Resisting Gentrification in Seattle: The Fight for Community Stewardship of Land

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Summer 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “Land Justice: From Private Ownership to Community Stewardship.”

Our generation’s task is to protect this neighborhood as a constantly evolving home for the working-class people who live and work here.In Seattle, for many Asian migrants, Chinatown-International District (also known by its initials CID) is our home away from home. Located on Coast Salish lands in Seattle, the CID is a diverse multiracial community, including many immigrants from across Asia, many Indigenous, Black, and Latine communities; and working-class people of all backgrounds. The city government estimates that residents in the neighborhood speak 17 languages in addition to English, the most common being Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese.

As an immigrant settler from Southeast Asia seeking linguistic and cultural community, this neighborhood provides a sense of familiarity and growth. From aunties who dance in Hing Hay Park, to massage workers who rub away anxiety and accumulated stress, to stores infused with the strong herbal scents of home displaying household wares for cheap, the CID is a place where my present is interwoven with remnants of my past from a different homeland.

It is not lost on the many residents and workers in the neighborhood that the CID’s location in the heart of Seattle makes it an attractive area for real estate speculation.

Stewardship requires actively resisting the concept of private property ownership by individual landowners and real estate developers.

Our generation’s task is to protect this neighborhood as a constantly evolving home for the working-class people who live and work here. Indigenous people of Turtle Island have taught us that central to our sense of home and belonging is land justice—the project of preserving land for everyday peoples’ livelihoods and relating to land as a collective good. This manifests as community stewardship of land.

What Is Stewardship?

What does stewardship mean? Community stewardship of land involves a few things: 1) community governance—which involves collectives of community members and organizations governing parcels of land themselves; 2) having local leaders and groups positioned to lead community discussions and decisions about land use through a public planning process; and 3) preserving a philosophy that land is for collective use to address community needs. This focus on stewardship requires actively resisting the concept of private property ownership by individual landowners and real estate developers.

In the CID, stewardship looks like embracing a range of land uses, including first, acknowledging that this is Indigenous land that should be used for the wellbeing and livelihoods of people native to the area. It is also about making space for housing for elders, for transient migrant workers, for people facing the brunt of the housing crisis in Seattle, and for unhoused and migrant communities. Our primary challenge is how to advance land justice in the context of current encroachments and capitalist notions of land ownership and real estate speculation.

Our Neighborhood Then and Now

The CID was for centuries home to the Duwamish people who lived on the tide flats at the mouth of the Duwamish River. The Duwamish were then displaced when Seattle city leaders extended the area’s shoreline in a project known as the Jackson Street regrade, completed between 1907 and 1910.

Colonial settlement in Seattle had started early when the Denny Party, some of the first European settlers, arrived in 1851. Soon after, Indigenous workers laboring at the Yesler sawmill, the first colonial industry on these lands, found home in this neighborhood as well.

Chinese laborers, mostly lumber-mill and railroad workers building the Transcontinental Railway, arrived slightly later, in the 1860s and 1870s. Japanese and Filipino workers found themselves here as agricultural and cannery workers, and, for Filipinos, also as colonial subjects of the US empire.

By the 20th century, the CID had become a multiracial hub, a place where groups that faced redlining—including Black, Asian, and Indigenous communities—could find housing, respite, leisure, and music. It is the home that we nurture and tend to, and that we strive to protect.

Fast-forward to the present: In 2016, the City of Seattle’s 2035 Growth and Equity Report revealed that the city’s long-term growth strategy put the CID as a neighborhood at the highest risk of displacement. In 2017, the neighborhood was upzoned, meaning buildings are allowed to be built higher to promote housing density. Density without protections means that these neighborhoods where communities of color had found respite for generations are now further exposed to intensifying displacement pressures.

The subsequent passage of the MHA (Mandatory Housing Affordability) ordinance that same year mandated that developers allocate a proportion of the housing units for low-income residents or provide a payment to the city. More affordable housing units and revenue have come through as a result, but the ordinance has been insufficient overall in addressing the displacement of low-income communities. In Seattle, the wealthiest 20 percent of the population is now 21 times wealthier than the poorest 20 percent. And like in so many US cities, the gap between Seattle’s rich and poor is getting wider and wider.

Why does this matter in the CID? This neighborhood is a major transportation hub adjacent to downtown and has been subject to many infrastructure and transportation projects over the decades. The area had historically been the site of the city’s Hooverville, where many recently arrived migrants, displaced Indigenous people, and workers found housing. Today, its proximity to downtown social services also means that it is a place where many unsheltered and unhoused communities find home and temporary shelter. This working-class neighborhood is burdened disproportionately with the structural impacts of displacement caused by the housing crisis and the drive to real estate speculation unleashed by a capitalist marketplace.

A Transit Project Threatens Our Neighborhood

The CID now faces another disruption—a massive public transit light rail project, backed by voter-approved taxes. While it’s a “green” form of transportation, if planning is not done in partnership with the community, the project will accelerate displacement.

Sound Transit is the region’s public transportation agency, overseen by an 18-member board consisting of elected officials from King County and neighboring Snohomish and Pierce Counties. It is responsible for developing the growing light rail system that connects the greater Seattle metropolitan area. Its third phase of expansion, also known as Sound Transit 3, sometimes shortened to “ST3”, involves a multi-billion-dollar light rail line requiring construction of a new tunnel under the CID and a new station.

People often think about threats to community stability caused by gentrification—that is, outside investors or wealthier people buying property and displacing current residents in the process. But transportation projects can also have traumatic effects on neighborhoods and shepherd gentrification. Famously, in the mid-20th century, “urban renewal” programs, often used to support highway construction, displaced hundreds of thousands of Black families nationally.

Sound Transit is simply the latest addition to the long list of governmental agencies that use the CID neighborhood as a place to go through, ignoring the vibrant community that is already there. The story of the new CID station siting repeats, yet again, a battle among vocal “colorblind” urbanist interests, powers-that-be pushing gentrification, CID residents divided by class, and community members who are organizing for the longevity and sustainability of a working-class neighborhood.

The Community Responds

Sound Transit is under enormous pressure to deliver ST3’s promised system expansion to voters who approved tax increases in 2016 to pay for it. After years of delay, the Sound Transit Board expects to make a final decision on the new Chinatown International District station location, and others along the new route, in early 2026. Community members and partners are deeply worried that the agency’s decision could mean either life or death for the CID as a working-class neighborhood.

We see the struggle regarding light rail station locations as just one part of a broader effort for the neighborhood to [benefit] current neighborhood residents.

In 2022, the CID Coalition, a multigenerational group of volunteer CID champions and activists, first rang the alarm bells. Sound Transit had announced two station location options in the heart of the neighborhood. Community members dug deep into Sound Transit’s plans, sifting through hundreds of pages of technical lingo and complex diagrams, determined to be at the table for this decision that would impact the livelihood of our beloved community.

Past station and route decisions by Sound Transit do not bode well for the CID. The first light rail line was built through majority-Black and Brown neighborhoods, such as Columbia City and Rainier Beach, located in Southeast Seattle. Construction and planning in these neighborhoods were significantly less resourced—and sited with less care and safety measures than the line going through North Seattle, which is wealthier and predominantly White.

Notably, Sound Transit’s light rail trains in Southeast Seattle run on the street surface for four miles, down a busy thoroughfare, Martin Luther King Way. In North Seattle and downtown, it runs above or below busy pedestrian and traffic streets. According to The Seattle Times, this discrepancy and safety flaws have resulted in a disproportionate number of pedestrian and auto collisions with trains on Martin Luther King Way since the line opened in 2009, injuring 91 people and killing 11 as of February 2025.

With this recent history in mind, CID community organizers successfully pressured the Board to offer alternative station locations. Instead of one station, the construction of which would cause a yearslong closure of the main thoroughfare of the neighborhood, the new station alternatives, dubbed the CID North and South locations, would be located at the edges of the CID, preventing a prolonged and disastrous shutdown of the main thoroughfare, and serving the needs of the community more efficiently and safely.

Community Stewardship of Land

In our vision, intergenerational and multiracial working-class communities can exist for the #Next100Years, not as an Asian Disneyland for tourist consumption, nor as a mere transit layover station. We see the struggle regarding light rail station locations as just one part of a broader effort for the neighborhood to grow and make a positive contribution to the city’s housing crisis, while benefiting current residents.

The GREAT for All Coalition (GREAT stands for Growth, Resources, Equity, Accessibility, and Transportation) is a coalition of community partners and organizations that have been organizing with workers, residents, and neighborhood small businesses to make that vision a reality.

We recognize that our relationship to the land reflects the social relations of our society. To arrive at community stewardship and community-led decision-making around the land, we must cultivate relationships and connections across various groups and communities in our neighborhood who call this place home.

Organizing for community stewardship of land means deep engagement with residents and workers to discuss how land can be distributed and used in the neighborhood. We conduct teach-ins and walking tours in various languages to support our community members having a deeper understanding of the histories and legacies of the spaces we live in.

A prerequisite for any potential community governance is the ability to cross language, ethnic, and racial barriers to foster a sense of collectivity. Sometimes this means uneasy conversations that try to get at the root of real race and class divisions in our communities. Other times it means we cheer each other on when one of us courageously speaks out about land for our community’s collective good, not for real estate speculation.

Our growing unity, which is dynamic and evolving, means we show up in numbers where our neighborhood is discussed. Some may call it a protest; we call it supporting each other by showing up.

Organizing for community stewardship of land also means that we insert ourselves into spaces that previously were unwelcoming to us to insist that there is no urban planning in our neighborhoods without us.

We want a neighborhood that grows, not one that is in crisis, bearing the consequences of Seattle’s unbridled real estate speculation and tech boom that has benefited only a sliver of the people who make these dreams possible.

Organizing for community stewardship of land is challenging within the context of Seattle’s development trajectory and affinity for market-oriented housing. The class divisions in the neighborhood are perhaps the hardest and most challenging to reconcile.

There are some business and property owners who want to see gentrification and development, who see the poor and unhoused in the neighborhood as a blight. Rather than advocating for services in the neighborhood and systemic ways to address safety for all, some stakeholders in the CID community prefer the erasure of poor and unhoused people from the neighborhood.

Gentrification and sweeps—couched in the language of development and public safety—are wielded and weaponized to remove impoverished people from the neighborhood. The current pressures facing immigrants due to the Trump administration’s attacks further amplify the anxiety and fear within the neighborhood.

It is not an easy time. While politicians and legislation prove insufficient and ineffective in protecting us, community power and organizing is our only bulwark against more destruction and suffering.

The struggles over transit developments that can actually serve the neighborhood are entwined in broader organizing for community stewardship of land. Together, we can meet the challenges before us.