This is the first in a three-part series about the region’s homelessness crisis.
In the middle of the night on March 20, 1970, an arsonist set fire to stairwells at either end of the Ozark Hotel on Seattle’s Westlake Avenue. When it was over, 20 people lay dead, mostly those who had been living on the upper floors of the five-story wooden building. Another victim died later in the hospital. It was the deadliest fire in Seattle history.
In the aftermath of this tragedy, the Seattle City Council enacted the Ozark Ordinance, restricting occupancy of buildings without adequate fire escapes and sprinklers. A year later, the Seventh Avenue Hotel burned, killing 12, and the council passed more restrictions, leading to the abandonment of some hotels and the closing of the upper floors of others.
It marked a turning point in the city’s ability to provide housing for its low-income residents, many of whom lived in rooming houses and SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotels in the area. Those buildings had been disappearing over the previous decade but the pace now accelerated.
The Ozark fire stands out as a moment when it became clear that the writing was on the wall for the area that introduced to the American lexicon the term Skid Row. (Yesler Way, which came to serve as a rough demarcation of downtown from where “the other half” lived, was for years known as the “Skid Road” for the logs that were “skidded” down the hill to Henry Yesler’s waterfront mill.)
The Skid Road that had for generations provided affordable housing and community amenities in close proximity to the kind of jobs available to the working men and women who lived there was on its way out, and neither the market nor government policy makers would provide the incentive to preserve and rehabilitate it.
Little did we know that it would bring us to the current state of affairs, where we now count those sleeping on our streets in the thousands, while to this day, there are buildings in the International District where noncompliant upper floors have sat vacant and unused for over 40 years.
There have certainly been periods in Seattle’s past when the struggle for housing reached crisis proportions. Hooverville, occupying the tide flats south of downtown, housed over 1,200 men (and a handful of women) at the height of the Great Depression. The Hotel de Gink provided shelter for even more in the World War I era, a time when the papers were peppered with stories about late-night raids of the Salvation Army headquarters by men desperate for winter coats, and women “compelled to seek shelter under a bridge at night.”
During the post-World War II economic boom, when Boeing’s employment rolls swelled above 100,000 in the city, there were also enough downtown jobs and day labor offices in close proximity to the Skid Road to support a vibrant SRO culture and, even as the number of lodging rooms declined throughout the 1960s, sufficient housing was still available (with the Christian missions helping to meet the needs of the truly destitute).
But the Boeing Bust hit at about the same time as the hotel fires, and from 1970 through 1971, over half its workforce was laid off. Nine days before the Seventh Avenue Hotel fire, the city’s most famous billboard made its first appearance: “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE – Turn out the lights.”
“We had to make a choice somewhere, back two or three years ago: Are we going to go commercial, or are we going to try to have a social conscience? So we’ve gone for free enterprise. Bag the social plan.”
Through all this, the redevelopment of the downtown core marched relentlessly forward. A successful World’s Fair was followed by the construction of Seattle’s freeway and then the Kingdome, which sealed the fate of many of the SROs. And as the economy recovered, the Skid Road became ripe for lucrative development. As was the case in other large American cities, SROs and flophouses where low-wage workers could live close to their jobs and communities of support gave way to rapid growth in office space and federally funded urban renewal that didn’t often result in replacing that lost housing.
The new fire codes helped seal the deal. As Joe Martin, a social worker who has been working downtown for the past four decades, told me some years back: “It allowed people who might have had ulterior motives to cloak themselves in the gown of morality and to express concern for the safety of people living in sub-standard housing … [in order to] expedite getting the folks out of there and knocking these buildings down so you could capitalize on the property.”
From 1970 to ’71, 40 hotels and other residential buildings, mostly in the Skid Road area, were closed and another 21 were demolished, eliminating a total of 3,264 units of low-income housing. In a 1983 inventory completed as part of the environmental impact statement prepared for the city’s downtown revitalization plan, it was estimated that between 1960 and 1980, 15,622 housing units were lost in an area comprising downtown, South Lake Union and First Hill. Of the 13,093 units that remained in the downtown area in 1982, nearly 4,000 sat vacant and only 7,311 were affordable for low-income residents.
Writer and entrepreneur Bill Speidel, who created Seattle’s Underground Tour and was instrumental in the redevelopment of Pioneer Square, noted presciently to the Seattle Times in 1972, “We had to make a choice somewhere, back two or three years ago: Are we going to go commercial, or are we going to try to have a social conscience? So we’ve gone for free enterprise. Bag the social plan.”