Bare Survival

I stopped into CJ's in Belltown this morning for a cheap breakfast on my way to work. I've been trying to knock out some accounting for around a month and figured this would be the day. Maybe it will. We'll see.

Just inside CJ's were L and K, two Real Change vendors who've been with us 1994. I joined them. They both said they'd die at Real Change, papers in hand. I confessed to a similar fate, and we clinked coffee cups to seal the deal. They're doing OK. L picked up my tab.

I briefly wondered what it would be like to sell papers myself for off books income, and decided I wasn't quite ready to go there. Not yet anyway.

I was greeted at my desk by the phone. I picked up. "Tim here."

A woman had seen the Operation Sack Lunch article in our recent food issue, and wanted to know how to reach them. I obligingly Googled the info.

"I was so happy to find your paper," she said. "You write about The Problem. I call it The Problem because it's #1. People are barely surviving out there."

"Theres a place in Renton that has sheds," she said. "If you have a piece of land they'll deliver. People live in them."

"What's that say about things," I asked.

"They look beautiful to me," she said. "I live in my car with my kid. Once or twice a week we can afford a hotel, and that keeps us going. I'd love to have a beautiful shed of my own.

"If you don't have good credit now, you're dead. Habitat for Humanity told me they can't help me unless I have good credit. Habitat for Humanity! That's when I knew I was dead.

"The last place I lived, I was evicted because I complained. There was raw sewage pouring out in the front yard. I complained and complained. It wasn't healthy. Finally I called the Health Department. And then I was evicted. Nothing I could do.

"There was a family that lived across the hall from me, and the kids slept on the floor for eight months. Once they covered their rent and food, there was nothing left. Good Will and those places don't have mattresses anymore because they say they cost too much to disinfect. They just don't do it. So no one can afford a bed. And the kids sleep on the floor.

"That's what we've come to. If you don't have credit, you're dead.

"If I ever get back on my feet, I''d like to come down and help you guys. You're the only paper that deals with The Problem. I'm so glad you're there."

A asked her to keep in touch. The accounting still needs to be done.

We Bring You This Class War, Already in Progress ...

John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition is losing it these days. When he gets to talking about condo conversions and housing demolition in Seattle, his face darkens by several shades, the veins in his forehead and throat stick out, and his voice jumps a full octave. Seattle is losing low-income housing about twice as fast as it’s being built, and it really pisses him off. In the 30 years he’s been fighting for housing, things have never been worse.

Meanwhile, we’re supposed to be “ending homelessness.” It’s a bitter irony.

We’re losing, and it’s all about political will.

Today, I attended the Seventh Annual Interfaith Task Force conference on Building the Political Will to End Homelessness. I’ve been to several of these things, and while I want to be supportive of my allies, it looked like the smallest one yet.

On the way there, I stopped for breakfast at the Westin Hotel. There, roughly three times as many developers, bankers, non-profit housing providers, city officials and others paid $65 each to hear J. Ronald Terwilliger — the CEO of Trammell Crow Residential and the chairperson-elect of Habitat for Humanity — make the business case for providing workforce housing in Seattle.

There were dozens of corporate sponsors. It’s amazing how the rich will line up to fork over money to the rich when it’s in their interest to do so. I showed up dressed as I always do. My long-sleeved green thermal T-shirt stood out in the room of about 250 suits.

Terwilliger is a man who, a few years ago, was tragically edged out by Time Warner in his bid to buy the Atlanta Braves. Terwilliger is Donald Trump lite, but with better hair, and has what, in his circles, passes for a full-blown social conscience.

An affluent society such as ours, he said, needs to provide housing for those who attend to our needs. Otherwise, various problems such as traffic congestion and pollution, low workforce morale, and a tougher hiring environment for corporations undermine the region’s ability to compete.

While Trammell Crow is very active in Seattle, and Terwilliger’s heart is with affordable housing, his pocketbook has other opinions. All of their projects involve luxury condos and apartments. There is no market incentive, he said, for them to build workforce housing in this city. In Seattle, Terwilliger would define that as housing for those who make up to 150 percent of median income. That’s somewhere above $90,000 annually.

Let me repeat that. There’s no incentive in Seattle, he said, for developers to build housing for people who make less that $90,000 annually.

To do that, Terwilliger would need code relaxations, tax breaks, and zoning incentives. Do this, he said, and people like him will be able to make the sort of profit they expect building the sort of housing we need. The economy will then hum like a new Lexus.

This morning’s gathering at the Westin might well have been called, “Building the political will to help developers make maximum or near-maximum profit while servicing a corporate-friendly market niche.”

Maybe someone else can come up with more elegant title.

Making as much money as you possibly can isn’t just a job. It’s a way of life. And, make no mistake, the wealthy in this country have successfully pursued “structural change.” They can never get enough of it.

Down I-5 a ways, at Grace Lutheran Church in Des Moines, today’s other gathering to build political will was a much more relaxed affair. They had no corporate sponsorship. They were, however, much more comfortably dressed.

The activists and church members gathered in Des Moines do what they do with minimal resources. They’re good people who are working to make a difference. But most of their efforts are directed toward charity and good works. That whole structural change thing is a bit of an afterthought, and there’s no real funding for it anyway.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem. It’s why John Fox looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm, and it’s why we’re losing.

Downtown social worker Joe Martin challenged the attendees to “inconvenience themselves in the cause of justice.” He called us to embrace a sense of the sacred that rejects an increasingly dehumanized future and engages in a fight for justice as though something real were at stake. It was an amazing, moving, radical speech, and I hope we get to reprint it sometime.

The audience clapped politely, and then ran toward the barricades. No, they didn’t. They ate lunch. And life went on as before.