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TI: Okay, so Bob, we're gonna start the third interview, and today is June 30, 2011. In the room we have Dana Hoshide on camera, Nina Wallace, who's observing, I'm the interviewer, Tom Ikeda. And where we finished the second interview was right at the time when you had joined InterIm, and you talked about going forward and getting a large grant, and right about that time you became executive director. And that's where we ended, so I thought we'd pick up the story there, and with the question, so now that you're executive director of this fairly new organization with some money, what do you do?

BS: Okay. Well, this is the most interesting time that, during the Civil Rights Movement and during the beginning of the Asian American experience and that movement. InterIm was -- InterIm, acronym for International District Improvement Association -- was started by the business community and property owners, as a quasi chamber of commerce. And it was funded, they got a little grant from the Model City Program because the International District was in the Model City boundaries. It's like it was a bird and it covered most of the Central Area, but the feet part, the leg part of the bird was down into the International District. So we applied for and got just a small grant. And when they started opening up meetings beyond the membership of the property owners and business owners it was open to the community, to the public, so the activists, those of us who were in the Civil Rights Movement, Latino/Chicano Grape Boycott, the Black Movement, the Native American Fishing Rights Movement -- [coughs] excuse me. All the Asian activists gathered in the ID. We met at St. Peter Claver Center for a couple of meetings and decided that the International District, Chinatown, Japantown, Manilatown, was under attack. I-5 was built, I-90 was being planned. This is, this is the mid '60s, early '70s. I-90 was planned. The Kingdome was a brainchild of the business community, and they were thinking about a multipurpose stadium somewhere in Seattle. The business community wanted it downtown, so the land that was affordable, available seemed to be on the railroad storage tracks, south of the government center of downtown, which is where the King Street, Union Street, King Street Station was. So all this is happening and I'm hired by InterIm because of the activists infiltrating InterIm board. There was enough people on the board when my name came up for executive director opening, I got voted in. And there was a lot of, little bit of turmoil inside the InterIm board who really didn't want me, and I think Tomio was one of those.

TI: So these were the business, property owners who weren't really sure about you and your activist group.

BS: Right. Well, because we were demonstrating, we came from the Civil Rights Movement, we must be a bunch of Communists, and there was really a lot of tension. And so we're in this, we're in these meetings at InterIm and part of the board, I'd say one third, maybe even more of the board members left. They didn't want to deal with us. Tomio, Shigeko Uno, Don Chin, who was president of the Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, Wesley Tao, a couple other folks stayed on. They stayed with the InterIm board 'cause they were very interested in the energy and the smarts of these young people that were there to protect the International District from being displaced, from being destroyed by all this public development. We were surrounded by all this concrete. And so one of the first things that happened was there were lawsuits filed by young law students, Peter Bacho and Norris Bacho and some of those, to stop the stadium. Of course, that didn't work. I mean, the suit was thrown out. But the businesspeople and professionals found at that we weren't just gonna hit the streets. We also had legal expertise that were helping us so that it brought us to this little bit, little bit of sophistication, little level of sophistication. In the meantime, when the state built I-5 through the district it was elevated over Jackson Street to Dearborn, I think it was. It's elevated, so you have all this airspace between King Street and Jackson Street and this, this large airspace, and InterIm decided to go to the governor and try to work out a deal where the community that was impacted by the construction of the stadium, as a small mitigation, the community should get rights to the airspace under the freeway, right? Some of the activists were saying, "What will we do with it?" They said, "We'll build a parking lot for the businesses," and the activists are saying, "Baloney. You guys just want, InterIm just wants to acquire the airspace to build a parking lot for the stadium people. They don't care about the business community or the residents of the ID." So there was give and take about that, and the thing was, let's get, let's try to get that parking lot, work out this other details later, the pros and cons of who would be using the parking lot.

TI: But what's interesting is there's lots of, I guess, tensions, suspicions about each other in terms of motives, "What are you doing and why are you doing this," at this time.

BS: Yes, yes. Right.

TI: Okay. Go ahead.

BS: And then this is about the time I become executive director, so I became sort of the negotiator, right? I've never led a demonstration. I was always in the background, and when people were arrested and busted, except for a couple of times, I'd be left at the bargaining table negotiating what, what the needs were, why we were marching, why we were taking over offices and throwing tantrums and stuff like that. So I was hired by InterIm and I became this negotiator, and we figured out that we could build two hundred and thirty-three stalls under this freeway, so even activists, radicals, have a little business sense, right? They've all gone to school. They do the math and they're thinking, well, that's not a bad deal, if the parking lot, the priority is for the residents and the businesses in the community rather than stadium goers when the stadium would be built, 'cause it was being planned then. So everybody agreed that would be a good idea, so that was the first time that we sort of came together with a major idea of InterIm acquiring a parking lot. Now, I don't know how many nonprofits are in the parking lot business, but it's a good business. Most of the funds that nonprofits get are probably, if they're public funds then there're restrictions on what you can do with it. With the revenue from the parking concession, wow, we could lobby, we could fly to Washington, D.C., and hit all the offices and do that kind of work. So it was unrestricted.

TI: Unrestricted funding, right.

BS: Unrestricted funds. The first, the first year or so we couldn't give a parking stall away. We were charging -- and the state paved it and they striped it, two hundred and, two hundred and twenty-two, two hundred thirty stalls -- six dollars a month that we were charging for a parking stall per month. And for the residents it was, it was probably half of that. And we couldn't give it away. I hired a guy named Ed Hidano. He just got out of graduate school from Washington State University, and we loaded him up with these fliers. Well, we couldn't, we didn't get much movement there that we got this parking lot. Then Mayor Uhlman came up with this idea of developing a magic carpet service downtown, free bus service so that people working in the downtown area could jump on a Metro bus from one end of downtown to the other end of downtown, at lunch hour or something, and it would be good for the businesses. And it was a good idea, except the boundaries of the magic carpet service were Virginia on the north and Yesler on the south. So we got our folks together, especially the elderly, and we marched on the mayor's office. "You're discriminating against our elderly. Our elderly should be able to ride a bus." And so the mayor's office would say, "Where do you suggest the magic carpet line end, or start in the International District?" We said, "Eighth and Jackson." That's where the parking lot was.

TI: So the parking lot would be right on the edge of the magic carpet.

BS: Right. We invented park and ride. You know, park six dollars a month, jump on the magic carpet service downtown. Now we've tried to figure out where park and ride was first started, and I think we were one of the first in the whole world.

TI: Now whose idea was that? Was that --

BS: It was just sort of, it was just, we heard about the magic carpet service and then InterIm said, hey, well we should take advantage of this, and so that's, we...

TI: Now, did you have any pushback from the activists, saying, hey, now all of a sudden the land will go to benefit people working downtown and not the residents, not the businesses?

BS: Well, that's why we set up, we set up parking rates to benefit the business, the residents first and the customers of the business in the ID first, and then monthly parking for those that worked downtown who jumped on the magic carpet service. But that was an InterIm innovation.

TI: And so was it successful? Did all of a sudden people --

BS: We still have it, and it's packed.

TI: A lot of businesspeople who just buy the monthly rate and they...

BS: Yes. They buy the monthly rate and then they send their customers -- we used to have a, we used to have a voucher kind of system, but I think we've done away with that because our rates in the parking lot are, I think, two dollars, two or three dollars all day. It's really a, it's affordable.

TI: Well it kind of works, too, because during the day the office workers are parking there, but then they, after work they come home and they move, then you have empty stalls again for the evening sort of business in terms of restaurants.

BS: Yeah. That's right, for the businesses, and that's been, that's been working pretty well. Because of the problems in the International District with street people and all that, then we have to be very vigilant and we have to step up security so that those that work late and park in the parking lot are not hassled.

TI: So that became a nice revenue stream for you.

BS: That wass the first major revenue source that we had, which allowed me as director to do a lot of lobbying. Most of the nonprofits are under a 501©(3), and because we were in a business, the parking lot business, we applied for and received a 501©(4) designation, which allowed us a little more leeway in this unrestricted fund that we were collecting.

TI: That's a good story. Okay, so now all of a sudden you've figured out a revenue stream so you actually have now resources to focus on the issues within the International District.

BS: Right.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.