Citiwire.net Neal Peirce on Seattle Ethnic Diversity, Bill Dodge on Regional Government Charters

America’s Most Diverse Zipcode: Hint of Successes to Come?

By Neal Peirce

For Release Sunday, June 20, 2010
© 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

America’s most diverse ZIP code, the Census Bureau reports, is 98118– the Rainier Valley neighborhood, five miles south of downtown Seattle.

And for good reason. 98118’s mixed population of immigrants from across the globe includes speakers of 59 languages– Chinese to Somali, Spanish to Vietnamese, Tagalog to Khmer. Yet close to a third of the population is African-American, an influx that started in the 1950s, and another third white, including remnants of the Irish and Italian immigrants of the early 1900s.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, 98118 was troubled by dilapidated buildings, drug dealing and prostitution– not a neighborhood you’d feel comfortable strolling after dark. But the recent immigrant waves have brought entrepreneurial juice including new restaurants and shops, upgraded real estate, and new urban flavor.

There’s public art on the streets, wafting smells of many cuisines, colorful varieties of dress. Rainier Valley “has the best selection of foods, music and culture that I think you can find in any neighborhood,” plus a very high “level of tolerance,” a local State Farm Insurance agent told the Northwest Asian Weekly.

Plus, 98118 has a strong group of community organizations. And it’s regionally connected with a stop on the new Sound Transit light rail line that runs from the Sea-Tac Airport to downtown.

Time for New Charters: The Regional Future of Local Government

By Bill Dodge

For Release Sunday, June 20, 2010
Citiwire.net

Local governments have strengthened their capacities multifold during my professional life. I recall vividly working with some that once keep financial records by hand, depended on snail mail for communications, and only responded to their neighbors under court order. Conversely, I have seen local governments earn the respect, and accompanying tax dollars, to provide state-of-the-art roads and sewers, public safety and recreation programs, and even bus service and affordable housing.

Yet in spite of this increased competency, individual local governments have been losing the ability to address many of their toughest challenges — the ones that cut across jurisdictional boundaries — at an increasing pace since the turn of the century. If there has ever been a time for innovation in local government, it is now.

Crosscutting challenges are not new. Some were predetermined by our natural environment. For example, local governments realized that taking drinking water out upstream and dumping waste water downstream only worked for the jurisdiction at the headwaters. Everyone else was going to drink someone else’s pollution. The same was discovered when the jurisdictions drawing on a common aquifer exceeded its ability to replenish itself and had to keep digging deeper wells. Neighboring local governments realized that they needed to negotiate watershed plans to assure adequate and potable drinking water. Ditto for airshed plans to breathe clean air.