CONCLUSION

Displacement and Exclusion, Past and Present

“We are not a welcoming city in the way that Seattle has historically been,” former mayor Mike McGinn declared in a 2018 article on the city’s skyrocketing cost of living.¹ That year marked something of a Seattle milestone; home prices had shown double-digit increases for the fourth straight year. By April, the median Seattle home price had surged to over $800,000, shattering records and confirming what many residents had long suspected: that their city was changing, and not always for the better.² As local and national news outlets rushed to cover the story of Seattle’s dizzying post-2008 rise, quotes like McGinn’s became commonplace. Longterm Seattleites, politicians, and newcomers alike lamented a city that had strayed from its roots as a welcoming place with a modest, low-key culture. The infusion of corporate power and concentrated wealth threatened to transform Seattle into another San Francisco or New York, a gilded enclave for the rich and privileged.

No place seemed to embody the city’s transformation more than the University Village shopping mall. Located in northern Seattle on the outskirts of the University of Washington campus, U Village (as it became known) had opened in 1956 as the city’s first residential shopping mall. Unlike Northgate and other malls that would open during the era, U Village featured locally owned stores, such as the Rhodes Department Store and Malmo Nurseries, that catered to people in the surrounding neighborhoods. After U Village fell on hard times in the 1980s, a new company bought the struggling mall and rebranded it as an upscale shopping destination. The mall’s glitzification accelerated dramatically in the 2010s, mirroring Seattle’s broader economic and cultural shifts. The 2018 opening of a University Village Tesla showroom served as a final nail in the coffin for many longtime residents, who viewed the arrival of this luxury electric car manufacturer as an apt metaphor for the fate of the city as a whole. A slew of blog posts and newspaper articles reminisced about the old mall and the humbler, kinder Seattle that was slipping further away.³

But the notion that there once existed a better version of Seattle ignores much of the city’s actual history, which isn’t as rosy as some would like to believe. The University Village mall provides a stark example. Before it was U Village, the land on which the mall now sits was once underwater, a marsh created by the natural ebb and flow of Union Bay and the larger Lake Washington watershed. The lakes, marshes, rivers, streams, and inlets that shaped Seattle’s distinctive topography made up the homelands of the Duwamish, the Indigenous peoples of Seattle, who navigated the waters by canoe and inhabited the surrounding lands for thousands of years. This particular marsh, known in Lushootseed as sluʔwiɬ or “perforation for a canoe,” intersected with several freshwater channels, providing a crucial connection point between Lake Washington and other parts of Duwamish territory. sluʔwiɬ also served as a site for fishing and resource gathering.⁴ In 1916, the City of Seattle embarked on a massive engineering project to link the city’s freshwater lakes with Puget Sound and create an industrial waterway for commercial traffic. The project lowered the water level of Lake Washington by several feet, which destroyed sluʔwiɬ, among other Indigenous sites, and further displaced the Duwamish from their homelands and waters.⁵

The University of Washington took over the newly available slice of property and leased it to the city for use as a landfill beginning in the mid- 1920s. Nicknamed the Montlake Fill, the site frequently caught fire, spewed toxic fumes and dust, and attracted swarms of rats and flies.⁶ Around this time, two Japanese families arrived in the area and opened up produce farms just a short walking distance away from the Montlake Fill, on the precise location of what would become the University Village mall. Widespread anti-Japanese hostility, discriminatory laws, and prohibitions on property ownership had driven many Japanese from the farming business. But these families occupied what the city and real estate industry then considered worthless land, so they encountered little resistance as they built homes, raised children, and worked every day of the year to provide fresh vegetables to local markets around Seattle.⁷ Their hard-earned livelihoods quickly unraveled in the aftermath of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II.⁸ As renters, the families had little protection or recourse when President Roosevelt ordered that all persons of Japanese ancestry be removed and confined to inland concentration camps in 1942. What they couldn’t sell or store in the frantic days before their removal, the landlords confiscated for themselves.⁹

After the war, investors began to eye this newly desirable land as an ideal location for a shopping mall. During the postwar period, the northern areas of Seattle had transformed from rural farmlands into a sprawling residential district for white families. The U Village company owners envisioned the mall as an explicitly suburban retail space and a gateway to the segregated, exclusionary neighborhoods of North Seattle.¹⁰ The mall’s construction went hand in hand with postwar white suburban development, raising property values and offering an insulated retail environment to match the area’s insulated racial environment. The longer history of the U Village mall thus reveals its creation not as an open, accessible retail space for down-on-their-luck Seattle families, but as an engine of segregation and white wealth accumulation built upon colonized lands and racialized displacement.

As the story of University Village makes clear, we cannot understand Seattle’s present without radically reconceptualizing the city’s urban past. This book has sought to reframe the early history of Seattle as a history of displacement, focusing on the laborers who built the city and then were excluded and displaced as they tried to create stable lives for themselves. In doing this, I hope to shed light not only on the early period of Seattle history but also what came after, when the economy shifted and Black workers, many from the South, arrived in growing numbers, as they did in cities up and down the West Coast during World War II.¹¹ Seattle’s transformation into a full-fledged manufacturing economy changed the workforce of the city—from migratory and seasonal laborers to factory workers and others whose jobs did not require constant movement. What didn’t change, though, was the embedded structure of race, and the vision of Seattle as a city for white families who could live where they wanted and enjoy all of the fruits of postwar economic expansion. For them, Seattle was indeed the “welcoming” place described by McGinn. But Black workers did not find a welcoming city. Their Seattle was an exclusionary city, one that accepted them for their labor but not their full inclusion in urban society.

The nostalgia that infuses current thinking about Seattle’s past not only erases the exclusionary roots of the city’s founding but also ignores how these forces continued, and continue, to structure racial inequalities. Our current moment of heightened inequality and rampant gentrification underscores the dire need for critical historical analyses that refuse to romanticize the past. It’s through the routes of the past that we can begin to reimagine our present and chart new paths toward more equitable futures.