The Mayor's Plan: Sad, Wrong, and Immoral

How is one to respond when the most beautiful, affluent, and liberal city in America outlaws basic human survival? What are we to feel? What words could measure up to the sadness of this moment?

The Mayor’s staff has described their draft policy on homeless encampments as “consistent and compassionate.” Consistent, perhaps. But compassion requires action based upon understanding and empathy.

This is not that.

Seattle has joined the ranks of cities across America whose growing affluence will no longer tolerate the sight of extreme poverty. As urban living attracts those who can pay the price, the visible poor have come under attack in communities from LA to Boston.

Within a few blocks of Pike Place Market, construction cranes mark four developments that will house 505 new condos with an average value of $2 million each. This represents about one-tenth of new downtown condo development.

As the move-in dates approach, repression of visible poverty has dramatically escalated.

Until sometime last year, the City of Seattle mostly left homeless encampments alone until complaints forced action. This was as it should be. Last year’s one night homeless count — held in the dead middle of a cold January night — revealed about 1,600 people surviving on the streets. They slept in doorways and in cars. They rode the night buses. They walked to keep warm. They huddled underneath blankets and inside sleeping bags.

They made do without shelter because the shelters were full.

And then, for reasons that have yet to be made public, City policy shifted. Since at least May, by order of the Mayor’s office, homeless encampments have been systematically destroyed with minimal notification and no regard for the wellbeing or the belongings of the campers.

Once this policy came to light — after Real Change surfaced documentation through a series of Public Disclosure Requests — a blind-sided City Council asked the Mayor’s Office for an explanation. What they received were lies about vacancies in the shelter system, false assurances that most clearances would halt, and empty promises about an open process to create policy.

As we reported last week, the campaign to aggressively clear campsites never slowed. And now we have the policy, formulated behind closed doors and offered for a two-week public comment period and one public hearing that will almost surely be ignored.

The draft policy, which criminalizes overnight sleeping on any public land, is far worse than any of us anticipated.

The Parks Exclusion Ordinance, passed originally to keep City Parks family-friendly, will be extended to every scrap of public property in the City. The power to issue exclusion citations on the basis of mere suspicion is broadly delegated. Exclusion order violations will bring criminal penalties.

Desperately poor people who need services will leave the city. And this is the exact intent.

The policy’s tight language leaves no ambiguity as to what activities are now illegal, but where City responsibilities are concerned — in matters of notification, outreach, storage of possessions, and provision of alternatives — the wording becomes extraordinarily open ended and filled with exceptions.

“Suspicion” of illegal activity nullifies a requirement for 48-hours notice. A judgment by a clean-up crewmember that belongings “may be contaminated by unknown substances” is enough to warrant their summary destruction. The talk of additional shelter for those who are evicted is so vague as to be unenforceable. Outreach is discussed, but no resources are committed and no responsibility assigned.

This policy is no more than the legal justification of an existing immoral practice.

Even more sadly, the Committee to End Homelessness in King County has steadfastly refused to take a position on this, the most significant shift in city policy toward the homeless in memory.

Given that the Mayor is on the CEHKC Governing Board, this is less than surprising, but that doesn’t make it right. Those who claim political and moral leadership for “ending homelessness” in King County are complicit in their silence.

It is unacceptable to allow the work of ending homelessness to be confused with the systematic practice of eradicating the evidence. By harassing homeless campers out of the city, we only deepen their misery and decrease the odds that they will ever find the services they need.
This week, Seattle will hold the Annual One Night Homeless Count. More than 700 volunteers will fan out through the city in the middle of the night to assess whether we’re winning or losing the war.

By turning the fight against homelessness into an attack upon the homeless themselves, the Mayor has undermined the integrity of the longest-running, most sophisticated homeless count effort in the nation.

This is profoundly sad. And sadder still if he gets away with it.

The City’s draft proposal on homeless encampment removal and information about the hearing and public comment process may be found at www.seattle.gov/humanservices. The Public Hearing is January 28, 6:00 pm, in the Seattle Center’s Rainier Room. Sign-up for testimony is between 5 and 6 pm.

Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty

The official 2007 Annual One Night Count of People Who Are Homeless in King County, WA, prepared by the Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless is out, and it's an impressive document on a number of levels. This is the results of the early morning street and shelter count on January 26, 2007, which found 7,839 people homeless in King County at that particular point in time. 2,159 were without shelter. 2,368 were in emergency shelters, and 3,312 were in transitional housing. Over the course of a year, one might expect about three times that number to be homeless in King County.

Let's begin with the superficial stuff. The report is beautiful. I'm used to one night count reports being done in Word. Maybe a few cool tables, or some fancy-shmancy tabbing, a border of two, but this ... this is something else. Using just black and yellow ink on quality paper and a full bleed, the designers have transformed the annual SKCCH report into something akin to a work of art. It felt too nice to write on. Bonelli Design and Girlie Press, with funding from CEHKC, knocked this one out of the park.

Next, this report has, believe it or not, literary flair. You actually want to read it. Well, most of it anyway. The five pages of charts in the back that break down the characteristics of those in shelter and transitional housing didn't do much for me, although they were lovely. I'm probably just not a big enough dweeb to appreciate them. I compared the breakdowns to those of 2003 and 2000 to see if there was any news and found none. Numbers were either more or less consistent, or the fluctuations didn't tell any story that I could see.

Otherwise, it's the same old story. People of color are disproportionately represented. The vast majority of those in transitional housing are families with kids. About half are between 26 and 54 years old. Most earn less than 30% of median income. Blah, blah, blah. It's good information, but I've never been one to believe that drilling endlessly into the data does much to end homelessness. Rather the opposite, I think.

All the data in the world doesn't change the fact that priorities are driven more by funding opportunities and politics than by actual information. It's not like we're these completely rational creatures who weigh all the data and then make decisions. It's the other way around. Much of the time, decision-making is based on power relationships and institutional self-interest, and then justified by the data.

But some things are more obvious that others.

We need more affordable housing. Many people don't earn enough to pay area rents. Treatment and mental health services are pathetically inadequate to the problem. And on January 25, 2007, a night where temperatures hovered just five degrees above freezing, at least two-thousand-one-hundred-fifty-nine people in King County were literally on the street.

You don't need a federally-mandated Homeless Management Information System to tell you what to do with that. The needs are overwhelming, and we're a long way from needing a more finely calibrated response.

My favorite parts of the report is where the human cost of what this means comes across. And repeatedly we are asked to not lose sight of the fact that these are people, not just bits of data to be crunched for use in the next report to the feds.

As you read the report and examine the tables on these pages, please keep in mind that these numbers represent people living in King County. Every tick mark on every tally sheet that volunteers return with on the night of the count represents a person with the same hopes and aspirations we all share: for safety and health, and for an opportunity to make tomorrow better than today. When people volunteer for the Street Count they are often sobered and outraged by the sight of fellow human beings attempting to shelter themselves clumsily or ingeniously from cold, rain, wind, desperation, and hopelessness. The release of this report is an occasion to recall those emotions – to renew and strengthen our private and public commitments to act on the necessity of ending homelessness.

Scattered throughout the report are quotes from homeless people and impressions of those helping with the count that help to convey the colossal human tragedy that these numbers represent.

“The neighborhood where we counted seems more inhospitable to homeless this year than last. There are more gated, locked and brightly lit areas. People last year were sleeping and this year they were walking or sitting in bus stops. We saw 25 this year; 29 last year."

“We saw 49 people in our team. One person was in a car, others were in sleeping bags and blankets, sleeping on the pavement. There were men, women and children. One group I saw looked like a family, with two bigger bodies and two small ones. They were sleeping close together under the doorway of a large building. There was one small bag of possessions, and not much else.”

“We counted 76 homeless [people], mostly in cars and campers near the railroad tracks. There were four people who had climbed in behind a dumpster to sleep—guess it made a good wind block.”

But what I appreciate most about this year's report is that the information has been throughly contextualized. We hear about the new areas added and why. We are told that new security measures, fences, and bright lights in the city may have simply driven homelessness further out where it occurs unseen and uncounted. New interviewing techniques are added to help counter the deficiencies of the count itself.

We are cautioned not to make too much of fluctuations from year to year, as there are many variables that may cause these, and warned that the count is inexact. We are reminded that the goal of many who sleep outside is to not be found. We are informed that, since the count was moved from October to the last Thursday of January to coordinate with HUD, comparisons to previous years are not statistically valid, and the decreases of a few percentiles in 2006 and 2007 therefore tell us little. We are made aware that the federal definition of homelessness excludes many who consider themselves so, and that very few homeless people receive benefits outside of food stamps. Less than half receive even this.

We are advised to take this year's reported reduction of homelessness by four percent with a huge grain of salt.

The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, however, has no interest in these finer distinctions. According to the USICH website, the United Way, riding on the heels of the success of the Ten Year Plan, needs our help to raise another $25 million.

UNITED WAY OF KING COUNTY, WASHINGTON ANNOUNCES $25 MILLION INITIATIVE TO HOUSE 1000 CHRONICALLY HOMELESS PERSONS.

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON. June 2007. The historic Paramount Theatre was the site for an equally historic announcement by United Way of King County President and CEO Jon Fine and 2007-2008 Campaign Chair John Stanton that the United Way will raise $25 million to provide permanent supportive housing to 1,000 of the county's most vulnerable citizens.

Since [the] launch of the King County 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness two years ago, street homelessness has been reduced by 10% each year. Funds raised through this dedicated campaign, will help achieve even more rapid measurable and visible results. The funds will be "highly leveraged through partnerships with the City of Seattle, King County, and the King County and Seattle Housing Authorities," said Mr. Fine. Additional case managers will be hired to do outreach to those being released from institutions and homeless people living on the street , and all housing will include wraparound mental health, and chemical dependency and employment services.

The announcement was made at the United Way of King County 2nd annual "Report to the Community" Breakfast attended by more than 600 business and community leaders. The keynote speaker, Boeing Commercial Airplanes President and CEO Scott Carson hailed the effort, and noted that while Boeing " is about making the impossible happen, ending homelessness is not something that is impossible. It's just hard." Campaign Chair and wireless technology entrepreneur Stanton said," We can end chronic homelessness in King County. It's not only the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do. It makes sense for all of us -- individuals and business alike."

Also speaking at the breakfast was Karen Marcotte Solimano, chair of the United Way of King County homeless planning council ("Out of the Rain"), who said that the community's success in ending chronic homelessness would energize efforts to end homelessness for all homeless people.

Awesome. I love the big round numbers and the bold vision. For just $25,000 a unit (because these dollars are so "highly leveraged") United Way is going to get 1,000 chronically homeless people off the street. And all they have to do first is raise $25 million.

At ten percent a year, we're pretty much right on track, huh? Just keep the dough coming to United Way, don't make anyone mad or uncomfortable with any talk about "inequality," and we'll make those numbers work somehow.

Anyway, I'm glad someone's being honest. The 2007 report is a nice piece of truth-telling that is clear on both its purpose and its limitations. It tells the story that needs to be told, and doesn't succumb to the self-serving propaganda that we see from the professional fundraisers at United Way and the political appointees at USICH.