Originally published Saturday, November 1, 1997

By DON CARTER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Paul Bascomb's got a percentage problem.

The black real estate agent serves the traditionally black Central Area. His clientele is 99 percent African American.

So far, so good.

But the Central Area is getting paler. Bascomb estimates that 80 percent of the area's new homeowners are white. And that leaves him in a bit of a fix.

"I'm surviving, but I'm not thriving," said Bascomb, whose business, Bascomb and Associates, is located at the corner of Jackson Street and 23rd Avenue. "I survive because black folks trust me, and bring their business to me and my agents. That's the only reason I survive."

The Central Area hovers today at the brink of a long-awaited economic renaissance. Millions of dollars worth of new development proposals hang in the balance, and the residential real estate market is already booming.

Nevertheless, like dozens of other small-business owners in his neighborhood, Bascomb finds the demographics of his community are turning against him and may, one day, force him to relocate or push him out of business altogether.

Once a bastion of black business ownership, the Central Area is awash in a tidal wave of new white residents. Many come for the relatively inexpensive housing. Some also crave the racial diversity, or the charm of an old-fashioned home with a front porch and hardwood floors.

However, there's a perception in the Central Area that white residents don't frequent the black businesses as often as the departing black residents did. The apparent changes have many newcomers and old-timers mighty worried -- and fearing that the Central Area's once-strong black business community is now an endangered species.

"The white residents live here, but the black business district is still here," said Charlie James, the founder and publisher of the African American Business & Employment Journal and a man more apt than most to voice piercing frustrations with the changing district.

"The whites don't even stop in the neighborhood businesses," James said. "You have people with a large, expendable income in the neighborhood, who don't spend money in the neighborhood."

The truth may not be so simple, other voices warn. But the fault lines dividing the area (whose boundaries are roughly defined as Madison and Jackson streets, and 17th Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way) are undeniable:

• At De Charlene's Beauty Salon on Madison Street and 21st Avenue, the clientele is almost exclusively black and increasingly from out of the area. Once, many of the women could walk to De Charlene's from their homes; now they drive from as far as an hour away;

• About a quarter-mile to the southeast, at the corner of Union Street and 23rd Avenue, a cafe and trinket store called The Mecca International attracts mostly white customers, even though the owner hoped to lure a black churchgoing crowd by banning alcohol and smoking. "It's hard. It's hard," the owner, Neb-Ra Musa, says of the local racial situation. "But when you are working, whoever walks in the door and supports you, you are like, 'Thank you!'"

• On the district's southeastern end, at the intersection of Jackson and 23rd, a Starbucks now thrives in the spot the Catfish Corner, a local, black-owned restaurant, hoped to snare. Sometimes, it's possible to head over for a latte and find the place packed to the rafters with white coffee drinkers.

But even that angle could work for only so long, he added. "Would the children of families who have suburbanized come back here?" he wondered.

The Central Area began as a Jewish neighborhood. By the middle of the century, though, the Jews had begun moving out and the black families started moving in.

By the 1980 census, the area was more than 80 percent black and about 11 percent white.

The 1990 census showed a population already shifting, with about 70 percent of the residents black and 24 percent white.

Today, real estate agents and other community residents say the majority of Central Area residents are white. Some even guess that by now, the 1990 census numbers have reversed themselves.

"If I put an ad in the paper with a property in the Central District, the phone will ring off the hook," said Harold Craft, a local real estate agent since 1970. "Ninety-five percent (of the callers) will be Caucasians under 45 years of age."

Most of his black customers, Craft said, move south, to Rainier Valley, Renton and beyond, where they trade proximity to Seattle for more spacious, newer, cheaper homes. Others find they must go simply because they can no longer afford the rent in the Central Area, he said.

He recalled one example of the kind of opportunity now available in the Central Area. A few months back, he said, he sold a three-bedroom house near the intersection of Pine and Union streets for $65,000. The buyer, an Ethiopian immigrant, remodeled the home and resold it recently, to a single white woman, for $165,000, Craft said.

But numbers tell only part of the story; Renee Rose's block tells the rest.

Rose and her two grown sons bought an old, dilapidated house seven years ago on 21st Avenue, between John Street and Madison. The street was riddled with violence generated by the drug trade, Rose said.

"When we moved here, there were three crack houses on this street," Rose recalled. "We were scared all the time."

Rose makes a living fixing up and subdividing worn-out homes, then leasing the resulting apartments. She's invested heavily -- indeed, completely -- on the aforementioned block, where she lives and where she and her sons now own eight converted apartment buildings.

Rose says that between her daily phone calls to the local police station and the presence of the many families in a new, low-income apartment complex on the block, the drug trade appears to have fled their neighborhood for less confrontational surroundings.

"Now we're almost in fat city, because our rents have more than doubled," said Rose, who recently left her day care job to focus full time on renovation and landlord-related work.

Indeed, an apartment that she rented in 1990 for $250 a month now leases for $750. But it's not just the rents that changed.

Rose and her sons are white. So are all of their tenants, save one.

"It isn't that we prefer whites," Renee Rose said. "It's just who we get."

Like many of her tenants, Rose does much of her shopping and dining in the nearby Capitol Hill neighborhood. That's where the QFC is, she explains. That's where she can find a coffee shop on every corner and restaurants with menus catering to her tastes.

"It's not about black or white," Rose said. "I go places that have what I want."

Plus, Rose goes to neighborhoods that are familiar and frequent shops with the clean, trendy looks she has come to accept as signals of prosperity and approachability.

Many Central Area business owners, struggling to get by, cannot afford to redecorate or add eye-catching new signs outdoors.

"We don't go that direction much," Rose concludes about the heart of the Central Area. "A lot of our tenants work on Broadway or downtown. They go west, not north or south. Others are students, and they don't have any reason to go to 23rd (Avenue) and Union (Street)."

Not surprisingly, these are not the type of new residents that old-timers welcome in the community. Craft, the real estate agent, looks askance at this new breed of Central Area resident. The first whites to move to the area sought out diversity, he said. But many in recent years are just looking for bargains amid people like themselves, he said.

"They came because they saw others there," he said. "(Some) felt it was going to be a white community and they could get in early. When values jumped, they would capitalize on that. They would always say, 'It's transitional, isn't it?' meaning white people are coming on to this street, this neighborhood."

By this point, the transition is so far along that the chairman of the Central Neighborhood Association is white. David Foster, a young architect with trendy, steel-rimmed glasses and a thoughtful demeanor, moved to the community in the early '90s. He says he was attracted by both the low home prices and the opportunity to live in a racially mixed neighborhood.

Ironically, his block gets more homogeneous with each home sale.

"The newcomers tend to be white and single, or married without kids, or gays," he said. "Occasionally, a black person moves in, and you have to wonder why that doesn't happen more often."

Despite the loss of many longtime patrons, however, some established Central Area businesses continue to survive, and even prosper.

Chester Dorsey opened his first automobile-detailing shop in the district 18 years ago. Today, he owns two more detailing shops, one in Kirkland and another in Bellevue, plus six self-serve car washes, including three in Portland.

A savvy man who hooked on early to a growing trend, Dorsey's self-described "auto salons" serves well-heeled customers of all backgrounds. The Central Area's increasing affluence only helps his business, he concedes.

At the popular eatery Catfish Corner, owner Woody Jackson attributes his rainbow of customers in part to a concerted effort to make the restaurant as aesthetically pleasing as possible on his budget. For example, he long ago installed big windows and lavished thousands of precious dollars on a sign for the front.

Over at Ms. Helen's Soul Food, another local hangout, the owner's son, Marvin Henton, says he plans to start advertising soon in alternative newspapers such as The Stranger that serve the white residents of Capitol Hill and, increasingly, his own neighborhood. Already, he figures the restaurant's business is 45 percent white customers, and growing.

"You've got to go with the change," his mother, Helen Coleman, said with a shrug. "White folks, black folks -- we've all got to eat."

Increasingly, those Central Area business owners who ensure all folks eat, and shop and obtain services in the area will be the ones who flourish, observers say.

It's a fact that has not escaped the notice of Ghrmai Mebrahtu, the owner of Mana Beauty Supplies & Salon at the corner of 23rd and Union. The store used to cater mostly to black customers, but now 20 percent of its products are targeted at whites.

"The demographics are changing, and it's up to us to attract the business," Mebrahtu said. "People have to stop focusing on those self-fulfilling prophecies. Change is difficult, and the ones that are not willing to bend are going to break."