Crime, kids and customers

Most young people within earshot trudged southbound on the Ave. toward class, rubbing gum and the bright morning sun out of their eyes.

Outside Pagliacci Pizza, not yet open for business, two Seattle police officers stood amid a group of people, all appearing to be college-aged.

"You can't be here," ordered one of the officers, delivering the group its order to disperse.

"This is a public place," a 19-year-old woman named Billy snapped back, not worried about being late for class. She did not have anywhere else to go and showed no fear.

Another person standing in the awkward circle backed her up: "This is America."

"Not for you," the officer bickered. He gave a short, patriotic speech and then began singing "My Country 'Tis of Thee." The kids joined in with him, but the officer cut it short to say, "I love my country."

"So do we," said Nat. He is 18, hails from Eastern Washington, sells a little pot and sleeps on cardboard somewhere on the other side of the University Bridge.

The group of seven stands a foot or so away from the building; they know that if they lean against the wall or kneel on the concrete they will violate of the city's anti-sitting law and are subject to search. Billy yelled some more, and the officers made more condescending comments.

And so went the morning rousting of a gaggle of so-called Ave. rats, University Way's community of homeless youth and small-time drug dealers, which are sometimes one and the same.

They are mainly white teens and 20-somethings who congregate on the 4700 block, socializing, panhandling and selling palm-fulls of dry, Canadian marijuana to passersby.

Together with a faithful contingent of older, burned-out transients, and a more visible segment of harder drug users and dealers, they have collectively been blamed by the police, real-estate agents, storekeepers and local media for much of the flagging district's ailments.

Wealthier, older consumers with pocketbooks more stable than a college student's are being turned off by the people who have turned on to the Ave.

"There used to be fine clothiers on the Ave., other jewelers, Nordstrom," said Joe Waldmann, owner of Porter and Jensen Jewelers, who will close the store which has stood for 40 years on the corner of Northeast 45th Street and the Ave. He made his decision final after a motorist was killed by a young man with a skateboard during a traffic dispute near his front door, but it was not the only reason.

"Mostly because of lack of business or similar business," he said, adding that Porter and Jensen is the last store on the Ave. that may draw customers who could afford to buy a $5,000 piece of jewelry.

But in addition to high-end shoppers, the legions of college kids and their non-lunch related dollars have wavered in their support of the Ave. Gone are the days of video arcades, the Underground dance club and Wizards of the Coast.

"It's a lot scummier than it used to be," said Steve Cox, 42, a 22-year U-District veteran who lives a block from the Ave. "You always had bums and weirdoes, but the skuzzball kids hanging out started in the early '90s sometime. It's been a slow thing."

Dubbed "notoriously un-hip" by Seattle's scenster weekly, The Stranger, high vacancy rates and high rental prices diminished the Ave.'s standing as a youth destination, not to mention a recent rash of police shootings and the skateboard incident.

"After that guy got hit with the skateboard, cops will stop you just for having a skateboard," Nat said, insisting he did not know George Strano, who's trial may start in late summer. "They're not kids that hang out here on a daily basis that know the crew that kick it here -- homeless kids."

The police presence has been beefed up to make shoppers feel more comfortable at the expense of the regulars, according to Nat, who claims officers confiscated his skateboard with no more explanation than "It'll make a good present for my kid."

Nat sells pot for money, and on a good day he can gross up to $900, but he generally makes less than that.

"Enough to eat," he said.

Chicken or the egg?

The Ave.'s business community wants access to customers, which police say are deterred by the Ave.'s regular population of homeless people and drug traffic.

They also want the infrastructure revamped -- a bigger sewer main and an assurance that plugging in Chirstmas lights will not cause a neighborhood brownout.

The police have cracked down on the Ave.'s drug trade. But orbiting around the dealers is a layer of homeless kids, many college-aged with no other place to go.

The kids say the police treat them unfairly. After all, they say, they have been a presence for years and have nothing to do with the harder drugs and violence that has tweaked the public's recent perception of the strip.

They also insist they cannot leave. At least on the Ave. they are near services, such as showers, food and shelter, they say.

The service providers, such as the U-District Youth Center, say they are there because that is where the kids are.

The business community's issues with sewers, sidewalks and electricity will be solved with the completion of the Ave. Project is finished -- slated to finish in the fall of 2003. Solving the problem of who makes the sidewalks of the Ave. their haunt might be more complicated than ripping up concrete.

Just pot

"A lot of pot," says Janet Duff. "And they have the mentality that it's not a drug."

A superviser at the U-District Youth Center -- a Catholic community service program -- Duff says many of the young people using the centers' facilities have different reasons for being on the street.

"For some, it's a bleak picture. Others say it's really fun to be out there, often to justify drug use, which is very heavy. They can get anything they want," she said.

Duff insists the person charged with the May skateboard killing was not a member of the regular homeless community.

The police "identify skateboards with our kids, but it wasn't them."

She's also quick to defend the programs offered to homeless and at-risk youth in the U-District as no chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: The kids were there first.

Police "think we came here, so the kids did, but that's not the way it happened," Duff said.

Nearly all a persons' needs can be met with the network of services available within a week. These include prepared meals, groceries, shelter, showers, health care, laundry, clothing, art supplies, clean needles, condoms, counseling to addresses employment, housing, education and mental health.

Dressed no different than any other middle-aged white woman, Duff feels comfortable in the neighborhood.

"I feel totally safe on the Ave.," she made clear.

Dan, not his real name, rummaged through the center's kitchen during the interview before settling on a bowl of breakfast cereal. He had recently returned after a couple years traveling, and sees the increased presence of harder drugs has led to more use.

"A lot of kids were out here two years ago and are still here," Dan said. "Some wearing the same clothes."

Duff thinks the kids are looking older, implying younger kids are staying off the street -- perhaps a sign of success, she suggests.

She credits better schools, better social service agencies and "better parents." Still, she hastens to add that the young people are also looking "more beat up."

'Cops and robbers'

Since the Last Exit closed three years ago, a coffee shop one area merchant called "a gypsy camp," much of the heavy drug activity shifted to the stretch in front of the University Heights Community Center.

Over the past year or so, the drug traffic has drifted south, settling around the busy Jack in the Box intersection and mingling further down the strip to the wide bulge of the sidewalk in front of Pagliacci and Rite Aid.

The same spot has served as the meeting point for groups of homeless youth since the mid-'90s. Wizards of the Coast closed its doors a year and a half ago and the 4500 block has been virtually claimed by the street kids.

"This is our block," Nat said, leaning against the wall at the old Wizards entrance a few days after his morning pledge with the police, adamant they do not allow any illegal activity other than selling pot.

"It's all weed. Every great now and then somebody's dumb ass will come looking for something else, I tell them to get out of here. This ain't the fucking block," Nat said.

Street regulars feel a sense of safety on the Ave., said Emily, 14, diminutive and blonde. Nat said the group pays extra attention to her, seeing to it that she is not singled out and harassed by "perverts."

"If any guy hit a girl on the block," Emily said, "they would get their ass kicked."

Similarly treated are women who arrive asking for "dates," girls Nat and his friends chalk up as prostitutes: They run them off. It's been a relatively recent phenomenon, but Nat and his friends attribute it to the hard-drug scene a block north.

"Just because you hang there doesn't mean you're like that," Nat shrugged. "But I could point a few out. That's what the cops are looking for, mainly. They're still fucking with us, too, but at first it was just tweak (methamphetamine), heroin and crack and shit like that which we could understand because that shit is foul. People die and fuck up their children's lives from that shit. I've seen it since I was a kid."

It is that relatively new element near the Northeast 50th Street intersection, comprised of some young black people in the predominately white U-District, Nat refers to. Some members of the group seem to be middle school age.

Many on the street refer to them as "the Africans" or "the Ethiopians." The ranks of Ave. rats include black youth that are just as accepted as anyone. Nat and another pot dealer, Mojo, both say they "racially profile" to dodge would-be strong-arm robberies and busts by undercover agents.

Each has numerous stories about friends lured into alleyways by "Africans" under the pretense of wanting to make a purchase, only to be attacked for their drugs and cash. Nat says his friend was robbed once at gunpoint.

"I don't serve anybody who isn't my color," Mojo said, an East Coast native who says he has a place to live but uses the Ave. to market his wares. He agrees that most hard drugs are kept off their section of the Ave., except for methamphetamines.

"But no more than usual," he shrugged.

Part of the reason Mojo has been so successful during his seven-year Ave. career, he says, is because of the caution he takes. By 7 p.m., he heads for home, avoiding the "cops and robbers."

"Mondays are iffy. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are good. Thursday, usually pretty good. Friday and Saturday usually pop off, and Sundays steady," he said.

The leaner, more-violent drug buyers and sellers on the Ave. may have something to do with increased policing in other areas, such as Aurora Avenue North, which police sources say may have displaced a significant amount of criminal activity. They also say they are taking care of it.

Police are making smaller the number of black people hanging around University Heights, but the group on the 4500 block remain the same size.

Police resources have been shifted, and foot and bicycle patrols have been added, said Duane Fish, spokesperson for the Seattle Police Department (SPD), assuring that all people, regardless of ethnicity, are treated the same.

"The increased presence primarily assures the public," Fish said, "but also is to discourage and deter crime."

The phenomenon of displacing criminal activity tit-for-tat is part of a broader social issue, he said.

"You'll see stepped up enforcement push problems to different areas of the city. But it is into other areas that already have the activity. Law enforcement is not the solution of all society's problems, but it plays a role," Fish said. "Until something large is done socially, we're going to keep pushing people around. You're not going to see these kind of drug dealers in Wedgwood."

Seattle has been in a ongoing process of displacing criminal activity.

"This is not a problem that started existing today," said Lt. Roy Wedlund of the north precinct. "When we put pressure on Broadway or Aurora, people are going to relocate. But they will go only as far as they need to go" so as to be close to their clientele, he said, adding, "They're not going to go to Bellevue."

Other contributing trends are what Wedlund termed as "entrepaneural" drug dealers from other cities, states and areas of the city, converging on a market.

He confirmed that many of the young black people that operated around Jack in the Box have been cleared out. Some of their situations, he said, are not as independent dealers raising their own capital, but employees of a supplier holding the money and drugs while they make contact with customers.

"They're street soldiers for Fagin," Lt. Wedlund said, referring to a character from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, a man who conscripts children into his gang of criminals. "They're very easily swayed and are getting something out of it. Money, but a lot of the time (they are paid in) drugs.

"They're throwaways. These are kids who would love to have a descent life with a mother and father, but don't because of abuse, parents addictions. They're out on the street; the street becomes home," said Wedlund.

Berkeley has Telegraph, NYU has Washington Square Park

Those who make their money selling the retail space on the Ave. have different takes on its future and reasons for its dodgy state.

But most agree the list of absentee property owners does not help the situation. However, the recent lowering of rental rates two or three dollars from a rough average of $17 will continue to help.

"It definitely came down," said Scott Soules, a real-estate agent who represents several properties on the Ave. "They had to in order to attract the businesses that would naturally do well with the real estate."

A member of the North Precinct Advisory Council, a body that makes recommendations to the SPD precinct, Soules says the "city is underserved with police," but believes the city and the police have "stepped up to the plate, and made a huge difference."

He thinks things are looking up for the Ave., pointing out a business that has recently signed a lease for the Wizards building, along with the Ruzhen Mongolian Grill that now inhabits the old McDonalds space. He is glad to see the corporate operations, such as McDonalds, Burger King and Taco Bell, leave the Ave. area.

"They're contrary to the character of the neighborhood," Soules said. "Out of step. Good riddance, I say."

Ellen Mohl, a colleague of Soules in the real-estate business, might not agree with his outlook. She thinks the Ave. is as bad as ever, and blames the city for accepting criminal activity on the Ave. as a fact of life.

"The culture of the street overwhelmed the retail culture," Mohl said. "And retail came before the kids did."

She is convinced the city has thrown up its hands and allowed the Ave. to slip further into commercial oblivion.

"They keep hoping that wider, prettier sidewalks will solve the problems," Mohl said. "Until the city deals with the culture allowed to incubate on the street, it can do anything to make it pretty and it's not going to take. It doesn't have to be that way, but I don't see anyone trying to clean it up."

"That's categorically incorrect," says Deirdre Grace, the northeast's neighborhood development manager for the Department of Nieghborhoods. "There's nothing further from the truth."

Grace says Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has taken a special interest in reviving the U-District, and has set a plan into effect going beyond the generalistic rhetoric of "cleaning up the Ave."

"We could have 'hard' policing, but that would just displace the elements somewhere else. That's not what we're about."

She says economic development, starting with an almost $10 million infrastructure sprucing, is only the start. In addition, the city has set aside funds to assist business owners in grooming their storefronts, along with an opening up of dialogue between the chamber of commerce, the police, the homeless youth and the organizations that serve them.

"The fact is, homeless kids are often blamed for the Ave.'s problem, when they are really the most vulnerable," she said, adding that she doesn't expect all groups to "join hands" and walk toward a single goal.

"It is not my agenda, or anyone I work closely with, to sterilize the Ave. People like it fun, funky, vibrant and edgy. We already have one U. Village."

Grace also cited absentee landlords as a "huge obstacle" toward economic revitalization.

Dennis Counts, yet another real-estate agent who works for owners on the Ave., takes a more stoic approach. He attended UW in the late '60s and early '70s and doesn't think things have changed all that much, or ever will.

"Back then, you had what are probably called hippies hanging out," Counts said. "I was probably one of them."

Nat, who frequents the falafel joints on the Ave., sees himself directly contributing to the Ave. economy.

"I buy something from every Goddamn store on this block," Nat said. "Except the Dawghouse. I like Wazzu."