The Central District’s Black population has thinned to the edges of King County over the decades and while the clinic still mostly serves communities of color, its patients no longer easily walk-in for appointments. Clients instead commute in from south Seattle, Fife, Federal Way, Kent, Renton.

Traffic is slow and busses are inconsistent and so more families have begun to arrive late or miss appointments altogether. The qualities that made Odessa Brown work — the constant communication, its touchpoint as a community center — have been fading.

“Where before we were centrally located…we’re suddenly more of a destination that families need to work harder to get to,” says Dr. Ben Danielson, the clinic’s medical director.

And so, as 75 percent of Odessa Brown’s patients have moved south, often pushed that way by increased housing prices, the clinic will now follow. Construction on a sister location — five miles south of the original clinic — will begin next year, on a lot across from the Othello light rail station.

Funded through private donors and Seattle Children’s “It Starts With Yes” campaign, this second Odessa Brown facility will be more than just a clinic — it will have community space, resources for parents, mental health services, a dentist, nutrition services, a school.

And it will have housing — 176 affordable units as a part of a partnership with developers to create Othello Square — an effort to slow the movement of its clientele even farther south. “We’re focusing on allowing mixed and low-income families to really remain in that neighborhood,” says Danielson.

Foxy Davison knows well the importance of having access to the Odessa Brown clinic.

Once, on a drive home from St. Louis, her then 3-year-old son Judah began to feel the pain that arrives when his round blood cells turn sickle-shaped. (He, as well as another sibling, suffers from sickle cell anemia). The family stopped at a hospital in Wyoming where the doctor began to lecture Brown about how children can die from sickle cell around age 4 and recommended a blood transfusion that could take days.

In reality, Judah just needed to get to lower elevation, she later learned.

Sickle cell disproportionately affects people like Davison — people of African descent. Where most people have wobbly cell walls, cells affected by sickle cell anemia can become rigid under stress. Pain can be so intense hospitals will use morphine to combat it.

It was after Judah and daughter Trinity were diagnosed that Davison confronted how race can impact her family’s medical treatment. At a larger hospital, says Davison, picking up a prescription for sickle cell pain medication can be “met with sort of more skepticism, a reticence to give the meds that you might actually need.”

“One of the doctors who's at Odessa, he always talks about the lack of funding and research [of the disease] and you’re like, ‘What is it? Why can’t we see progress on this issue?’” says Davison, sitting in her home in southwest Seattle. “He's a White man and he just said,’ It affects the wrong people.’ And I remember tears when I heard that because it was the one time where race just stabbed me in my gut. Because you're talking about my kids and you're just telling me that because they don't look a certain way that they can't get answers to their condition.”