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Columbia City Farmers Market
- Katie Mcclure
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Based on interviews with Columbia City Farmers Market Founder, Karen Kinney, and Columbia City Farmers Market Manager, Valerie Franzen, on June 5, 2024
On a Wednesday afternoon in the summer of 1998, thirteen farmers set up their stalls in a grocery store parking lot at the corner of Rainier Avenue and Edmonds Street in Columbia City. The market was modest. The crowd was small. But Karen Kinney, the woman who had spent more than a year helping to build it from nothing, remembers the feeling in the air as something unmistakable.
"The community loved that they had a farmers market," Kinney recalls. "These kinds of things weren't only reserved for North Seattle and Downtown at Pike Place."
That pride has never left. Almost 30 years later, the Columbia City Farmers Market continues to anchor Wednesday afternoons in Southeast Seattle, serving as a community gathering place, a fresh food resource, and a vital economic venue for the region's farmers.
A Flyer at the Library
Karen Kinney arrived in Seattle in 1979, moving from Memphis with a background in social work, an MBA, and a history of community organizing. She settled in Rainier Valley because it felt, "the most like home". Her grandfather had owned and operated a dairy farm, and she had long harbored a dream of opening a coffee shop in Columbia City with a friend. That plan didn't work out, but Kinney stayed involved in the neighborhood through various organizations and part-time work.
In 1997, she spotted a flyer at the local library: community members were being invited to join a task force exploring the possibility of bringing a farmers market to Columbia City. Two thoughts crossed her mind. "This sounded fun. And I knew I had the skills to contribute."
She walked into the meeting and was immediately struck by what was in the room: not just enthusiasm, but talent. The steering committee that coalesced around that initial spark was made up entirely of local Rainier Valley residents who brought their professional expertise to the table. A tech-savvy community organizer from the Department of Neighborhoods built the website. A marketing and graphics expert handled the visual identity. A graphic designer from the Pacific Science Center contributed to materials. A colleague from the Department of Neighborhoods with a farming background helped think through the agricultural side.
The model they chose to build on was the U-District Farmers Market, launched in 1993 by Chris Curtis. But from the very beginning, the Columbia City team intended something distinct: a community-based economic venture with a genuine food focus. They set out to be a professional organization that would pay its employees rather than run solely on volunteer labor, and a market designed to deliver real economic benefit to the farmers who showed up every week.
Building the Mission
The mission the team developed was threefold.
To bring fresh fruits and vegetables into Rainier Valley and serve as an accessible source of fresh food for the community.
To provide a strong sales venue for farmers, a place where growers could build a profitable and mutually beneficial business relationship with their customers.
To bring people into the Columbia City business district, which, with the support of the Columbia City Business Association and the Rainier Valley Chamber of Commerce, was beginning its revitalization into the thriving district it is known as today.
The zip code they were working in, 98118, is one of the most diverse in the country. The team knew that meant their marketing had to be as diverse as their neighbors. Using school data, they identified the top languages spoken at home in the area and produced marketing materials in each of them. They organized their outreach by category: schools, churches, community centers, ethnic organizations, and developed a specific approach for each group.
Location was chosen with care. The committee settled on the parking lot of a grocery store at the corner of Rainier and Edmonds, now the site of a PCC Community Markets. The property owner, Chris Kim, was community-minded and welcomed the market. The committee paid him rent, reinforcing from the start that this was going to be an economically positive venture for everyone involved.
Getting Farmers to Come South
One of the early obstacles was farmer hesitancy. Many growers who sold at the U-District market were reluctant to bring their families to Southeast Seattle, which carried an undesirable reputation at the time. A key figure in changing that was Jerry Pitizone, a farmer who had grown up in Beacon Hill and was already selling at the U-District. His personal endorsement of the south side, and his active encouragement of fellow farmers to give it a try, made a decisive difference.
The day came down to a Wednesday. Saturdays might have seemed the obvious choice for shoppers, but the committee's view was that the market's primary customers were the farmers. Growers wanted a midweek date so that crops reaching peak freshness could be offered at their best, reducing food waste. It also helped that the U-District operated on Saturdays: the Columbia City market wanted to complement, not compete.
Opening Day and Earning Its Place
Launch day was small, but lively. Thirteen farmers set up their stalls, neighbors came out, and something clicked. The farmers felt the appreciation of the community and kept coming back. But as Kinney is quick to note, a strong opening day is not a guarantee of a thriving weekly event. Building the Wednesday market into a genuine community institution took years of sustained outreach, programming, and partnership.
A wide range of supporters helped make it stick. Windermere Real Estate on Genesee was an early champion, including the market in flyers sent to prospective home buyers and providing financial support. Yard signs went up throughout the neighborhood. Flyers went home in children's backpacks. Every piece of marketing included a map, because at the time many people didn't know where Columbia City was, and those who did often associated Southeast Seattle with a less-than-favorable reputation. Educating people about the neighborhood was part of the work.
Under Kinney's management, the market wove itself into the fabric of the neighborhood. It partnered with Kubota Garden's plant sale, Orcas School, and cultural celebrations including Latina Days and Filipino Days. And when a Fourth of July fell on a Wednesday, Kinney didn't close. She transformed the adjacent park into a festive space with silk flags, bales of hay, and wheelbarrow races. "The next week," she recalls, "people started using the park space." Helping that park come back to life, she says, was something special.
Access, Equity, and the Food Program Legacy
From the beginning, the food access mission was not an afterthought. The Columbia City Farmers Market was known early on for the authenticity of its Southeast Asian produce, crops that reflected what the community actually needed and cooked. That attunement to the neighborhood has only deepened over time.
The market also became a policy pioneer. It piloted a food stamps program that allowed EBT card holders to use their benefits at the market, a model that has since been adopted at farmers markets across Washington State. Programs like Fresh Bucks and Market Match have continued to expand, making fresh, locally grown food as financially accessible as possible.
The story of Tan Tan Farm captures the spirit of what the market has meant. The farm chose to stay exclusively at Columbia City because, in their words, they wanted to keep selling to "our aunties." They had started farming specifically to grow Southeast Asian produce that couldn't easily be found elsewhere. Baby bok choy goes to Ballard for shoppers curious to try something new. Full-size bok choy comes to Columbia City, for people who know exactly what they're cooking and want all they can get.
What It Means to the People Who Built It
Valerie Franzen, who has stewarded the market in the years since Kinney's founding tenure, describes something she has heard consistently from vendors and shoppers alike: "This is the market where people are happiest to be there. They are genuinely excited to shop, talk and learn from farmers, and enjoy time with their community. It's a different atmosphere from other markets."
For Franzen, the most meaningful stories are the ones about farmers growing: hearing a grower say they were ready to expand their stall, invest in new equipment, or move to a larger parcel of land. Those moments, she says, carry real weight in an industry with notoriously thin margins.
In recent years, the market has been doing tours with the Latino Community Fund, providing participants with funds to spend at the market and helping them enroll in EBT and Market Bucks programs. The response, Franzen says, has been deeply moving: "This is what shopping at home is like."
For Kinney, the reward has always lived in the relationship between food, farmers, and community. "I have some really long-term relationships with the farmers that are so important to me," she says. "Watching them grow and develop." And she still carries the memory of that first market day, the look on shoppers' faces when they realized they had something as good as Pike Place, right here in their own neighborhood.
Still Going
Both women speak about the future in terms of continuation and deepening rather than reinvention. Kinney hopes that farmers' markets will continue to serve as gathering places, spaces that deliver something grocery stores cannot: the chance to talk to a farmer, learn where food comes from, and spend an unhurried Wednesday afternoon among neighbors.
Franzen hopes the market will remain a place where the next generation of farmers can build a viable livelihood, a space that demonstrates that farming is not just economically possible but deeply connected to the communities it feeds.
And for those who were there from the beginning, the pride has never left.
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