Transportation infrastructure can often be described as a question of mobility, focusing on how people or goods can move from one place to another. How many vehicles can a road carry? Where should lanes, bridges, and ramps be built?
But across the country, communities are increasingly asking different sets of questions about our transportation infrastructure. Questions like who benefits from our current transportation infrastructure? Who has been harmed by it? What was destroyed or lost as a result of building said infrastructure? How can repair happen? And what becomes possible when we repair those harms?
Hosted by Equivolve with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the retreat in Seattle brought together five teams from Minneapolis, Flint, National City and Southeast San Diego, New York City, and Seattle that are working through different challenges and successes but aim for the same outcome: reconnected communities through transformative transportation projects.
The retreat served as the culmination of the Equitably Reconnecting Communities in Small and Midsized Cities Initiative, launched by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in 2023.
The initiative emerged from recognition that transportation investments have often reproduced racial inequity and community harm. Therefore, the retreat wasn’t designed to simply share technical transportation strategies, but to support community organizations and public agencies in translating lessons into action.
There were four goals identified for the retreat:
- Strengthen partnerships between community organizations and public officials.
- Build relationships among people doing similar work across the country.
- Learn from emerging insights and consider how they may be applied locally.
- Generate concrete next steps for advancing local campaigns.
As well as a few questions that framed the gathering, which were:
- What are the possibilities for infrastructure?
- What becomes possible for people once those conditions are in place?
- And what processes are needed to realize those conditions and possibilities?
All images were provided by Equivolve.
Parts of the retreat also reinforced what we know through our organizing. Transportation is about more than just a transit or highway project. It is an opportunity to repair communities previously targeted by racist policies, restore economic opportunities, prevent displacement, and return decision-making power to the people who have carried the consequences of past infrastructure decisions.
In the context of our Bring Back 6th Ave campaign, our framing and approach have not only addressed Olson Memorial Highway as a transportation issue but also asked questions like: what can be restored when land is reclaimed for communities long overlooked and harmed by the building of this highway? And what organizing tactics, policy levers, investments, and community decision-making processes are necessary to make that a reality?
A reality where the Near North community can safely move between neighborhoods. Where locally-owned BIPOC businesses can thrive along a connected commercial corridor. Where public lands can remain public to support opportunities for Northsiders that build community and generational wealth. And housing investments don’t push out the people who fought for it. Where children can access green spaces, schools, libraries, and community spaces without putting their lives at risk. Where the history of the community is not erased, but becomes part of the future envisioned.
In the Context of Seattle
One of the most informative parts of the gathering was learning about Seattle’s context and the history that shaped current realities for the communities there.
Duwamish River: The Fight for Land Restoration
Our time began in the South Park community at the Duwamish River with a tour from Yaya Johnson, who is with the Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC). The Duwamish River Community Coalition represents working-class residents, tribal communities, environmental organizations, small businesses, and others working toward a cleaner, healthier, and more equitable future for the Duwamish Valley.
“The river remembers.”
– Yaya Johnson with the Duwamish River Community Coalition
Two communities that border the river, South Park and Georgetown, are most affected by the river’s pollution. DRCC’s work has pushed community voices into decisions about environmental cleanup, housing, transportation, parks, economic opportunity, public safety, and climate resilience. The Duwamish Valley Action Plan brings these issues together rather than treating them as separate policy silos. The plan identifies seven interconnected priorities, including a healthy environment, parks and open space, community capacity, economic opportunity and jobs, mobility and transportation, affordable housing, and public safety.
The Duwamish River was central to life for thousands of years. Indigenous people used the river for fishing, transportation, and more before settler colonialism. The wide river was then dredged and straightened from a 14-mile meandering river to a 5-mile waterway, allowing for industrial development to expand along the river. This resulted in decades of industrial pollution, eventually leading the Environmental Protection Agency to deem the Lower Duwamish Waterway (LDW) a federal Superfund site.
DRCC emphasizes that addressing these issues separately, without racial equity and anti-displacement goals, can reproduce the very inequities the work is intended to solve.
South Park: What it Means to Organize Around a Whole Community
We also learned about Reconnect South Park, a community-rooted effort addressing the harms created by State Route 99, which cuts diagonally through the neighborhood and isolates residents from parks and services while concentrating pollution, noise, and safety risks near schools and community spaces.
The work is exploring multiple possible futures for the corridor: improving crossings, transforming the corridor into a neighborhood street, or reclaiming the land for other community uses.
Their advocacy prioritizes community-defined priorities that shape the questions to ask, like what kind of future is possible if land were reclaimed from the highway.
El Centro de la Raza: From Occupation to Community Institution
Our visit to El Centro de la Raza offered another lesson that transforming a place begins with people refusing to accept the future handed to them.
We were welcomed by Estela Ortega, Executive Director of El Centro de la Raza and one of the activists whose work has led to meaningful change. She gave participants context and history of what took place in the space we were in, and it felt special to hear from someone who could recount that history and her leadership since then.
“The janitor gave us the key that day, and told us to give it back when we are done. And our work has never been done since then.” – Estela Ortega
She shared that this work started in 1972, when the Beacon Hill community was facing federal cuts to educational programming that left many Latino students and staff members without an educational home. Seattle was also experiencing deep economic hardship and racial division. Many Chicano activists and organizers entered the abandoned Beacon Hill Elementary School and ended up occupying the school. What began as a peaceful occupation became the founding of El Centro de la Raza, The Center for People of All Races.
The occupation lasted three months. Organizers didn’t simply ask the city to give them a building. They occupied the building, organized, negotiated, occupied City Council chambers, and eventually occupied the mayor’s office. Their persistence resulted in a five-year lease for the building at $1 per year. Winning the building was only the beginning. Community members transformed the abandoned school into a lasting institution providing services, education, advocacy, organizing, and a gathering place for communities across Seattle.
More than five decades later, El Centro de la Raza continues its work, challenging systemic racism and poverty while providing services and resources to people across racial and ethnic communities. It’s also become a place with affordable housing development and access to transit. Truly being a community asset that continues to serve the needs of residents and community members.
This was a particularly powerful lesson in community transformation: it requires more than changing the political landscape. It was also about building institutions that can hold community power over time.
Parting Thoughts
To conclude this reflection, infrastructure does not exist in isolation from community life. It determines where people live, where businesses survive, how children get to school, the kind of air we breathe, whether people can safely walk to a park, whether families can remain in their neighborhoods, and whether communities have access to economic opportunity.
Decisions on anything, let alone infrastructure, have never been neutral in the course of this country’s history. Because those decisions have caused harm, repair requires a holistic lens and approach to start moving toward a more just world.
In the case of Seattle, those communities were repeatedly asked to absorb the consequences of decisions made in the name of growth, mobility, and economic development.
But those communities’ history exemplifies that people can organize to change the trajectory. South Park residents are imagining alternatives to State Route 99. The Duwamish River Community Coalition has spent decades organizing for environmental justice and community-led recovery, resulting in meaningful restoration. El Centro de la Raza turned an abandoned school into a powerful multi-generational community institution for organizing, services, culture, and community power.
These examples remind us what is possible with community-centered transformations and holistic approaches. We can create economic opportunities; we can protect residents from displacement. Land can be reclaimed and restored. Histories can be honored meaningfully. Local ownership can be fully supported and strengthened.
That is precisely the opportunity and the heart of the Bring Back 6th movement, making Minneapolis a great example as well for many generations to come.