The project is outcomes are working...

Last week, we were contacted regarding possible youth intern positions at the Seatle Department of Transportation. Several of the 2014 teens were asked to prepare for school-year employment opportunities and get their resumes out of the computers for printing. We were told that 5 positions were opening and to notify as many teens as I could who went through the 2014 project this summer.

We were able to field four teens and four positions were filled with Yesler 2014 teens!!! Word back has it that the training and exposure this summer aided in preparing them for the interviews, as well as provided the ability to have an informed conversation about some of the fundamentals of urban planning and design.

SDOT Week

Sara Robertson from the Seattle Department of Transportation working with Tony Mazzella, both alumni of the University of Washington Urban Design & Planning Department, scheduled a week-long exposure to the workings and process of this city department.

The Yesler2014 Team met with engineers and planners from the traffic management center, the street and Right-of-Way designers, and surveyors, concrete pourers, mapping specialists, foreman, coordinators, and executives.

We met with civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers. Analysts, adminstrators, Race & Social Justice representatives, community surveyors, designers, and skilled trades people.

We worked on GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and learned about "live" mapping, found our homes on Google Earth (tm), learned how curb-cuts are modified at 31st and Yesler Way next to Leschi Elementary, and found out that the cost of of repairing a sidewalk is thousands of dollars.

SDOT conducted a sidewalk survey on Wednesday to assess the walkability of the walkways, the condition of the pavement, identifying repair needs, and learning how to analyize an intersection for its ability to be used efficiently.

We also met with SDOT Director, Grace Crunican and got to field questions about parking regulations, traffic management, congestion pricing (go Bria!!), and how to get the streets repaved.

Great day!!

ABCD: Asset-Based Community Development

"Learning to look at your community through the eyes of what it has, not what it does not have."

Is this a revelation, something that is new to the field of urban planning, community building? It is not. However it is a forgotten application, a tool that transforms how a resident of a neighborhood or community beset with ideas and lessons learned that do not value the "unseen capital" that every community in any city has, regardless of economic class or affluence.

And in the hands of a fantastic community educator, trainer, and artist, Merica Whitehall, Assistant Director of Childrens Literacy Project/Treehouse Tutoring Corps located at the School of Educational Leadership at Seattle University, we worked to shift our thinking around what value a community holds and can use for leverage and activation of solutions to its needs.

The ABCD exercise was a challenge for the teens, and for some of the adults. It was enlightening and hopefully gave the youth some ideas about seeing themselves as valuable and part of the capital of their community.

More on the ABCD soon...

The first few days in....

After meeting everyone, laying out the basics of what we would all be doing this summer at Yesler Terrace, we got right to it.

The Yesler2014 Team is made-up of 12 youth from Yesler Terrace and the surrounding neighborhoods. The project is partnered with the Seattle Youth Employment Program and seven of the youth were recruited through thier summer employment program.

The goal is to bring in their personal experiences that relate to planning and design and then frame them in the context of formal planning and design process, practices, and policies. The goal is to open-up the terms and tools, translate them, make them practical and real-world.

TOD's, Networks and Nodes, traffic management, linkages. For people who study this stuff it is difficult, but take twelve 14-18 year old youth who haven't really thought about what we were trying to discuss and it made a very interesting conversation.

"Why would we use the bus when we can drive a car?"

"I want my right to drive, how can they make us stop driving?"

"Why are there traffic circles in the middle of the street?"

"What do you mean they are not trying to stop congestion?"

"Why was the trolley removed from Yesler Hill?"

All valid questions for a teenager having to face the possibility of not being able to do what their older siblings or parents do now for transportation. We talked about it more and in two weeks we go to SDOT to find out all about it.

So, their first writing assignment is to prepare questions for the Executive Director of SDOT. Aaaaaawwwwwww, man!! Why? Because you signed up for this....to learn how the city works, how a community is planned, how your surroundings are moved, guided, coordinated. To represent, to learn their voice(s), to think about things a bit more for a little while.

Here we go....

There is this place in Seattle that has housed the rich and the poor, the in-between. It was home to a forest, a trolly line, a logging mill, and home to the city's most powerful madams.

It serves as housing for those in need and takes care of those who are ill. It is part of Seattle's history and has been home to both famous and infamous. Yesler's Hill, Skid Row, Profanity Hill, Yesler Hill, Tap-Tap Lane, Yesler Terrace, a gateway to the rest of Seattle's central and south communities.

Planned redevelopment of Seattle Housing Authority's Yesler Terrace Community, set currently to start in 2012, is poised to be one of the most transformative changes in the long history of redevelopment on this 29 -31 acre site at the southern end of Seattle's First Hill neighborhood.

From the first uses by Indigeneous nations of the Suquamish and Duwamish peoples, to the changes guided by European colonists, and to the ripples of Asian, East African, Central and Latin American immigrants who call Yesler Terrace home, the land first built on in 1853 called Yesler's Hill is a dynamic study of cooperation, conflict, challenges, and changes.

Yesler Terrace is changing again. For better or for worse, change is coming again, and the questions are the same as they were when Helen Burns walked on the hill in 1937 to start the process of equitably and respectfully moving the established residents to make way for the one of the first fully racially integrated public housing communties in the United States.

Over the coming months, and hopefully years, myself, the collective, the youth our teaching team works with, and the community we work to help sustain through the coming changes, hope to transmit and discuss the issues that surround any urban-core redevelopment of public housing lands.

This one will be historic. The social, economic, environmental, political, generational, and educational sparks will be flying, and it is our goal to bring the issues to the front in a fair and equitable way.

The project's 12 youth are from the Terrace and surrounding neighborhoods. Their training and experience is centered in looking into the planning and design process, historical research, community building, basic design skills, and opening their minds to looking at issues from several sides. The hope is that they will spread the word and take a postive role in the future of Yesler Terrace.

Plan right it. Improve it always.