Mount Baker: Area's diversity neither new nor accidental

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Mount Baker

Area's diversity neither new nor accidental

By ED PENHALE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The diversity didn't just happen. People who live here say they sought out a racially and economically mixed community in which to raise their families. And that is nothing new in this part of Seattle.

As the I-90 construction project threatened to disrupt Southeast Seattle in 1970 by creating a massive concrete barrier between rich and poor, white and black, David Boerner -- then president of the Mount Baker Community Club -- spoke up for diversity in this statement to the Seattle City Council:

"We think it is healthy when the children of welfare recipients go to school with the children of investment bankers and lawyers, and when black and white and yellow and red children can play together in our parks and beaches."

Over the years, Mount Baker has lived up to that vision. According to 1990 census figures, the population of about 6,100 is 37 percent African American, 44 percent white and 17 percent Asian or Pacific Islander. Native Americans and people of other races account for the remaining 2 percent.

The neighborhood has some of the most expensive houses in Seattle and is home to what some residents call Seattle's "ruling class elite," including two well-known African Americans, former Mayor Norm Rice and current King County Executive Ron Sims.

"It is a community that definitely has learned to become very organized," says Seattle police Capt. Nick Metz, who commands the department's South Precinct.

With the median home price at $400,000, Mount Baker increasingly is the home turf of doctors and lawyers, Boeing Co. executives and high-income, high-tech Microsoft employees.

"It has key people -- movers and shakers -- from city politics, business and everything else," Metz says. "When you go to them and say, 'I need your help,' they step up to the plate."

Closer to Mount Baker's Rainier Avenue business district, first-generation Southeast Asian immigrants have settled in, struggling against barriers of poverty and language to establish themselves in jobs, homes and small businesses sprouting up along Rainier Avenue.

In a way, the Southeast Asians are repeating the history of the Rainier Valley's first immigrants: Italians, who decades earlier came here to live and set up businesses. The area, then known as "Garlic Gulch," today is dotted with restaurants, shops and offices bearing Asian names.

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