Thursday, December 20, 2007

Ceis and Desist


Last night, I overnighted with around forty other folks, about half of whom were homeless, at the City Hall encampment held by the Real Change Organizing project. Somewhere between 11 and 4 am I got some sleep. I don't know how people do it. Even with the benefit of a sleeping bag, air pad, and dome tent, my night in the cold and rain was physically miserable.

For the 1,600 or so people in Seattle whose needs are unmet by the shelter and housing options that are available this isn't a one night lark. It's their reality. The fact that people are dying on our streets is unsurprising.

At the rally against campsite clearances we held to kick off the camp, Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless Director Alison Eisinger asked a very good question. Why, when the city is doing so much to end homelessness, would the Mayor's office treat us, their allies in the homeless advocacy community, as the enemy? I think what she actually said was, "Why would they want to piss us off?"

She was of course talking about the Human Service Department's high-handed and duplitious response to being called on their secret policy of campsite clearances, and their ensuing scramble to manage the media attention, legal liability, and political pressure that followed.

My guess is that there's pressure coming from somewhere else. I have some guesses also as to where. The downtown condo boom is attracting a wave of affluence to the downtown, as more and more who can afford the pleasures of urban living opt to do so. In the few blocks around Pike Pace Market, 505 new condos will come on line within the next two years with an average value of $2 million each. Over the next three years, 5,000 or so new condos will open downtown. The premise is that those who opt for the urban lifestyle will not be made uncomfortable by some of the harsher realities that prevail.

This represents an enormous amount of investment, presumably by powerful people who have allies, all of whom know the value of a campaign contribution.

Which gives Mayor Nickels a two-year time-line, both to the next election and the move in date for the new Xanadu. This doesn't align very well with projected progress on "ending homelessness." So other tactics are necessary, and the commitment to these tactics is firm.

So some counter-pressure is called for.

A funny thing happened this morning. Last night, a well-decorated officer told one of our leaders that the Deputy Mayor would be by to talk with us at 9:00 AM. Mayor's staff called again after sunrise to confirm. We had a message of our own, formulated in the giddy morning hours shortly after the first Starbucks opened at 5:30 AM.

We alerted the media that Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis was coming to talk to us, and that we had an announcement for him.

I need to backtrack here to say I've only had two other interactions with Ceis. Once last summer, I interrupted an interview that Sharon Chan of the PI was doing to show her a finger puppet I'd been playing with. The time before was just after Nickels came into office. He'd requested a meeting after Real Change ran a critical piece on his boss. Amazingly, he told me that unless we allowed prior to publication opportunity to comment on articles, our access would be very limited.

We'd never had access, so I wasn't all that impressed by the threat.

So anyway, Tim arrived, and an awkward conversation ensued.

Ceis: So you guys have some petitions to deliver or something.

Us: No. That's at noon.

Ceis: But you said you had petitions. That's why I'm here.

Us: We said we would deliver petitions at noon. You called us. No one said anything about petitions.

Ceis: Well, I won't be there. Neither will the Mayor.

Us: Well, the petitions aren't ready yet, so we'll just give them to who ever's there.

Ceis: You can give them to the secretary.

Us: Fine.

Ceis: Is there anything else you wanted to say (by now, about three television cameras have homed in on our utterly mundane conversation).

Us: Yes. We're going to be back every three months, until the City has ended homelessness.

Ceis: You can go through Fleets and Facilities to apply for a City Hall Plaza public event permit.

Us: We'll be here, either way.

At this point, the cameras had tightened in. We backed out of the circle, leaving Ceis to be captured by a phalanx of TV reporters who wanted to know how the City was responding to advocates concerns.

We didn't plan an ambush. We really thought Ceis would have something to say. We figured he'd be expecting media and didn't want to disappoint. When the reporters were done, David Bloom and Bill Kirlin-Hackett of the Interfaith Taskforce on Homelessness respectfully continued the grilling. Then, as a homeless woman asked what they were going to do about people dying on the streets (those numbers keep going up) Ceis smirked and fled, and we offered our side of the story.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," said Frederick Douglas. "Never has, and never will." We're building a demand-side response to the supply-side economy. Ceis is a guy who knows a little about hardball. Think of us as the opposing team.

— photo by Revel Smith

45 comments:

Anonymous said...

Currently the homeless people are feeling the pressure from around the country. Take a look at Jacksonville,Fl. They sucessfully moved the homeless from downtown at nighttime at any rate. The need as the city saw it was to clean up downtown to develop and draw people to that area. Oddly enough the only free kitchens are in that same area

Dutch Denooyer said...

If you really want to be discouraged, read some of these bloggers from the P-I:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/soundoff/comment.asp?articleID=344218http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/soundoff/comment.asp?articleID=344218

Apparently Tim Ceis isn't the only one with a cold heart!

"Uta" Urban said...

It went down like he said. Told the media we had a "verbal surprise" for Ceis this morning (you only get to say that once).

Here's an example of the media doing forthright reporting, at least.

http://www.kirotv.com/video/14899771/index.html

The giant is awake and the people of Seattle are observing. What will they do next?

Anonymous said...

Lots to do to overcome the unbelievable prejudice that exists against the homeless. Take KIRO radio's guest host, Frank Shires, covering the event as sub for Dori Monson. Shires called those in encampments "bums" (several times) on KIRO today and went so far as to say the only remedy was to lock them all up in Western State. I phoned in, and he proceeded to miscategorize and ignore what I said, of course. Then he cut me off after one comment and went back to his incendiary rant. This guy claims to be a libertarian. He's nothing less than a liar, much like Dori Monson. They are both hate-mongers in the guise of being all about "personal responsibility." Geesh! He's a over-opinionated radio talk show host: How much lower can you sink? They claim it's all about wanting lower taxes, but when I explained "Housing First" to Shires (and the savings it can produce), he is either too stupid to understand it or he enjoys p*ssing away his tax dollars on all the most expensive remedies. If he's libertarian, then I must be lost in space. So add Shires to the list of those who'd rather hate the homeless and who think ending it involves a final solution. Rich Lang was right when he wrote recently in "Real Change" that the only remedy some have in mind to end homelessness is to kill them.

Anonymous said...

From the "Sound Off" comments to a recent PI article on the camps:

"Posted by Libertarianguy at 12/20/07 7:56 a.m.

We as a community do have the right to say that we don't want to encourage these people to live here. They can go other places where people might want them to live their miserable,meaningless lives and mooch off of their social services. We can also give them the option of ending their misery by euthanasia, putting an end to their suffering in a euthansia clinic. Just a different point of view.Practical but cold hearted, I admit."

Rich Lang, I thought your satire in Real Change about killing the homeless was too over the top. I was wrong. Sincere apologies for my naivete.

Anonymous said...

Re Donna's citation of a libertarian's comments and Rich Lang's Swiftian suggestion, the bitter irony is that homeless people ARE dying (110 in King County in 2006, that we know of). Some of them might have chosen euthanasia over how they actually died. Freezing to death, dying of an untreated illness, being hit by a car, being killed during a violent attack -- euthanasia sounds pretty good when you think about those manners of death. Most or all of those deaths would have been avoidable had we chosen leaders who valued kindness -- simple kindness -- over "practical cold-heartedness". And saving those 110 lives wouldn't have cost as much as that one obscene little trolley.

Doug McK. said...

Sally, that is not the only irony of a libertarian siding with the city on this issue.

The idea of the government messing with people's property kind of goes right to the core of the libertarians mantra.

You would think that some of those guys with the table full of pamphlets on the sidewalks in the University District would have been out there with us if they actually read some of their own literature!

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