I am writing to encourage support for the Dean Falls project on 22^nd and E Madison.

I have been in Seattle, living in the Central Area, for the past forty-three years. I have always been an active member of my community. Several of those years were spent in St Joseph parish on north Capitol Hill (no longer considered part of the Central Area!). I am currently Squire Park (NW corner of the Central Area) Community Council President, Vice-President to the Central Area Neighborhood District Council, Neighborhood Planning Stewardship Committee chair. I have a deep commitment to social justice.

All of my life I have seen Madison act as a social and economic division between the north and south sides of Capitol Hill. The racial divisions of the central area have slowly been pushed to the south. During the late forties and early fifties the white population abandoned the inner city and fled to the suburbs. However, during the sixties and early seventies the northern tip of Capitol Hill was a solid, middle class, white, Catholic ghetto. The black community reached as far north as E Roy. Even though immersed in a solidly white culture, my childhood and adolescence was a mix of racial interactions.

Starting in the mid-seventies with the gas crisis, when it began to be chic to move back into urban neighborhoods, north Capitol Hill began to be gentrified. It was a white on white gentrification of wealthy displacing the middle class. The white middle class consequently pushed the black community farther and farther south as the area between E Roy and E Madison was gentrified. This was a white on black gentrification of white middle class displacing a black lower middle class population.

This gentrification continues today. It is now approaching the heart of the black community. A community, which has struggled to maintain an urban neighborhood for over thirty years without any help from the city or the economic structures, which have coddled the economic health of the white community.

The Dean Falls project both geographically and economically allow the black community to make a stand against the injustice of gentrification. The neighborhood the black community suffered to maintain in the face of extreme adversity and prejudice, must be allowed, encouraged and promoted to be developed by this same neighborhood. The black community must be supported in an effort to stand up and cry, "This is my neighborhood. I will not be moved."

22^nd and Madison is the last move of the racial border. The Dean Falls project provides an opportunity for the black community to create a vibrant economic hub on the edge of the encroaching white community.

I have been privy to the back room conversations of whites. Even though we no longer beat and lynch our black brothers openly on a wide scale, we continue to practice a deeper, more subtle and vicious lynching of the black community. Through the sin of omission, our inadequate and incomplete decision making processes, cuts the throat of black projects. Through an intolerance of cultural differences, which do not match the expected required behavior, the white economic structures systematically exclude the black community from participation.

In the name of social justice, I am, as a blue-eyed white man, currently disgusted with the white culture's behavior. I am willing to do what ever it takes to ensure my culture of birth does not systematically execute an economic genocide of the black community.

Sincerely,

F. John Jeannot