It's A Wonderful Life

My 92 Corolla broke down rather spectacularly last week. I was on I-5, crawling home in heavy traffic, when the front end of my car began to resemble a dry ice fog at a KISS concert. The temperature gauge climbed into the red. I was in trouble. My inner Boston driver kicked in as I fought my way, lane by lane, to the right. I could feel the life drain from the car. "It's been 189,000 miles," she said. "What do you want from me?" We made it to the breakdown lane just after the on ramp a half mile before the 85th street exit. Ten seconds later, all the gauge lights came on and she quietly died.

"Fuck!" I explained.

I called Triple-A, raised the hood, and slowly waved a road flare like it was a sparkler that wanted to be a roman candle. It would be an hour or so, they said. The flare exhausted, I climbed down into the culvert to pee, smoked a few cigarettes, closed the hood, and tried the engine. Miraculous resurrection, by way of St. Jude. After four pitchers of water provided by the gentle smiling African immigrant giants at the Aurora AM/PM, I made it home.

Still in denial, I thought a coolant flush might do the trick. For years, I'd denied the men at Jiffy Lube this simple pleasure. Perhaps, I thought, they'd been right all along.

"We have good news and bad news," they said.

What's the good news?

"We're not charging you for your coolant treatment."

My spirits sank. What's the bad news?

"You can guess. There's a giant hole in your radiator." Subtle rivulets of green water poured from the top seam, wasted like the seed of Onan into the plastic-laced pit below.

Can I drive?

His face reflected the sudden knowledge he was dealing with a moron.

"I wouldn't," he said. "Not far anyway."

Various experiments revealed I had five miles or so before the needle neared the red and the terrible smell commenced.

One doesn't do without a car when one has twin five year-olds. Their little legs are poorly suited for long distances, and buses don't come equipped with car seats. So my work today was clear. Cancel my morning and early afternoon meetings, find a rental car near my mechanic, get downtown to work, make a crucial 3:30 meeting near U-Village, and get back to Shoreline for a 5:00 conference with my kid's kindergarten teacher. All very doable.

Just as I was leaving, staff called to say I was wanted on The Conversation at 1 and that the heat wasn't working at Real Change. I gave staff a number to call for HVAC repair, and called the KUOW producer to say I'd fit it in, but would have to do so from my shitty Verizon celphone, perhaps from the Enterprise lobby. She dubiously agreed.

I didn't tell her that the Verizon signal frequently drops. Everybody knows that.

The operation was timed like a dimestore watch. It would be fine. As I left home, my friend couldn't get her passenger door to close. We stood on an icy patch, bouncing the door back and forth, futzing with the mechanism while trying not to fall, laughing at this latest insult from The Universe. After five or six minutes of this, I blew graphite into the frozen latch from the nearly depleted tube I found in my glove box. Click. It worked. Fuck you, Universe.

We slowly worked our way across the ice of north Aurora, watching the engine gauge go from frozen to warm to hot. Ten blocks before Enterprise, we were close to redlining. The aroma of broiling antifreeze filled the air.

"Baby," I said, "We're going to Starbucks."

My Corolla gratefully rested in the cold while we went inside to nurse our respective burnt bean addictions. I politely asked the barista if they wouldn't mind turning down their annoying Christmas music while I did a phone interview at 1:05. They graciously obliged. At 12:57, the 2008 Starbuck's Christmas CD fell silent as a ron yon virgin.

Three minutes later, my cel rang. I'd be live on KUOW in a few moments with Ross Reynolds to open The Conversation. I did that thing I do under these circumstances, which is to retreat into that special place where the entire universe collapses into a triad of me, the interviewer, and my talking points. Ten minutes went by in a Blink.

I was packing up when the store manager came over to say hi, and told me about how much she likes the Real Change vendor they let work their drive through. He, too, worships the burnt bean and the symbol of the mermaid. We are legion. A filled Food Lifeline donations bin sat inside their front door. There are good people in this world, I thought. They help balance out those of us who are shits.

My car sprinted the next ten blocks without breaking a sweat. I was placed in a new KIA. "I've always wanted to drive a KIA," I smirked. They smirked back, and said that KIA actually stands for Korean Imitation Automobile. We discussed how this knowledge affected our feelings of brand loyalty. A woman who was far too smart and funny to stay in such a crappy job for long followed me the twenty blocks down Aurora to my mechanic. My needle rested happily in the middle. There was no smell. We accomplished the transfer.

I drove my virtual Korean rental car, feeling invincible. I made it downtown, to U-Village, out to Shoreline, and back to Edmonds. I felt like Lance Armstrong after the Tour de France, but before the steroids scandal.

I was standing in the dark, nearly empty parking lot of my kids' school when my cel rang. It was Rosette from Real Change, asking if I could be in at 8:30 to meet the HVAC people. "You must have worked your magic on KUOW," he said. Why? "People have been coming in all day with boxes of stuff for the survival gear give-away, saying they heard you on the radio." I smiled and felt a little like James Stewart when he discovered all wasn't lost. Everytime a bell rings, she said, an angel gets his wings.

Why I Was Arrested

I went out into Cherry Street by City Hall yesterday after camping out there with 150 of us on Sunday and waited with fourteen others to be arrested. It had been a long time coming. Simultaneous to the arrest, we flooded the Mayor's office with calls. The press coverage was huge and it was favorable. We need to do more. This is a beginning. Not an end.

Until last year, the City of Seattle would clear encampments after a pattern of neighborhood complaint identified problems needing to be addressed. It didn't happen all that often. The shelters are full and thousands remain outside. Everyone who knows anything about homelessness in Seattle knows this. The policy, therefore, had been to mostly look the other way.

Then came the condo boom. Housing costs in Seattle rose dramatically and cheap housing became even more scarce. The rental vacancy rate went below 4%. Those who lacked decent credit, had felonies, or had poor rental histories were basically fucked. They couldn't get in. The numbers on the streets rose by at least 15%. Then came the sweeps.

We started hearing whispers about a zero-tolerance policy in the Mayor's office on homeless encampments last summer, but couldn't get any on the record confirmation. Finally, a public disclosure request offered the proof we were looking for. There was the acknowledgment in black and white that policy had shifted, and a list of key sites for proactive clearances. Public employees were required to report any camp they saw, and any single report from anyone was enough to trigger a clearance. Horror stories began to surface. Homeless people complained widely of losing their stuff and of radically increased harassment.

Once we broke the story, the shit really hit the fan. The City launched a media offensive to justify their actions, focusing on filth, criminality, and drug use. Most of the media, for a time, obliged. The City recognized that their asses were hanging out all over the place and retreated for awhile to assess and address their various legal vulnerabilities.

Now, there's a set of protocols that pretends to offer help to people, yet shelter turn-aways are at a record high. They hired a couple of outreach workers, and give notice before they throw people's stuff away. They added twenty shelter beds. For 2,633 people counted surviving outside. And those were just the ones who were found. Twenty beds.

Throughout all of this, advocates were stonewalled and kept in the dark. The Mayor and his staff meet all questions with the same empty, dehumanizing mantra. We spend $40 million a year on housing and homelessness. We have a ten year plan to end homelessness. Homeless campsites are illegal, filled with debris, feces, bottles of urine, and hypodermic needles. People are being offered services.

The City sells the protocols as consistent and humane, and speaks of how liberal they are. Yet two huge loopholes were added after the public comment period that deny protections to the homeless in the majority of cases. Camps of less than three structures are unprotected. Camps that reoccur in areas that are cleared will also be denied protection. The Queen Anne sites cleared a week ago have already been reposted for repeat clearance. Within six months, it appears, no outreach, notification, or storage of possessions will be required most of the time.

The sites where homeless people frequently camp will all soon be permanently posted for immediate removal. The gloves will, once again, be off, and we'll be back to where we started, with the City doing whatever the hell they want. This isn't conspiratorial shit. This is the clear intention behind the wording of the protocols. The permanent posting strategy may not stand up to legal challenge, but it will be years before a suit is filed and a ruling made.

Meanwhile, people are being chased around and harassed. They are being driven to more remote locales, and their gear is being trashed. Their odds of survival have decreased. The stress of homelessness has radically multiplied. At Real Change, we see it everyday.

The story of organizing and committing the Civil Disobedience action at City Hall will have to wait til later. We wanted a media grand slam that was critical of the Mayor. It happened, although, as usual, print and radio were the only ones to leave the City frame behind. Both the dailies — the Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times — were great, and got the story right. The key bit from the PI was this.

"What the mayor needs to realize is that opposition isn't going to go away, it's only going to increase," said Tim Harris, one of the event's organizers and executive director of the nonprofit activist publication Real Change. "He has to negotiate with human service advocates and homeless people to come up with a more just policy and agree to some form of accountability."

The Seattle Times talked to me about four times over the course of several days, and got the story right as well. My favorite part there was ...

"We feel it's time to make the strongest statement we can, and say that we withdraw our consent from the way the city is being run," said Harris, the executive director of Real Change.

But the most amusing coverage for me was the KUOW interview, which I did at 6:10 a.m. while reclining on the broad wall next to the stairs that lead up from the 4th Avenue side of the building. As I talked on my cell, I looked out over a sea of tents and sleeping bags on City Hall Plaza.

It wasn't too early. I got up at 4 when a reporter from KOMO asked for an interview and the few hours sleep I managed that night came to an end. I guess she was worried she might get scooped.

KUOW is a major NPR affiliate, and the story was repeated several times over the morning. My favorite moment here is the short sardonic laugh I offer when asked why people don't just go to shelters.

The footage of the Civil Disobedience portion of our demonstration above is by Dr. Wes Browning. More to come.

Sweeps of Compassion?

When the Mayor appeared on KUOW’s Weekday last Monday, Greg Nickels had just given the Dalai Lama the key to the City and taken a brave stance in favor of compassion. While the show was supposed to be about Key Arena and the new grocery bag tax, the convergence of the Dalai Lama and the new protocols begged for comment.

Host Steve Sher pressed him hard.

Why only twenty new beds when your own staff says there are 100-300 homeless campers? Couldn’t Tent Cities be a solution? Isn’t this a shortsighted quick fix? Aren’t these policies punitive? Where’s the compassion?

Unfortunately, Sher chose to confront Nickels with a statement I made to Sharon Chan at the PI after the City blindsided us with the release of the protocols.

The City released paper versions of the protocols to the press two hours before making them available to advocates. Chan was scheduled to call me at 4 pm. The documents were released at 3:30.

Taking no chances, they buried the story in Saturday’s paper with a late-Friday press release.

It took me about ten minutes to find the stuff they were hiding. All camping on public property was illegal and subject to citation or arrest. No surprises there. This was in the draft and no one expected that to change.

But the City was now making a distinction between “unauthorized camping” and “unauthorized encampments.” Camping is to erect any equipment that a reasonable person would assume is for the purposes of remaining when the property is closed. An encampment is three or more structures, any of which is within three-hundred feet of the next.

In a lawyerly bit of work that few people would catch in a quick reading, the protocols are written to apply to “unauthorized encampments.” Yet all camping is illegal.

So, do those who are camped alone or in pairs rate notification, outreach, and access to shelter and services? The answer would appear to be no.

Also deeply troubling is the new recurring encampment clause, which says that sites will be monitored once cleared, and if encampments re-occur three times within a 60-day period, permanent signs will be posted and belongings will be cleared without notice.

Given that just twenty new shelter beds have been provided, and more than 2,600 people were found outside during last year’s count, one can reasonably assume that encampments are likely to return.

Call me cynical, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where within 6 months, every key site in the City will have reached this status.

There is also a provision in the procedures document that says anyone who already has a citation will not have the right to enter posted areas to retrieve possessions. The more expansive administrative rules document — which details the legal framework behind the procedures — clarifies that the previous citation rule is site-specific.

But I didn’t get that far before the press called. Everyone in the world, it seems, was trying to get the twenty-megabyte document from the City server at the same time, and the download was like molasses in January. There was no time for detailed legal analysis, and none of this was in the easily digested press release.

So when Sher asked if something I overstated to the PI was true, I was surprised to hear Greg say he didn’t know.

Sher: There’s a little bit of punitiveness in this though. If people camping on a site have been cited elsewhere they won’t get the 72 hours notice to vacate and they won’t be allowed to retrieve their belongings? Is that the rule? Is that true? That’s what Tim Harris, the Executive Director of Real Change said. He was looking at the rules and said, still seems to be punitive?

Nickels: Well, the intent is not to be punitive. The intent is for people to understand what those rules are and to provide the help that they need to be able to avoid this kind of, uh, inappropriate shelter.

Sher: But is that true though? That if they’ve been cited somewhere else they won’t get the 72 hours notice? They don’t get their belongings?

Nickels: You know, Um, Um, I don’t know.

Sher: Well, He’s quoting your rules. So, if it’s wrong you’ll tell me.

Nickels: There you go.

Then Nickels goes on to promise that everyone in the encampments “who needs services will get services” and blow smoke about how everything will be great once we’ve ended homelessness.

I was wrong, but it was still a sweet moment.

If the new policies on campsite removal were limited to the good news in the City’s press release — expanded notification time, contracted (but underfunded) outreach services, better provisions for storage, and twenty new shelter beds — we’d have grudgingly declared victory and moved on to focusing on oversight and accountability.

The Mayor’s Office has fatally undermined the legitimacy of the new protocols by sneaking in provisions that exempt those camped alone, in pairs, and, eventually, in any of the City’s key sites, from the rules. The rules are that much of the time there will be no rules.

It should surprise no one that a policy that began in secret would, after six months of process, arrive at a self-justifying set of protocols in which the secret exceptions are hidden in plain sight.

There are no provisions for independent oversight of any sort.

This brings us back to exactly where we started, with the City removing most encampments without notification, services, or storage of belongings, operating without accountability, and lying to cover their tracks.

This is not acceptable. A compassionate policy on campsite removals requires the following:

The hidden exceptions must be challenged and removed from these protocols. Otherwise, the three-camp definition and the recurring encampment clause will render the policies meaningless by greatly limiting their application.

Outreach needs to be consistent, relationship-based, and adequately funded. The zero-tolerance for campsites approach outlined in these protocols undermines the capacity to do real outreach by needlessly chasing those who are often already resistant to services from place to place.

The City Council needs to press hard for oversight and accountability. We should know how many people have been removed from encampments and where they went. If the exceptions that exist were applied, this information would offer a very limited picture of what's really happening.

While strategies and tactics still need to be worked out, this much is clear. These protocols are unacceptable.

It’s always embarrassing to get something wrong in public. I find solace in knowing Mayor Nickels gets stuff wrong too. In the space of twenty minutes on KUOW, he said he didn’t know what was in his own policies, that there was enough shelter for everyone, that homelessness would be solved by 2014, and that the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness was “on-track.”

Were these the mis-statements of a bumbling, under-informed public servant who goes on the radio without having his facts straight? Or were these the calculated and often-repeated lies routinely offered by power to justify the unjustifiable?

While you’re deciding, we at Real Change will be organizing a response. We hope you will join us.

Come Out, Come Out ...

The more the City’s crackdown on visible homelessness unfolds, the more I feel like the proverbial blind men feeling up an elephant. The aggressive City-owned property clearances that began last spring have continued unabated after advocates cried foul over brutal tactics and an absence of protocol. City policy that has emerged has more to do with addressing legal vulnerability than meeting public concerns.

Then there’s the Washington State Department of Transportation, with two unintended tragedies on their hands this year: Isaac Palmer, killed by brush clearing machinery last June in his sleeping bag, and now another “transient” dead on a construction site. WSDOT has pursued a shadowy but equally aggressive clearance strategy of its own.

The City has also placed No Parking 2-5 a.m. signs in known car camp areas. As recently as January 30th, Human Services head Patricia McInturff said on KUOW’s The Conversation that there is no real Department of Human Services response to car camping.

Well, someone somewhere has a “response.” What is this? Twenty-fucking-Questions?

Why all the bureaucratic hide and seek? What does it take to arrive at basic accountability? The practice of chasing people from place to place — while throwing away whatever survival gear work crews find — simply deepens the misery of the desperate without offering alternatives.

On March 13, the Real Change Organizing Project will sponsor a day of downtown visibility with morning, lunchtime, and evening rush hour shifts that culminates in a return to City Hall. This time, the goal is to camp on the Plaza 200 strong. Whether you spend the night or the lunch hour, we need to hear from you. Make a commitment to stand for basic human decency. Please email campout_for_change@yahoo.com today.

Deconstructing Patricia

I had the rare treat of following Seattle Human Services head Patricia McInturff on KUOW's The Conversation today. Given that my cold is going bronchial and I'm running on about 3 hours sleep, I did OK. I said "you know" too much, but hit my basic talking points. The city lies. What they say and what they do are very different. The "there is shelter available" line is a lie. These phantom "outreach workers" she keeps talking about seem to only exist in some parallel universe that few of us have seen. And to consistently describe those who struggle to survive outside as diseased, drug addicted, waste-producing, vermin attracting, criminals is to stoke the engines of ignorance and hate. Even when you call it compassion.

If you listen closely, you can hear the moment I decide to ignore Ross Reynolds' very interesting question to spend my dwindling time undermining the City's credibility.

Few realize that, in the absence of an approved policy, the City is continuing to aggressively clear sites just as before, with little to no notice or accountability. Real Change vendors have come in the last two days in a row with reports of returning to camp to find all of their survival gear and other belongings gone. No notice. No retrieval of belongings. and certainly no "outreach workers" or "shelter referrals."

So let's look at all that unused shelter capacity of which she spoke so assuredly. According to her latest newsletter there's 75 severe weather beds at City Hall and 25 for women at the Frye. Our analysis of those numbers shows City Hall Overflow with an average of 9 beds being open, and the women's beds being, on average, at capacity. During very severe weather, she says, there's a no-turnaway policy. What this actually means is that they start packing people into the rec room at the Union Hotel as well. Cool.

Between 2:30 and 5:30 am the Morning of January 5th, more than 2,600 people were counted surviving outside. 140 were counted in the overflow beds, which seems to have pretty much chewed up all that "capacity" she keeps talking about. The notion that they're checking to see if beds exist before clearing a camp, which she actually said, is ludicrous. I mean, how would that work? They clear the camps during the day. No one knows what few beds will be available where until they show up looking for shelter that night.

Let's see. What else.

She did this really cool thing with the phrase "personal property," which to most people sounds like the property that a person has. Not so. It's ID. Perhaps photos. Eyeglasses. Prescriptions. When you get right down to it, the list is really quite small.

An Encampment Workgroup Memo that turned up in one of our myriad public disclosure requests is quite clear on this point. "Any sleeping equipment (sleeping bags, cardboard, tents) found in the ROW may be disposed of immediately." This is obfuscated in the final with some lawyerly language about disposing of any "soft goods" that "may be contaminated with unknown substances."

This remains my favorite phrase in the document.

Interestingly, she did not say that the City now handles reports of encampments on a case-by-case basis, as she told the City Council last month and recently re-iterated in a communication to Nick Licata. This is probably because she got the December 11 email from Customer Service Bureau Director Darby DuComb.

"I am worried that we are getting confused.

TC want us to respond to all clean ups requested by anyone from within the City or from external customers. We are NOT reviewing them on a case-by-case basis, we are responding as usual."

Thanks for clearing that up Darby. TC is of course Tim Ceis.

What else. She seemed positively shocked to hear that advocates discovered language in the proposal that would deputize anyone the city chooses with the power to hand out camping citations.

Let me help. It's on page 11 of 14 in the Rules document, in the Notices of Exclusion Section, under paragraph 6.3.1, related to "Delegation."

6.3.1.2 The authorizing official may also delegate to others the authority to enforce on City Property these and any other applicable written or posted rules, and to issue notices of exclusion for violations.

Seems pretty clear to me. But I'm not a liar.

But the Big Lie is that the Mayor discovered that there were various departments with policies at odds with each other, and in his wisdom, directed his staff to seek consistency and compassion.

The internal documents clearly show that the Mayor's office had directed all City departments to aggressively clear encampments, and that the absence of a policy to guide this meant the gloves were completely off. It wasn't until their secret policy was uncovered that they bothered to consult City legal at all.

But here's the thing. The gloves are still off. Nothing has changed. This is their pathetic attempt to bring the law in line with existing practice, not, as would be perhaps more typical, the other way around. The painting up top, by the way, is by Rose Greenway, and is called The Liar comes bearing illusions, which we bear willingly.

But all in all, this was a good press day. In addition to a good airing of the issue on KUOW, The Stranger's Erica Barnett gets all weepy over Monday's hearing, and the Seattle PI's Editorial Board made some people I know positively giddy today with their take no prisoners 48 Hours to Scatter.

The urge to clean up parks and other areas serving as de-facto squats is an understandable one. No one likes to be faced with the misery of others. Hygiene and public safety issues with the living conditions of the homeless are certainly credible. But there's got to be a better way to address those concerns without making already-suffering human being feel like refuse. ...

City leaders should come up with a plan that focuses on making life for the homeless more, not less tolerable while building more shelters and housing for them.

It's Rude to Gloat, But ...

While the Nickels administration has been fairly effective at describing homeless encampments as dangerous, disease breeding havens for the drug-using criminal class in the print media, and in the Seattle Times in particular, yesterday's coverage of the Real Change Organizing Project protest encampment and rally was, from a City perspective, way off script.

Radio play was remarkably sympathetic and in-depth. Liam Moriarty's excellent KPLU coverage came in addition to a shorter piece within their regular newshour, so that was a two-fer. Our Organizing Director Rachael Myers went head to head with City Human Services Director Patricia McInturff on KUOW's popular news talk show The Conversation. Both delivered their messages like the seasoned pros they are, but the call-ins that followed leaned very heavily Rachael's way. I did twenty minutes on KIRO710's popular Dave Ross show, and was able to deliver some of the deeper context that's been missing so far. The interview on this clip follows Ross' opening monologue on the perplexities of the "pay it forward" coffee craze. There was a nasty bit on Dory Monson's KIRO Talk Show, but that's predictable. Peter Steinbrueck took that one on. A braver man than I. When I checked, the podcast wasn't up yet.

Television coverage was just as good. Q13's coverage was sympathetic in the extreme, and caught a good bit of the amusing Tim Ceis ambush yesterday morning. Michelle Millman at KIROtv did us right, and KING5 did a strong piece as well. While Ken Schram's KOMO monologue on symbolic help to the homeless wasn't part of our coverage, you'll want to watch it anyway. In the print realm, the PI ran a balanced piece with a photo on page one that wasn't bad at all, even if they did completely follow the City's framing. They also won my love and respect by printing an amazingly on-target guest editorial by a former greenbelt camper. The Seattle Times resisted the temptations of pack journalism and blew us off altogether. Guess my corporate lapdog poll hit a nerve.