Go With God

Tonight, I attended the annual dinner of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, which this year honored Reverend David Bloom's more than thirty years of service to our community. David laid the groundwork for the ITFH somewhere between his work at the Church Council of Greater Seattle and one of his numerous faux "retirements" while he was employed as the "Faith Community Organizer" at Real Change. While that position wound up being something we couldn't sustain, David's work led to the first Building the Political Will to End Homelessness conference and the deepened involvement of congregations in homeless advocacy and service provision. Over the years, I've learned that seeds that at first don't seem to take can send down roots that remain hidden for years. Then, one day, there's a new tree for people to climb on.

It feels as though the faith community is on the verge of a turning point of sorts. The Church Council of Greater Seattle has new leadership in veteran community organizer Michael Ramos, and is more committed to their social justice mission than ever. More and more congregations are supporting SHARE/WHEEL's tent city work by hosting the encampment on their property. Numerous congregations have aligned with the Sound Alliance organizing effort for economic justice. The Archdiocesan Housing Authority is organizing churches for legislative advocacy on housing issues. Rich Lang over at Trinity is working with faith community allies to engage more deeply in this work and move through charity toward justice. The Rauschenbusch Center for Spirit and Action has roared to life and is starting to hold public speak-outs in Westlake Center.

Tonight David spoke of the difference between optimism and hope. He is not optimistic, he said, over our prospects of ending homelessness. This pessimism is well-founded. Bullshit pronouncements from the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness aside, things have been getting worse for approximately thirty years, and that trend line shows little prospect of changing.

There is, however, reason for hope. Optimism under these circumstances is just whistling through the graveyard. Hope, on the other hand, is an exercise in prophetic imagination. Hope is visionary, and is less about belief than will. Hope, said Emily Dickinson, is "the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all."

When Michael Ramos spoke on behalf of the Church Council at Camp4Unity last June, it gave me hope. That hope is sustained and furthered whenever I see people or institutions extend themselves in the service of justice. We're not winning yet, but the tide, it seems, is beginning to turn. Michael's speech is reproduced below.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, we read, “God says, this rather is the fasting that I wish; releasing those bound unjustly, setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke. Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and homeless. Then, your light shall go forth like the dawn and your wound shall be quickly healed.”

The Church Council of Greater Seattle mourns the deaths of the more than 250 women and men who were homeless and who have died in recent years. A county and city as prosperous as ours can only be considered great when we are moved with radical compassion such that the most displaced are valued with the most affluent, and that our very selves are offered as a bridge to mend the unconscionable gap between rich and poor in our midst. Homelessness is, from a faith and human perspective, a scandal that calls for a conversion of heart in all of us, lest we grow complacent and tolerant. Behind each death is a name and a life, that that to the Women in Black, Church of Mary Magadalene and Real Change, matter. In memory of these people, let us stand so that others may not fall.

Our faith traditions call us to prioritize those who are poor. The measure of our economic and social decisions is our impact on those who are most vulnerable. What is done FOR the people most affected? What is done TO the people most affected? How do they take part in the decisions that affect them? When more than 2,600 people can be counted on the streets in our county as homeless on a given night, a 15% increase in the same areas over last year, we must ask ourselves how we are addressing this priority. When one night in May, 42 people are turned away from Operation Nightwatch, a final sanctuary for those without a place to stay, the crisis is lack of shelter, not a few tents in the woods. The principle must guide the policy must guide the practice. The people who are marginalized, neglected, abandoned, homeless need to be made the basic criteria for a continuum of care that provides for shelter first even while we create new sources of housing.

As a key partner in the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County, we too believe that housing is a right and that we need to come together to provide the home and the support services for each in need. More than 150 of our congregations demonstrate their commitment to this vision each year, as well as our own programs. Yet, when there is nowhere else to go, even the legitimate health and safety considerations for our public spaces must yield to the demand for survival of those who camp in order to live. As sweeps become a matter of policy, it is these people who bear an inherent dignity who must have a say.

We appreciate the 20 additional shelter beds and the case managers who visit the tent encampments. But, the primary concern for safe shelter has not been adequately addressed. We ask the city to revisit the Tent Encampment policy so that the loopholes in it not serve as an excuse for further harm to those with whom we ought to be concerned. That would be a thoughtful follow-up to another memorial for those whom society judges, but whom we uphold and affirm as people whom God deems worthy and valuable in his sight.

Less Amelioration, More Agitation

I was on an ending homelessness panel tonight at Seattle University. The small auditorium was full. The panel covered the spectrum of approaches. Bill Kirlin-Hackett of the Interfaith Task Force sat to my left and said "No one is to your left."

He was speaking figuratively, I guess.

When it came my turn to solve homelessness in six minutes (Nancy Amidei was having entirely too much fun with her kitchen timer), I said we need less amelioration and more agitation.

I said we know how to solve homelessness because we've solved it before.

America's last period of massive homelessness, like the one we have now, was also the result of major economic dislocation. Civil War demobilization collided with industrialization to release hordes of hungry war-torn men to unemployment at a time when the rural and home-based economies were being destroyed by the factory. Between then and World War II, there were three depressions, and hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of men roamed the country in desperate search of work.

Skid Rows were born, with whole economies of cheap rooms, baths, food, booze, and sex to meet their needs. Hobo camps were ubiquitous. The homeless were a despised class, viewed with disdain and scorn by those whose positions were more secure.

World War II ended all of that with full employment, but the demobilization this time was entirely different. Even after kicking all the women and Blacks out of the factories, there would not be nearly enough work. The government had a choice.

Did they really want a to turn a bunch of deeply disillusioned hungry men out into the streets? Men who had seen war, were expert in the use of small arms and explosives, and not in the mood to take any shit?

They did not. Most of the white guys got the GI Bill, which delayed the shock by absorbing many into the university system. This was perhaps the greatest engine of class mobility this nation has ever seen. There were FHA loans that made homeownership broadly accessible. Roads were built. Ambitious public works projects meant good jobs. The 1949 Housing Act promised decent housing to all. A pact of sorts existed between government, business, and the civil sector that recognized a mutual interest in some pursuance of the common good. This led to modest but steady economic growth and declining rates of inequality right up to 1973.

Homelessness had been ended. A few small missions looked after the winos and hard cases. Nearly anyone could manage a roof over their head. There was plenty of cheap housing. The bottom rungs of it had been built before the war to satisfy a large market of migratory labor. It was still there.

Homelessness was solved by the same policies that boosted the middle-class and brought prosperity to many. Then, over the seventies and with Reagan, things pretty much went to hell. The economic restructuring this time around was globalization, and as bad as things are, they could well get much, much meaner.

Corporate control of our politics has reduced government to a means of enhancing the bottom lines of global entities run by an elite floating class of the super-rich. Prisons are big business and one in ninety-nine Americans is behind bars. I'm not making that up.

No Child Left Behind is to education what Ending Chronic Homelessness is to poverty: a big fucking photo-op smoke screen to hide the obvious fact that poor people are getting raped a little harder every day. Higher education at any university that could actually change your class standing is largely out of reach of the bottom 80%.

There is no money to rebuild the decaying national infrastructure because we're too busy shoveling dough to warlords like Dick Cheney so that they can steal Iraq'a oil and start World War III.

And housing? No money for that. Too busy cutting taxes for the rich. Grover Norquist's dream is coming true. Soon, government will be small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.

We're in some sort of post-1973 parallel reverse universe, where everything about the economy that worked for the majority has been turned into its opposite.

And then, as I gazed into a sea of impressionable young faces, I heard myself saying that the Black Panthers had it right. You need to do the work that meets people's needs and brings them together, and you have to make revolution.

And given the above, who can argue with that?

After I got home, I started thinking about what it meant that I had been out telling college students to be revolutionaries. It felt a bit like I'd turned a corner. Had I just advocated for the overthrow of the United States government? These are dangerous times for that sort of thing.

And my immediate thought was, "what government?"

Government, in a way, is a sort of a neutral entity. It's a set of administrative functions concerned with budgeting and oversight and such. The question is who owns it? Are the people in there anywhere, or has it mostly just become a vehicle for the furtherance of elite interests?

So to me, being a revolutionary is about understanding that inequality is about two sides growing further and further apart, with the benefit to one coming at the expense of the other, and that this other side is willing to do almost anything to keep what they have and get even more.

They always want more.

Revolution, in terms of a social change strategy, is really the only viable option. The power of the ruling class has to be challenged. And the bottom 80% or so of us and more have a mutual interest in taking the bastards on. From there, it's just a question of tactics.

Strategies of mitigation don't touch the logic of the capitalism that we have. If we want to end homelessness, it's a fact we have to face. And we'll all benefit when we do.

Less amelioration, more agitation. I think I'm making a bumpersticker.

The Jesus Strategy

Bill Kirlin-Hackett over at the Interfaith Taskforce on Homelessness has floated the idea that if the City persists in their aggressive campsite clearance policy, which seems more than likely, then the churches should embrace Tent Cities on their property to offer safety and support to those who are displaced. Call it a sanctuary strategy. I like it, so long as the strategy extends into an organizing campaign for a more humane and accountable City policy. I do wonder, however, how many churches and temples would sign on. Some of the most powerful and connected religious leaders in the City seem to be sitting this one out. Which brings us to our newest poll: What Would Jesus Do?

So, imagine. Jesus comes to Seattle. He's drinking too much coffee and feeling a little damp. He sees the City chasing homeless people around the greenbelts and throwing away their survival gear. He swings into action. What's he do? Drive the demons from Marilyn Littlejohn? Join the United Way Board? Or does he organize and offer sanctuary? This is a capable, multi-tasking sort of Jesus, so you can choose more than one answer. As always, vote at top right.

Of the 826 visitors that week, a full 25 weighed in on this critical issue. 18 said Jesus would organize a sanctuary strategy. 12 said he would exorcise Marilyn Littlejohn. This is a pretty high number, given that most people don't know Littlejohn, but if you did, you'd understand. Just 4 thought that JC would come onto the United Way Board. I don't know that he'd much appreciate the company. He'd probably rather be with the poor.

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.

When Matter and Antimatter Collide ...

Today, I'll spend my early morning at an Urban Land Institute forum at the Westin, listening to a multi-millionaire named Ron Terwilliger talk about the need for workforce housing in Seattle. Terwilliger's message is that tax incentives and deregulation can offer incentives to developers to build housing for moderate income people. This will reduce the inefficiencies associated with commuting and make our local economy hum like a new Lexus. The place will be crawling with developers and bureaucrats. Fun.

Then, I'll mosey on over to Grace Lutheran in Des Moines where the Interfaith Taskforce on Homelessness is once again Building the Political Will to End Homelessness. Keynote speaker Joe Martin has promised a thundering Jeremiad to knock us out of our accommodating complacency, and John Fox will be there, as always, to point out that we are losing ground on housing and need to develop a sense of urgency to match the moment. I'll join the afternoon panel on gentrification, and sometime between now and then will figure out what I'm going to say. John will come armed with charts. I will not. I will, however, reproduce John's charts here.

Afterwards, I'll try and make some sense of this phenomenon of housing advocacy in parallel universes, and try to answer the question of what would happen were those universes were to collide. Hint: Click on the picture of Spock for the answer.