Day labor lotto

IN PREDAWN DARKNESS, 25 Latino men begin their daily quest for work in Belltown. Smoking and talking in an odd triangular lot beneath the Aurora overpass at the corner of Western Avenue and Battery Street, they are waiting for the hour to strike 6, when a year-old job placement center for Latino day laborers will open its gate. Run by the nonprofit Casa Latina, the facility is a makeshift affair. Its only structures are a small trailer and a wooden shelter draped with blue tarp for walls, spruced up by a few surrounding plantings and two freestanding, colorful murals.

Casa Latina does have, however, a set routine. At 6 am sharp, the gate opens and the men line up to get into the trailer, where a staffer writes down names, gives everyone half a blue raffle ticket, and puts the other half in a canister. The men then take turns picking half-tickets from the canister—a serious business since it determines who gets the first shot at that day's jobs. There's typically still a while to wait before employers call in or show up in person, so many walk down the street for a free breakfast at the Millionair Club, the city's veteran organization for helping day workers.

The Millionair Club gives food to all comers but, unlike Casa Latina, requires identification documents for job placement that many Latino immigrants don't have. After a breakfast of meat sauce over bread with milk, the workers return to the Casa Latina site for more waiting and, for those who choose, a daily 7am English class that focuses on practical language.

As half a dozen laborers on chairs beneath the wooden shelter repeat "cent-i-meters," a nearby worker in a red jacket and jeans indicates he is eager to say something. "These guys right here, they're trying to find protection," explains Carlos, a 31-year-old Mexican immigrant. "That's the whole point."

Before this site opened, many of these men worked the longstanding labor market of Belltown's streets, hopping into cars and pickups that cruise the neighborhood for workers. Risks abounded: Employers didn't always pay after the end of a grueling day, there was no compensation for on-the-job accidents, and even climbing on board a truck could be hazardous to one's health due to the sometimes literally cutthroat competition between workers. Casa Latina tries to counter those risks by organizing workers, helping to establish guidelines such as a wage scale from $9 to $12 an hour, and providing lawyers to pursue claims for workers' compensation and unpaid back pay.

Not all day laborers have appreciated the effort. As a matter of fact, some have slashed the tires of Casa Latina staffers and made death threats against people at the site. Correspondingly, some people in the neighborhood believe the project has had mixed success. This belief has fed a debate over a new expansion plan by Casa Latina, a controversy that says a lot about how much Belltown has changed in a remarkably few short years.

LAST SUMMER, Casa Latina built its day workers' center as a temporary trial facility. Now, the organization has teamed up with the respected nonprofit Plymouth Housing to plan a permanent building on the site that would continue its current function and add 40 to 50 units of low-income housing, targeted in part at Casa Latina's largely homeless clientele.

On the surface, the debate over the expansion plan has revolved around its effect on prime Belltown concerns these days— the lack of views and open space in a neighborhood that has become the city's hippest and turned almost every patch of land into a high-rise. The Casa Latina site avoided development largely because of its peculiar shape and because it is owned by a public entity: City Light.

Even when Casa Latina began renting the land last year, the space continued to feel undeveloped because of its small-scale structures. As you walk along First Avenue, past the sleek cafes and condos that dominate the neighborhood, a striking opening arises above the site, offering a view of Puget Sound and the Olympics. Some kind of change is in the cards, however, with or without Casa Latina. City Light intends to surplus the land when the organization's lease runs out at the end of the year.

"That is the last view corridor left in Belltown," says Gretchen Apgar, owner of the Speakeasy and president of the Denny Hill Association, Belltown's broadest neighborhood group. She wrote a letter in May urging the city parks department to create a park at the site, noting that the recent Belltown Neighborhood Plan, as well as several previous neighborhood plans, envisioned open space on Western. She received a letter last month indicating that isn't likely to happen. Now, Apgar just hopes that Casa Latina will preserve as much of the view as possible. Although Plymouth Housing has estimated it needs four or five stories to make the project economically feasible, some innovative ideas were proposed at a recent design workshop. One suggestion, for example, was a window that would allow you to see through the building from First Avenue.

Apgar seems amenable. Like a number of community leaders, she wants to work out a solution with Casa Latina because of the important work it does. She calls the Latino day workers who have hustled the neighborhood's streets for as long as she can remember "almost like a symbol of Belltown." But that's the old Belltown, of course; the seedy, eclectic Belltown that was a natural haven for the down-and-out.