive growth and environmental hazards of post-WWII capitalism. Like savvy general managers anticipating the crunch of the salary cap, the electorates in those cities made hard political choices well before the appointed hour arrived to make them. These roster moves helped them outpace rivals in towns with less foresight. Towns like Seattle in 1968.

For all its reputation as an environmentally conscious city, Seattle was mired in transit mediocrity for nearly a century. After Seattle voters rejected “The Bogue Plan” and its 90 miles of comprehensive citywide transit in 1912 and then turned down Forward Thrust’s rail initiatives in 1968 and 1970, Seattle finally opened its relatively piddling 14-mile light rail system in July 2009 after a Sound Transit measure for it passed in 1996. If city transit systems were ESPN Power Rankings, Seattle was somewhere near the bottom of the list of big-league cities for close to 100 years.

It’s hard to say whether the Mariners or the Seahawks are a better metaphor for Seattle transit history. The Mariners and existential underachievement have gone hand-in-hand for the entirety of the franchise’s history, leading one to conclude that Seattle can’t have nice things because of some unfixable regional hex or an inexorable symbolic curse. And like Forward Thrust in the late 1960s, a doubleheader of success and failure has stalked the Seahawks since the mid-2010s, when the deliverance of one Super Bowl was dashed by the disappointment of the next. While it is unfair to look out at the thousands of acres of public parks Forward Thrust left behind and call it a “failure,” it is also impossible to discuss Forward Thrust without exorcising the specter of what could have been.

Forward Thrust and professional sports—urbanism and civic athletics—are joined at the hip. The highs and lows of one reinforce the aspirations and disappointments of the other. Children of the same era, they’re repositories for all the same civic urges that make people want to congregate in American cities.

What Seattleites can’t achieve in their politics, they have a way of sublimating into their sports.

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The story of how the Seahawks and Mariners came to Seattle is the story of businessmen and their proxy politicians who manipulated city politics behind the scenes. They circumvented the outward-facing political process until the last possible second, at which point they asked the public to go into hundreds of millions of dollars of debt to pay for a facility that would further enrich those same businessmen. In his seminal 1976 history text Seattle: Past to Present, Roger Sale wrote “in the big leagues, money and power play rough.” In the case of Forward Thrust, they also played cunningly:

The Washington State legislative session before the Forward Thrust vote of February 1968 saw legislators who endorsed Forward Thrust grease the skids of state government to serve the project. This effort entailed the advent of seventeen separate state bills that either enhanced Forward Thrust’s chance of electoral success or made its core measures legally feasible. Among them were:

• S.B. 505, which authorized cities in Washington State to construct stadium facilities, and created a revenue source all potential stadia with a 2% excise tax on hotel profits.  
• And S.B. 270, which raised King County’s borrowing limit from 5% to 10% of the county’s total assessed property value, and extended the duration of county bond limits from 30 years to 40 years.

These measures allowed the county to go into deeper and longer debt so that a city therein could build a stadium; the construction of this stadium would be more likely to be approved by voters since the debt required to build it would be spread out over a longer period, and would be partially reimbursed by a tax subsidy. Forward Thrust researcher Suzanne Vandenbosch has written that “it does not seem likely that many voters were aware that these bills were under consideration.” Nonetheless, they all passed. As a result of the precedent set by S.B. 270, the debt for the Kingdome—finally paid off in 2015—outlived the Kingdome itself by 15 years.

The team comprising Forward Thrust’s legislative offensive line was not a rag-tag group of loveable losers, but a powerful conglomerate of capitalists. An April 1968 issue of Seattle Magazine provided a power map of “The Seattle Establishment,” placing Forward Thrust mastermind Jim Ellis in the number one slot, and most of his business and political associates on the Forward Thrust committee closely behind him. Ellis was also a partner in one of two financial firms in Seattle that was large enough to sell the massive municipal bonds needed to finance Forward Thrust—an electoral slate of 11 bond measures totaling $5.8 billion of debt. To put it crudely, Ellis was a Visa salesman who tried and largely succeeded, in getting the public to accept the gaudy terms of a sexy credit card with a high spending limit.

In fairness, Jim Ellis’ motivations for stewarding Forward Thrust sprang from a deep sense of personal responsibility. This is described stirringly in Matthew Klingle’s 2009 book Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle as arising partially from survivor’s guilt after his brother died in combat in World War II. At the same time, the traceable profit motive leading from the political activism of Forward Thrust to Jim Ellis’ personal finances was not a good optic. It hurt the Forward Thrust ballot initiatives politically. The editor of The Washington Teamster—which had over 35,000 readers in King County in the late 1960s—asked “here’s the question that has been bugging me,” in November 1967; “what legal firm will write up the $5 million bonding fee for the [transit measure]? Will it be Jim Ellis’?”

What we were seeing in this convex of sport and civic debt was a phenomenon described by Jason Hackworth in The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism. It was the creation of a system of financialization where, in the words of Hackworth, “cities are vulnerable to the decisions of capital market gatekeepers because they are dependent on debt.” Forward Thrust heralded the erection of massive financial arbiters like Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch, who determine the creditworthiness of whole American cities, standing between them and the capital they need to fund improvement projects and basic services. The prerequisite for this debt dependency is an unwillingness to pursue other, progressive streams of revenue, like taxes on high income, inheritance, and financial services transactions.

The many businessmen on the Forward Thrust committee did not suggest taxing themselves to pay for the Forward Thrust ballot initiatives. And the politicians who endorsed Forward Thrust in the state legislature did not re-write state law to allow municipalities to pursue more progressive streams of revenue. A dream of Washington progressives and leftists since The Great Depression, a high-earners’ income tax would have been every bit as impactful for future generations as a mass transit package. But instead, Forward Thrust re-wrote state laws to allow counties the privilege of taking on more and more debt.

Forward Thrust was a harbinger of the slow cancellation of the Keynesian capitalist consensus that funded a strong welfare state and social entitlements with various redistributive mechanisms. As the 70s arrived, that status quo was replaced by neoliberalism—a guise of capitalism defined by pro-business policies that pervade the public commons, upwardly redistributing all of the resulting wealth while downwardly redistributing the costs of creating wealth.

Seattle’s transit policy lagged behind other American cities in 1968. But in sports, it was ahead of the curve. Because while many histories of American urbanism date the rise of neoliberalism at New York City’s budget crisis of the mid-1970s, Seattle and Forward Thrust were already experimenting with neoliberal governance a decade earlier:

A cohort of politicians secretly jigger state laws under the influence of an elite business establishment before presenting the public with an omnibus of debt that would privately enrich their cronies. That sounds more like a political machination of the Koch Brothers in 2018 than of Seattle moderates in 1968. Forward Thrust walked this path for the benevolent goal of public transit (and the seemingly benign pursuit of pro-sports); but that shouldn’t distract from the fact that it was a largely supra-governmental approach to public life that made government an instrument for private ends.

Forward Thrust was the first inning of the neoliberal long game, played well before anyone quite knew the rules.

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In his 2010 book Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining The Games We Love, sportswriter Dave Zirin details a litany of examples where sports became a venue for private profit and civic extortion. In New York City in the 2000s, George Steinbrenner threatened to move the New York Yankees to New Jersey or Connecticut in order to secure $850 million in public bonds for the construction of a new Yankee Stadium that opened in 2009. In Minnesota, Twins owner Carl Pohlad lined the pockets of area politicians until they bully-balled a regressive sales tax through local government to help fund a $500 million stadium that broke ground in 2007. In Washington D.C in 2006, Mayor Anthony Williams jammed a $611 million tax hike through the city council to fund a new baseball stadium, in a city that had the highest poverty and infant mortality rates in the nation.

Forward Thrust anticipated each of these incidents by forty years, parlaying Seattle’s anxieties about remaining a second-tier town into making its electorate go into generational debt to finance the Kingdome in 1968. In hi­s 2013 book Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics, Bill Mullins wrote that “Seattleites who pushed for a new stadium were less concerned about [its] financial impact and more attracted to the prestige of becoming a big-league city.” And yet economics and emotion went hand-in-hand, as politicians like King County Executive John Spellman pitched the Kingdome as a “job creator” that could help lift the region out of a torrid early 1970s recession.

Even as they are themselves often unaccountable, sports are supposed to provide fans an escape from the ups and downs of an unaccountable economy. The iteration of the Seahawks spanning 2012-2017 did their part to deliver on the promise of Forward Thrust, gifting Seattle fans six exemplary years of football in which the team was annually among the most consistently competitive in the league. With the team’s logo harkening back to the indigenous tribes that first stewarded the land the franchise represents, and many of its players taking stands against the galloping inequalities of American life, the Seahawks resonated with Seattleites of color in ways that Forward Thrust failed to when it was soliciting votes for its transit initiative.

The architects of Forward Thrust aspired to a blandly universal urbanism that was impressive because of the grand sweep of its ideas, but wanting for impassioned specificity. The failure of Forward Thrust’s transit initiative to inspire passion—not just support, but passion—from its base may account for much of its failure to pass.

Conservatives of various kinds never lose touch with their sense of indignation, because it has a simple root: that times change. Since time only moves in one direction, these groups will always have something to oppose, and will be constantly aggrieved in a way that can be measured in political energy expended, votes cast, candidates elected. The broadly defined Left—a group that ought to include urbanists who think equitable, easily navigable cities are a site for human liberation—are not always so easily ignited. It’s harder to impress upon voters that things can change than it is to tell voters to oppose change; as a result, visionaries in search of big new projects seem ever on the electoral defensive against people whose political modus operandi is to just say no.

But herein lies a way in which professional sports—for all their faults—can imply something greater than their sordid foundations. Looking out at the seas of Seahawks fans in the aforementioned golden age of 2012-2017, one is struck by what is possible when masses of people begin to believe that something is possible. The futile years of Seahawks history—which rival and even exceed those of the hapless Mariners—suddenly seemed to matter less in their playoff runs than the determination of the team to end them.

For better and worse, sports remain one of the few avenues of public life where masses are allowed to imagine together; where the virtues of collective action are performed and praised. We cheer for these teams because, somewhere in there, we’ve all found ourselves.

The featured Kingdome and Seattle skyline image is courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives.

The post Forward Thrust Part 3: Big League City first appeared on The Urbanist.

It’s hard to look out at Seattle’s landscape—both physical and metaphysical—and not see the impact of Forward Thrust. An electoral slate of 11 bond initiatives and one property tax levy, the 1968 and 1970 Forward Thrust measures were a massive investment of money, effort, and imagination that changed the social, environmental, and cultural fabric of Seattle forever. Showing the sheer size of Forward Thrust’s fiscal endowment with numbers adjusted for inflation (a rate of 7.33:1 when comparing 2018 dollars to 1968) gives a sense of the program’s scale and ambition.

• The $865 million parks and recreation bond left the Seattle area with 4,776 acres of parkland, including Seattle Aquarium, Hing Hay Park in the International District, and downtown’s resplendent Freeway Park (later christened Jim Ellis Freeway Park, after Forward Thrust’s political mastermind, Jim Ellis).
• The impact of the $293 million “multi-purpose stadium” bond are evidenced at least eight days a year in autumn and winter and another 81 times in spring and summer, as they were responsible for bringing the Seattle Seahawks and Mariners to town with the now-defunct concrete monstrosity known as the Kingdome (much more on this in the next installment of this essay series).
• Even the failed $22 million public housing measure, which provided funds towards a “land bank” to be used by Seattle for the purpose of purchasing land that it would later redistribute to developers interested in erecting affordable housing, lives on as an innovative idea in urbanist circles nationwide.

Most of the Forward Thrust measures were not ends-in-themselves, but enticements calculatedly conjured by Jim Ellis to bolster his brainchild: the $2.8 billion public transportation bond that would have left Seattle with a 47-mile, 30-station subway system due to be completed by 1985. The point of placing the stadium and public housing levy on the Forward Thrust slate in 1968 was to make the transit bond popular-by-association. Senators Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson did their parts to help cause, securing a $6.5 billion federal appropriation for the construction of the subway, pending the approval of a county vote. However Ellis’ ploy failed in 1968, with the transit bond garnering only 50.2% of the vote (county measures require a 60% majority to pass).

Seattle mayor James Brama rallied Ellis for an encore, only to have the measure fail yet again in 1970. The federal appropriation for public transit was re-routed to Atlanta, where construction began on the city’s MARTA line.

While many of the secondary and tertiary Forward Thrust measures passed, Seattle transit enthusiasts were stuck at the intersection of fatigue and defeat. Forward Thrust had succeeded; Forward Thrust had failed.

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Let’s start with the good news.

Forward Thrust managed to convince tens of thousands of voters that problems created by America’s post-WWII march to prosperity were not impersonal and abstract, but completely within the realm of political solvability. With a baseline of economic stability established after federal spending for World War II halted the Great Depression, much of Seattle’s civic discourse in the 1950s and 1960s turned towards questions about the region’s future. Chief among these were environmental concerns that cut to the heart of a car-centric capitalist economy built on cycles of mass production, accumulation, consumption, and waste.

Dozens of open landfills, including an epic dump in the Montlake area that did not close until 1971, dotted the city’s landscape in this period. The region’s waterways were sullied by human and industrial waste. Traffic on the newly constructed I-5 expressway became a signpost for anxieties about population growth and air pollution. Using tried-and-true campaign techniques like canvassing, campaign brochures, radio and newspaper ads, and earned media, the Forward Thrust Committee—stewarded by attorney Jim Ellis—convinced voters that these blights could be addressed with decisive political action.

Amazingly, Ellis was adept at convincing suburbanites that his urbanist vision of mass transit and more public parks was worth pursuing. In her 1974 University of Washington Ph.D. thesis paper about Forward Thrust, Suzanne Vandenbosch summarizes voter data from the 1968 election, revealing that Forward Thrust outperformed among “Suburban Fringe” voters relative to their Seattle counterparts by at least 4% on every individual measure, and by an overall mean of 7%.

According to 1970 census data, 54% of Bellevue residents owned two cars, and another 33% owned at least one; but if the countywide Forward Thrust election of 1968 were restricted to Bellevue voters alone, mass transit would have passed by a 62-38 margin. Vandenbosch notes that voters in the “white collar suburb of Bellevue” composed Forward Thrust’s strongest municipal bloc, with voter turnout there outperforming the county as a whole by 7.8% (58.8% turnout in Bellevue versus the county mean of 51%, and the Seattle mean of 50.5% for the 1968 Forward Thrust election). Apparently, many of those who led the Puget Sound region’s suburbanite march saw its limits most clearly.

But Forward Thrust also resonated with poor Seattleites—African-Americans in particular. In the 1968 election, Forward Thrust outperformed among Black Seattleites relative to Seattleites as a whole on every individual measure, and by an overall mean of 8.4%. The measures for community centers (+11.4%), rapid transit (+11.3%), and the affordable housing land bank (+16.2%) were particularly popular among Black Seattle voters relative to the general Seattle electorate. Had the measure for rapid rail transit been restricted to Black voters in 1968, it would have passed by an even 60-40 margin.

True to national trends, recently enfranchised Black voters were more likely to support social programs—like Forward Thrust—that benefit society as a whole. Relatedly, class and race were key electoral determinants in Forward Thrust’s dual legacies of failure and success.

Forward Thrust’s rapid transit measure was most popular among county voters making less than the 2018 equivalent of $53,000 a year (52% of this bloc voted yes) and among voters making more than the 2018 equivalent of $79,500 (56.8% approval). While Forward Thrust was popular in upper-middle class affluent Bellevue, it floundered in blue collar Renton, with Vandenbosch concluding that an economically insecure petty bourgeoisie is less likely to support social programs than poor people and also less likely to be as forward thinking as people with more money.

Meanwhile, Ballard voters of Scandinavian descent did not show strong support for Forward Thrust. Every individual Forward Thrust measure underperformed among these voters relative to the Seattle electorate as a whole, and by an overall mean of -7%. Rapid transit (-9%), community centers (-10%) and the low income housing land bank (-8%) were particularly unpopular among white Ballardians—an unfortunate ancestor of the neighborhood’s performative hostility towards affordable housing at a recent city council hearing on the topic.

Additionally, some research Asian Americans in Seattle were generally unenthused about Forward Thrust. Precinct data shows that census tracts with large Asian American populations in the International District were among the poorest in the city and had the lowest rates of home ownership, but reported lower levels of voter support for Forward Thrust than any comparable Black-dominated precinct in the city. Vandenbosch surmises “this perhaps reflects a lower expectation on the part of the Asian-American community that government programs will meet their needs”—a sad commentary on the long history of racial exclusion aimed at Asian Americans in Seattle, which included mass transit being wielded as an instrument of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

The Forward Thrust outreach team spent a great deal of time in the 43rd and 46th Legislative Districts of Washington State, which compose some of Ballard, most of Fremont, and much of North Seattle. This investment of time combined with the underperformance of Forward Thrust in those areas and the comparatively high citywide voter turnout for an off-year ballot initiative may lead one to conclude that the Forward Thrust campaign energized its political enemies, inadvertently encouraging more “No” votes.

A program worth a combined $6 billion in debt and taxes, Forward Thrust was a big political target with a big price tag. The rail transit package was particularly vulnerable politically. The fact that the rapid rail lines were funneled largely through downtown meant that the campaign was susceptible to charges of corruption and speculation. And as we’ll see in the next installment of this essay, the fact that Jim Ellis was a bond lawyer for a brokerage firm that stood to gain from the massive municipal debt of Forward Thrust certainly did not help the cause.

A November 1967 issue of King County Democrat ran a cartoon of Jim Ellis surrounded by moneybags atop a caption that read “Forward Lust.” Many King County political operatives were outraged by the cartoon; Forward Thrust was endorsed by practically every vector of establishment, from elected officials to labor unions. But this did not stop The Washington Teamster, which had a readership of 35,000 people in King County, from running op-eds that criticized Forward Thrust as a conflict of interest in the run-up to the February 1968 election.

At the same time, in a January 1968 feature in Seattle Magazine, Ellis complained about being called “a communist” by political opponents like developer Vic Gould. In his memoir Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle, University District radical Walt Crowley reflects on lambasting Forward Thrust as “little more than changing the table linen aboard the Titanic.” On his soapbox as editor of the leftist University District newspaper The Helix, Crowley also decried Forward Thrust as “timid and grossly inadequate” in January 1968.

Forward Thrust was thus torpedoed from both the left and the right. This was a tragically fitting fate for a centrist technocratic scheme dreamt up by establishment moderates who believed in the virtues of political balance.  

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Politically, Forward Thrust existed at the extremes of race and class, achievement and frustration. It was popular among the very rich and very poor. It found a political home in affluent suburbs, and also in Seattle’s downtrodden urban core. People who had the time and luxury to imagine how it would benefit future generations backed it, as did many of those who, for one reason or another, stood immediately to gain from its implementation.

Areas that would be served by rapid transit generally favored it; those that wouldn’t didn’t. Perhaps a rail system that focused more on east-to-west travel without funneling all lines through downtown would have had a better chance of succeeding with the hostile Ballard electorate—or in the University District, where the Forward Thrust committee spent much of its time, but voter turnout was 15.3% points below Seattle turnout generally. But maybe this would have further galvanized the confused voters who somehow saw Jim Ellis as both a greedy businessman and a rabid socialist; Forward Thrust as an octopus of capitalist speculation and also a communist albatross.

Politics is the art of picking sides, and Forward Thrust is responsible for the choices it made on the canvass of the post-WWII Puget Sound electoral map. Dick Page of Forward Thrust’s campaign staff confessed to Seattle Magazine “our organization never once [asked] ‘what are we going to do for the Negro?’ For every person suggesting we give special preference to the Central District, we had two others claiming that the major problem area was the Green River Valley.” Page and his cohort thus concluded that catering to a white enclave in a sparsely populated area of the county would be a better investment of time and attention than appealing to Black voters who were disaffected but nonetheless more numerous and more enthusiastic about Forward Thrust’s core programs.

Even though Black support for Forward Thrust was 8.4% above the municipal mean, Black turnout for the election (42.5%) was 7.7% beneath Seattle turnout as a whole (50.2%). If similar rates of political subcapitalization existed elsewhere in the electorate—particularly among disadvantaged groups—we’re justified in concluding that the white male-centered composition of the Forward Thrust campaign and its steering committee was a political liability. At a November 1965 speech where he commenced the Forward Thrust Effort, Jim Ellis mused that “with the tools of urban design, a regard for human values and plenty of work, we could build one of the great cities of man.”

But as Jeffrey Craig Sanders notes in his 2010 text Seattle & The Roots of Urban Sustainability, it was women—and not “man”—who were the most likely to be excited about Forward Thrust’s downtown-centric focus. A 1968 survey by a civic group called the Central Association revealed that women were twice as likely as men to take the bus, and half as likely to drive downtown. 65% of women surveyed said they “prefer to work downtown,” and revealed that women found downtown more satisfactory for shopping and more convenient than male correspondents. Many members of the Central Association also served on the Forward Thrust committee; the lessons of the survey did not appear to be internalized, as Forward Thrust’s campaign materials made no explicit appeals to women as voters.

At the same time, we can marvel that a steering committee composed of 90% white men and exactly one woman (of over 200 members) was responsible for any electoral success at all. The universalist pretension of Forward Thrust was its greatest strength, appealing to those who had the leisure to believe in a grand vision for society, and also those who couldn’t afford not to.

Jim Ellis Freeway Park remains a great place to go for a walk and ponder why Forward Thrust was a failure. Forward Thrust is dead—long live Forward Thrust!

The featured Seattle Municipal Archive image is of Powell Barnett and three Seattle Parks officials (the white guys).

The post Forward Thrust Part 2: The Art of Picking Sides first appeared on The Urbanist.

It seems to me that the rising popularity of the term “progressive” in our civic discourse has coincided precisely with some very unprogressive political phenomena in Seattle: rampant unaffordability in housing and an attendant homelessness crisis; enduring racial disparities in our school system; the proliferation of regressive taxes that contribute to displacement and economic insecurity; the tragic spectacles of police-authored violence in the form of brutal sweeps of the homeless and the murders of unarmed citizens of color.

As the calendar turned to 2018 and the 50 year anniversary of the Forward Thrust bond initiatives of 1968 was upon us, I wanted to take a deeper look at Forward Thrust than that initial 800-word editorial; and I wanted to take readers on a tour of its significance to the present day. So over the next few months, I’ll be distilling the results of this search here in The Urbanist, and in person at four neighborhood charrettes across the city with the help of Town Hall Seattle.

I’m fascinated by Forward Thrust because it seems a positive example of what civic boosters and journalists termed “The Seattle Spirit” in the late 19th century–a mélange of determination and folly that leads local residents to mobilize around large questions about the fate of the region and its people.

Sometimes that spirit has enabled self-sabotage and racial subordination. We cannot talk about Seattle without talking about the expropriation of human capital and resources from the indigenous peoples of the Puget Sound region, who hosted the city’s white settlers when they were in desperate need of direction, and were ceremoniously rewarded in the generation subsequent to the initial 1851 settlement with a slew of broken treaties and greedy land grabs. We cannot talk about urbanism without talking about enforced residential segregation that consigned African Americans and Asian Americans to decreasingly small portions of the city grid in the 20th century, then nearly booted them out of city limits altogether with the forces of gentrification in the 21st. And ultimately—as I’ll show in the course of this essay series–we cannot talk about Forward Thrust without talking about it as a political failure: a brainchild of downtown businessmen and political moderates who could not get the votes for their mass transit and public housing agenda because they refused to look for them in areas where the populations most impacted by these measures–people of color and low-income whites–usually live.

At the same time, “The Seattle Spirit” has revealed Seattle at its best. It was evidenced when workers across all unionized trades ground capitalist production to a halt in exchange for better wages and worker protections in the General Strike of 1919. It was apparent when civic engineers embarked on a series of dramatic regrade projects from the late 1890s until the Great Depression in the early 1930s, leveling the city’s steepest hills and readying now-stalwart neighborhoods like Capitol Hill and Beacon Hill for habitation. It was shown when the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party, founded the same year as the first Forward Thrust initiatives in 1968, provided free healthcare and school lunch to the city’s most vulnerable residents. And “The Seattle Spirit” was in action as area residents—in a rare move for a citizenry that was by most accounts defined by sleepy liberalism in the post-WWII period–took the future seriously enough to plan for it by approving (most of) the Forward Thrust initiatives.

When we talk about Forward Thrust, we are not parsing over the past so much as we’re forecasting our own future. Concern for our collective fate as a city was my impetus for starting this project. It will also be my motivation for sharing it.

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Forward Thrust was a gamut of ballot measures put before King County voters in two separate elections in 1968 and again in 1970. Conceived of by civic visionary Jim Ellis (a graduate of Seattle’s John Muir Elementary School), Forward Thrust was authored in the long shadow of the founding of METRO in 1958—a municipal corporation responsible for sewer disposal and mass transit that eventually resulted in the launch of King County’s bus fleet in 1973. Forward Thrust was intended as a set of comprehensive futurist reforms that would ready Seattle for its second post-WWII tidal wave of population increase. With an expansive subway system as its centerpiece, the Forward Thrust campaigns put new fire halls, modernized environmental infrastructure, hundreds of public parks, and facilities for professional sports before voters.

Unfortunately for transit enthusiasts, the fact that Forward Thrust was a King County initiative (and not a Seattle-specific one) lumped transit enthusiasts in with voters who were more reticent. The Space Needle had announced Seattle’s stature as a proverbial “world class city” in 1962, and the Seattle World’s Fair of the same year put the city on the global cultural map. Washington Senators Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson were securing boatloads of federal funds for futurist research projects at the University of Washington, and even commandeered the majority of the funds that would have gone towards the construction of a subway system in Seattle had the Forward Thrust initiative for it passed at the ballot box.

In Seattle proper, life was dynamic and changing. In county outposts like Issaquah and Sammamish, where clusters of farmland could still be found in the 1960s, not so much. The suburbanite suspicion of downtown business types and metropolitan modernization diluted the urbanite urge for public housing and rail transit.

According to Roger Sale’s seminal city history Seattle: Past to Present (1976), Jim Ellis placed peripheral measures like professional sports and community centers besides his rail transit package because he thought they would increase the chance that the rail transit initiative—buoyed by positive associations with other, more popular measures—would pass in 1968. Tragically, King County voters approved of the side dishes but had a distaste for the entrée: the bond measure that led to the creation of the Kingdome and the subsequent arrival of the Seahawks and Mariners passed by a 62-38 margin. Bonds for youth service centers (72-28), and public parks including the Seattle Aquarium (65-35), sewer improvement (63-37), and new fire halls (70-30) enjoyed equally resounding victories, as Ellis predicted. Sadly, rail transit was the least popular of the measures, earning only 50.2% (county elections required a 60% vote share for an initiative to pass). The less-commented on but equally significant public housing bond also failed (58-42).

Encouraged by rail transit’s close margin of defeat in the 1968 election, Jim Ellis upped the ante on another two years of campaigning for Forward Thrust, this time coupling it with a measure for more community centers and a new county jail in 1970.

In the final installment of this essay series, I will tackle the question of whether Jim Ellis’ embrace of the carceral state help or hurt support for his transit initiative among urban voters. At the same time that Richard Nixon carried the 1968 presidential election with a “tough on crime” message that emphasized “law and order” to corral hippies and dissidents, many of those same activists were increasingly visible on Seattle’s social landscape. In October 1968, Black Panther Party chair Aaron Dixon appeared on the cover of Seattle Magazine, wearing a nonplussed stare while driving a police car to ironically highlight the Panthers’ opposition to the criminal justice system as an occupying force in Black urban areas of Seattle. Asian American activists in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District also vigorously opposed the proposed county jail. But Ellis would not have lumped it in with his mass transit initiative if he did not think it would have enhanced the subway’s chance for success.

Suffice it to say for now, history has revealed Ellis to be on the wrong side of a political equation that put voters of color and young people on one side of his calculus and Seattle moderates on the other. The subway initiative failed again in 1970, this time by an even greater than it did in the 1968 election (46-54). For good measure, the ballot measures which lumped the jail in with more police stations and community health centers were also rejected.

Started by the Black Panthers in 1968, the Carolyn Downs Family Medical Center remains open to this day. Ellis never got the chance to open his planned health center, and would have to wait until 1996 to see regional voters approve a rail system that began service in 2009. 

“If rapid transit is to have a new beginning,” Jim Ellis told reporters after the 1970 failure, “it will have to come from people other than the Forward Thrust Committee.”

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Who were these “people” Jim Ellis spoke of? When the Forward Thrust Committee incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1966, it was composed of 23 men and one woman. Businessmen (eight) were the single largest constituency group on the committee, followed by elected officials (five), attorneys (three), civic association members (three), two utility company heads, a labor union leader, an architect, and a University of Washington professor. While this steering committee may have been reflective of the “official” types enfranchised by the Seattle political process, it was hardly representative of the emerging strains on the city’s civic fabric.

In a retrospective about the state of Seattle politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s, electoral wrangler Peter LeSourd writes that “by the close of the 1960s, the spirit of social and political activism that was spreading across the country had reached Seattle. Citizens groups were protesting plans to tear down Pike Place Market and to construct new city freeways. Opponents of the Vietnam War and African Americans protesting segregated schools and employment discrimination staged large and vociferous public demonstrations.”

The lack of a more significant working-class (or any activist) presence proved to be a political misstep for a campaign aimed at a heavily unionized populace during a tumultuous time in the city’s politics. But Jim Ellis’ political frame of reference didn’t leave much room for the populations he’d need support from if his big idea–rapid rail transit–were to succeed. In the remaining three installments of this essay series, I will relate questions about the successes and failures of Forward Thrust to the city’s present political landscape. For urbanists in particular, this discussion ought to have profound implications:

Often stereotyped as a mostly-white and white-collar fixation, urbanism–inasmuch as it exists as a concrete body of ideas–speaks to an appreciation for city life as a vector of human creativity, enlightenment, and liberation. In this sense, an urbanism that does not account for the specific social and political divides that segment cities will fail at delivering on this mandate for robust urban life. Take it from Forward Thrust: no ideology can be a narrow isthmus, and no city an island.

The featured image is a transit station envisioned in a Forward Thrust report. The image is courtesy of UW Special Collections.

The post Forward Thrust Part 1: No City is an Island first appeared on The Urbanist.