Africatown starts community design process for Midtown Center project

Africatown Community Land Trust is getting ready to design Africatown Plaza, a long-planned project with affordable housing and small business space. But the land trust, formed to promote community land ownership that helps the Central District’s black community thrive, is doing things a bit differently: gathering community input first.

“Our approach is community-first in everything that we do,” said Africatown president and CEO K. Wyking Garrett over the phone last week.

The story of the Midtown Block—where the project is sited—is long and fraught. Its location at the corner of 23rd and Union has become a symbol of the neighborhood’s gentrification. As tensions rose, a family dispute threw ownership of the site into question, complicating the future of the property.

In 2017, a deal was finally struck: As part of a $23 million land deal, Africatown Community Land Trust, along with Capitol Hill Housing, got 20 percent of the parcel. (Lake Union Partners is developing the rest.)

Typically, architects and developers will put together plans and submit them to their local Seattle Design Review Board for approval. But in a fast-changing neighborhood experiencing rapid displacement—according to city data, the Central District was 73 percent black in 1973 but was down to less than a quarter in 2010—Africatown wanted to connect the community with the design team at the jump.

“We don’t want to be museum pieces in the community,” said Garrett. “We look at the building as a living monument, so rather than have a plaque or an art piece or a mural, this is a building that [honors] the past while allowing the future to be created and continued.”

Africatown held a public design event May 23 at the Liberty Bank Building, another community-led development built on the site of the first black-owned bank west of the Mississippi that just opened its doors back in March. That was a collaboration between Africatown, the Black Community Impact Alliance, Capitol Hill Housing, and Byrd Barr Place.

Liberty Bank Building prioritized the public around it, with a central courtyard, a robust art program, and multipurpose space like the one used for the design meeting. Holding space for community was a big topic in Africatown Plaza’s feedback, too.

“A lot of people wanted to see a cultural place or a destination for people who live in the community as well as those that are now outside of the geographic community and having a place for people to come back to and gather,” said Garrett. “There were strong themes around business incubation and community space.”

Architecture firms on the project include GGLO and the “mission-driven” Sage Architectural Alliance, along with affordable housing architect David Baker. According to Garrett, African American architects are “leading the process” with the design.

“Cultural competency definitely was something that was a big part of the RFP—experience, perspective around Afrocentric design themes,” continued Garrett. (An RFP, or request for proposals, is a process for getting project bids.)

Garrett said participants “were happy to see a design team, an architectural team, that was reflective of the community.”

The plan is for the building to have 134 units priced at 60 percent area median income (AMI) or lower. Currently, a single person at 60 percent AMI makes $45,600 a year, or $65,150 for a family of four.

Construction is scheduled to start toward the end of 2020—but in the short-term, Africatown is planning another meeting later this month.