The Herons Come Home To Roost

One of our Real Change vendors once told me how she loves selling the paper in Magnolia. "All of the people are beautiful," she said. I asked what she meant and she gave me poetry. "All the men have pink skin and white hair and the most beautiful shoes you can imagine."

And, apparently, they don't want homeless people around. They might scare away the Blue Heron.

The eruption in Magnolia reported in last Saturday's Post-Intelligencer by Sanjay Bhatt isn't a surprise to us. Real Change's Cyd Gillis reported on the first of four neighborhood planning meetings concerning proposals for homeless housing at Fort Lawton three weeks prior, and the reaction wasn't much different then.

Along with neighborhood concerns over housing for Native elders and families who had experienced domestic violence coming out of transitional housing — could Girl Scouts, they asked, be assured safety while selling cookies door to door— Gillis reported that the various proposals on the table were moving past the selection process toward finalization.

United All Tribes ambitiously proposed a mixed-income housing development that includes a Native American College and 169 units of permanent housing for homeless seniors, families and single adults. DESC's proposal would have put 75 units of housing there for chronically homeless people. The watered down mix the City seems to now favor would work with United All Tribes and the YWCA to create a range of affordable housing that includes at least 66 units of housing for homeless elders and families who are leaving transitional housing.

The choice of 66 is interesting in itself. This is the number of Capehart Housing units that will revert to Discovery Park green space sometime after the last military family moves out in 2009. Councilmembers Peter Steinbrueck and Sally Clark strengthened some wimpy language in the final Capehart acquisition deal last September to ensure one-to-one replacement of the doomed housing.

Bhatt's article had numerous lovely details.

At one community meeting, some residents wondered whether homeless housing at the fort would attract wife-beaters, sex offenders and crack addicts. They rolled their eyes when city officials asserted that such housing increases property values. They worried about the impact on schools and scoffed at the idea of homeless people shopping at the closest grocery — which sells pheasant-and-rosemary pâté for $9.99 and ground coffee for up to $18 a pound.

"We're the ones who live here, and we want to have a nice, safe neighborhood to live in," Donald Raz, a King County deputy prosecutor and Magnolia resident, said later.

Like most affluent neighborhoods in Seattle, Magnolia doesn't have any housing for homeless people mainly because land is too expensive for social-service agencies to buy.

The quotes from Block and Quinn were especially interesting.

"What is it that makes homeless people different enough that they don't 'fit' in that neighborhood?" asks Bill Block, project director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, a coalition of agencies, businesses and churches. "Affluent people become homeless."

I suppose they ocassionally do. But mostly, in this economy, they become more affluent. I'm guessing that Bill's attempt to sell formerly homeless people as being just like the exfoliated folk of Magnolia went over about like a dead baby joke at a baptism. Is economic diversity so threatening we need to pretend it doesn't exist?

But the Buried Treasure Quote of the Week Award goes to Quinn.

"Fundamentally they [federal officials] understand that with homeless housing, you can't have so much out there that you can't sell the fair-market value housing," said Adrienne Quinn, director of Seattle's Office of Housing. "We're trying to achieve that balance," she said.

Did she really just say that? Did someone dose her Dasani with sodium pentathol? I mean, this is extraordinary.

Perhaps what she meant was that federal officials would not knowingly undermine property values by overly imposing homeless housing on any one community. But this is also a refreshingly honest take on the laws of supply and demand. If you provide too much housing for poor people, it undermines the market scarcity that drives up cost (or viewed from the other side, profit). It seems odd that anyone could believe we're anywhere near that point, but I guess one can never be too careful..

Is anyone surprised that Magnolia, which has fewer poor people and lower rates of charitable giving than most any neighborhood in the city, is afraid of the homeless? Given the City's recent media litany regarding homeless criminality on City public lands, we should expect reactions like theirs everywhere.

You can't stigmatize homeless people as drug addicted vectors of disease and moral decay on one day, and on the next say they're just like the top income-quintile folk of Magnolia. The cognitive dissonance will make people's heads explode.

The recent City propaganda campaign around homeless camping exploits fear that is there for the taking. Homeless people, in much of the middle-class imagination, symbolize much more than an implied absence of housing affordability. Peter Marcuse's landmark Neutralizing Homelessness essay dwells on this point. "The homeless are alienation incarnate," he says, and disturb our sense of the appropriately public and private.

Timothy Gibson, in Securing the Spectacular City, expands upon Marcuse's observation.

The spectacle of homeless citizens attending to themselves in public is disturbing in its own right. In other words, when the homeless are forced to attend to their private needs in parks, alleys, and sidewalks, public spaces begin to take on aspects of "home:" they now become places to sleep, to drink, to make love, to use the toilet, and so on. In modern bourgeois societies, this is activity "out of place." This activity inverts the distinction between public and private spaces that is fundamental to middle-class notions of citizenship and propriety. Such activities can therefore signal to urban residents the "order of things" has been unraveled—that is this place at least, things are falling apart. ...

For many urban residents, the homeless have thus become something of an urban "indicator species" for social disorder, "diagnostic of the presumed ill-health" of urban life and the need to gain control and rationalize urban public space.

The City didn't invent fear of homeless people as Other. In their quest to turn downtown Seattle into a squeaky clean vision of urban living — something akin to an upscale suburban mall but with better food and more atmosphere — they just used the tools at hand. When Magnolia gives in to irrational fear regarding potential strangers in their midst, it's a case of the Blue Herons coming home to roost.

Ask Greg: Do the Homeless Shit in the Woods?

Dear Greg,

I know this is an uncomfortable topic, but I heard that the last homeless count found at least 1,600 people trying to survive outside of Seattle’s ridiculously stretched homeless shelter system. Where do these people shit? In the woods?

Grossed Out

Dear Grossed Out,

Seattle is a partner in the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County, and has committed to no longer simply manage the problem but to put an end to it.

Since this effort began in 2005, the City has invested $28 million to create 559 new permanent housing units for homeless people. Working with partners like King County and United Way, we have collectively produced 1,000 new housing units for chronically homeless persons.

Just this year, Adrienne Quinn and I rewarded our friend Paul Lambrose for his political reliability with a noncompetitive $3.5 million in City funds for yet another Plymouth project. Who’s gonna complain? Right?

The City of Seattle spends approximately $40 million each year to support housing, programs and services for homeless people. While this is less than half of what we placed in the City budget for South Lake Union infrastructure this year to sweeten the deal for mega-billionaire Paul Allen, you’ve got to admit it sounds like a hell of a lot of dough.

Probably more than these people are worth.

While we are seriously behind in meeting Ten Year Plan Goals, and have made numerous policy decisions that benefit developers but substantially aggravate the housing affordability crisis, we prefer to not talk about that.

We’d rather talk about homeless people shitting in the woods. Ew. Gross.

Our Ten Year Plan calls us to collect reams and reams of data on all aspects of the problem. No longer do we rely on hearsay and conjecture. Due to the award winning investigative reporting of Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur and the tireless detective work of West Precinct’s Sgt. Paul Gracy, we have a clear picture of the problem.

We now know that homeless people are shitting in the woods in greater and greater numbers, spreading the risk of hepatitis, AIDS, avian flu, and the common cold. They often pitch their tents just a beer can’s toss from their disgusting piles of trash. These people are lazy, filthy, and diseased, and, as you said, just plain gross.

After several decades of “tolerance” and “compassion,” Seattle has finally arrived at the solution that these people cannot be allowed. Especially when there are other cities and states with lower real estate values whose greenbelts, bridges, and viaducts might be more amenable.

Fortunately, the number of homeless persons in Seattle appears to be diminishing. Thank you for your interest in homelessness issues and for writing to us on this important topic.

Sincerely,
Greg Nickels,
Mayor of Seattle

The Turnip Gets His Say (Sort Of)

My sock puppet post seems to have hit a nerve. Wes was telling me recently that he's never seen Bill Block get mad. Well, I have. I think the secret is to compare him to a turnip. Bill emailed to say I'm more interested in having a colorful blog than in checking my facts.

I do hate to be dull.

There are a few corrections to be made. The handout and PowerPoint were created by Leadership Tomorrow for anyone who intends to speak on behalf of CEHKC, and not for the benefit of the Consumer Advisory Council (CAC) alone. It's in beta stage. SHARE/WHEEL didn't hear it that way, but as Anitra so delicately put it, "When you're getting fucked all the time, you develop a habit of expecting to be fucked." So maybe Bill should clarify with them as well, so they can stop holding strategy meetings about how they're going to metaphorically kick his ass.

I'm also informed that there are two CAC reps on the Interagency Council, which turns out to be true. Out of 38 seats. Filled mostly by high level government bureaucrats and senior staff from the largest human services and housing agencies in King County.

Bill says the CAC is being empowered.

He has offered, for example, to get some board training for them. I'm not really sure that this addresses the issue.

SHARE/WHEEL, I'm informed, is the only organization that has actually been allowed to have organizational representation on the CAC, and they fought for that tooth and nail. All other homeless and formerly homeless people are instructed to leave their affiliations at the door. They are on the CAC as individuals.

I wonder if that's true also for, say, Paul Lambros, the ED of Plymouth Housing, or Adrienne Quinn from the Office of Housing. Or City Attorney Tom Carr. I sort of doubt it. I mean, how would that work?

Anitra says it's pretty easy to be intimidated if "you don't know that you have 300 people standing behind you." I'm sure that's true. I mean, the other people at the table come from more privileged classes, make about ten times as much money as you do, and can talk insider jargon that you don't really understand without even knowing they're doing it. And there you are. You're outnumbered about twelve to one, and you've been informed that you don't represent anyone but yourself.

Here's the other thing. When I asked Bill about the Governing Board handpicking their representative from the Consumer Advisory Committee, his response was that no one else gets to choose their representation. That very "powerful" organizations wanted on and were refused. To me, this misunderstands the point.

The person Real Change nominated to the CAC, for example, is a recovering addict and a felon with limited formal education. He is staying clean, dealing with major health issues, and working toward his dream of one day holding a job in the field of waste management. Everyday life for him borders on the heroic.

He sells Real Change for a living. To pretend for a moment that this guy is on an even playing field with people like Greg Nickels or Paul Lambros or Tom Carr is just fucking sick.

It seems to me that there are two ways one could go about building "consumer" representation into the coalition. One would be to understand the vastly different relationships that people have to power, and attempt to compensate by encouraging genuine empowerment along the lines that SHARE/WHEEL has achieved in their representation. The other is to tokenize and to call that empowerment.

Rachael and I met with Bill shortly after he took this job to talk about homeless representation. If you want homeless people's ideas to really inform this process, we advised, forget about putting individuals in the position of representing "the homeless." Hold forums. Do surveys. Get real feedback about how the issue is viewed from a broad spectrum of those most affected and analyze those results for meaning.

But that's not the route they chose to go. I wonder why?

I don't think Bill Block is the issue here. There aren't many people who could hold together a coalition of county and city officials, high level career human service administrators, housing developers, business people, faith community advocates, and foundation heavyweights.

Let's face it. Most of these people aren't all that interested in what homeless people think. They already have their own ideas, and these have to do with their own self-interest. Lets remember our Niebuhr here. Individuals behave morally. Institutions act upon their self-interest. This is a coalition of institutions. This homeless inclusion stuff is ten percent reality and ninety percent useful fiction.

Are we such children that we don't understand this?

I don't believe for a moment that homeless people are an authentic part of CEHKC. Power sets the agenda and dictates the terms of inclusion. SHARE/WHEEL has some ability to push back, and those who have power don't like that a bit. It hasn't been that long since the city basically went to the mat in a failed attempt to defund the opposition.

Or have we forgotten that already? Somehow, I doubt that SHARE/WHEEL has.

Mitch Snyder is Spinning in His Grave

I've heard from several very well-placed sources that the upcoming Seattle conference to more deeply engage the faith community in providing housing and services to homeless people is not tied to the Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives. Apparently, there's a small pot of money left over from the Fannie Mae Foundation melt-down, and this is part of how it's being spent. While the OFBCI does have a strategy of sponsoring conferences around the country, this is not that.

The Church Council's Sandy Brown and Seattle Office of Housing's Adrienne Quinn are co-chairing the organizing committee, and there is said to be a huge amount of latitude in creating the goals and outcomes for the conference. While I'm satisfied that this is being driven locally and not from DC, organizing for this has intentionally been below radar, and that's set off some alarms for people. If we're really about building a movement to end homelessness, we need more transparency and discussion and less secrecy and control.

That said, here's some stuff for conference organizers to consider, since they never asked.

• Churches have been doing this work for a long time, and in most cases don't have a lot of resources themselves. Whatever thoughts people are having about churches being the backbone of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness needs a serious reality check. Earth to CEHKC: The mainline churches are in decline and mostly composed of those old enough to have voted for Kennedy. The evangelicals are interested in other things and the mega-churches have perverted Jesus into some kind of an Amway salesman for God, where if you pray hard enough, you'll be rewarded with a new Ford Explorer. This strategy has its limits.

• The Bush administration is engaged in a structural reassignment of responsibility for managing the wreckage of robber baron capitalism, and they're not it. But they love churches. Love, love, love. And Phil Mangano's got that God-talk thing down cold. It's a great system. Untrammeled capitalism creates, figuratively speaking, a never ending stream of lepers, and the church folk get to line up to wash their feet. Everyone wins. The rich get richer, the faithful get an in with God, and some of the lepers get clean feet. End unfair but hopefully thought-provoking metaphor.
  

• Exactly when was it that everyone turned into a total chicken shit and stopped talking about raising hell to end poverty? The Ten Year Plan, until people get a backbone and start getting real about poverty and the role of federal policy in creating inequality, is not "ending homelessness." It's managing homelessness at a higher level of sophistication with fewer government resources.

• Ending homelessness will take new federal priorities, and that's a long hard fight that too few are talking about. The fact that we've allowed a fast-talking, disingenuous, refugee from a community theater production of The Music Man who also happens to be a shill for the Bush Administration to become the national spokesperson for "ending homelessness" is the saddest commentary on what homeless advocacy has become that I can possibly imagine. Mitch Snyder is spinning in his grave.

Last night I was at a meeting that was billed as a Progressive Roundtable. It was mostly enviros, politicos, and think tank types talking about how to build a progressive movement, and there were guests from successful progressive coalitions in Michigan and New Mexico bearing rumors of effective strategy. One described how 501(c)3 organizations who provide services need to operate at the very edges of the quite substantial amount of lobbying that is allowed. I found myself at once very excited by this rather obvious idea, and very saddened at how far this is from our reality.

If Fannie Mae wants to pay to convene a conference, we should use it to talk about how the movement to end homelessness has been co-opted by bureaucrats and rendered about as politically threatening as a newborn kitten. We can hold the conference at a Catholic church. Then we can all make our confessions and do some penance by getting off our safe and complacent asses to do some real organizing.

Oh Great. A Faith Symposium.

Apparently, there will be a "Faith Symposium" held somewhere near you sometime in the near future. Fannie Mae is working through United Way King County and the Seattle Office of Housing to train and fund churches to not only create more housing for chronic homeless people, but to also staff the services that they require.

Fannie Mae, as close readers of this blog will know, is the government entity that favored the National Alliance to End Homelessness with a $5M grant just as they were crawling into bed with the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, thus quadrupling their budget in a single year.

The Faith Symposium is one of seven conferences being held around the country that come out of Bush's Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives. There have been two quietly organized, invitation only planning meetings. Interestingly, the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness was not among the invitees.

Adrienne Quinn of Seattle's Office of Housing told attendees of the last meeting that since the feds are out of the housing business, it's time for churches to step into the breach. And not just for housing. For everything else too.

As Bush strengthens his Party's Christian-right base by shifting money out of community development and into his faith-based slush fund, it looks like there are plenty of liberals who are happy to line up for a little dough as well.

Let's just roll back the whole fucking New Deal. We already have income disparity to rival 1929. Now we just need everyone to understand that government doesn't do charity anymore. That it's better left to the churches.

Here's what churches should be doing instead of shoring up their budgets with government funding: Opposing a murderous war for oil that is undermining whatever hope we have for achieving long-term security, urging their members to find meaning in service and not in the empty idolatry of consumerism, and insisting that government use its resources and regulatory power to protect the weak, rein in the strong, and promote the common good.

My Jesus would tell 'em take that money and shove it up your ass.