Mitch Snyder Lecture, Cambridge, 2007

Below is the text from my speech at First Church Cambridge on Sunday, where I gave the annual Mitch Snyder lecture. It's actually a reconstruction of the speech, since I spoke from notes, and my attempt to record the thing failed. Rumor has it that a plaque is in the mail. The photo above is another gem from the JwP archives. I need to check this against news clippings, but I think this is the 1991 demonstration where several hundred of us stormed the statehouse and there were multiple arrests. I was in a room with Statehouse security, State Patrol, and Boston cops that morning to discuss CD arrangements. They set up booking for us right in the basement. Very convenient. I'm the guy with the bullhorn

When Jim invited me out for this he said I could say anything I liked, and insult anyone I wanted, but that I couldn’t swear. So, to build in some insurance, I picked these up on the way here. They’re a special kind of eggs. They don’t have any carbs. Say’s so right here. “No carbs.”

So I’m going to hand these off. Pass them around. If I let fly with an F-bomb, throw. Aim for the head. It’s about Mutually Assured Destruction, because I’m not sure what I’ll do if anyone actually throws one.

Jim titled this “How to Really End Homelessness,” although he said I didn’t have to talk about that. And that I could mock it if I liked. But that’s actually what I’m here to talk about.

The first thing I wondered was why didn’t Jim just invite Phil Mangano. I actually pronounce his name Philip F. Mangano. You can ask Jim what the F stands for. But he’s THE guy. He’s a sort of a native son here who’s become Bush’s homelessness Czar. He has a couple of lines that he likes to use.

He says that he’s from Massachusetts, and he’s an abolitionist, and that Republicans ended slavery and that they’ll end homelessness too. And somehow people don’t throw eggs.

He also says that the solution to everything is more data. No longer, he says, will we rely on “conjecture and speculation.”

I don’t think we necessarily need more data. I think we need more resources.

When I do my class I ask the students to think of the federal commitment to end homelessness as a sort of a zen koan. That’s an apparent absurdity, like the sound of one hand clapping, and if you think about it long enough you break through into new levels of consciousness.

So, here we have what has arguably been the most hostile administration to the interests of the poor in 70 years. They’ve slashed antipoverty programs and shoveled money to the wealthy as tax breaks, and they’ve continued the assault on public housing. McKinney-Vento, the program that federally funds homeless shelters and such, was increased by $70 million over 2002-2006. This was a great victory for the homeless.

Over 2004-2006, funding for HUD was slashed by $3.3 billion. And the Bush administration says every chance they get that they’re ending homelessness. HUD just had a press conference last week to say chronic homelessness, due to their good work, is down by 12%.

So, it’s a zen koan, and I’ll come back to that. But meanwhile, think about it. Meditate.

I think we can end homelessness. We’ve done it before. I teach a class on homelessness and I’ve noticed that twenty somethings have often grown up with it and think this is the way it’s always been. Those who are older know different. But you might be surprised to know that we’ve had mass homelessness before, and we ended it.

The previous period of homelessness, like our own, was rooted in major economic dislocation. The Civil War ended, and the demobilization left hundreds of thousands of men, mostly white men, uprooted and without work. The end of the war coincided with the replacement of an agrarian and home-based economy with the factory system of labor. In the space of a few decades the populations of the rural and urban areas basically flipped.

The factories kept their labor costs down with women, children, and immigrants. Blacks were largely kept in the south as cheap agricultural labor through a system of terrorism. The railway system was new, and provided a means for white men to travel in search of work, and enormous numbers did. They were despised and feared.

There were three depressions, two in the late-1800’s, and then the Great Depression.

But they roamed the country, and a whole infrastructure, a market solution, arose to meet their needs. Areas like Seattle’s skid road and Chicago’s main stem arose to house and shelter them in cheap housing and missions. There were hobo camps. In Seattle, by the 30’s a vast Hooverville of shacks and tents, with a Mayor, a people’s college, and streets with names, arose.

Most people think it was the New Deal that ended the depression, but it wasn’t. It was the war, which created full employment. The men who could went to fight, and women took jobs. People of color had new employment opportunities. The shantytowns emptied out.

After the war, government was not about to have millions of hungry, disillusioned, war hardened men trained in the use of arms wandering the country. That did not seem like a good idea.

So a new era began. Public housing was built. Suburban home ownership became readily available through cheap FHA loans. There were public works programs to build roads and such. There was the GI bill to send people to college, one of the greatest engines of class mobility this country has ever seen.

Of course, this wasn’t available to everyone. It happened within a context of institutional racism, and black people weren’t generally getting the GI-bill. There was red lining to determine who got those housing loans. The blacks who got work during the war were forced out of the factories.

But the shantytowns did empty. More important, there was the Fordist deal that said we need our workers to be consumers as well, and that there was a balance of interests to be maintained, and that meant a regulatory government, corporate CEOs who considered the public interest, and strong organized labor.

From 1945-1973, there was steady economic growth averaging 3.8%, and the gap in inequality became more and more narrow.

You might have noticed that each of these things, access to higher education, easy access to the housing market, public housing, and work for anyone who needs it, are the very things we now lack. In fact, each of these is going in the wrong direction as we become a more and more unequal society.

Worse, the relationship between capitalism and democracy has become unhinged. There is little left in place that looks out for the public interest.

This looks like a pretty sophisticated audience. I probably don’t need to go too deeply into the causes of contemporary homelessness.

There was another major economic dislocation. That was deindustrialization. The internet and the shipping container greatly accelerated the globalization of the economy, and the rules changed. We went from being a manufacturing based economy to a service and information economy. What Barbara Ehrenreich calls the Kmart-Bloomingdales economy, and is becoming the Value Village-Tiffanies economy. Lots of competition for lousy jobs at the bottom end, and well-rewarded work for those who have the skills, education, and background.

There was deinstitutionalization, where these inhumane mental health hospitals were closed down to move people into the community where they would have neighborhood-based services. The second part never happened, and people just got dumped on the street.

Housing stopped being a basic human need and turned into a speculative commodity. Urban renewal wiped out the cheap pre-war housing. One person’s housing is another’s urban blight, and it became condos, parking lots, and new business towers.

Then, of course, came the Reagan years, with its supply side ideology that strengthened the power of business, weakened labor, and attacked the social services safety net. And it’s been that way since. And there was the attack on public housing. The past three decades have been the story of the feds getting out of housing.

Over the 80s, homelessness in American cities tripled and quadrupled. That’s what we were seeing and responding to during those years of homeless activism here. There was a crisis in the streets. But even after, homelessness tended to rise each year by double digits. That’s slowed recently with the strength of the economy, but I wouldn’t make too much of that.

Inequality has steadily increased for more than thirty years to now be at its widest ever, and the rate seems to be accelerating.

So lets come back to our zen koan about the federal commitment to ending homelessness.

There was an important article that pops up a lot in the academic literature by a Columbia University urban planning professor named Peter Marcuse. It was published in 1986 in, prepare to be frightened, Socialist Review, and was called Neutralizing Homelessness. One of the reasons this article amazes me so much is that it is so very prescient.

Marcuse says that massive homelessness in a society as affluent as our own constitutes a legitimation threat to the government, because it really doesn’t feel right that we have to step over people in the street. We might start wondering why it is that our economic system is failing so many people.

But government, he says, is on the horns of dilemma. To ignore the problem is to appear illegitimate and unjust. But to do something about it, really do something about it, is to undermine the whole wage labor system upon which everything rests. So, what do you do. You make a big production of appearing to do something.

This rests on a handful of techniques, and you’ll recognize them all. You drill way down into subpopulations and you obsess over data. This makes it an issue for specialists and helps to divide and conquer.

You isolate the problem, both intellectually and physically. Turn it into a technocratic human services issue and divorce the discussion from poverty and inequality. Move the homeless people themselves away from the rest of us where we don’t see them, and when we do, we are frightened.

You deny. This mainly has to do with low-balling the numbers through narrow definitions and various other tricks.

And you victim-blame. It’s not about structural unemployment. It’s not about institutional racism. It’s not about poverty and widening inequality. It’s about screwed up people that us middleclass do-gooders need to fix.

The goal, then, isn’t to end homelessness at all. It is to convince the politically active middle class that we’re ending homelessness, and to reduce the evidence.

I often say it’s like a fat man running. There’s lots of visible effort, but not a lot of progress.

But I do have some good news. Bet you weren’t expecting that. But the thing is, it’s couched in bad news.

We’ve already talked about widening inequality. Real incomes for most of us have been largely flat since 1973. But the things that have grown more expensive most rapidly are the same things that make us middle-class, or offer access to the middle-class. Homeownership. Higher education. Decent healthcare. The middle-class is feeling very squeezed, and they are.

Think of how many homeless people you know who are unemployed or underemployed but not receiving unemployment. They’ve dropped out of the unemployment stats. So have all those who are in prison. There’s a huge structural unemployment issue that the statistics hide. 1 in 99 people in the United States is in prison or jail. One in 31 live under the supervision of the corrections system. Since the 70s there has been a five-fold increase in incarceration rates. The war on drugs has racialized incarceration and poverty. Bruce Western here at the Kennedy School talks about how the hugely disproportional number of blacks in the prison system is an engine of racialized inequality, due to the reduced employment and earning prospects.

I was talking to a friend who works at the ACLU yesterday, and he says he sees it as the newest incarnation of the 3/5s of a man rule for voting, since most of those people are disenfranchised as voters once they’re felons.

Inequality is also widening because government and the democratic process have been captured by corporate interests who see democracy as just one more means to seek advantage and build their bottom lines. The big money, lobbyists, and lawyers that they throw into the legislative process totally sidelines authentic citizen participation.

And all of these things are being talked about more. Poverty is coming back on the agenda. And not because we want to do something for others. It’s because we need to do it for ourselves. The middle-class being squeezed and the growing incarceration rates and increasing inequality and homelessness are all part of the same thing, and we’re starting to figure out that we're in this together.

The strongly-felt economic vulnerability of the middle class offers a basis for helping to address the true causes of homelessness as well, because it’s not just about helping them. It’s about looking out for ourselves as well. And history shows, whenever there’s been lasting broad-based, structural change, it’s benefited the majority of us.

I really see the Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, as conspiratorial as this sounds, as being the superstructure through which the federal government neutralizes the issue. It’s depoliticized and reduced to a technocratic approach to a social services delivery problem. The focus is on chronic homelessness, which you may read as visible homelessness. This comes at the expense of other sectors. The chronically homeless are about ten percent of the whole and they’re the most visible.

There was just an article in the New York Times about how family homelessness in Massachusetts is growing, and they suspect it’s growing elsewhere as well. You just have the means to track that here because of some prior legislation.

And communities, if they want federal funding to help with homelessness are forced to buy in. The grants are evaluated on a points system. And you get points for having an HMIS database system, and you get points for having a ten year plan. There’s over 300 of these things now, and every time a Bloomington, Indiana adopts a plan, Philip F. Mangano flies out to do his Saint Francis of Assisi routine and his rah rah show about how we’re really ending homelessness. And there’s enough truth in it, if you view things narrowly enough, for it all to look pretty good, and people buy it.

But what’s really happening is that, in the post-industrial era, cities have had to reinvent themselves to remain viable, and are increasingly becoming islands of wealth. I wrote an article. I called it, Quick, Hide the Poor. The Rich are Coming.

Various cities adopt various strategies. Some go the sports stadium route, which doesn’t usually really work. Some go for the urban upscale consumption draw, to compete with the malls and draw shoppers downtown with various amenities and restaurants. Some go for the cultural center thing. Seattle’s done all of these. We have two new stadiums, a revitalized upscale downtown shopping center, a new symphony hall, an expanded art museum, a new outdoor downtown sculpture park.

But we’ve also attained the biggest prize of all: we’re a port city, and a command-control center for global capital. Corporations will almost always move their manufacturing where labor’s cheapest, but there are other functions, which for purposes of flexibility they generally outsource, that they’d rather keep local. Legal, accounting, marketing, etc. And they don’t want to be dealing with guys in Tokyo. They want to be able to meet in each others’ conference rooms and send documents back and forth by bicycle courier.

This is where the winners in this economy work, and increasingly, it’s where they live. Last year, Seattle raised the height restrictions on downtown condo development, and all the developers raced to city hall to get their permits in first. There’s a crane every few blocks downtown. 5,000 or so units with an average value of $750,000 are going up downtown in the next few years.

In just the few blocks surrounding the new symphony hall, the new art museum, and the Pike Place Market, a quaint historic market with a stunning view of the Sound, where you can get your fresh baked bread, fresh fish, and organic vegetables and shop for crafts, there are four luxury towers going up with a total of 506 units. Average value: two million dollars.

Seattle is an extreme example, but this is happening in cities everywhere. What’s also happening is an increased policing of the urban poor, and new laws that criminalize what they do. Camping, sleeping in parks, sitting on sidewalks, panhandling, etc.

I was just at Grendels this morning and the bartender told me — I had the steak and eggs. It’s just where they seated me — that he was at a neighborhood meeting where the police chief said there would be a greatly expanded police presence soon in Harvard Square. And that they had trained the police to understand the various homeless subpopulations (criminal class, alcoholic, mentally ill) and to respond to them each appropriately.

Cops aren’t social workers. “Hi. I’m the police. I’m here to help.” This is about what’s happening everywhere. Driving homeless people away, and getting the numbers down.

In Seattle, we’d been hearing rumors of a zero-tolerance policy of homeless encampments, but we couldn’t get anyone in city government to confirm this. So we put out a bunch of freedom of information requests. We just FOIA’d everyone. To our great surprise, we found the smoking gun email we were looking for. It said that the policy had shifted from one of tolerance with clearances triggered by neighborhood complaints to proactive, monthly, clean-ups, with a list of ten targeted sites. Nine of the ten were within the one-night count area. Most were very urban, and not even in greenbelts or near residential neighborhoods.

But the best part was that the city was using Department of Corrections labor to clear the sites, with armed police back-ups, and they were just throwing people’s stuff away. Slashing up their tents, and destroying their belongings. They were putting up signs one day ahead of time saying they were doing a clean-up, and that if you need help, you should call the Community Service Officers.

The Mayor defunded that program two years ago. When you call, you get a “number disconnected” message.

And it was a secret policy. The city council didn’t know. Neither did the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. They Mayor is on their Governing Board, but they weren’t informed.

This isn’t about ending homelessness. It’s about eradicating the evidence.

There’s a carrot and a stick to the Ten Year Plans. The carrot is Housing First. This is the notion that it’s less expensive to just house someone and provide services than to have them cycling through jails, hospitals, and shelters. And it’s true. It is. The problem is that our ability to do this runs up against the limitations of local resources, because little or nothing is coming from the feds.

I always say that federal funding levels are a precise calibration of maximal cooptation for minimal funding. Homelessness goes for about $1.5 billion.

Which leads to a reliance on other forms of simple repression to get those numbers down. Every year there’s a count — for some reason the federal government requires it to be in the last week of January — and success is measured by how those numbers look.

The Ten Year Plan focus on ending homelessness is fixated on chronic homelessness because that’s the visible homelessness. When that goes away, the problem as far as we can see ceases to exist. The affluent few who are taking over the urban cores won’t have their suburban comfort zones challenged, and the investments of those who have bet heavily on the urban condo boom will be protected, and that’s what this is really about.

And the big attraction is that we get to end homelessness by a sort of a magic trick. Through the data, the technology, our great sophisticated understanding of the problem, we’re targeting resources and making a difference. But the thing about magic tricks is that they are based in illusions.

It’s not real.

There are no short cuts. Ending homelessness is about ending poverty, and ending poverty is about building for power. We whine and we say, “Oh, we tried that. It’s too big. It will never work.” Our expectations on that score have been very reduced. That’s — don’t throw eggs — crap. We don’t have a choice.

Coming together to challenge inequality, to build power, is in our own self-interests, and it’s also the only way we can really end homelessness. I’ll take questions.

Why Don't You Just Say What You Mean?

Below is the text of my keynote speech last night at Temple Beth Am for the H2R Fundraiser. No wonder no one ever asks me to speak anymore.

I was going to speak extemporaneously, but then Sally told me I couldn’t swear, and I thought I’d be better off tonight with a written speech.

The other thing she said was, “Oh, and no Jew jokes.” Not a problem, I thought. No swearing, no Jew jokes. Got it. I can do that.

And then I run into her at the Interfaith Task Force Building Political Will conference a few weeks ago and she says, “and don’t talk about Jesus.”

At this point I’m wondering if maybe she’s having some second thoughts. Like, she thinks I’m going to conclude by asking you all to look in your hearts and consider, “What would Jesus Do?”

So a few days ago, I thought I’d play with her.

We’re talking about directions here and she’s trying to explain the weird intersection at 80th and 26th or something and I say, “Sally, I’ll find it. I’ll just look for the big steeple with the cross.”

And there’s this moment of silence. And she says, “Tim, that is wrong on so many levels.”

But thanks for having me anyway.

I don’t get that many speaking gigs anymore, since I contracted Tourette’s earlier this year.

I hope, a half hour from now, that you’re not regretting the invitation.

I’ve been writing a lot lately, and that’s led to a lot of thinking, and anyone who in these times thinks much is pretty angry.

So I’m here tonight as an angry person

I’m angry because I see the feds claiming to end homelessness while they attack programs that serve the poor, and continue to walk way from their commitments to housing.

I’m angry because I see homelessness framed mostly as a matter of helping dysfunctional people, as opposed to changing a broken system.

I see homeless advocacy that doesn’t really include the voices of poor people or support the organizing we need to see.

I see a “movement to end homelessness” that embraces cost-benefit analysis in order to minimize the expense society must bear for the poor.

A movement that mostly avoids the big picture because we’d rather be “making a real difference” by being immediate and practical, and besides, we’ve tried that whole ending poverty and inequality thing before and it didn’t work.

I see a two-tiered economy, what Barbrara Ehrenreich once dubbed the Kmart/Bloomingdales economy, in which the educated middle class on up does better and better, and other working people struggle more and more to make ends meet. As the middle class continues to erode and face more economic insecurity, we are becoming the Value Village/Tiffanies economy.

I see the people who sell Real Change. About 60% claim some form of disability, and the help available to them is pathetic. I see functional nine year olds coping year after year in a shelter system they can’t escape.

There is a three to six year wait for public housing, and lots of road blocks designed to knock you off that list.

If you’re dirt poor, and more and more people are, you have to be suicidal or homicidal to get mental health treatment.

Options for substance abuse treatment are pathetically under-funded and largely short term, and too often people leave treatment to face the same hopelessness that drove them to drugs in the first place.

And here’s where I go from being angry to being downright bitter. The rhetoric is that in all of this, we’ve chosen to End Homelessness, and not just maintain the structures of mitigation. And we do this by institutionalizing new, but more localized, structures of mitigation.

We say we’re taking a structural approach to ending homelessness, and yet the structures of poverty and inequality itself go largely undiscussed in our work, much less directly challenged.

I believe homelessness can be ended. We’ve ended it before.

Most people think of mass homelessness as something that arose in the late 70s and early 80s, but this isn’t right. We’ve seen this several times before, also in times of massive economic dislocation.

In the 1870s, Civil War demobilization and the advent of the factory system of labor created a huge class of hungry men who rode the new railways in search of work. The old, home-based and largely rural systems of production were disrupted and replaced by an urbanized factory system that did little to lift people out of poverty. There were two depressions in the late 1800’s.

A great tramp army roamed America. The dean of Yale law school, Francis Wayland, said that the homeless and jobless man of his time was a “spectacle of a lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage.”

A skid row infrastructure, most fully realized in Chicago’s “main stem”, saw the market opportunity presented by these migrant laborers, and created cheap housing, cheap restaurants, bars, thrift stores and pawnshops, to meet their needs. Areas like this arose in cities across the country.

Much of this was knocked down by urban renewal, our domestic post-war version of the Marshall Plan.

Most of us have seen pictures of the huge homeless shantytown that existed south of Seattle’s skid road during the Great depression of the thirties and forties.

And most of us think it was the New Deal that ended the depression. It wasn’t. The New Deal helped in many ways, but it was the war that emptied America’s shantytowns and also spelled the end of places like Chicago’s main stem.

The war created full employment, and when it ended, government did not want to repeat the post-civil war experience of relegating hordes of hungry, disillusioned men, now trained in the use of small arms, to the street.

And so we got the GI bill, which was one of the greatest engines of class mobility this country has ever seen. We got public housing, cheap credit and federal lending to feed the suburban boom. And we got an understanding between labor, government, and big business that growing the middle class was in everyone’s interest.

Robert Reich’s new book, Supercapitalism describes the period of 1945-1975 as the not quite so golden age: we had McCarthyism, racism, oppression of women, cultural monotony and uniformity, yet, there was a linkage of democracy and capitalism, and an acted upon belief in the common good which took inequality to historic lows.

When you look at the structural forces that ended homelessness in the forties, you see the mirror image of present structural realities now: there is a two-tiered economy, widening inequality, schools that reinforce the class system, higher education made less attainable, and an assault on the very idea of public housing. Robert Reich argues that democracy and capitalism have come unlinked, and that while the market is very responsive to consumers and investors, the structures of democracy that promote the common good have atrophied and become largely useless.

Most of you are probably familiar with the roots of contemporary homelessness in the late 70s and early 80s. The effects of urban renewal and the systematic destruction of cheap housing caught up to us just as the feds decided to get out of the housing business and begin the long process of de-funding HUD, which continues even now.

There was deinstitutionalization, which with the best of intentions dumped thousands of mentally ill people on the city streets without providing the promised alternatives. And deindustrialization, brought on by new infrastructures that accelerated the mobility of capital and turned our economy from one based in manufacturing to one that created mostly service industry jobs for the working class, and jobs for the educated middle class in the burgeoning information-based economy.

There was Reagan era supply-side economics with its slashing of the social services safety net.

And housing itself made the great leap from being a necessary place to live to being a speculative commodity, and the first of the many urban condo booms to come began to happen, eliminating great swaths of affordable housing in its wake.

The shelter system arose as an emergency response. As founders of Seattle’s DESC — created 30 years ago to meet the needs of the mentally ill, addicted, and vulnerable homeless that other shelters were ill-equipped to handle, will often say — the E in DESC stood for Emergency. They thought they were dealing with a unique crisis that would, in less than a decade, pass.

It didn’t. The perfect storm of the 70’s was a structural realignment, much like earlier economic disruptions of the late 1800s and the twenties and thirties of our own century. Over the 80’s homelessness in American cities tripled and quadrupled, and through the 90s and until recently rose by double digit percentages pretty much each year. We’ve been locked ever since in the Emergency response paradigm.

But the Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness say they’re out to change all that. And I have to ask, really? Are they really?

The National Alliance to End Homelessness puts number of homeless in a year at 2.5 to 3.5 million. Their one night snapshot number is 730,000.

Every year, I eagerly anticipate the Conference of Mayors report, which usually arrives in February. Rate of growth slowed in recent years from double digits, but in 2006, we were still up by 5%, and 9% for families. 86% of cities are turning away homeless families that seek shelter.

Here in Seattle, the meaning of our own most recent homeless count is a matter of contention.

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, found 7,839 people homeless in King County at that particular point in time. 2,159 were literally on the street, like, there’s one riding the bus all night, and there’s one walking with bags at 3 am. That's 2,159 people.

This report shows homelessness decreasing in similar count areas by 4% from last year. The previous year saw around a 3% decrease. Yet, as the report authors are quick to point out, we shouldn’t make too much of this. The first year that decreases were reported, the timing of the count was moved from October to the last Thursday in January to meet federal guidelines.

Also, there was this observation, also in the 2007 report: “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."

Turn-aways at emergency shelters are as high as they’ve ever been. I’ve recently heard that 40 women each night are being turned out to the street, and the numbers of men are up as well, but harder to measure. These are split between multiple sites.

But not everyone is so careful with their numbers. The United Way of King County, in their recent press release announcing their goal to raise $25 million to build 1,000 units of housing for chronically homeless people, said homelessness in Seattle had decreased by 10% two years in a row. This 10% decrease per year puts us pretty much on track for meeting the ten year goal, shows success, and gives contributors a reason to hope that their money will indeed accomplish the stated goal.

The federal US Interagency Council on Homelessness quickly added the United Way statistic to the many other ten year plan success stories on their website. The more nuanced Coalition for the Homeless version went unreported there.

People often say to me, Tim, why do you hate the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness so much? And I don’t, really. It’s just that the giant sucking sound you hear is all of the energy that could be directed toward organizing that is being exclusively put toward direct services.

And I also say, well, to understand that, you have to think of it as a zen koan.

This is an imponderable, you know, the sound of one hand clapping. That sort of thing. An apparent absurdity, that if you think about it long enough, you break through into a new clarity and a fresh way of seeing the world.

So the koan here is, where does the Bush administration, arguably the most hostile administration of this century to the interests of the American poor, get off in making deep cuts to poor peoples programs and continuing to gut federal housing programs, while holding the stated objective of ending homelessness in Ten Years?

Between 2002 and 2006, there has been a $70 million increase in funding for McKinney-Vento, the federal package of legislation that funds homeless relief. Yet over 2004-2006, a shorter period, HUD funding has decreased by $3.3 Billion, with another $2 billion in cuts in the works. Other programs, serving the poor have seen deep cuts as well.

I’ve come to regard federal funding as a precise calculation of maximum cooptation for the minimum amount of money. It’s like they’ve developed a special slide rule to figure it out. Homelessness, through McKinney-Vento, goes for about $1.6B now. The cost of the Iraq war are calculated by the Democratic party at about $195 million a day. So the funding for ending homelessness is a little better than a week of Iraq.

My own break through moment came when I reread a 1986 article by Columbia professor Peter Marcuse called Neutralizing Homelessness. In this, Marcuse identifies the ideological bones of the federal response on which the present day policy response hangs.

Marcuse says that the widespread existence of homelessness in a society as affluent as our own is a moral outrage that challenges the legitimacy of the social and economic order itself. Homelessness, therefore, must be ideologically neutralized.

"If government does not deal with homelessness," says Marcuse, "it appears illegitimate and unjust; if it does try seriously to alleviate homelessness, it breaks the link between work and reward that legitimizes wage labor. Neither horn of the dilemma is a comfortable resting place."

The way to respond, then, is to talk a great deal about ending homelessness, while taking no effective action to actually solve the problem.

It’s like a fat man running. There’s little progress, but huge amounts of apparent effort.

Solutions, therefore, are "aimed more at dealing with ordinary (housed) people's reactions to homelessness than with homelessness itself."

Marcuse outlines four basic ways in which this happens:

DENY: Find creative ways to lowball the numbers. Narrow the definition so as to exclude. Minimize. Maybe hold your street homeless counts in late January

BLAME THE VICTIM: Focus public attention on the most stigmatized members of the homeless (mentally ill, addicted, alcoholic) and place the blame on character defects, as opposed to structural unemployment and unaffordable housing. I’ve spent twenty years trying to get across that homelessness isn’t just about the visible drunks and crazy people. That most homeless are families and working poor people, only to have that undone by those who use the terms chronic homeless, street homeless, and homeless interchangeably, and in doing so collapse the distinction.

SPECIALIZE: Drill deep into data and subpopulations. Marcuse quotes neo-conservative Thomas Mann saying solutions to homelessness should be in the form of "separate policies for separate subpopulations" rather than focusing on universals such as housing, wages, and access to social services.

ISOLATE: Ghettoizing homeless people outside of mainstream society in shelters and such while criminalizing public displays of extreme poverty with no-sitting ordinances, forbidding public feeding, criminalizing park sleeping, etcetera, all of which are on the rise nationwide.

Sadly, his prescriptive solutions of twenty years ago didn't really take. The militant Union of the Homeless that so inspired him in 1988 pretty much flamed out within a few years. A direct-action based demand for housing mostly ended with the 1990 suicide of Mitch Snyder. The National Coalition for the Homeless, which once carried the torch for a more structural approach to homelessness, is a shadow of its former self, and has been entirely eclipsed by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which operates hand in glove with the Bush administration's United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Here in Seattle, we’re seeing the same trends that are occurring everywhere else, but in a more extreme form. According to the 2000 census, incomes in Seattle rose over the ‘90s by 56 percent for the wealthiest fifth, while incomes for the bottom fifth fell by 7.4 percent. 52.6 percent of Seattle residents reported paying more than a third of their income in rent, a proportion exceeded only by Boston.

Our progress toward the Ten Year Plan goal of adding or expanding upon 950 units of low-income housing a year is being trumped by market forces, as condo development and rising rents takes affordable housing off the market about twice as fast as it can be produced. Seattle is becoming a city of rich and poor.

In a five block area near the Pike Place Market that developers refer to as Seattle Gold Coast, there are 4 condo developments scheduled to be completed in the next two years, offering 505 new units of housing at an average price of over $2 million each. One must earn about $90K a year to afford homeownership in Seattle. You need to make about $19 an hour to comfortably afford the current price of a rental.

So what would I have you do?

First we have to do what we are doing, and then some. The response can’t be separated into charity over here and justice over there. These responses need to be linked. I’m not arguing that we walk away from acts of mercy to fight some vague class war. I am arguing that we need to take more political risks, and reach out across class to fund and build a social justice movement.

And we have to, when appropriate, dare to bite the hand that fees us.

I hate to pick on United Way. There’s much that’s good about what they do. They are raising $25 million dollars to fund housing for chronically homeless people, but where’s the funding for organizing poor and homeless people with their allies?

That’s not what foundations and government are interested in. Charity is a lot less complicated, risky, and controversial.

So organizations like Real Change, SHARE/WHEEL, and the Tenant’s Union starve for funding while the Mayor hands $3.5 million to Plymouth Housing Group to build housing for chronic homeless people without even pretending to have a process.

Plymouth does a lot of great things, but boat rocking isn’t one of them.

We need our United Ways. We need our Plymouths. But we need organizing too, and we have to stop thinking of it as some sort of afterthought to perhaps be considered once the other bases are thoroughly covered.

We have to, again, look to the last time homeless was ended in America. Access to education. A major federal investment in housing. A government, business, and community alliance that worked toward the common good, and ensured that the benefit of some didn’t come unduly at the expense of others.

The path toward truly ending homelessness is the path forward for all of us.

History shows that government responds to mass movements, especially when those who are most affected have become disruptive and have allies in the broad middle class: This was true once of labor and could be again. It was true of the civil rights movement. It was true of the anti-poverty movement that led to the reforms of the Great Society that, before sidetracked by Vietnam war, were effective in reducing poverty and inequality

The closest we’ve come to this in the movement to end homelessness was Housing Now!, organized in 1987 by Mitch Snyders’ CCNV. There was a loud and disruptive grassroots movement that included the poor and homeless, and it gave us McKinney-Vento.

Our problem was that we saw this as an end, as opposed to a beginning. We got tired. We became timid. We allowed homeless advocacy to be professionalized and sidelined into technocratic service provision, cut off from the wider anti-poverty movement.

The American Prospect this year did a special issue on poverty, which was remarkable in that it didn’t mention homelessness once.

This issue, which was once seen as the tip of the iceberg, the canary in the coal mine — choose your own metaphor — is now orphaned and sidelined as a narrow social services issue. And the moral outrage that homelessness in an affluent society represents has been sidelined right along with it.

This is a failure of moral and political imagination.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities talks about how funding for the war, line item give-ways to corporate interests, and tax breaks aimed mostly at the wealthy, undermine the possibility of increased federal funding for housing. They say we can no longer afford housing advocacy that ignores these larger issues. They say policy choices must start to target weak claims on funding, and not weak clients.

We can end poverty, they say, but everything has to go back on the table. The current approach assumes everyone keeps the cards that we have, and that game is totally rigged.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to talk about why, after 13 years in Seattle and more than two decades of organizing to end homelessness, I still think that street papers in general and Real Change in particular is one of the most powerful organizing models I’ve seen.

As a newspaper, we’re able to support and engage with the broader movement for social justice. We’re able to meet the immediate and sometimes desperate needs of our vendors for an income with dignity, while giving them an opportunity to work for social justice themselves. We stand with one foot in our community of about 270 homeless and very low-income vendors that sell the paper each month, and the other foot in our mostly educated and affluent readership.

The longer we do this the more we understand that our effectiveness is based in the power of those reader/vendor relationships.

Our challenge, and the challenge for all of us, is to build the space where those relationships can come together in a truly cross class movement for economic justice. This space, for the most part, doesn’t even exist now. Real Change is a beginning. SHARE/WHEEL is a beginning. There are also huge rumblings happening in the broader advocacy movement, and things are starting to shift. But the real work, truth be told, has barely started.

We don’t have all the answers, and are struggling ourselves to find the right way forward, but we need you there with us, helping to light the way. Thank You.

Dionysius Doesn't Dance Alone

The Greeks had their maenads. Women under the spell of Dionysius would dance all night and then rip small animals apart with their bare hands. The Balinese have the Monkey Chant. The Sioux had the Ghost Dance. Hippie counter-culture had the Grateful Dead and The Doors. The French and others have carnival.

Throughout human history, across the centuries and across cultures, people have come together to lose themselves in drink, dance, drugs, music, and ritual. We all want, it seems, to expand our boundaries and lose ourselves in the company of others.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s thoroughly remarkable Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy delves into the history of group ecstasy, its suppression by colonialists, church officials, and political elites, and what it means for us now as we struggle to hold together a society of individualists.

This sort of social history is where Ehrenreich truly excels. While recent work as an undercover journalist (Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch) have brought her writing to new audiences, one hopes they will move along with her to embrace this profoundly meaningful history of joy.

Euripides’ Bacchae, often described as the most inexplicable of plays, explores the tension between ecstatic experience and order as Pentheus the king and Dionysius the androgynous stranger face off in a farcical yet deadly power struggle.

This archetypal conflict of Pentheus and Dionysius echoes on throughout much of human history. As the increasing popularity of such events as Burning Man and the enduring appeal of storefront charismatic churches and small dark music venues attest, the historic victory of Pentheus, while significant, is never complete.

The depth of the European ecstatic heritage is perhaps best illustrated by the cooptation of Dionysian myth in the social construction of Christ. Dionysius, with his various festivals and close association with the benefits of wine, was the most wildly popular of the pagan deities, although Baal and Asheroth were popular as well for many of the same reasons.

Nor are depictions of the Dionysian limited to the New Testament. While the militaristic god that evolves throughout the Pentateuch was well suited to an imperial religion held by a surrounded people, every time the chosen folk got a little breathing room they’d go running right back to Baal.

A dozen or more centuries later, as class and hierarchy increasingly defined the social experience, the central role of dancing and celebration in the life of the community came under fire, and under the watchful eye of the Calvinists was nearly extinguished.

Ehrenreich traces the evolution of the suppression of community to the emergence of social hierarchy. In case after case, the pattern is the same: elites increasingly pulled back from popular celebration into more exclusive and careful gatherings of their own. As elites withdrew, the subversive aspects of carnival-like celebrations offered both the opportunity and organizing structure to parody and sometimes attack the upper classes. They became threatened, and gradually outlawed popular celebration.

As Europeans took their increasingly dour worldview abroad, the suppression of ecstatic ritual was a mere footnote to the wholesale extermination of entire civilizations. Yet, as in the case of American slaves, what was driven underground would often reemerge in less overtly threatening yet still subversive forms.

While Ehrenreich stops short of offering a blueprint for the restoration of collective joy, she offers the universalizing influence of festival as an antidote to the impoverishment of public life. Being responsible to one another, she says, begins with establishing emotional connection. Recovering joy isn’t just about loosening up and having more fun. It may be a matter of survival.

The Poverty of Affluence

Last night I finished Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. A fascinating look at the history of ecstatic group experience and it's suppression by those it may threaten. If you wonder why modern life feels so pale and unsatisfying, read this book. I wanted to share just this one paragraph, which vividly describes our sorry state:

We pay a high price for this emotional emptiness.… Collectively, we seem to have trouble coming to terms with our situation, which grows more ominous everyday. Half the world's people live in debilitating poverty. Epidemics devastate whole nations. The ice caps melt, and natural disasters multiply. But we remain for the most part paralyzed, lacking the means or will to organize for our own survival. In fact the very notion of the "collective," of the common good, has been eroded by the self-serving agendas of the powerful—their greed and hunger for still more power. Throughout the world (capitalist and postcommunist), decades of conservative social policy have undermined any sense of mutual responsibility and placed the burden of risk squarely on the individual or the family.

This really is the problem isn't it? Rebuilding the sense of collective responsibility. Reintroducing the concept. Like George on Seinfeld. "HEY! We live in a SOCIETY you know!"

Our Pale Imitation of Life

This weekend I'm reading Barbara Ehrenreich's new work on the demise of ecstatic experience and why it matters. It's called Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. This is a much better and more ambitious book that the title suggests.

Collective ritual that creates altered states of consciousness is something that has existed in cultures throughout the world since the beginning of recorded history. Its subversive aspects and inconvenience to capitalist production has, in most instances, led to its repression and virtual extinction. This, says Ehrenreich, has been an incalculable loss. The range of human experience is radically impoverished, and our unmet desires are exploited by less salubrious forms of collective immersion.



A few decades ago, a recording of the Balinese Ramayana Monkey Chant made a huge impression on me. When I saw photos of several hundred men seated in a tight circle, obviously transported by the experience, I thought, this is what is missing from our lives. This sort of group ecstasy is what we all hunger for, whether we realize it or not.

This surrender to the group can be experienced joyfully as a form of religious experience, or, in the form of Carnival, a subversive loosening of restrictions that creates cohesion. Or, it can take the more negative forms of nationalism, or its more extreme form, fascism. Bill Buford's remarkable Among the Thugs, which takes an immersion journalism approach to European soccer riots, offers yet another negative example of where this longing to lose oneself in the crowd can lead.

I'm only a bit more than halfway through the book, so I'm not sure if Ehrenreich goes here, but I think the desire to lose oneself in the collective is hardwired, and goes to the core of what it means to be human. We've been socialized to think of ourselves as a lone self, but somewhere, deep within each of us, lives the intense desire to merge with our tribe. The absence of this experience is part of why so many of us seem so tragically lost, and are so willing to be swept away by those who would profit from our emptiness.

One More Reason It Sucks To Be Poor

For nearly twenty years now, I've been lucky enough to mostly have work that I love, but it hasn't always been that way. I've landscaped and I've dug ditches in clay with jackhammer, pick, and shovel. I've worked in a potato chip factory and in an auto parts warehouse. I started food service work when I was fourteen and worked in three different restaurants washing dishes or busing tables. I've shined shoes and delivered papers. I've done farm work. I've performed data entry and I've been a telemarketer. I've worked in a factory building mobile home rafters. All of these paid around minimum wage or less.

But worst of all was a 3 month temp assignment at Boston's University Hospital. Pallets of supplies would come in and I'd put them away. I'd fill orders and stock supply carts. It was independent work and no one bothered me much. I'd certainly worked harder in other jobs, and gotten much dirtier. But for pure humiliation, being on the bottom of the food chain at a hospital is tough to beat.

Once the supply carts were stocked, part of my job was to deliver them around the facility. That's when I'd become the lowest of the low. My invisibility was my superpower. I had a new BA in Social Thought and Political Economy, and thought that this somehow made me worthy of respect. I was alone in this assessment. No one else knew or cared.

It's interesting that other low-status work didn't really bother me. Everyone else was low-status as well, so I had company. But not there. I was beneath the notice of pretty much everyone.

I thought about this again half a dozen years later, when I spoke to a group of SEIU members at Boston City Hospital.

I'd been hired to help stop the privatization of the hospital by uniting the three unions there with the low-income communities the hospital served in Dorchester and Roxbury. The SEIU workers were on the bottom of the hierarchy and pushed the carts, made the beds, and cleaned the messes. I'd come off of a number of years of homeless organizing, and as I looked at the room, I saw poor people. The faces in that SEIU meeting, lined by work and trouble, looked just like any room of homeless folks I'd ever seen.

In that moment, I understood that the line between the working poor and the homeless is largely in our imaginations. It's a revolving door of hard times and vulnerability. People who work hard for their money deserve better.