‘Profanity Hill’ No More

Jessie Epstein would not recognize this place today.

Not the crop of brand-new apartment buildings with restaurants and roof gardens. Not the pedestrian walkways, pea patches and public art exhibits. Not the friendly modern streetcar. Not even the modest building named in his honor.

And probably not the people who are living here.

But once Jessie Epstein discovered the big park on the south end of this place, he would get his bearings.

Because he’d recognize the view.

From this brand-new park, looking towards the west, you can see downtown and Beacon Hill.

This is Yesler Terrace, 2024.

An experiment, of sorts.

And that concept, Jessie Epstein would understand.

Profanity Hill

It was 1937, and the U.S. Congress had just passed the Wagner-Steagall Act to encourage American cities to build public low income housing. It was part of a slew of new programs in FDR’s New Deal designed to jump-start the economy in the aftermath of the Great Depression.

For the first time, the feds were making a serious commitment to housing the poor. They offered low-interest loans to cities building public housing. Those loans would not have to be paid back for 60 years.

The first city to grab this opportunity was New York, which had three public housing projects by 1940. But Seattle was not far behind, thanks to recent University of Washington law school graduate Jessie Epstein.

In 1937, Epstein was working for the UW’s Bureau of Governmental Research, where he kept tabs on promising federal programs. Once he heard about the Wagner-Steagall Act, he got very excited. To Jessie Epstein, the opportunity to build low-income housing in Seattle was not just promising. It was personal. And Epstein decided he was going to make it happen.

Epstein’s first task was convincing the Washington State Legislature to approve a local housing authority, as that was a requirement to get the federal money. Epstein helped write that legislation and then scoured the state lobbying on its behalf.

In January 1939, the state approved the bill, and a couple of weeks later the Seattle City Council established the Seattle Housing Authority. By early summer, the feds had awarded Seattle a $3 million loan to build Seattle’s first public housing project — which would be called “Yesler Terrace” — in a low-income neighborhood just east of downtown.

“The Seattle Housing Authority was about to get off to a rather stellar start,” wrote HistoryLink author John Caldick in 2014, “and it doesn’t trivialize the countless contributions of many others to say that it was largely Epstein’s doing.”

The Seattle neighborhood picked to undergo this transformation was a 42-acre site on First Hill, just north of what is now Little Saigon. Back then, the area consisted of whorehouses, laundries, and wooden homes in various states of disrepair. Many of the homes had been converted into boarding houses. The neighborhood’s nickname, appropriately enough, was Profanity Hill.

In 1940, SHA dispatched its brand-new relocation supervisor, Irene Burns Miller, to Profanity Hill to tell its 1,000-plus residents that they were going to have to move. Much later, Burns wrote a book about her experiences there – a book she called Profanity Hill.

“Relocation of tenants, on ‘Profanity Hill,’ was particularly interesting because of the colorful conglomeration of various nationalities, mixed marriages, and houses of prostitution,” Burns wrote in her book.

 

That’s not to say, however, that Profanity Hill was completely disreputable. Its residents included 127 Japanese Americans, many of whom operated businesses in the neighborhood. There were also 161 white families and 66 black families in the area, along with some Chinese folks, Filipinos, “and a smattering of Indians, Greeks and Eskimos,” according to Miller.

While most of the residents of Profanity Hill were poor, very few of them would qualify to live in Yesler Terrace. Under SHA’s original housing guidelines, only families who earned less than $1,200 per year would be eligible — about $26,000 in today’s dollars.

It took SHA (only about a year) to tear down the existing buildings at Profanity Hill and build Yesler Terrace. Soon, Seattle had its first low-income public housing project — 68 wooden row houses on First Hill with fenced backyards.

It filled up very quickly.

Transformation

From the day Yesler Terrace was just an idea to the day it was built, four years would pass.

A Yesler Terrace makeover 65 years later would take a lot longer than that.

In 2005 SHA was contemplating a transformation of Yesler Terrace from a community of very low-income renters to a mixed-income neighborhood with tenants of all economic levels. SHA would sell off some of its property (which had shrunk from 42 acres to 30 acres once Interstate 5 was built along its western edge in the 1960s) to private developers. That sale would help SHA finance the rebuilding of its own housing, the buildings meant mostly for its very poor tenants.

The renovation was long overdue — many of the buildings were falling apart. There were rats. There was mold. Some of the basements leaked.

“The infrastructure underneath was cracked and bad,” SHA communications director Kerry Coughlin told Seattle investigative reporter Levi Pulkinnen in a 2019 interview. “It couldn’t be rehabbed anymore.”

Many of the residents in the very close-knit and diverse community — where you could hear two dozen languages — had lived in Yesler Terrace for a long time. They would all have a place in SHA’s new buildings, but the makeover talk made them nervous. There was also trepidation within the ecosystem of service providers, educational organizations and other stakeholders which had sprung up around Yesler Terrace in its 65 years. The Seattle City Council, which would have to approve SHA’s plans, also had concerns.

SHA would need the buy in of the residents and the city as well as the community groups and other stakeholders. The agency also needed the support of foundations which could help fund the project. HUD would weigh in.

“(There were) a lot of cooks in the mix,” says Al Levine, who was SHA’s deputy director at the time. Levine shepherded the agency through all the decisions that had to be made to finalize the Yesler Terrace makeover.

“It took eight years,” Levine recalls.

It was 2013 when the city of Seattle finally signed off on the Yesler Terrace redevelopment plan. This time, the very poor tenants of Yesler Terrace would not have the neighborhood to themselves. They would be sharing it with people who could afford to pay more.

SHA would sell off some of the land at Yesler Terrace to private developers, who would build new apartment buildings at the site. With the money from those sales, SHA would build replacement housing for its long-term residents.

Now, 11 years later, the build-out of the new Yesler is nearing completion. SHA has sold off almost half of the property — 12.7 acres of the 30-acre site — and has built several new buildings for its own tenants. In SHA’s buildings, there are two tiers of renters — the extremely low-income residents who pay 30% of their earnings in rent, and others who pay twice as much (though they are still considered low-income).

The private property developers at the new Yesler, on the other hand, are charging market rate rents for many of their units. A one-bedroom market rate unit at Mason and Main on 12th Avenue South, for example, is currently renting for about $2,300 per month. Under an agreement with SHA, some apartments must be offered at a somewhat lower rate.

Yesler’s biggest private developer is Seattle-based Vulcan, and it was the first developer to buy into the Yesler makeover. Vulcan’s interest encouraged other companies to get involved.

“They bought the first three sites and they ended up bidding on (some) of the other sites,” Levine says. “They outbid people, they spent more, and they developed the first projects.”

“If Vulcan had not done that,” Levine adds, “I’m not sure Yesler would be as successful as it turned out.”

To date, Vulcan has invested $40 million in the makeover of Yesler Terrace. Its intense interest in Yesler began around 2010, when its redevelopment of South Lake Union was winding down, says Ada Healey, the company’s chief real estate officer. Vulcan saw Yesler Terrace as “a diamond in the rough, a large piece of property dramatically underdeveloped,” Healey adds.

In the long term, Healey believes that the redeveloped Yesler will be the glue that will connect the International District with Capitol Hill. “I think Yesler helps connect the city better,” Healey says, “and it will always serve as a place that people who work downtown can live.”