Beacon Hill Beacon

Plaza Roberto Maestas.

SEATTLE - In 2000 the American Institute of Architects and HUD agreed to sponsor a national competition to annually confer HUD Secretary's Housing and Community Design Awards to recognize excellence in affordable housing, community-based design, participatory design, and accessibility. "Good design," they believed, "is a cornerstone of solid homes and thriving neighborhoods."

Entries from the Northwest always fare well, winning Secretary's Awards at least every other year. For an affordable, accessible home in Port Townsend, Washington. A multi-service center for the homeless in downtown Portland. A mixed-use, mixed-income residential complex in Vancouver. A "new" neighborhood in King County.

2017 brought another Northwest winner - El Centro de la Raza's Plaza Roberto Maestas in Seattle, located ten minutes from downtown on Beacon Hill - named one of America's Great Neighborhoods (https://www.planning.org/greatplaces/neighborhoods/2012/beaconhill.htm) in 2012 - and, arguably, the city's most diverse and vibrant communities. The AIA jury said the Plaza Roberto Maestas "a model for community-inspired transit-oriented development." Like the two other 2017 award winners in Hayward, California and St. Louis, Missouri, HUD Secretary Ben Carson added, Plaza Roberto Maestas "will inspire designers across the nation to recognize that affordable housing can enhance the fabric of their communities by combining form with function."

Form-wise the site wasn't much to look at the day in April, 2015 that ground was broken. Just a big, graveled parking lot, bordered on one-side by a once-abandoned, dilapidated elementary school that's now, thanks to CDBG funding from HUD, El Centro's headquarters.

In 18 months the project - financed by City of Seattle, the State of Washington and, yes, HUD - had "transformed" the lot, said the AIA, into a "multicultural hub for the neighborhood" with 112 units of affordable housing, retail and commercial space for local businesses,, community space, an expanded child development center and an almost 13,000 square-foot festival plaza, all just across the street from a light-rail station that, in a matter of minutes, get residents anywhere they need or want to go to work, to school or to play in Seattle.

Function-wise, Plaza Roberto Maestas was a response, the AIA added, to the "urgent need for affordable housing." Over the past decade Seattle's economy has boomed, driving housing prices ever higher while leaving low- and moderate households with and ever smaller stock of affordable places to call home.

With construction on schedule, El Centro hosted a first-come, first-served lottery on a Monday afternoon in February, 2016 to pick the families who'd live in the 112 sparkling, energy-efficient, affordable units at Plaza Roberto Maestas. More than 60 people, said Crosscut (http://crosscut.com/2016/02/housing-chances-draw-a-crowd-with-many-sure-to-lose-out/), began "lining" the Sunday afternoon before they even could apply. By the next afternoon El Centro had received four applications for every one available unit.

"It was a stunning response," El Centro's Stephen Deal told Crosscut. "We knew it would be big, but it exceeded our expectations." It's "hurtful," added executive director Estela Ortega. "It makes it so as soon as we do this project, we've got to do more development."

But bricks and mortar, form and function alone aren't enough. What matters most is a community's fabric, the sense among residents of shared purpose and a widely-held view that there's that there could be no better place to raise a family, to build for the future, to call home.

That's been a core principle for El Centro since its "birth" the evening of October 11, 1972 (http://www.elcentrodelaraza.org/about-us/history-evolution/) when a handful of principally Latino people toured an abandoned, dilapidated elementary school on Beacon Hill being offered for rent or sale by Seattle Public Schools. They were not there to buy or to rent, but to peacefully occupy and, ultimately, transform the building into a cultural, educational and service "center for the people of all races."

Forty-five years later, they're still there, celebrating its victories, but well-aware of all the work that remains. For all El Centro's successes, 45 years later la lucha continua.

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