I am demanding that the City of Seattle and the King County Executive’s office immediately shut down the DESC Navigation Center currently situated in the Pearl Warren building in Little Saigon.
Per response from Cindy Wong with the City, the final closure would be by end of Q1 2025 as remaining residents are transitioned to other living arrangements. Her incomplete response does not satisfy the concerns I have over the lingering impact of the Center’s current operations and is therefore unacceptable.
Change in Navigation Center Mission
My response is that the Navigation Center is not just a low-barrier shelter but also a harm reduction facility that has undoubtedly played a consequential role in the devastating social, economic and public safety disruption of Little Saigon and the CID since at least Covid (2020). As long as this drug treatment function is maintained, there can be no guaranteed relief for Little Saigon/the CID.
Mismanagement and lack of communication
For how long this function has been operated, we do not know as harm reduction was not, as far as we know, part of the original mission of the Navigation Center but appears to have become a goal sometime along the establishment of the Center since 2017. Was this mission from shelter to drug treatment ever communicated to the public? Was consent and oversight/input ever solicited?
I am demanding the full release of the City/County/DESC Navigation Center records to the public.
Lack of Credibility
How can the community, the public, expect to believe the City and the County when through their mismanagement and total lack of honesty and transparency, they have been indirectly responsible for the enormous damage the Center did and its role in the years-long debacle of 12th & Jackson culminating in stabbings and shootings in 2024?
Discrimination and exploitation
A drug treatment facility without trained medical staff and management should never have been sited in the Little Saigon/CID not to mention next to a school yet this was perpetrated counting on the community’s economic depression and lack of political power. The CID and Little Saigon, economically depressed and politically powerless, were unable to support let alone coexist with this kind of social experiment. And the DESC Navigation Center was a failed social experiment.
Such a decision would never have been made for any other city neighborhood/community that would have had the political means to question and challenge.
Branding and Urban Decay
The damage done to Little Saigon and the Chinatown International District goes far beyond the consequences we all well know.
Optics and language matter.
Little Saigon and the CID have suffered the resulting consequences of urban decay – the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude.
Neglect of the community infrastructure as seen in defacement, absentee landlords and lack of street hygiene must be included in the social and economic decay of the CI and Little Saigon.
Lack of economic opportunity as seen in low wage, female-dominated service jobs is another.
Good Faith and a Future of Commitment
The problem thus is not Little Saigon nor the Chinatown International District. Despite heroic efforts by community businesses and leaders going it alone, more is needed.
It is the City of Seattle and King County who have contributed to the urban blight and decay of Seattle’s historic living immigrant community.
Continued public safety enforcement is important; so is the dedication by many to the economic and political vitalization and support for self-determination as Little Saigon/CID look to a better future without the Navigation Center and without further discriminatory impositions by the City and County.
The best way to right these wrongs is to start with closing the Navigation Center immediately and fully. We have borne the burden of the City’s and County’s failed social experiment long enough. I want the full records pertaining to the Center released to the public.
Secondly, the City and County must commit to keeping further social experiments/centers (recall the County’s proposed Sodo homeless siting which the CID fought) out of Little Saigon/CID.
Thirdly, as a community of small businesses and low income residents, well designed/scaled and architecturally compatible affordable housing planning would help this community.
Fourthly, but not finally, there needs to be an official liaison between the City/County and Little Saigon/CID where real power is shared not dispensed from the top down, so to speak.
Sincerely,
Patty Fong