July 28, 2022

To: Sound Transit Board Chair Kent Keel, Sound Transit Board of Directors, Sound Transit System Expansion Committee, King County Council, Mayor Bruce Harrell, City of Seattle Councilmembers

RE: Selecting or confirming a preferred alternative for the West Seattle and Ballard Link Extensions Project

Dear Chair Keel, Sound Transit Boardmembers, King County Councilmembers, Seattle City Councilmembers, Mayor Harrell, and Executive Constantine,

InterIm CDA is a community-based nonprofit 501(C3) community development organization. We are rooted in the Chinatown-International District (CID) and provide community-based real estate development services, housing services, and programmatic services for immigrant, refugee, API, and other low-income communities. We provide comment today through a lens of equitable development—where we intend to create space for everyone to participate in and benefit from the Chinatown International District neighborhood’s growth. Our representation focuses on those most easily left behind—low income people, immigrants, refugees, and people of color.

We support the expansion of the light rail system for the region. We recognize the challenges we all face expanding high-capacity transit systems in the densely built environments of Snohomish, King, and Pierce Counties. We realize how important it is for the Sound Transit Board of Directors to identify a preferred alternative for the WSBLE project.

It is through this lens that we offer you our perspective on further developing the WSBLE project in the CID.

The community is unified in its call to reject another permanent injury to our culture and community. This neighborhood has been disproportionately harmed by past infrastructure projects, and our DEIS letter lists projects and policies in explicit detail. While our community may disagree about whether we support or oppose light rail and whether we prefer 4th or 5th Avenue, we are in complete agreement that this project must not result in yet another existential blow to the CID and people of color.

We support Sound Transit’s plan to expand light rail. InterIm seeks development outcomes that promote transportation mobility and connectivity, and we recognize that the WSBLE project is intended to add much needed capacity to the light rail system. We seek to find a just and equitable approach that improves connectedness between the CID and the Puget Sound region without displacing current residents, small culturally relevant businesses, and community organizations from the neighborhood.

All the alternatives in the DEIS for the CID Segment will result in permanent harm to the CID. The DEIS only studied direct impacts to residents and businesses resulting from project construction. It did not give any real consideration to how each alternative will impact residents, businesses, and community and culture after the project is complete. This is the primary way in which economic and cultural displacement, our top two concerns, work.

The CID is unique and important, and critical to our region’s social and cultural fabric. The Racial Equity Toolkit created for the project openly acknowledges the substantial displacement risk to the CID neighborhood, but admitting to risk is not enough. Sound Transit has not adequately analyzed or mitigated the impacts to the historically marginalized CID community.

Our community will need additional support to withstand the displacement pressure imposed by the project. Approaches to community support cannot be done in a business-as- usual manner. This neighborhood will require meaningful investment to reduce the economic, and cultural displacement forces at work from transit development. This must be done both with an eye of preventing the displacement of people already in the CID as well as keeping the CID a viable location for working class immigrants and refugees, small culturally relevant businesses, and community serving organizations. Mitigation for any of the alternatives will be substantial, and the cost is a direct result of a century of racially motivated and culturally insensitive planning and development in the name of “greatest good for the greatest number” of people in the region.

We will work with Sound Transit to clarify and eliminate impacts, and recommend mitigations. InterIm CDA is prepared to work with Sound Transit to examine impacts and trade- offs, and help find creative ways to avoid them. Only after really meaningful work to eliminate impacts will we be willing to help explore ways to mitigate impacts we can’t eliminate.

We appreciate the Sound Transit Board of Directors’ leadership during the process to confirm or modify the preferred alternative. Thank you for your understanding as you call for further study in the CID Segment before selecting an alignment. We are prepared to work with Sound Transit and the City of Seattle to identify community benefits and associated mitigations appropriate for the WSBLE project.

 

Sincerely,

Pradeepta Upadhyay