Ticket to Inclusive Community Building: Puget Sound Neighborhood Organizes to Shape Economic Opportunity
The diverse immigrant community around Casino Road on the south side of Everett, WA, has some tough issues to confront, including how to make its voice heard in regional economic development. But after more than two years of Covid hardship, what people needed was a chance to gather, relax, and rejoice. Their carnival made the work of community organizing feel like a party.
A carnival is like catnip for kids, and the Connect Casino Road Carnival this year was no exception. Children from the neighborhoods bordering the Casino Road commercial corridor in Everett, WA, looked forward to the occasion for weeks.
And it was a smashing good time, turning out a record crowd—upwards of 350 people—to play, eat barbecue and ice cream, move to the DJ’s rhythms, chat, and perchance win a raffle prize (we’re talking a 48-inch TV) at The Village on Casino Road, a four-building hub taking in more than 20 service and faith-based organizations that is a welcoming home-away-from-home to hardworking immigrant communities of South Everett.
“It was beautiful,” says The Village director Alvaro Guillen. One carnival attendee was inspired to return to The Village the following week to sign up for English classes. Another landed a job at The Village as a resource navigator. “This carnival built community,” Guillen says. “It connected families with resources and with other community members. It provided time for the families to gather, to celebrate, have fun.”
The carnival unobtrusively served another purpose, too. LISC Puget Sound was there collecting community members’ input on serious issues like the neighborhoods’ affordable-housing and transportation systems. Getting this fine-grained local intelligence was an indispensable step in a planning process that aims to center community voices in neighborhood economic development, over the long term, and right from the beginning. Asking folks to come sit around a conference table and peer up at a white board—the traditional listening session—“feels very extractive, like it serves us,” says LISC Puget Sound Deputy Director Tina Vlasaty. And after two grinding years of Covid hardship, she says, what community members said they wanted most was the chance “to come together in joy.”
A power-sharing path to economic development
To approach underinvested communities with respect for their priorities at every step of the way is a core principle of community-centered economic inclusion (CCEI), a three-year process developed by LISC and The Brookings Institution. With major support from the healthcare organization Kaiser Permanente, CCEI is now underway in 15 districts across the country, including Casino Road.
In the simplest terms, CCEI’s objective is to create and begin implementing a strategic action plan that reflects broad realities on the ground, yet is laser-focused on fostering economic benefits for neighborhoods that too often haven’t reaped the rewards of wider economic growth. Local LISC offices play the role of go-between and convener, opening lines of communication between community stakeholders and traditional power holders at the municipal or regional level—people in a position to influence economic-development policy and resource provision.
For LISC Puget Sound, which opened just last year, relationship building has been especially important. As newcomers to the scene in Everett, says Vlasaty, “we wanted to make sure we were invited.” She kicked off the CCEI process there in 2021 with old-fashioned legwork, reaching out to county and city electeds and staff to gauge where LISC’s CCEI work would be most useful. There was talk about focusing on the Everett Station district nearer Kaiser Permanente’s local headquarters, but city stakeholders instead pointed LISC toward the so-called WHEB triangle (that stands for Westmont-Holly-Evergreen-Boeing), a wedge of territory in South Everett with Casino Road as its northern perimeter.
A community on the cusp of change
This area has enjoyed little engagement and investment compared to Everett Station. And it stands at a critical juncture. In a decade or so, the regional Sound Transit plans to open an extension of its light rail system into central Everett, joining it with Seattle and Tacoma to the south. The plan is for the line to jog west to Everett’s Paine Field, an airport that opened to commercial flights in 2019, and the Boeing plant that is the world’s largest production facility, then travel east just north of Casino Road, with stops at either end of the corridor.
It’s almost guaranteed this will bring millions in new investment to the area, and get perhaps thousands of commuters off area roads. “The real challenge,” says Everett director of economic development Dan Eernissee, “will be to do it in such a way that really benefits the community and doesn't undermine it, that doesn't replace really cherished community businesses with the generic chain restaurant, the generic chain version of it all.”
The Casino Road community is frankly skeptical. In fact, according to Guillen local leaders were sharply disappointed in October when a board of regional elected officials guiding the transit expansion refused to consider an alternative route along the I-5, a major highway, that would substantially bypass Casino Road. Where Eernissee sees an opportunity for affordable, convenient car-free living and capital to seed economic development, some residents of the WHEB triangle’s northern census tracts can’t help but see a flashing signal warning of gentrification.
“The community wants economic development,” says Guillen. “We know that light rail is bringing opportunities. But for whom? What is the mitigation plan so that people who were born here, have children here, go to school here, have their families and friends here in this neighborhood won’t be displaced? That’s what is not clear for the community.”
The census tracts adjoining Casino Road are majority non-white, a diverse immigrant community hailing from Mexico and Central America as well as Africa, Russia, and elsewhere—people who’ve fled danger and unrelenting poverty, and who face steep obstacles in America as well. Many—maybe 20 percent—are undocumented. Well over a third of households with children live in poverty.
The Community Foundation of Snohomish County did foundational work here before the pandemic, engaging community members in an extended planning process that ultimately led to the construction of a community center at The Village—the warm, open gathering place local people had longed for—as well as the founding of Connect Casino Road, the organizing and advocacy organization that put on the carnival with a small grant from LISC. When Covid hit, the organizations of The Village doubled down on survival lifelines, providing food for the hungry, rental assistance for those facing eviction, case management for stressed families. The new community center underwent a phased, Covid-safe opening, and residents never had the chance to rejoice together in this major achievement.
Watering progress at the grassroots
So when LISC came along in 2021 people understandably wanted a long-overdue party, not another white-board session. At the Casino Road carnival, their ideas (not their dollars) were the coin of the realm; jotting comments on sticky notes was the “ticket” to enter the raffle and dig into carnival treats.
Produced in the spirit of fun, the stickies nevertheless drew a coherent picture of community concerns: “Lugares para cruzar las calles” [Places to cross the street]. “Getting to Kasch Park by foot.” “Más securidad!” “Food prep areas and kitchens.” “Lugares para jugar fútbol!” “More interurban trails.” “Youth apprenticeships.” A host of scribbled notes surfaced the worries of people living in a dense neighborhood of rental apartment buildings with scant protection against displacement, amid a region characterized by rapid growth: “Rentas más económica.” “Better maintained housing quality.” “Support renters.” “Rents going up too fast!” “Friends and family are moving away or getting evicted.”
According to a LISC market analysis completed in May, residential rents in the WHEB triangle are a tick lower than the city average, but they’re rising apace—and the lion’s share of affordable housing is naturally occurring, older buildings that today rent for less at market rate but may be readily snapped up by profit-seeking developers as the neighborhoods change. Indeed one of LISC Puget Sound’s early actions in the CCEI process was to hold a kind of summit for local affordable housing developers, making the case for an exception to the housing authority’s policy to avoid concentrating poverty by siting affordable housing in places like Casino Road. “What we said was, that’s great, but this affordable housing is not permanent affordable housing, and it will go away,” says Vlasaty.
Here’s the question before all parties in Everett’s bid for economic inclusion: what needs to happen to make the light rail, and growth in general, a boon rather than a threat for the families of Casino Road neighborhoods?
Vlasaty and Guillen and their colleagues have been talking about expanding The Village’s suite of services to include technical assistance, financial coaching, and organizing for local small businesses, and maybe even creating a commercial kitchen incubator space at The Village with affordable housing above. Events could activate the space and strengthen community identity. The city’s Eernissee, meanwhile, envisions stringing parks together in an urban trail for affordable multi-modal travel, and possibly using the area’s municipal golf course for more community-serving purposes. The city’s goal, he says, is to preserve affordable housing unit for unit, explore opportunities for community control of commercial space, and protect the distinctive character of Casino Road’s communities.
With light rail coming in the 2030s, now’s the time to prove out these ideas and commitments, to build trust, and to identify resources that can be layered for catalytic investments. Eernissee hopes the LISC-led process will help create the venue for “an ongoing conversation” between the city and WHEB neighborhoods served by The Village. Guillen emphasizes that communication needs to be a two-way street in which community members’ expressed needs hold import and sway. Though by all accounts a good place to start, Casino Road’s memorable summer carnival was just a small down payment on that promise. Watch this space.