Welcome to Seattle-King County. If you are not white and planning to live in areas with mostly other people of color, be prepared for the following amenities: toxic industrial waste (South Park), flight-path noise and carbon pollution (Beacon Hill), juvenile detention (Squire Park), low levels of public and private investment (Rainier Beach), stress on services and affordable housing (Chinatown-International District) or outright displacement (Central Area).
And whither the people of the Duwamish?
It’s no deep secret that both White Center and Kent are majority nonwhite communities. White Center, which no longer lives up to its name, has a large Latinx population. Kent is the 10th most diverse city in the country, when also considering linguistic and birthplace diversity.
The rub: The state’s first COVID-19 diagnoses and related deaths occurred in Kirkland, which is overwhelmingly whiteand wealthy. Never mind that the county has and will continue to introduce quarantine facilities in largely white areas; its first two were in communities of color.
“I am honestly disappointed they chose non-affluent, racially diverse areas for their quarantine sites even though most of the cases are in affluent areas,” Kent City Councilmember Satwinder Kaur, who is Sikh, wrote in an email.
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