Washblog

The big news.....Bob Edwards has changed his position.  He will be making a motion at this morning's Port Commission meeting to suspend the demolition until there can be a special meeting of the full Commission and the motion will also direct the Port Commission staff to work on finding a compromise.

Demolition was due to start in mid-August so this should put it on hold.

Others speaking at the press conference were King County Executive Ron Sims, King Co. Councilmember Larry Gossett, King Co. Housing Authority Exec. Director Steve Norman, and Rev. Sandy Brown, Exec. Director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle.

The general thread of what said by all the speakers was that, because there is such a shortage of affordable housing in the region, compromises must be found to save high-quality affordable housing from being needlessly destroyed.

Burien Deputy Mayor Rose Clark and Councilmember Gordon Shaw, who both want the Lora Lake Apartments demolished, were in the crowd and didn't seem too happy.

I sent Bob Ferguson a note of thanks.  This was indeed the right thing to do.

I was low-income for much my adult life, for several months as a teen actually homeless, and at various points later on receiving WIC coupons, heating assistance, food bank fare, etc.   In the early 1990s I lived in inexpensive housing in Georgetown without a shower or central heat right under flight paths that not only frequently drowned out all conversation, but also shook the buildings. My son lived there the first 9 months of his life, and those apartments are occupied today.

The contention is that Lora Lake apartments will be too noisy and that may be the case.  I don't think that poor people should have to live in substandard housing.  And it is very telling that this affordable housing is right in a flight path.  But these are nice apartments, not substandard.  And they will not, I understand, be as noisy as what my family and I lived with.  And I know in the most concrete way possible that I was very grateful for my apartment in Georgetown.  I loved living there.  I would have been seriously impacted -- in fact, I would have been heartbroken --  to have lost that housing.

"The arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

Why is this ironic?  Because that piece of Boulevard Park is being proposed for annexation by both the City of Burien and the City of Seattle.  So, housing in the flight path must not be all bad for Burien.

That said, I think it's really important to acknowledge why this situation is so upsetting many in Burien:

1. The agreement between Burien and the Port has been in place since 1998.

2. Lora Lake apartments were scheduled to close in 2005, but were only kept open because of delays in the third-runway project.

3. 82 percent of the rental housing in Burien qualifies as affordable or low-income housing, compared to an average of 46 percent for the whole county.

An aside on the KCHA:  I visited their web site tonight, and was surprised at how little information there is on their governance.  No meeting announcements, no minutes, no contact info for the commissioners, and the "news" portion of their web site hasn't been updated in nearly five years.  There isn't any mention of the situation at Lora Lake, except for a page that ironically markets the complex as "Luxury Living in Burien":

http://www.kcha.org/lookingforhousing/propertyfactsheet.aspx?pfid=107

People at Lora Lake by and large had jobs and contributed to the local economy. They were a neighborhood with relationships.  That's all gone.

Many people probably had to move into lower quality, possibly low income housing -- in Burien and elsewhere.  That puts a serious pinch on low income people who will have fewer choices.

Plus the closing caused the destruction of a whole neighborhood and social structure.  If there's bad karma floating around here, you can find it in that.

Let's also be clear that the Lora Lake apartments are NOT 900 feet from the runway.  They are 900 feet from the flight path -- a similar situation for many people north of Lora Lake in Burien and Boulevard Park.  There's a big difference here.

The noise issue is a smoke-screen for stubborn decision makers.  About 10,000 people live near the Lora Lake apartments in largely the same setting.  South of Lora Lake, there are many low income apartments actually facing the runway.  Is the Burien City Council going to close those, too, and tear them down?

Kudos to all the people who can see beyond the City Council's near-sightedness.

If perception is reality, then the world must be flat and the sun must revolve around it.