An Acquired Taste for the Suburbs.

Next to Burger King and TJ Maxx on Kent's East Hill, Philly's Best Steaks & Hoagies occupies a former Skipper's Seafood 'n Chowder House. The owners of Philly's Best branched out from their original location at 23rd Avenue and East Union Street in Seattle's Central Area, opening their Kent store just down the road from Punjab Sweets and the Ukrainian Assembly of God in late 2001.

On a Monday afternoon, post-lunch rush, the customers are mostly African American, from a hip-hop kid to a grandmother in sensible shoes. To Charles Humphrie, the affable 39-year-old who co-owns Philly's Best with three other Philadelphia transplants, the fact that there are a lot of black people now living south of Seattle is old news. He'd rather talk about his sandwiches.

"Food has no color barriers," he says, explaining that he's converted lots of people in the neighborhood—whites, Asians, Hispanics, even local King County cops—to his hometown's cuisine.

A short cruise down many of the Federal Way, Kent, or Renton strip-malled arterials reveals one of the most striking demographic trends in King County's history: Sprawl and diversity have become quite comfortable bedfellows, transforming the south county into an accidental social experiment by which much of white Seattle, not often exposed either to the suburban or the African-American experience, literally pales in comparison. Every city and unincorporated area in South King County saw tremendous development and population growth of all kinds in the past decade and now account for a slightly greater total population than Seattle itself. These places also have shown huge gains in numbers of African Americans.

The Puget Sound area has never been and probably never will be home to the large numbers of African Americans found in other American cities and suburbs. Charles Humphrie's brother, hearing that Seattle's total population was about 500,000, commented, "What? There are 500,000 black people in Philadelphia alone." But the demographic change in outlying areas, taken with foreign immigration, is creating more diverse neighborhoods across a broader swath of Western Washington than ever before. Because of lower real-estate prices, fair-housing laws, personal preference, Seattle's gentrification, and other factors, South King County has become a complex and rapidly evolving place, in spite of the fact that most urbanites associate its strip malls and housing developments with grinding homogeneity.

Meanwhile, Seattle, traditionally very segregated, remains so, even though blacks no longer are restricted to a few neighborhoods by discriminatory laws and practices. Although less-trendy and traditionally white neighborhoods like Lake City are showing some increase in black population, gentrification in southeast Seattle is a far more dominant trend.

FEWER SEATTLE BLACKS

Of the roughly 91,500 African Americans in King County, about half live outside Seattle. Of the African Americans living outside the city, more than 80 percent live in the south county, resulting in the distribution of about 37,000 African Americans from Seattle's southern borders to the Pierce County line and east to the Cascade crest. In many places, their proportion as a total of the population roughly equals Seattle's black percentage but obviously is much more dispersed. And just as in Seattle, the range of black people living in the suburbs varies widely, from single mothers pushed into SeaTac or Tukwila by high Seattle rents to double-income, home-owning families in Kent or Federal Way.

Putting aside for a moment the huge impact of Asian, Latino, Russian/Ukrainian, and other immigration on South King County, consider these figures: Between 1990 and 2000, Kent saw its black population rise from 3.8 percent to 8.1 percent of the total, a 350 percent increase within the African-American community itself. Federal Way's proportion rose from 4 percent to nearly 7.7 percent of the total, for a 144 percent increase in black population; Renton went from 6.5 percent to 8.3 percent, for a 55 percent increase; while the numbers of African Americans in smaller places like Auburn, Burien, Des Moines, SeaTac, and Tukwila all more than doubled.

Geographic boundaries in rapidly developing areas have little to do with the new demographic, which stretches almost to Thurston County. There are signs that Tacoma, whose percentage of African Americans exceeds Seattle's, is starting to become gentrified just as many small towns in Pierce County have seen growth in numbers of blacks. In the Puyallup South Hill area, according to the Tacoma News Tribune, the African-American population increased 566 percent between 1990 and 2000. (The city's school district recently settled a lawsuit with the families of black students who faced harassment—in one instance a white student showed up in blackface—and death threats.) McChord Air Force Base and Fort Lewis draw many African Americans to this area in the first place.

At the same time, Seattle's black population has diminished—not dramatically, but measurably. In 1990, African Americans accounted for 10 percent of Seattle's total population. By 2000 that percentage was down to 8.3, representing about a 10 percent decrease of the black community.

While only a few places in the suburbs can claim the concentration of blacks living in the Central Area or southeast Seattle neighborhoods, South King County figures are thrown into sharper relief when compared to Seattle neighborhoods north and west of downtown. There are more African Americans living in Tukwila alone, a city of only 17,000, than in the combined zip codes of 98103, 98107, and 98115—which roughly correspond to Fremont, Wallingford, the southern half of Ballard, Bryant/Ravenna, Wedgwood, and much of Laurelhurst and View Ridge, whose total populations add up to 103,500.