In 2024, The Seattle Times reported that the Chinatown-International District (CID) was one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

“Not all of Seattle’s low-income tracts were in the University District. There were five others, and the one with the lowest median income was in the Chinatown-International District/Yesler Terrace area, at around $36,900. In an adjacent tract located in the central part of Pioneer Square, the median was slightly higher, at $40,100.”

Crime—particularly violent crime—continues to plague the CID. But it’s not just violent crime: insufficient street maintenance, illegal sales to businesses, graffiti and defaced buildings, trash accumulation, and loitering are also problems.

Cameras are the instrument of choice—the city’s, and even some community leaders’ and citizens’—in response to the problem of crime in the CID.

Cameras are the desperate last resort of seniors and businesspeople in the CID when all else has failed—if anything else was ever proffered. “(There is) No help,” according to one prominent community leader, and that was probably a spot-on call.

If we are going to fight crime in the CID, community leaders and the city must come up with better solutions.

As long as poverty bedevils this city’s only living immigrant community, there will be crimes—of all types—and this is morally unconscionable and unacceptable.

As long as the CID is branded with the disproportionate burden of low-income services and housing, it will never gain prosperity, health, dignity, and respect. This is yet another unfortunate and unacceptable acknowledgment of the desperate poverty in the CID—and terribly unhelpful to a community that needs and deserves all the amenities of a white middle-class neighborhood like, say, Laurelhurst.

The root causes of poverty and their connections to crime must be addressed.

I submit that one of the reasons the CID is permitted to languish in its problems of poverty and crime is racism.

Until liberal Seattle acknowledges the indifference and inaction of Mayor Bruce Harrell, the City Council—including Councilmember Bob Kettle—and the broader patterns of benign racism, our community cannot expect anything more than temporary fixes, rather than real, humane, and just solutions.

There is an immediate way residents and business owners in the CID can take steps to protect themselves: they can solicit the assistance of the city SPD’s Crime Prevention Community Coordinators for a free security consultation. Any recommendations that might require financial assistance should be supported by the city.

I call upon the CID Public Safety Council to personally engage with residents who are experiencing residential safety concerns (particularly those who have been vocal about desiring cameras), as well as with landlords, to investigate and provide assistance.

Finally, I recommend a joint community, city, and county task force to investigate and make recommendations on solving the poverty of the CID.