White Center Is Served

Dubbed Rat City by its northern neighbor, White Center has long been Seattle's stepchild. Its one-story ranch houses are typically surrounded by chain-link fencing, and sidewalks are a luxury. Spanish is spoken more than English, and nearly half the residents aren't white but Latino, Samoan, Bosnian, East African, and Asian. The main commercial strip—a hodgepodge of smoke shops, pawnshops, and adult video stores that give way to pho joints, taquerias, and one very popular Salvadoran bakery—feels more inner city than county outpost. It's an area of above-average crime where, in one recent incident, a woman bit off her ex-boyfriend's lower lip during a spat at a halfway house.

The origin of the neighborhood's rodent-related nickname, which is widely used, is the source of some debate. One theory is simply that there was a prolific rat problem in the working-class borough during World War II. Another is that "rat" was taken from an acronym that classified Seattle as Restricted Alcohol Territory. Local lore says the servicemen who went to unincorporated White Center for the sauce called it Rat City. Whatever the source of its moniker, White Center is an unincorporated accident, part of a 6-square-mile smudge that King County Executive Ron Sims has been trying to unload for more than a decade. He says the county just doesn't have the tax base necessary to serve such a needy neighborhood. Until recently, White Center had no takers.

But now, everyone's scrounging for a piece of it, and no one more doggedly than Mayor Greg Nickels. For reasons that seem conscientious, calculated, or merely sentimental, depending on whom you ask, Nickels now wants to fold Rat City into the big city, bringing White Center into the official, loving embrace of Seattle. He's declared this goal a top priority during the remaining two years of his second term.

Nickels' campaign is being met with suspicion and resistance in many camps: White Center residents, competing cities, and recalcitrant state lawmakers who have been so far unwilling to give Seattle a tax refund it would need to digest the new hood. In the coming weeks, Peter Steinbrueck—the retiring City Council member and outspoken critic of the mayor who is widely thought to be planning a run against Nickels—will try to use a council vote to take the mayor's annexation option off the table.

The struggle over White Center is now shaping up to be as bruising as the battle royal over the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and with some of the same grudges.

Just as when that first yuppie couple moves to your block, Seattle ownership of White Center will gentrify the neighborhood and propel property values up, Steinbrueck contends. "It will drive the low-income people out. People who think it will help the community are misguided."

"It's not an attempt to try and change the neighborhood," Nickels retorts. "We want to provide a higher level of services."

That can't come soon enough for Sims. When he talks about the neighborhood, the normally affable Sims grows agitated, almost breathless. "We can't sustain the service levels there. We can't. We can't," he says. He likens the county's limited spending in White Center to throwing a life ring out halfway: "You drown nonetheless."

The county has state law on its side. The 1990 Growth Management Act, which sets rules for curbing sprawl and strengthening urban planning, says cities, not counties, should be adopting unincorporated areas like White Center, and should do so by 2012. The act gives the county cover for cutting services, which Sims says is happening on a broad scale today and may become worse over the next few years.

Of the nine remaining unincorporated areas in King County, the one that the county calls North Highline (which includes White Center) is by far the biggest drain on Sims' coffers. This year King County will shell out $14.4 million for services like police, health care, and parks, and receive only $4.7 million in revenues—a deficit of nearly $10 million. (While none of the areas supported by the county are "profitable," the others operate at much smaller deficits of a few hundred thousand to a couple of million dollars.) It doesn't help that North Highline has by far the county's lowest median income, less than $40,000 annually per household, according to 2000 census figures.

Sims remembers trying to generate interest for annexation in the late 1990s, but says the city was already becoming preoccupied with redeveloping existing neighborhoods like South Lake Union. White Center as it exists today is no accident: "It's there by design," he says. (A phrase he repeats three times during a half-hour interview.) "People had been ignoring it for a long time."

Like any owner readying a shabby treasure for auction, the county has spent years prettying up the place to make it more desirable. Sidewalks were added in the business district, and most important, the county secured a grant from the feds to raze and revamp a sprawling housing project called Park Lake. The 95-acre development (now called Greenbridge) is the first thing you see coming up the hill from Seattle on Southwest Roxbury Street, a sort of welcome mat to a neighborhood in transition.