I Smell Toast

An article in Crosscut this morning describes Wednesday's Real Change Annual Breakfast as "a rally to dump Mayor Greg Nickels and, for that matter, much of the Seattle City Council." I didn't think we were being that obvious.

We got some good laughs with a video of the mayor lying, and called for support of the Nick Licata sponsored bond issue proviso that will slow down Seattle's new jail long enough to consider alternatives. My speech on this at the NW Socialists Conference is also the featured video at the Socialist Worker national website.

And yes, the Real Change 14th anniversary Nurturing the Grassroots breakfast, which drew 450 people and raised more than $71,500 to fund our organizing, was hardly a meeting of the Mayor Nickels fan club. For that, we'd need a much smaller room and better food. With the Nickels' approval ratings down to 31%, and at 26% among frequent voters, the Mayor is burnt political toast.

The Wednesday morning annual Real Change breakfast had aspects of a Dump Nickels rally. Homeless advocates showed film footage in which they alleged that Nickels was lying outright both about the amount of present available housing for the homeless and the nature of the Nickelsville tent city encampment now situated in the University District. The people at Nickelsville were not really homeless, Nickels alleged on a giant TV screen at the breakfast, but really activists posing as homeless. They went home to their own beds at night. Nickelsville residents attested that they had no homes or beds of their own. The mayor's proposal for a multimllion-dollar new city jail also came under fire. The present jail's population, it was asserted, has shrunk rather than risen in recent years.

The article links to Aimee Curl's Seattle Weekly piece on Nickelsville of last week, which graciously gave me the close quote.

Real Change Executive Director Tim Harris calls Nickelsville a "fabulous success," in large part because "it's still there." Still, he's skeptical that they'll ever be able to build a Dignity Village–like settlement. "At least not under this mayor," Harris says. "He's really dug in. He's really inflexible. But it's not a given that he'll win the next term."

To quote the bard — Lou Reed, to be specific — "He's done. Stick a fork in his ass and turn him over."

A Season of Holiday Hate

Given the confluence of a recent grossly uninformed Seattle Times "Squatters, Be Gone" editorial, Nicole Brodeur’s recent revelations that the homeless are to be hated and feared, and yet another alarmist op-ed regarding the extremely sudden scourge of armed homeless drug addicts, C.R. Douglas’ very Seattle Crosscut piece asking whether it might be time to crack down, and the tasteless yuck fest at the expense of those who don’t have shit that appeared issue before last in the Seattle Weekly, I’m beginning to wonder whether the holiday season has been rededicated to hating the homeless? Hey Seattle, let’s start a new tradition!

When Real Change moved the Mayor’s official-but-lets-preserve-deniability policy of homeless sweeps to front and center by surfacing hard proof through our FOIA requests, we knew that we ran the risk of creating a backlash. The Mayor’s office, along with the top parks and human service honchos on city payroll, has responded with a lying disinformation campaign that is based in the denial of plain facts and the tight control of information.

Meanwhile, the smear campaign is on. In a city where the shelters turn people away every night, those who survive outside are being depicted as subhuman, diseased criminals. Alongside this, the phony compassion rhetoric wilts to slime like two month-old lettuce.

Pushback begets pushback. Week after next, homeless people are going to see who their friends are. Details on Monday.

Northwesterners United Against Panhandling

Crosscut had one of their interns compare and contrast approaches to homelessness in Vancouver, Portland, Seattle, and Spokane, and here's his conclusion:

The new consensus on dealing with homelessness appears to be a major step forward, and governments across the Northwest are providing funding and making concerted efforts, with varying degrees of success. All of these efforts, however, are in jeopardy due to the continually rising real estate market and rental rates. Unfortunately, in most cases the governmental attempts to provide housing for homeless people has not led to a net gain of low-income housing. Governments are currently pursuing courses of policy that are insufficient to address the growing crisis of affordability for renters. Until there is a solution to the structural problems that are eating up low-income stock, homelessness will not go away.

The full article is worth looking at. While he takes the Ten Year Plan approach at face value and completely misses the trend toward criminalizing the poor, he gets that federal actions don't match their rhetoric, and that the market is killing us. Not bad at all for a dilettante.

Amazingly, a quick search turned up recent articles about new anti-panhandling legislation in Portland and Tacoma, the ugliest anti-panhandling flier in the history of the world from Salem, OR, an anti-panhandling op-ed in Vancouver, plans for a panhandling education campaign in Spokane, a new panhandling ordinance in god-forsaken Billings, Montana, and an anti-panhandling campaign in Denver. And, of course, the Seattle campaign. Is there something in the water? What is this telling us?