How to Play to Win

I made this full page Real Change poster back in 2006, when we were fighting the Downtown for All campaign along with SAGE to get downtown condo developers to pony up a $20 per square foot surcharge for affordable housing for floors that exceeded Seattle's previous height limit. The developers and the Mayor had reached a back room agreement of $10 per square foot that they fully expected to be obediently ratified. It wasn't. We fought the downtown interests and won, and the higher surcharge is expected to raise about $14 million for housing.

We helped build the grassroots support that would take a minority idea favored by Tom Rassmussen, Peter Steinbrueck, and Nick Licata to final approval by the entire Council.

What made this happen?

We worked our relationships. Real Change partnered with SAGE to strategize and bring in other allies, but we also brought in Real Change vendors and their relationships with readers to help build pressure. Many other allies came into motion. At the hearings it was the will and the interests of the people versus the self-interest of the developers, and we were heard.

We made it interesting. We took what had been a sleepy technical issue that was poorly understood by most, and made it about equality and basic fairness. Would the downtown be just for the wealthy, or would it be a Downtown for All?

We did our research. Peter Steinbrueck got the city to commission a neutral third party to produce an expert opinion on whether development at the higher surcharge was still sufficiently profitable. Downtown interests tried their best to delegitimate the report, but they never got traction. One turning point was when Columbia Tower developer and Seattle legend Marty Selig testified that if developers could not pay the $20 surcharge and still make a profit, "they shouldn't be in the business."

We polarized. We made t-shirts that said "Developers Stole My Downtown and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." We made an issue of the Mayor's clear allegiances. We held a well-attended "Zoned Out" forum on downtown issues and put our council members on the spot. We beat up on weaker kneed allies who were more willing to compromise than we were and got them to back off. We took what had been a sleepy technical issue and made it a moral crusade.

We called their bluff. The downtown establishment kicked and screamed all the way to the final vote, but their dire prognostications of the flight of investor capital to the wilds of Bellevue failed to materialize. What's more, the more they threatened, the less support they seemed to have on the Council, and the more attractive siding with the democratic will of the people became.

As we continue to work on issues of housing affordability, wage equity, and civil rights, we need to remember our successes, and that the downtown interests don't always prevail. People power can trump money and clout, if you're smart about your organizing and play to win.

A Seattle Manifesto

Manifesto: Italian, from Latin manifestus, clear, evident. See manifest.
A public declaration of principles, policies, or intentions, especially of a political nature.

This editorial runs in this weeks Real Change, and is intended as a challenge for all of us to reconsider our approach to homelessness and poverty. Our systematic failure as homeless advocates and service providers to recognize that radical inequality and increased poverty and homelessness are linked have placed us in the position of now being part of the problem.

Call it a sign of the times. Cities throughout the Northwest and beyond are getting tough on visible poverty. Tacoma and Portland have enacted some of the most stringent “time, place, and manner” restrictions on panhandling anywhere, and Seattle has quietly adopted a “zero-tolerance” policy on homeless encampments of any size. San Francisco is an anti-homeless war zone, with homeless sweeps becoming both more frequent and brutalizing.

Even here, in liberal Seattle, the diamond-hard edge of our times is beginning to be felt.

The Downtown Seattle Association says there are more human feces on the street now than before public toilets were installed. They want this basic public amenity removed.

They say panhandling is up by thirty-eight percent this year alone, despite their new “Have a Heart” campaign to discourage direct giving. They say that outdoor meals programs, which serve some of the toughest cases, attract litter, dysfunction, and blight.

Yet, few others seem to have noticed. Business is booming. The convention center and facilities at other hotels and conference centers are fully booked. Downtown living is more popular than ever, and concerted efforts to effectively address homelessness are underway.

So why the meanness? Why here? Why now?

The answer has to do with the future of our downtown, and the hardening soul of Seattle. As those who have the means increasingly opt for in-city living, Seattle is becoming an island of affluence in a sea of growing economic and racial disparity.

One barrier to downtown living is the perception that it might not be safe. With big money committed to downtown development that is designed to attract the wealthiest one percent, the DSA's preoccupation with squelching visible poverty makes a lot more sense.

While everyone knows that the downtown has been rezoned for “tall and skinny” condo development, the upper-end of this market is the proverbial tail that wags the dog.

There’s the Escala at 4th and Virginia, slated to open in 2009. "Anticipate perfection. Embrace elegance. Experience grandeur," says their website. This 30-story glass tower at 4th and Virginia has 275 new condos going for a million dollars or more each. Nearby, at the Fifteen Twenty One Second Avenue Building ("designed exclusively for the confident few"), 143 units sell for an average of $1.8 million each. The move-in date here is December 2008.

The Four Seasons, going in at 1st and Union and scheduled to open in summer 2008, bills itself as "Seattle's Signature Address," and will feature 36 private residences above a luxury hotel. Condos are priced from $2.5 million to more than $10 million.

With all this wealth comes a vision for a downtown that is safe, secure, and sanitized, where the über-rich and the merely affluent can buy groceries at the public market and uphold high cultural standards at the SAM without ever having to confront the ugly side of inequality.

It'll be sort of like New York. But without the diversity or the people.

There is a strategy in play, and it involves both carrots and sticks. The priority for "ending homelessness," led by federal funding opportunities and eagerly adopted by government, philanthropy, and large human services institutions who stand to benefit, focuses on that ten percent or so of homeless people who constitute the visible urban poor, otherwise known as the "chronic homeless."

No matter what the issue — homelessness, education, the environment, whatever — federal funding levels are a precise calibration of maximal cooptation at minimal price. Homelessness goes for around $1.6 billion right now. Cheap.

The stick is the increased policing of the urban poor, and new legal tools designed to drive poverty from the center to the periphery.

If there is a central fact of life in America at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is this: What we don’t see doesn’t bother us.

As the Downtown Seattle Association beats their steady media drumbeat of faux-compassion and tough love for the poor, we can expect them to move from rhetoric to more explicit forms of action. We need to prepare for when this happens

Approaches to homelessness that stigmatize and criminalize poverty must be resisted. Rhetoric that legitimates fear and hatred of the poor under a threadbare cover of compassion needs to be questioned. Policies that undermine equality and democracy need to be identified and opposed.

For too long, the strategy to end homelessness has focused on charity, while questions of economic justice have received little more than useless lip service. Meanwhile, a one-sided class war has raged on right under our noses.

Don’t you think it’s time to take sides?

The People Have Spoken.

OK, I admit it. I'm a little obsessed with the panhandling thing. Since Kate Elston made a cartoon of my position in the Post Intelligencer a few weeks ago, I've become this straw man for the opposition to hold up and say, "Well, surely you don't agree with him!" The Stranger's SLOG, following Elston, has me calling Downtown Seattle Association's Have a Heart Give Smart program "a war on the poor," a claim that is overheated at best, as the DSA's lobbyist was delighted to point out. A young appellate lawyer with a degree from Yale who lives and works downtown and thinks he knows more about homelessness than I do (people like him know more than the rest of us about everything) blogs that my position is "absurd," and some Republican poli-sci prof from Houston has dismissed me as the "latte left."

This is annoying.

Panhandling is suffering made visible, and that's why it makes people so uncomfortable. I think most of us could stand to be a lot less comfortable, content, and complacent. Panhandlers have something to teach us about the world and about ourselves.

All of this got me wondering about what else is being said. Are there other downtown yuppies blogging about how annoying it is to be asked for change? I searched the Technorati blog engine for references to "Seattle panhandling" and discovered the answer to be "not really."

• Some guy who describes himself as "politically and socially conservative Catholic who enjoys the silly side of life" goes on for a bit, and dignifies the DSA's Peg Dreisinger's assertions with the term "research." It doesn't take much to convince some people.
• Another low point comes from some asshole Harvard Law graduate, who blogs at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute that New York panhandlers make $60 an hour and don't even open savings accounts. This sends him into a tight-assed little rage.
• Someone on MySpace is planning to be homeless for 48 hours this month, but has already decided that "every chance they get when panhandling they use to get abusive substances." It is also a well-known fact that MySpace is where the English language goes to curl up and die.
• Again on MySpace is a story from Bellevue about a woman pulling up next to someone in a 90s T-bird to ask for a few dollars for gas. Incredibly, she gives it to her. Another soft touch on MySpace, this one from Bothell, discusses karma and resisting the urge to judge. It's a nice little essay. A Capitol Hill MySpace blogger has responded to the P-I article too, and has a thoughtful position as well.
• A guy from North Dakota who moved here four months ago notices a post-Hempfest surge in panhandling. "They're like an annual locust - a plague on the city after the largest "protest-ival" is over," he says. "I'm not sure what bothers me more, the little kids in strollers at Hempfest or the leftover stoners." Being from South Dakota myself, allow me to say, "Welcome, brother."
• A quite lovely post on panhandling as an opportunity to practice compassion comes from a woman in San Fransisco. I think she kind of nails it. This from her post:
  

"i saw a woman tonight in front of walgreens on polk street. she was a slight pile of dirty clothes with a head and tiny feet in socks sticking out. she was sobbing, begging, lamenting. she had lost her shit, basically. her face looked so old and she had gray dirty hair, eyes swollen from crying and splotches. she was holding herself and rocking back and forth. i've been to that walgreens a million times and every time ignored the people begging out front. tonight i gave her about a couple of dollars in change. if a beer is going to make this night bearable for her, then i'm not going to deny her that. how many of us actually use our change anyway. every home i've ever visited has some kind of jar full of change. people stockpile it for years and then cash it in. most of us would not miss it."

Quick! Hide the Poor. The Rich Are Coming.

Ask most people if public begging is a problem in Seattle and they'll say no. Compared to most cities, they'll say, the panhandlers are low key, polite, and not especially numerous. I admit to drawing from a sample of less than ten here, so this isn't exactly science, but for normal people, the panhandling "problem" isn't really a big issue.

And yet the Downtown Seattle Association can't stop talking about it. Why? While press flak Anita Woo talks about how panhandling drives away convention center business, this can't be the whole story. Business downtown is booming. Ask anyone.

So what's really going on here?

The DSA being a forward looking group of folks, I'd say the answer lies in the future. We need to look at what's being built.

As downtown Seattle becomes an enclave of urban affluence, with new developments sprouting up like forty story mushrooms beneath the biggest wettest cow pie you've ever seen, price tags range from expensive to stratospheric. And as the well-to-do discover urban living, they bring their suburban comfort zones along for the ride.

One barrier to downtown living is the perception that it might not be safe. With big money betting on the idea that the super rich — along with the merely affluent — will make the downtown their home, the DSA's preoccupation with squelching visible poverty makes a bit more sense.

A quick look at the new downtown reveals what's at stake.

There’s the Escala at 4th and Virginia, slated to open in 2009. "Anticipate perfection. Embrace elegance. Experience grandeur," says their website. This 30 story glass tower at 4th and Virginia has 275 condos for sale, going for a million dollars or more each. Amenities include a 24,000 foot members-only club, with a private theater, fitness area, restaurants, and wine caves where residents might store their private collections in convenient locked cases. The website's virtual tour seems to indicate that each unit comes with its own trophy wife at no extra charge.

The Cristalla, just a half a block down the street from our office, has units that go for over $3.5 million. In these, a column of water drops from the ceiling to fill the generously sized bath tub. When Real Change moved in back in '94, Belltown was pleasantly seedy. Now, the seedy have been priced out by the greedy, and we're hanging on by our fingernails, possessed of the sure knowledge that our very excellent deal will one day come to an end.

The Four Seasons, going in at 1st and Union, bills itself as "Seattle's Signature Address," and will feature 36 private residences above a luxury hotel. Condos are priced from $2.5 million to more than $10 million. Ironically, the proximity of the Pike Place Market, the preservation of which was considered a victory for the little guy, is listed along with the Seattle Art Museum as a key amenity for the uber-rich urban dweller.

Nearby, at the Fifteen Twenty One Second Avenue Building ("designed exclusively for the confident few"), units are selling for an average of $1.8 million each. Obscenely enough, this 143-unit development is sited where the Green Tortoise Youth Hostel once was, where bunks without amenities could be had for a few dollars a night. The "confident few" are slated to begin moving in sometime around December 2008. While most high end downtown living is mixed in with condos for the merely affluent, this project distinguishes itself as an island of extreme wealth unto itself, where only the rich need apply.

You get the idea. With all this wealth comes a vision for the sort of downtown where no one ever has to feel uncomfortable. No one who’s rich, that is.

It'll be sort of like New York. But without the diversity or the people.

While prognostication is always a tricky business, some things we know. The DSA will drive toward the criminalization of panhandling, the elimination of outdoor feeding, and the removal of public toilets. While the political will for such steps does not yet exist, they're working on it.

Meanwhile, the priority for "ending homelessness" will focus on that ten percent or so of homeless people who constitute the visible urban poor, otherwise known as the "chronic homeless." This, being the federal policy priority, is where the money is, and the "advocates" have lined up to cooperate.

No matter what the issue — homelessness, education, the environment, whatever — federal funding levels are a precise calibration of maximal cooptation at minimal price. Homelessness goes for around $1.6 billion right now. Cheap.

Sadly, the philanthropic and religious communities don't seem to have discerned that the Bush administration, with their Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, may not simply have the best interests of poor folk in mind.

If federal policy on homelessness didn't align with the interests of wealthy real estate developers, it would be a bit surprising, wouldn't it?

But that's not a comfortable thought. Better to bask in our own righteousness than to ask who benefits. Questions like that don't sit well with the folks who hand out the money.

When the DSA inevitably makes their move to criminalize panhandling in Seattle with time, place, and manner restrictions similar to those passed in Tacoma, it'll be revealing to see which side some people are on.

Silence is complicity, and having nothing to say while poor people are being further criminalized will not be a comfortable option. Not if I can help it.

Moments in Time

Today, in my ongoing series of posts of no consequence, I bring you a mossy montage of images from the half-mile Moments in Time kiddie trail that starts a few hundred yards from our cabin. I’ve been pretty much laid out with a cold since the day I arrived, although it seems to be getting better.

So, this is about my speed.

We are, however, sitting in the middle of a mountain rainforest, so even the lame trails are pretty amazing. Lots of crazy moss and ferns and big-ass trees. I went out with a digital camera and my little cheap-o Canon home video recorder and stitched this together in iMovie today with a nice little thing in E minor behind it. Seasoned nature photographer that I am, I only fell on my ass twice as I was backing up to get a better shot.

Near the beginning is a picture of a bench on a rocky little beach with a spectacular view, even on a cloudy morning. That’s where I phoned into Dave Ross’ Show on KIRO 710 this morning to talk about panhandling. Like everyone else, I always think of the stuff I should of said later on, but I think it was fine. My main goal was to call out the Downtown Seattle Association’s love affair with Tacoma’s panhandling laws and their stealth campaign to bring this to Seattle. If you listen to the broadcast, (2nd hour, Dave Ross Show, 8/22) you’ll notice that DSA press flak Anita Woo doesn’t deny this is where they’re heading.

They’re being very, very circumspect about this. Maybe they’re thinking two-to-three year campaign. Start with panhandling education. Keep landing press hits every three to four months to create the impression that panhandling in Seattle is actually a major issue. Wait for the City Council elections and look for five toadies to push the thing through. City Attorney Tom Carr already sounds like he’s on board.

Whenever they get around to it, I think they’ll find that Seattle ain’t Tacoma. Downtown Seattle is succeeding fabulously. If they think they need to beat up on poor people to broaden that profit margin a bit more, I’m more than happy to give them a run for their money, the greedy fucks.

Kate Elston: Fair Reporter or Tool of the Elite?

I interrupt my vacation week of postings of no consequence to comment on today's story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Begging the Question: How is the Money You Give Panhandlers Actually Spent. As slam dunk set-ups go, I've seen worse, but this is one of those articles that make me want to tell the next reporter I talk to that I'm recording the conversation.

"To give or not?," reads the intro in today's on-line edition. "Downtown advocates urge Seattleites to pass beggars by while others bristle at a compassion-less 'war on poor.'"

The "war on poor" quote is mine. I also have a B section Page 1 pull quote where I say, "There's this thought that because people are poor they need to be under a judgmental microscope. They should be able to spend the money however they want."

This sets me up, of course, as the idiot liberal who supports the local crack trade through my undiscerning largess. The question was, does Real Change control how our vendors spend their money? Not the more complicated, "Should people be concerned about what panhandlers will do with the money you give them?"

Reporter Kate Elston, who seemed honorable enough, may not see the difference, but I do.

She does, however, quote me accurately when I say that the self-esteem people find in selling Real Change often leads to positive lifestyle changes. I thank her for that.

The "war on the poor quote" was out of context as well.

I described the DSA's anti-panhandling campaign as part of a pattern, wherein cities in general are becoming these dense enclaves of concentrated wealth as suburbanites go urban and bring their precious comfort zones along with them. This is the context of both the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness's obsession with chronic homelessness (read visible urban poor), and the heightened policing and criminalization of visible poverty that we're seeing everywhere.

All of this, apparently, didn't fit Elway's advocates versus critics of panhandling frame, so she choose instead to make me look like some sort of a reactive nut case by employing the "war on poor" quote without all that bothersome context.

I do find it interesting though, that nowhere in the article is DSA's often-made assertion that panhandling is up by 38 percent this year alone, despite the efforts of their panhandling education campaign. This omission makes them come off as the reasonable ones.

As I've said before, I was neutral on the campaign itself. It's the DSA's recent "drive the bastards into the sea" escalation that pisses me off.

Where they're heading with this was obvious earlier this year, when they landed an article in the Puget Sound Business Journal. The Downtown Seattle Association will push for restrictions of panhandling similar to Tacoma's, which are some of the strongest in the nation.

The evidence of this comes in paragraphs 14-15.

Other cities have taken more extreme measures. This year Tacoma made it a misdemeanor to panhandle in certain places — near ATMs, bus stops, building entrances, and other public areas. The city also outlaws panhandling before sunrise and after sunset.

Seattle City Attorney Tom Carr said people have a constitutional right to beg on city streets. Buit establishing time place and manner restrictions — as Tacoma did — is a way to protect free speech while combating undesirable behaviors."

This is how the DSA works. Keep it in the media. Beat a steady drumbeat of horror stories, half-truths, and pseudo-concern for the poor, and when the timing is right, push for repressive measures against those who have nothing. Punish the poor right out of the downtown so that we don't have to see them anymore.

New York's Giuliani showed us the way, and all those who would like to disappear the poor need only follow his example. It's a predictable formula, and we don't have to guess about anyone's intentions. The writing is on the wall and it's in the P-I.

Zero Tolerance for Dehumanization

Today the police brought formal charges against my friends Rainee and Bruce. I can't remember the last time I've felt so angry about anything. The details surrounding their case are so outrageous that it's hard to accept that they are in great danger, but they may well be.

They could go to prison, lose their daughter, and have everything that they've struggled to achieve destroyed. But they probably won't. Their counsel is the lead medical marijuana lawyer in the area, and the media, Real Change included, seems to be taking a keen interest. For now, I'm optimistic.

"How could anybody do that to someone?"

The answer lies in the word "someone." Drug users, like homeless people, are considered subhuman. So we're not dealing with "someone" at all. We're dealing with the dehumanized Other, who does not merit our empathy.

Heather left a comment on last week's Drug Users in Belltown post directing me to an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled Your Brain on Drug Addicts. As it turns out, I'm a subscriber, and the article was in the pile below my coffee table.

Here's what it says. Brain imaging studies confirm what many of us already know. For most people, drug addicts and homeless people do not trigger empathy. They trigger disgust. They don't really even register as people.

With co-author Susan T. Fiske, also of Princeton, Harris chose which out-groups to show on the basis of stereotypes about them and the emotions they evoke. Fiske previously noted that the stereotypes of out-groups vary on two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warm and competent groups like American Olympic athletes inspire pride. Warm groups that are deemed unable to act on their warmth, such as the elderly or disabled, elicit pity. Cold groups that are nevertheless competent, such as the rich, induce envy. And groups that are low on both warmth and incompetence – drug addicts and homeless people – arouse disgust.

Fiske and Harris showed photographs of these four kinds of outgroups to 10 Princeton undergraduates as they lay in an fMRI scanner. To 12 other Princeton undergraduates they presented photographs of inanimate objects that aroused the same emotions as did the out-groups – for example, a sports car to induce envy, or an overflowing toilet to evoke disgust. They found that the pictures of the objects, homeless people, and drug addicts did not excite the mPFC, although they did activate brain regions associated with emotions.

So there it is. Were one actually dealing with another human being, the idea of manipulating an eight-year old who's beloved grandfather had just died to bust a couple who grow prescription medical marijuana for pain control would be unthinkable.

But if you're used to thinking of drug users as disgusting subhuman creatures who must be eliminated, then anything goes.

This is the issue that drew me to homelessness in the first place. Homeless people are widely regarded as subhuman. So are addicts and prisoners. When you have an expendable group of people who arouse disgust, terrible things can happen. The dehumanization of anyone leads to the dehumanization of us all.

Speaking of which ...

This week I fielded two press calls about downtown homelessness. The Downtown Seattle Association, as I said before, is on a new propaganda offensive over panhandling and public toilets. They are trying desperately to whip up some righteous indignation.

Thus far, they're not getting a lot of traction. But you can bet that they're not giving up. As the relationship between city and suburb changes, with cities becoming the new nucleus of upscale density, visible poverty is more unwelcome in urban centers everywhere.

Thus the fixation on "chronic" homelessness, and the companion stick approach, an escalation in the policing of the urban poor.

Being the angry sort of guy that I am these days, I'm finding diplomacy less and less appropriate to the moment. Last winter I had numerous conversations with the DSA's Peg Dreisenger and Anita Woo about the panhandling education campaign they had in the works. They were being reasonable, and so was I. I'm not wild about panhandling either.

They wanted an endorsement, but I wouldn't go that far. If they did their campaign in a way that focused on positive alternatives, as opposed to negative stereotypes, I said, I would not organize against them. They arrived at Have a Heart, Give Smart, and were rewarded with my public neutrality. I liked their brochure.

During our last meeting, Anita Woo, the DSA's communications staffer, told a story about a woman panhandler who was spotted hopping into her SUV to make a quick call on her Blackberry.

I laughed at her.

"You can't tell that story," I said. "It's like Ronald Reagan and his Cadillac driving Black welfare queens. It's apocryphal bullshit." We all laughed nervously.

She went on the radio during the launch of the campaign and told just that story. She punched away at all the buttons that the lit itself avoided. They're making a lot of money off of credulous do-gooders. It's all a big lucrative scam. They're mostly addicts. Etcetera. It's like they couldn't wait to take the fucking gloves off.

That was last January. Since then, they've escalated. Their position now is that, despite their panhandling education campaign, downtown begging is up by thirty-eight percent!

Woo trotted out the Blackberry story to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter just last week. You gotta love a good story.

Here's another one.

The DSA is also opposed to handing out sandwiches on the street. Here's a handy DSA guide to public policy: if it's visible downtown poverty, they want it to go away.

We were talking about downtown feeding, and Peggy Dreisenger, the affable manager of DSA's street program, told me the real reason one doesn't feed the poor.

Chronically homeless people have, through their years of alcohol and drug abuse, undermined the viability of their digestive organs. If one, therefore, feeds one of these wretches a sandwich, their body will reject it. They will throw up in the nearest bush, curbside, or sidewalk, and someone, probably one of her employees, will have to clean it up.

The do-gooders, she said, don't understand this.

I contained my amazement, walked back to Real Change, and told our editor what she had said. He knew. She'd said the same thing to him several weeks prior.

Since then, I've had the opportunity to ask the opinions of various health care professionals, each of whom were appalled at the story.

This story is about one thing. Dehumanization. This isn't something we should tolerate. Politeness, even here in Seattle, has its limits.

Zippity Doo-Dah

One of our long time Real Change vendors has been doing very well lately selling the paper in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood. "The people are beautiful," she said. I asked what she meant. "All the men have pink skin and white hair and the most beautiful shoes you can imagine." Such exfoliated well-shod splendor.

This made me wonder what's really going on in Magnolia. Due to the magic of city-data.com, I can Google a Magnolia zip code and find out. The median age, at 40.5, is about five years over the mean for Washington. The average home value is $521K, and the average adjusted gross income is $90,931, with 5.1% living below poverty. If you believe this, there a fewer poor people in Magnolia than anywhere else in the city. Charitable giving is 2.9%, which puts the Magnolians in competition with those cheap-asses in West Seattle and the skin-flint Swedes in Ballard for least giving neighborhood. There are 53 white people for every Black, but one in 16 is Asian. Lesbians and gays make up 1.4% of the population.

This being a lot like eating potato chips, I kept going. What happens, I thought, when one crosses the ship canal into Ballard? Having several choices, I chose 98117 as representative. Median age is 38.4 and adjusted gross income is $61,206. 5.7% live below the poverty level. Charitable giving is just 2.7%. Here, there are 67 whites for every Black. This is remarkable. Statistically speaking, one could go to a Starbucks every day for 5.8 days without ever seeing a Black person. Asians are again in the number two position at a 1:18 ratio. Almost 2% are gay or lesbian, as near as anyone can tell.

So what happens if I go downtown? I tried 98101, which is the neighborhood just south of Real Change in Belltown. This would be, I suppose, the marketing term known as the West Edge, over by Pike Place Market. The median age goes up to 42, and income climbs to $115,946, with 24% below poverty. Wow. 4.5% goes to charity. Hmmm. Almost one in seven are Black, and one in nine are Asian. Just 1.2% homos. A little repressed maybe, but compared to Ballard and Magnolia, it's the United Nations.

How does my neighborhood in Shoreline compare? A 1:17 Black/white ratio but 1:5 Asian to white. We're about 38, and earn $42,485, with 3.4% going to charity. Almost 11% live below the poverty level, and the queers apparently prefer neighborhoods with better aesthetics because we're down to 1.1%

A bit south and over on the other side of Aurora, where lower-end condos are sprouting up like dandelions in the springtime, there's a few more Blacks and about the same number of Asians. They're a year younger, 13% richer, 3.2% goes to charity, and they are no more queer than their brethren in Shoreline.

Moving southward across Lake Union, we arrive at Capitol Hill, the epicenter of which is The Stranger in the 98122 zip. Here, incredibly, the Black to white ratio is 1:2. These are 1999 figures, and I'm sure this is no longer the case. The median age is just 32, but incomes soar above Shoreline levels to $53,718, or just below the Washington State average, with 3.9% going to charity. Nearly 20% are living below poverty. Official figures are that 3.9% are gay or lesbian, which is, of course, ridiculously low.

Further south still, we have the Central Area/International District, and to avoid the skewing effect of water front property, I'll go with 98108. Here you have three Blacks to every two whites and the Asians outnumber everyone. Incomes drop to $37,706, the lowest in the city, with almost 15% below poverty, but charitable giving is 4%. 1.5% report as unmarried same sex households.

Over in Rainier Valley at 98118, Blacks, whites, and Asians are in a virtual dead heat, with Asians being slightly ahead. 38% rent. Median income is $43,653, which is actually better than in my neighborhood. 3.5% goes to charity. The average is, of course, radically skewed by all those beautiful waterfront homes with a view of the Cascades where the white people live and the black people tend the grounds. If you don't believe me, drive through there sometime and look for yourself. You'd think you were in 1954 Georgia. 2% gay and lesbian. 14% live below poverty.

Coming around to West Seattle, which is rumored to be a part of this city, I've gone for the center at 98126. Here, there are ten whites to each Black, and a 1:5 Asian ratio. Incomes are damn near average at $53,623, with 13.5% below poverty and 2% queer. Charitable giving is 2.6%, the lowest in the city.

All of this confirms that Magnolia is indeed rich, white, and somewhat cheap. Maybe if they saw more of what the rich people downtown see they'd give more of their money away.

The Trouble with Poor People

The Downtown Seattle Association has taken the offensive on panhandling again. Today I talked to a reporter from the Puget Sound Business Journal who said they told him that incidents of aggressive panhandling were up forty percent this year. Their theory is that Tacoma's stringent new anti-panhandling laws have driven the hard cases to Seattle. The reporter wanted to know what I thought.

"I'll bet you dollars to donuts (My mother used to say this — Sometimes I can't believe what I hear coming out of my mouth)," I said, "that if you call West Precinct, they can't corroborate those numbers. The MID throws statistics around like they're real but there's no science behind them at all."

Which is true. The Metropolitan Improvement District has their Downtown Ambassadors walking around writing up incidents of panhandling, alcohol and drug activity, sitting or lying on the sidewalks, urination, defecation and such, but the sort of consistency that would make these numbers meaningful — numbers of ambassadors on the street, what they are focused on looking for, primary areas of deployment — simply isn't there.

The MID finds what they're looking for. This is how, for instance, the MID could argue last year that public urination and defecation has risen since the installation of public toilets. Similarly, they now argue that five months after launching a campaign to discourage panhandling, the results are in. Panhandling is up by forty percent.

Yeah. That makes sense.

I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that the panhandling education campaign was just the beginning of what appears to be an ongoing strategy. As the downtown goes more and more upscale, the poverty that exists amidst our troubled affluence is to be rendered as invisible as possible.

And if real solutions are expensive and complicated, then increased repression will do just fine as the next best thing.

You don't need to be a genius to see where they're going with this. If aggressive panhandlers are coming here from Tacoma because that city has enacted stringent anti-panhandling legislation, maybe we need laws that will make Tacoma look like a bunch of smelly homeless-loving-hippies! It's reverse polarity magnet theory.

On a related note, I got another call today from a guy who doesn't give to panhandlers because he thinks that nine in ten of them are on the make. But, he finds the existence of that ten percent who might be truly needy very troubling. He wants government to remove the ambiguity from poverty.

"What I need," he said, "is a way to identify the ones who need my help." He suggested that a licensing process be created to certify the truly needy. Then these could proudly display their deserving poor badge, and people like him could stop anxietizing.

This idea actually has a long history. The first laws requiring the public badging of paupers appeared in England in 1697 and persisted well into the next century.

"One could argue that a licensing process would be demeaning," he said, "but it's certainly no less demeaning than panhandling itself."

The caller said he could remember the first time, in the seventies, that he saw a panhandler in Seattle. He thought it odd at the time. America is no longer a superpower, he said. We are now "the wealthiest third world nation in the world."

As extreme poverty and extreme affluence rub shoulders more and more, that prescient description will only become more apt.