Get Mad Like A Canadian

I stumbled across something on the Homeless People's Network tonight from Canadian health nurse Cathy Crowe on how Philip Mangano is spreading the Ten Year Plan gospel up north, much to the annoyance of those who wonder where America gets off telling anyone how to solve their housing problems. Others in Canada, however, are predictably receptive to his message.

While Canadian cities are looking at the Bush administration's approach to homelessness, the fact that the Bush administration is cutting funding to housing seems lost on Mangano's Canadian hosts. American homeless advocacy organizations in the US such as the National Coalition for the Homeless report this decade as being worse than the Great Depression for homeless people. In addition, the United States is increasingly relying on what has been dubbed "Weapons of Mass Displacement" - policies and funding decisions that limit necessary life-saving supports and spaces for people who are homeless. For example "no-feeding laws" in some American parks, increased policing and ticketing measures in downtown cores, street sweeps, removing public benches, closing public parks at night, using public works trucks to hose sleeping people down, fingerprinting homeless people who use certain shelters, all practices that create further hardships and worsen displacement.

As my friend and documentary filmmaker Laura Sky notes, "Mangano is charismatic and compelling in naming our own collective wish - a home for every resident. At the same time, his solutions are part and parcel of the conservative federal, provincial and municipal policies that brought us the problems we're experiencing right now. The mantra of those policies is: cut services, they're inefficient; cut supports, they're too expensive; eliminate shelters, they're a blight on our cities. We need housing instead, the argument goes - at the expense of support for those who will be swept into that housing. All this without addressing the economic and social conditions, which create the need for shelters.

Crowe is a founder of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, "a group of social policy, health care and housing experts, academics, business people, community health workers, social workers, AIDS activists, anti-poverty activists, people with homelessness experience, and members of the faith community" who have declared homelessness a "national disaster" and advocate what they call the 1% solution. It has a kind of simple elegance. All levels of government, they say, "should dedicate another %1 of their budgets to housing. In Canada, this would be another $2B federally and $2B locally each year.

One place that money could come from, of course, is the military. This is where, despite their freezing fucking weather and their weird devotion to the Queen, I could be content to call myself Canadian. "The Federal government will allot 8.5% ($18.2 billion) of its budget in 2007-2008 to the military. Money is now flowing towards the military at a rate 69% higher than 10 years ago."

Wow. $18.2 billion. This is why the 2002 friendly fire incident — where American bombs killed four Canadian soldiers while wounding Afghanistan's leader Hamid Karzai — wiped out about half the Canadian military. By comparison, the cost of the US war in Iraq alone is up over $547 billion.

Canada now spends 8.5% of their federal budget on the military. Outrageous. Here, in the heart of the decaying empire, it's more like 54%.

And yet, somehow, Mangano gets to walk around pretending that this isn't a problem for housing, because, after all, it's the responsibility of the localities to get the resources. He's just the vision guy. It's just assumed that the feds are tapped out, and that challenging the war economy is somehow off limits to all right-thinking people. We Americans are good at compartmentalizing.

Maybe, in ignoring that big sucking sound emanating from the Pentagon, people think they're being patriotic or something. Support the war. Screw the people (and their kids, and their kids' kids, and the Iraqi kids too. Why not?).

More and more, I think that the movement for economic justice must grow to drive the movement to end the war. It's the only way we win. This unbelievably misbegotten war is tolerated because, for most of us, it's invisible. But growing poverty, inequality, economic vulnerability, and homelessness are right under our noses everyday. Things are falling apart, and we know where the money's going. It's hardly a great leap of logic to make the connection. And yet, we continually fail to do so.

Learn from the Canadians. They're not nearly as nuts as we are.

Denial Is a Strategic Option

Apparently, the Washington State Interagency Council on Homelessness had their quarterly meeting today, and Paul Carlson — Phil Mangano's man in the Northwest over at the USICH — was there to defend the inside the beltway party line.

The WA-ICH was formed two years ago by Governor Gregoire to "create greater levels of interagency coordination and to coordinate state agency efforts with the efforts of state and local entities addressing homelessness." They seem to be doing a great job, and to have a realistic sense of what might be done right now, although the state budget picture might take some of the wind out of their sails. While today's minutes are not yet on their website, last May's offer a glimpse of realists strategically getting things done. Here's the bullets from the Re-entry Housing Program presentation.

• Efficiencies alone will not result in reducing homelessness by 50%.
• If we are going to move things forward where do we focus to maximize impact?
• This is a way to end homelessness for one demographic group - people coming out of institutions who have severe disabilities. It is well documented that by reducing recidivism and the associated impact on local hospitals, etc., costs are avoided.
• The DSHS Program for Assertive Community Treatment (PACT) team is a proven model from providing intensive services, however there is no funding for housing.
• High need/high risk offenders who are released from prisons and jails need housing and intensive services. However there is no PACT team equivalent for this group. Will there be an “ask” for an investment in the needed services?
• For veterans, full access to veteran benefits is essential.
• There may be a tie in to the local Community Health Centers.
• There is a definite tie in to the local Community Justice Centers.

Good stuff. The links between homelessness, incarceration, and the disproportionate impact on people of color make this work a place where a handful of bureaucrats can make the world a good bit more rational and just.

Paul was, by all reports, a pretty decent guy before he went over to the dark side. His most recent pre-DC post was as a dweeby but good natured technocrat at Seattle's Office of Housing. Since his migration to DC, however, Paul has helped Phil spread the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness gospel with what can only be described as evangelical fervor.

In some ways, it's an easy sell. People want to believe that homelessness can be ended without addressing all that structural change stuff like inequality and the cooptation of government by the wealthy. You get good data, shift some resources around, work the cost-benefit arguments, and wa-lah, political will materializes and homelessness ends. Easy-peasy.

Part of the data collection process is to ensure said data offers the numbers to support ones case, and Paul has developed a reputation as Mangano's dog in the fight against an accurate count. At recent issue is whether the federal definition should expand to include those in "transitional housing." This would mean resources becoming available, for example, to the 903,000 kids who attend public school under the Dept. of Education definition of homeless, but do not otherwise qualify for homeless assistance. Current federal definition excludes those homeless who are doubled up or living in poverty hotels.

When the question arose of whether the Washington State definition should include transitional housing, Paul spoke. You don't want to do this, he said, "because it's going to be really hard for you to meet your target of cutting homelessness by half if you keep counting them as homeless."

This, obviously, speaks volumes about the federal strategy to "end homelessness."

A representative from Veterans Affairs said what others were thinking. "Well, that would be very artificial. They are homeless, so we will count them as homeless, and we'll just have to reduce homelessness in real ways."

Note to Paul: We here in Washington still cling to that whole "reality-based" thing. While it doesn't make your boss look as good as, say, lying, it tends to actually help people more. Think about it.

The Logic of Annihilation

I've been reading Susan George's Lugano Report. Someone left it in the staff bathroom and I made it mine. Books come to us. Sometimes at just the right time to push us over the edge.

The premise is that a bunch of out-of-sight-rich people are anonymously convened by World Bank, IMF, and WTO types to soberly analyze how to save liberal capitalism from the contradictions of globalization and to deliver whatever conclusions they may, untainted by sentimentality or other political considerations. They publish their findings as a report, named for the exclusive Swiss town in which they convened.

They note in passing that while globalization produces widening inequality, the gains of one pole do not come at the expense of the other. Wealth is being created. That some "losers" don't share in the bounty is another, unrelated, matter.

Philip Mangano said something very much like this to me once. We were having dinner, back when he was new and I hadn't entirely come out as the enemy. As far as I know it was his first Seattle visit. We reconnected as Boston acquaintances.

As Phil and I, two over-privileged white guys whose most pressing problem at the moment was the interruptions of the over-solicitous waitstaff, sat there sorting out the future of the homeless, we kept coming back to the same issue, mainly because Phil kept dodging the question: what about inequality?

The New York Times Magazine had just documented for the thousandth time since the Reagan administration that the gap between the rich and poor is wider than ever. How could the Bush administration fix homelessness without discussing economic justice?

Phil, staring at his pasta, became uncharacteristically silent. When he finally spoke, it was to say that people getting rich had little to do with others becoming poor. While a rising tide, he admits, does not lift all boats, it does not follow that big ships sink little ones (my metaphor, not his).

I imagine this isn't an uncommon opinion in some circles.

After dismissing the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights as out of date and defining any downward transfer of wealth or resources as unrealistic, the commission comes to the heart of the matter.

There are simply too many people who have no value, and their sustenance drags down everyone else. In the global economy, individual human rights have become an unsustainable anachronism. The logic of the past no longer holds.

"We have ... lost touch with the notions of collective offence and the greatest good of the whole. This good may sometimes necessitate coercion and sacrifices which our era no longer recognizes as legally or morally justifiable. Our societies are hard put to apply the concept of collective responsibility, much less that of collective guilt for the state of the Commonweal.

The proof is that we still consider it 'ethically correct' that illiterate, unemployable, superfluous, and degenerate people continue to proliferate and to propagate as much as they like; to the point that judgments such as this one cannot even be expressed in public without immediate censure, pious denunciation, and, in certain contexts, legal action. Plato, Aristotle, and Tertullian wouold have been dismayed by this state of affairs, just as they would have been astonished by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The world population, they recommend, should be reduced by about 2 billion people in twenty years, or by about a hundred million people a year over two decades.

For this to happen, however, the commonsense of things needs to change. People would not, without careful groundwork being laid, come to accept the idea.

What makes this book both so brilliant and disturbing is that the data going into the analysis is real. There are ruling class biases, but she's not making anything up. Her grasp of the literature and culture of global capitalism is complete and her feel for the bureaucratic mindset is astonishing. The effect is chilling, and all too real for comfort.

It is plain that the market, on its own, cannot create mass welfare under present demographic conditions and that these must consequently be corrected. For genuine population control to become acceptable, a new culture of thought and opinion must be instituted; one which does not assume doctrinaire and unlimited personal freedom as its starting point or 'human rights' as its fulcrum.

She goes on to describe the various superstructural changes that might be employed to bring about this shift, changes that use available educational, policy, and media apparatus to chip away at the old order and usher in the new.

This is a fantasy. While George extends current logic to its conclusion, we're not there yet. But it's where we're going.

The other day I watched a guy call for the "euthanization" of drug dealers at a City Council meeting. He said that's what "we" would do.

"On the fourth conviction, we're going to euthanize him. I know this sounds drastic, but it is the leverage tool to get compliance to stop the bleeding of taxpayers dollars for prisons and police officers. It addresses the problem to the point."

Who the hell is we? I don't think it's too early to start asking this question. This, I've been thinking, is how it begins. People like him start pushing the limits. Maybe they start running for office. Toss in a terrorist attack and a depression, and all bets are off. Things would get very ugly very fast.

These are not normal times.

This is part of why I find the new enthusiasm for homeless sweeps, with its focus on the criminality and public health risk of outdoor survival, so incredibly disturbing. As community after community seeks to actively criminalize squatting on public land, the logic of global capitalism and surplus people is several orders removed from the bureaucratic imposition of order. And yet, it is there.

People are being removed and criminalized without regard to their rights or need for survival, and this is already acceptable to many. At bottom, their removal is a by-product of heightened 'quality of life' expectations that co-occur with rising property values. Their misery is inconvenient.

The equation runs like this: camping on public land is illegal, therefore, all campers are in violation of the law and engaged in criminal activity. Arrest them, or at least make them leave. For this to work, under present notions of morality, there must be an alternative. One needn't bother making the alternative credible. No one of any consequence is watching all that closely.

The warm pretense of services softens the glare of the hard icy terrain. We're on the slope, and we're sliding.

Screw Those People

Ever wonder where the homeless people being displaced by Seattle's aggressive new campsite clearance policy are supposed to go? Here's the simple answer: somewhere else. The rural homeless are relatively invisible and, unlike the urban poor, don't especially bother the rich. So, no Ten Year Plan for them. This excellent article from High Country News offers a glimpse of the growing rural homelessness problem, to which not much of anyone is paying attention. Here's my favorite paragraph:

Philip Mangano, head of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, coordinates the federal response to homelessness — and he agrees that it’s harder for rural areas to get federal money. But “rural folks need to get beyond the idea that someone’s going to come from Washington to solve their problem,” he says. “They have to be strategic and creative in fashioning a solution.”

Mitch Snyder Lecture, Cambridge, 2007

Below is the text from my speech at First Church Cambridge on Sunday, where I gave the annual Mitch Snyder lecture. It's actually a reconstruction of the speech, since I spoke from notes, and my attempt to record the thing failed. Rumor has it that a plaque is in the mail. The photo above is another gem from the JwP archives. I need to check this against news clippings, but I think this is the 1991 demonstration where several hundred of us stormed the statehouse and there were multiple arrests. I was in a room with Statehouse security, State Patrol, and Boston cops that morning to discuss CD arrangements. They set up booking for us right in the basement. Very convenient. I'm the guy with the bullhorn

When Jim invited me out for this he said I could say anything I liked, and insult anyone I wanted, but that I couldn’t swear. So, to build in some insurance, I picked these up on the way here. They’re a special kind of eggs. They don’t have any carbs. Say’s so right here. “No carbs.”

So I’m going to hand these off. Pass them around. If I let fly with an F-bomb, throw. Aim for the head. It’s about Mutually Assured Destruction, because I’m not sure what I’ll do if anyone actually throws one.

Jim titled this “How to Really End Homelessness,” although he said I didn’t have to talk about that. And that I could mock it if I liked. But that’s actually what I’m here to talk about.

The first thing I wondered was why didn’t Jim just invite Phil Mangano. I actually pronounce his name Philip F. Mangano. You can ask Jim what the F stands for. But he’s THE guy. He’s a sort of a native son here who’s become Bush’s homelessness Czar. He has a couple of lines that he likes to use.

He says that he’s from Massachusetts, and he’s an abolitionist, and that Republicans ended slavery and that they’ll end homelessness too. And somehow people don’t throw eggs.

He also says that the solution to everything is more data. No longer, he says, will we rely on “conjecture and speculation.”

I don’t think we necessarily need more data. I think we need more resources.

When I do my class I ask the students to think of the federal commitment to end homelessness as a sort of a zen koan. That’s an apparent absurdity, like the sound of one hand clapping, and if you think about it long enough you break through into new levels of consciousness.

So, here we have what has arguably been the most hostile administration to the interests of the poor in 70 years. They’ve slashed antipoverty programs and shoveled money to the wealthy as tax breaks, and they’ve continued the assault on public housing. McKinney-Vento, the program that federally funds homeless shelters and such, was increased by $70 million over 2002-2006. This was a great victory for the homeless.

Over 2004-2006, funding for HUD was slashed by $3.3 billion. And the Bush administration says every chance they get that they’re ending homelessness. HUD just had a press conference last week to say chronic homelessness, due to their good work, is down by 12%.

So, it’s a zen koan, and I’ll come back to that. But meanwhile, think about it. Meditate.

I think we can end homelessness. We’ve done it before. I teach a class on homelessness and I’ve noticed that twenty somethings have often grown up with it and think this is the way it’s always been. Those who are older know different. But you might be surprised to know that we’ve had mass homelessness before, and we ended it.

The previous period of homelessness, like our own, was rooted in major economic dislocation. The Civil War ended, and the demobilization left hundreds of thousands of men, mostly white men, uprooted and without work. The end of the war coincided with the replacement of an agrarian and home-based economy with the factory system of labor. In the space of a few decades the populations of the rural and urban areas basically flipped.

The factories kept their labor costs down with women, children, and immigrants. Blacks were largely kept in the south as cheap agricultural labor through a system of terrorism. The railway system was new, and provided a means for white men to travel in search of work, and enormous numbers did. They were despised and feared.

There were three depressions, two in the late-1800’s, and then the Great Depression.

But they roamed the country, and a whole infrastructure, a market solution, arose to meet their needs. Areas like Seattle’s skid road and Chicago’s main stem arose to house and shelter them in cheap housing and missions. There were hobo camps. In Seattle, by the 30’s a vast Hooverville of shacks and tents, with a Mayor, a people’s college, and streets with names, arose.

Most people think it was the New Deal that ended the depression, but it wasn’t. It was the war, which created full employment. The men who could went to fight, and women took jobs. People of color had new employment opportunities. The shantytowns emptied out.

After the war, government was not about to have millions of hungry, disillusioned, war hardened men trained in the use of arms wandering the country. That did not seem like a good idea.

So a new era began. Public housing was built. Suburban home ownership became readily available through cheap FHA loans. There were public works programs to build roads and such. There was the GI bill to send people to college, one of the greatest engines of class mobility this country has ever seen.

Of course, this wasn’t available to everyone. It happened within a context of institutional racism, and black people weren’t generally getting the GI-bill. There was red lining to determine who got those housing loans. The blacks who got work during the war were forced out of the factories.

But the shantytowns did empty. More important, there was the Fordist deal that said we need our workers to be consumers as well, and that there was a balance of interests to be maintained, and that meant a regulatory government, corporate CEOs who considered the public interest, and strong organized labor.

From 1945-1973, there was steady economic growth averaging 3.8%, and the gap in inequality became more and more narrow.

You might have noticed that each of these things, access to higher education, easy access to the housing market, public housing, and work for anyone who needs it, are the very things we now lack. In fact, each of these is going in the wrong direction as we become a more and more unequal society.

Worse, the relationship between capitalism and democracy has become unhinged. There is little left in place that looks out for the public interest.

This looks like a pretty sophisticated audience. I probably don’t need to go too deeply into the causes of contemporary homelessness.

There was another major economic dislocation. That was deindustrialization. The internet and the shipping container greatly accelerated the globalization of the economy, and the rules changed. We went from being a manufacturing based economy to a service and information economy. What Barbara Ehrenreich calls the Kmart-Bloomingdales economy, and is becoming the Value Village-Tiffanies economy. Lots of competition for lousy jobs at the bottom end, and well-rewarded work for those who have the skills, education, and background.

There was deinstitutionalization, where these inhumane mental health hospitals were closed down to move people into the community where they would have neighborhood-based services. The second part never happened, and people just got dumped on the street.

Housing stopped being a basic human need and turned into a speculative commodity. Urban renewal wiped out the cheap pre-war housing. One person’s housing is another’s urban blight, and it became condos, parking lots, and new business towers.

Then, of course, came the Reagan years, with its supply side ideology that strengthened the power of business, weakened labor, and attacked the social services safety net. And it’s been that way since. And there was the attack on public housing. The past three decades have been the story of the feds getting out of housing.

Over the 80s, homelessness in American cities tripled and quadrupled. That’s what we were seeing and responding to during those years of homeless activism here. There was a crisis in the streets. But even after, homelessness tended to rise each year by double digits. That’s slowed recently with the strength of the economy, but I wouldn’t make too much of that.

Inequality has steadily increased for more than thirty years to now be at its widest ever, and the rate seems to be accelerating.

So lets come back to our zen koan about the federal commitment to ending homelessness.

There was an important article that pops up a lot in the academic literature by a Columbia University urban planning professor named Peter Marcuse. It was published in 1986 in, prepare to be frightened, Socialist Review, and was called Neutralizing Homelessness. One of the reasons this article amazes me so much is that it is so very prescient.

Marcuse says that massive homelessness in a society as affluent as our own constitutes a legitimation threat to the government, because it really doesn’t feel right that we have to step over people in the street. We might start wondering why it is that our economic system is failing so many people.

But government, he says, is on the horns of dilemma. To ignore the problem is to appear illegitimate and unjust. But to do something about it, really do something about it, is to undermine the whole wage labor system upon which everything rests. So, what do you do. You make a big production of appearing to do something.

This rests on a handful of techniques, and you’ll recognize them all. You drill way down into subpopulations and you obsess over data. This makes it an issue for specialists and helps to divide and conquer.

You isolate the problem, both intellectually and physically. Turn it into a technocratic human services issue and divorce the discussion from poverty and inequality. Move the homeless people themselves away from the rest of us where we don’t see them, and when we do, we are frightened.

You deny. This mainly has to do with low-balling the numbers through narrow definitions and various other tricks.

And you victim-blame. It’s not about structural unemployment. It’s not about institutional racism. It’s not about poverty and widening inequality. It’s about screwed up people that us middleclass do-gooders need to fix.

The goal, then, isn’t to end homelessness at all. It is to convince the politically active middle class that we’re ending homelessness, and to reduce the evidence.

I often say it’s like a fat man running. There’s lots of visible effort, but not a lot of progress.

But I do have some good news. Bet you weren’t expecting that. But the thing is, it’s couched in bad news.

We’ve already talked about widening inequality. Real incomes for most of us have been largely flat since 1973. But the things that have grown more expensive most rapidly are the same things that make us middle-class, or offer access to the middle-class. Homeownership. Higher education. Decent healthcare. The middle-class is feeling very squeezed, and they are.

Think of how many homeless people you know who are unemployed or underemployed but not receiving unemployment. They’ve dropped out of the unemployment stats. So have all those who are in prison. There’s a huge structural unemployment issue that the statistics hide. 1 in 99 people in the United States is in prison or jail. One in 31 live under the supervision of the corrections system. Since the 70s there has been a five-fold increase in incarceration rates. The war on drugs has racialized incarceration and poverty. Bruce Western here at the Kennedy School talks about how the hugely disproportional number of blacks in the prison system is an engine of racialized inequality, due to the reduced employment and earning prospects.

I was talking to a friend who works at the ACLU yesterday, and he says he sees it as the newest incarnation of the 3/5s of a man rule for voting, since most of those people are disenfranchised as voters once they’re felons.

Inequality is also widening because government and the democratic process have been captured by corporate interests who see democracy as just one more means to seek advantage and build their bottom lines. The big money, lobbyists, and lawyers that they throw into the legislative process totally sidelines authentic citizen participation.

And all of these things are being talked about more. Poverty is coming back on the agenda. And not because we want to do something for others. It’s because we need to do it for ourselves. The middle-class being squeezed and the growing incarceration rates and increasing inequality and homelessness are all part of the same thing, and we’re starting to figure out that we're in this together.

The strongly-felt economic vulnerability of the middle class offers a basis for helping to address the true causes of homelessness as well, because it’s not just about helping them. It’s about looking out for ourselves as well. And history shows, whenever there’s been lasting broad-based, structural change, it’s benefited the majority of us.

I really see the Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, as conspiratorial as this sounds, as being the superstructure through which the federal government neutralizes the issue. It’s depoliticized and reduced to a technocratic approach to a social services delivery problem. The focus is on chronic homelessness, which you may read as visible homelessness. This comes at the expense of other sectors. The chronically homeless are about ten percent of the whole and they’re the most visible.

There was just an article in the New York Times about how family homelessness in Massachusetts is growing, and they suspect it’s growing elsewhere as well. You just have the means to track that here because of some prior legislation.

And communities, if they want federal funding to help with homelessness are forced to buy in. The grants are evaluated on a points system. And you get points for having an HMIS database system, and you get points for having a ten year plan. There’s over 300 of these things now, and every time a Bloomington, Indiana adopts a plan, Philip F. Mangano flies out to do his Saint Francis of Assisi routine and his rah rah show about how we’re really ending homelessness. And there’s enough truth in it, if you view things narrowly enough, for it all to look pretty good, and people buy it.

But what’s really happening is that, in the post-industrial era, cities have had to reinvent themselves to remain viable, and are increasingly becoming islands of wealth. I wrote an article. I called it, Quick, Hide the Poor. The Rich are Coming.

Various cities adopt various strategies. Some go the sports stadium route, which doesn’t usually really work. Some go for the urban upscale consumption draw, to compete with the malls and draw shoppers downtown with various amenities and restaurants. Some go for the cultural center thing. Seattle’s done all of these. We have two new stadiums, a revitalized upscale downtown shopping center, a new symphony hall, an expanded art museum, a new outdoor downtown sculpture park.

But we’ve also attained the biggest prize of all: we’re a port city, and a command-control center for global capital. Corporations will almost always move their manufacturing where labor’s cheapest, but there are other functions, which for purposes of flexibility they generally outsource, that they’d rather keep local. Legal, accounting, marketing, etc. And they don’t want to be dealing with guys in Tokyo. They want to be able to meet in each others’ conference rooms and send documents back and forth by bicycle courier.

This is where the winners in this economy work, and increasingly, it’s where they live. Last year, Seattle raised the height restrictions on downtown condo development, and all the developers raced to city hall to get their permits in first. There’s a crane every few blocks downtown. 5,000 or so units with an average value of $750,000 are going up downtown in the next few years.

In just the few blocks surrounding the new symphony hall, the new art museum, and the Pike Place Market, a quaint historic market with a stunning view of the Sound, where you can get your fresh baked bread, fresh fish, and organic vegetables and shop for crafts, there are four luxury towers going up with a total of 506 units. Average value: two million dollars.

Seattle is an extreme example, but this is happening in cities everywhere. What’s also happening is an increased policing of the urban poor, and new laws that criminalize what they do. Camping, sleeping in parks, sitting on sidewalks, panhandling, etc.

I was just at Grendels this morning and the bartender told me — I had the steak and eggs. It’s just where they seated me — that he was at a neighborhood meeting where the police chief said there would be a greatly expanded police presence soon in Harvard Square. And that they had trained the police to understand the various homeless subpopulations (criminal class, alcoholic, mentally ill) and to respond to them each appropriately.

Cops aren’t social workers. “Hi. I’m the police. I’m here to help.” This is about what’s happening everywhere. Driving homeless people away, and getting the numbers down.

In Seattle, we’d been hearing rumors of a zero-tolerance policy of homeless encampments, but we couldn’t get anyone in city government to confirm this. So we put out a bunch of freedom of information requests. We just FOIA’d everyone. To our great surprise, we found the smoking gun email we were looking for. It said that the policy had shifted from one of tolerance with clearances triggered by neighborhood complaints to proactive, monthly, clean-ups, with a list of ten targeted sites. Nine of the ten were within the one-night count area. Most were very urban, and not even in greenbelts or near residential neighborhoods.

But the best part was that the city was using Department of Corrections labor to clear the sites, with armed police back-ups, and they were just throwing people’s stuff away. Slashing up their tents, and destroying their belongings. They were putting up signs one day ahead of time saying they were doing a clean-up, and that if you need help, you should call the Community Service Officers.

The Mayor defunded that program two years ago. When you call, you get a “number disconnected” message.

And it was a secret policy. The city council didn’t know. Neither did the Committee to End Homelessness in King County. They Mayor is on their Governing Board, but they weren’t informed.

This isn’t about ending homelessness. It’s about eradicating the evidence.

There’s a carrot and a stick to the Ten Year Plans. The carrot is Housing First. This is the notion that it’s less expensive to just house someone and provide services than to have them cycling through jails, hospitals, and shelters. And it’s true. It is. The problem is that our ability to do this runs up against the limitations of local resources, because little or nothing is coming from the feds.

I always say that federal funding levels are a precise calibration of maximal cooptation for minimal funding. Homelessness goes for about $1.5 billion.

Which leads to a reliance on other forms of simple repression to get those numbers down. Every year there’s a count — for some reason the federal government requires it to be in the last week of January — and success is measured by how those numbers look.

The Ten Year Plan focus on ending homelessness is fixated on chronic homelessness because that’s the visible homelessness. When that goes away, the problem as far as we can see ceases to exist. The affluent few who are taking over the urban cores won’t have their suburban comfort zones challenged, and the investments of those who have bet heavily on the urban condo boom will be protected, and that’s what this is really about.

And the big attraction is that we get to end homelessness by a sort of a magic trick. Through the data, the technology, our great sophisticated understanding of the problem, we’re targeting resources and making a difference. But the thing about magic tricks is that they are based in illusions.

It’s not real.

There are no short cuts. Ending homelessness is about ending poverty, and ending poverty is about building for power. We whine and we say, “Oh, we tried that. It’s too big. It will never work.” Our expectations on that score have been very reduced. That’s — don’t throw eggs — crap. We don’t have a choice.

Coming together to challenge inequality, to build power, is in our own self-interests, and it’s also the only way we can really end homelessness. I’ll take questions.

Families: The Next Big Thing

The news from Massachusetts this week is that family homelessness is up dramatically. There is a "right to shelter" law in that state that requires an accurate count of families in shelter. In other states, the numbers are less clear, but anecdotal evidence suggests that Massachusetts, where the number of homeless families is now up to 1,800 from 1,400 in June of last year, is not unique.

Not surprising. Federal funding priorities in recent years have been targeted to the elimination of visible homelessness, and local efforts have largely followed the funding. Meanwhile, the sorts of supports that make the difference between mere poverty and homelessness — food stamps, housing assistance, childcare support, access to health care — have all lost ground.

The argument has often been made by the Bush Administration's US Interagency Council on Homelessness and their lap dogs at the National Alliance to End Homelessness that ending homelessness is much easier than ending poverty or solving the housing crisis.

This is true. But only if you're talking about visible homelessness. If you're at all concerned with the other, more invisible, ninety percent of homeless people who don't look like winos, then things get a little more complicated.

When a community commits to housing with services for those with the most severe addictions and mental illness, visible street homelessness will most certainly decrease. When this is combined with intensified policing of the poor, as is the case in nearly all Ten Year Plan cities, you can get those numbers down even further. The business of ending homelessness is good for business.

But this isn't ending homelessness. It's reducing the evidence of homelessness while poverty increases and affordable housing becomes more scarce. It's classic Bush administration perception-management smoke and mirrors.

The next load of shit coming down the pike from the USICH will be Ten Year Plans to End Family Homelessness. This promises to be a good deal trickier.

The first planning conference, sponsored by the NAEH will be hosted right here in Seattle this February. Philip fucking Mangano is already telling us how solving family homelessness will be all about the data.

The overall number of homeless people is up from a few years ago, Mangano said, but nobody can pinpoint an exact number of families because reporting requirements vary widely from state to state.

“Our desire would be to have many more states step up and track the data,” Mangano said. “Research and data, that’s what should drive the resources that we make available. Instead it’s often anecdote, conjecture and hearsay that does that.”

Here's a radical idea. Maybe solving family homelessness isn't so much about the data as it is the resources. Maybe if the feds weren't doing their best to kill public housing and routinely slashing other supports for low-income people, fewer families would be in such desperate situations.

Maybe, if we spent less time tracking data and engaging in gut-busting bureaucratic exercises to chase a few crumbs of federal funding, and more time demanding the government be less beholden to corporations and the wealthy and more concerned for the welfare of ordinary people, we'd see finally some real results.

If it were up to me, one message would come through loud and clear this February. No Resources, No Plan. The feds don't get to put us through their hoops and look all concerned and active on the issue of family homelessness unless they start walking their talk. Otherwise, it's just more smoke and mirrors.

What Zero Tolerance for Camping Means

I have it on good authority that Seattle has a zero tolerance policy for homeless encampments. This is not a policy that, so far as I know, has officially been acknowledged. Here's how it looks. An encampment is discovered. Police or some other functionaries are quietly dispatched. Belongings are disposed of. Warnings are given to not return. Most people never see it or notice

But stop a moment to consider the meaning of "zero." Not one. Zero.

The reality of this came home this morning when a vendor stopped me as we passed each other outside of Real Change. This guy is around sixty. Quiet. Gentle. Built strong. The city is his home. Literally. He beds down outside every night.

"The police came up to me in my sleeping bag last night and told me I needed to get into a shelter," he said. " Apparently this happened near midnight in some out of the way spot in Queen Anne.

The joke here, in case you're not laughing yet, is that the shelters are full and are turning people away each night.

"They said they wouldn't ticket me this time," he said, "but I needed to go. Are the shelters federally funded."

This vendor believes that if he goes to a shelter, the people who are watching him will know, and he'll lose his social security benefits. He's eligible in another five years.

"I've darn near lost everything," he said. "I can't afford to lose that too."

This was a guy who can take care of himself, but he still reminded me of a frightened child.

It was just the thing I needed to renew my feelings of rage for the day.

It's almost always something.

I tried to reassure him that there was no relationship between shelter and his benefits, but he looked dubious. If you've ever tried to reason with schizophrenia you know that I mean.

Afterwards, I considered his odds of living to collect social security and decided they weren't all that great.

This is how Seattle will eventually achieve that twenty percent decrease in "chronic homelessness" that they presently need to lie about. If you set things up so that contacts with police are more frequent and threats of arrest, ticketing, and fines follow, people will eventually get the idea and go somewhere else. Somewhere not quite so urban, where they're not being counted with quite the same meticulous precision. In LA, the police go out to the urban camps to ostentatiously wake people up and count them every two week, and then feed the GPS data into a GIS system, This has to be seen to be believed. While some locales are more extreme than others, the pattern is similar everywhere.

City goes upscale to reinvent itself as a center of affluent consumption and convenient enviro-friendly urban living in these challenging times of sink or swim capitalism, and the authorities are enlisted in helping the homeless learn that they're no longer welcome. Meanwhile, business, philanthropy, government, human service providers and others are focused on solving chronic homelessness through Housing First.

The cops provide the stick when no one's looking. We all congratulate ourselves on our ability to offer carrots. End result: they go away. We declare victory over homelessness. Woo-hoo!

I've actually noticed a new phrase entering the lexicon alongside ending "chronic homelessness" and "street homelessness." We are now out to "reduce visible homelessness."

This, at least, is refreshing in its honesty. Here it crops up near the end of a City of San Diego press release. Here's a guy running for office in San Fransisco with an anti-visible homeless plank in his platform.

Here, as well, is a fascinating bit I found in a summary of a Law School journal article.

Part Two describes the evolution of homeless legal advocacy. First, it looks at the initial wave of litigation during the 1980s over the right to emergency shelter for the homeless. It then examines the second phase of litigation during the 1990s that challenged the attempts by municipalities to reduce the visible homeless population through various measures, such as anti-vagrancy, anti-camping, and "quality of life" ordinances. While this litigation has led to important victories and captured the public's attention (though not always its wholehearted support), it remains only a part of the picture. Suing over the right to emergency shelter or the right to panhandle on streets or sleep in parks is critical to many homeless people, but it does not address the underlying causes of homelessness, such as the crisis of affordable housing, decreasing income and public benefit levels, and lack of access to other needed services.

Here's a good one. The US Interagency Council on Homelessness' Philip Mangano, the man for whom my contempt know no bounds, met with the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty last August and agreed to work with them to end the criminalization of homeless people.

How the hell is he gonna do that? That's half of his strategy.

According to the agreement letter that the first meeting produced, there should be a follow-up meeting happening right around now. Can't wait to hear how that's working out.

Genesis of a Misinformation Campaign

1.) United Way King County releases a press statement announcing their campaign to raise $25 million to build 1,000 units of housing for chronically homeless people. The press release includes a statement that chronic homelessness in Seattle has been reduced by 10% annually two years in a row.

2.) Nobody notices until the US Interagency Council on Homelessness quotes this misinformation on their website, and I draw attention to the problem that this claim is unsupported by any facts.

3.) United Way of King County gets embarrassed, and excises the offending statistic from the original press release that is posted on their website.

4.) A reporter from Dallas/Fort Worth's Star Telegram writes another one of those annoying "Phil Mangano is the best thing that ever happened to homeless people since hot soup and army blankets" articles, which states that Seattle has reduced chronic homelessness by 20%.

5.) Outraged local activist contacts said reporter to ask where he's getting his information. Reporter produces the map above, received as part of his press materials from the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, thus perfectly illustrating Mark Twain's famous dictum that "There are three kinds of lies: lies. damn lies, and statistics."

The Devil Wears Brooks Brothers

There was a time when I could self-induce a near stroke simply by Googling Philip Mangano, the Bush appointee who heads the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. I knew Phil in a former life when I was active in Boston. For awhile he was the Cambridge Shelter Commissioner. That was a sweet gig. No one really knew what he did, but he was great at it.

He also ran the Boston shelter providers trade association for awhile, which was not to be confused with the advocacy coalition that actually did things for poor people. This was the coalition that did things for service providers.

Phil was widely regarded as an oleaginous chameleon in a nice suit.

So when he got reinvented as the Bush administration's maverick crusader to end homelessness, it sort of made sense.

He and I had dinner together about five years ago, back when he was still new and I was still sort of giving him the benefit of the doubt. He had this stagey "down with the people" routine that I found really annoying, and would affect instant intimacy with anyone who was homeless as he asked for their story and felt their pain.

I guess he still does that.

He had all the elements of his rap down even then. There was the "Massachusetts Abolitionist" line. "Republicans ended slavery and they'll end homelessness too." I did my best to try to pin him down on whether he was a D or an R but he wasn't talking.

There was also the evangelical belief in the power of data and in Housing First, although back then he was still promising that the feds would offer resources. He's pretty much backed off of that one. He was also saying that federal housing policy should focus on those under thirty percent of median income. He doesn't say that anymore either.

When I asked how you could end homelessness without addressing deepening poverty or widening inequality, he said that affluence and poverty were unconnected.

I wonder if most Republicans think that? How convenient.

So, I'm a Phil watcher. It's astonishing to me that this guy can walk into a room full of homeless advocates anywhere in the United States and not get lynched. I used to go nearly apoplectic over his press.

Now I just think it's kind of funny.

Take this article, for instance, Abolitionist Apostle, where he was awarded Governing.com's 2006 public official of the year award. He compares himself to Saint Francis of Assisi. Phil Fucking Mangano, the guy who hobnobs with the powerful, is known for his finely tailored suits, always flies first class, and takes limos instead of cabs.

This article, like many, discusses how Phil's work is a "spiritual calling."

When I really want to torture myself, I read his Religion & Ethics interview, in which he utters the words "I think it simply reminds us that ultimately the issue of homelessness is a spiritual issue. It's not really an ideological issue, it's not a political issue, it's not an economic issue," and again refers to his "Franciscan nature." But if you're really looking to be entertained, skip to the part where he talks about Simone Weil. "She is a patron saint of mine, I would say. When I read her words, it's pretty much sacramental to me."

Another story from New Orleans captures his big vision, no substance style nicely.

"Those same voices have been around for a long time," he says, his voice rising as he heads toward a big point. Those same voices told Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that slavery wouldn't end and that women couldn't be equal, he says. They told Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn that the Iron Curtain would never fall, told Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu that apartheid would never end.

"They were wrong then -- and they're wrong now," Mangano says.

Nice. The day he can reconcile his boss' constant attacks on the poor end 'ending homelessness" will be the day he can invoke Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu without making me want to puke.

But no search is complete until you've seen the Philip Mangano Quote Page.

Here's one that you're better off not over-thinking: “We've been bailing the leaky boat of homelessness ... only to see more people fall in.”

Metaphor isn't one of his gifts.

Another of his favorite lines is that “The very definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.” He stole this from Albert Einstein, but it's a good one.

The feds take $52 billion in federal housing dollars away and replace that with $1.5 billion in money for homeless programs, and then wonder why homelessness isn't going away. I'll bet Einstein could figure that one out, even if Phil can't.

Fighting the Good Fight in DC

Maybe there's hope after all.

Tony Lee thinks so. Tony is the lobbyist for Poverty Action and is one of the distinguished old men of our movement. When he says something, it's usually a good idea to listen.

A few weeks ago we found ourselves at the same event, and as Speaker of the House Frank Chopp went on about something or another in the next room, we retreated to the food table and went to work on those little fruit tart pies that always show up at these things. I tried to sell Tony on my Phil Mangano bounty offer, and described how the homeless ten year plans were misleading our movement, ignoring poverty, and providing cover for the federally led slaughter of the poor. I admitted to having gone a little bit insane recently.

Tony said I should relax, because the national poverty agenda had new momentum and unity and would basically outflank the "advocacy" whores who have sold out poor people in the name of growing the poverty industry.

He didn't actually say "advocacy whores." But I'm sure that's what he meant.

There's some encouraging evidence that he's right. This Thursday, a beltway press conference will be held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act. While an earlier post here compared national homeless advocates to yappy little dogs, that now seems unfair. It has been pointed out that yappy dogs have done little to deserve such a comparison.

But more to the point, a consensus statement of national level homeless advocates has been drafted, and the ten year plan strategy is nowhere to be found. In fact, the statement addresses the deficiencies of the federally driven policy alternative quite explicitly.

There is none of the rah-rah "we're winning against homelessness" crap that Mangano and company seem to live for. There is explicit recognition that McKinney-Vento is necessary but not sufficient. There is a call for the feds to dramatically expand their role in providing housing. There is recognition that the attack on poor people's programs must be halted and reversed. The civil rights crisis that exists for homeless people is named, and there is a call for a wage-led strategy to reduce poverty.

This is very good news. While the US Interagency Council on Homelessness and the National Alliance, by virtue of superior resources and political clout, have made the Ten Year Plan paradigm seem like the only game in town, a quiet revolution has bubbled underground.

I got a hint of this last week when a homeless advocate from a southeastern state called to talk. He found my blog when he Googled "philip mangano is the devil." Myself and the staff at WRAP helped him with material for a presentation at the NAEH conference.

Also revealing is the fact that an NAEH conference workshop on McKinney-Vento turned into a minor revolution. NAEH organizers had set up the workshop to only promote CPEHA (the version they favor), and dismissed alternative legislation with the following sentence: "There are two other proposals, the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act of 2007 (HEARTH) (HR 840) and the Administration's Homeless Assistance Consolidation Act of 2007, which has not yet been introduced."

Workshop attendees revolted, and shared their own comparisons of the competing versions of legislation. As one person relayed, "The folks that I talked to were disgusted. That is sloppy, misleading, and irresponsible. That is pretty much how they felt and I know first hand that they complained about it."

This week's press conference is more evidence still. The Ten Things to End Homelessness list is basically a big fuck you to Phil "I love Project Connect and Ten Year Plans" Mangano. Take a look:

1. Assist currently homeless people by reauthorizing and doubling funds for HUD McKinney-Vento programs.

2. Create housing for low-income households by enacting a National Housing Trust Fund.

3. Protect, preserve, and expand existing federal housing programs that serve the lowest-income people.

4. Appropriate funds for at least 5,000 Section 8 housing vouchers forhomeless veterans through the HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing Program.

5. Expand access to addiction and mental health services for people experiencing homelessness through reauthorization of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

6. Increase homeless and low-income persons’ access to healthcare by reauthorizing and expanding the Consolidated Health Centers program.

7. Increase homeless persons’ access to mainstream disability income, temporary assistance, and workforce investment services.

8. Provide homeless children and youth with increased services and support by reauthorizing the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program in the No Child Left Behind Act and the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act.

9. Require the Administration to develop and publish a coordinated federal plan to end homelessness.

10. Require jurisdictions receiving federal housing funds to protect the civil rights of homeless persons.

This is a major step in the right direction. I like number nine in particular, which calls USICH on its strategy to devolve all responsibility for homelessness to the localities.

Here's the thing though. Better positions only take us part way there. To get these ideas off paper and into legislation, we need to broaden our political base and vision, build for power, and make poverty into the kind of issue that political leaders have to address or else.

Gimmicky press conferences alone won't make much of a difference, but if the signers of this statement can figure out how to back these words up with the kind of action that makes people listen, then we'll be getting somewhere.

Two People of No Consequence

I was telling someone at a Poverty Action fundraiser last night that I've been losing it lately. One measure is that I've taken to offering anyone going to the upcoming NAEH conference $500 to pie Phil Mangano. The bounty's on the table, but no one's taken me up on it yet.

It's probably just as well. Splattering banana cream all over Mangano's impeccable tailoring and distinguished mane of silver hair would probably get one sent to Guantanamo these days, which is why I don't just do it myself. Even if someone else did it, they'd probably arrest me for conspiracy to assault a presidential appointee or something.

I don't know about you, but my last angry period was like twenty years ago, and coincided with my college years. I was reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States for one class and Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching for another, and then Reagan invaded Grenada. I just sort of lost it for the next decade or so.

Eventually, I got used to the world being a corrupt shit hole and became sort of blasé about it all. I'd see some new outrage and think, "Well, that's how it is, isn't it?" This, I think, is basically the definition of middle age. But lately, it's like all the sores have been reopened.

And there's always some asshole standing around with a box of salt.

Last Friday, for example, I wrote about how one of our vendors literally got his head caved in, and the cops don't really seem all that interested in catching his homeless assailant. They went through the motions of doing a report at the scene, and, when our vendor was released from the hospital a month later and knew who his assailant was and where to find him, they couldn't be bothered to come take a report.

Today we tried again. Our vendor, who wears a helmet to protect his misshapen head and has brain damage from the assault, once again called the police. His assailant has told other street people that if he sees our guy again he's going to kill him. We're pretty sure that the assailant is in police custody right now for a different assault charge.

So we called 911, and this time, at least, they told us out right that they couldn't be bothered. They did say, however, that they would call back later to get a statement over the phone. An hour later, our guy had to go. Six hours later, we were still waiting for the call. Our staff called back to ask what happened.

The operator reported that they called back, but got the front desk recording and didn't know which extension to push, so they gave up.

The third sentence of the message, said our staff, is "press 0 for the front desk."

Well, they didn't stay on the line long enough to hear that, so they closed out the complaint. Normally, two attempts are required before this occurs, but they felt they'd exhausted their options.

They perked up a little at hearing that our guy was getting death threats, and said we should try again tomorrow. For the third time.

It's hard for me to believe that the police would be this disinterested if anyone with a credit card and a house key had gotten his head bashed in. In fact, if even the assailant had been middle class, there would be more interest. We haven't yet reached the point where it's open season on the homeless.

But when a homeless guy tries to kill another homeless guy, it's just two people of no consequence. They don't even give us a quarter to call someone who cares.

The Canadians Have Caught On

I've found a new hero in Canadian "street nurse" Cathy Crowe. This longtime health professional and homeless advocate worries that Philip Mangano has been spending too much time in Canada spreading the gospel of Housing First for the "chronic homeless" and public/private partnerships such as Project Connect.

Crowe totally has Mangano's number. Which doesn't mean Canadian politicians and human service bureaucrats won't be just as enamored of the corporate-friendly Ten Year Plan strategy to end homelessness as their technocratic brethren to the South. It just means that Canada still has homeless advocates who are willing to question the government.

And if our government isn't questionable, I don't know whose is.

Crowe describes Mangano's Canadian Ten Year Plan road show as promoting a punitive approach to homelessness that is hostile to emergency services and focused on victim-blaming approaches that offer cosmetic change while doing nothing to address root causes of homelessness.

Michael Shapcott and I had a chance to hear Mr Mangano in Calgary earlier in May. He really is a remarkable speaker — you could almost say evangelical — preaching the issues of health, economics and the social evils of homelessness. The trouble is that the American approach is obviously not working. It's a game of smoke and mirrors. So why on earth are our municipal and national leaders looking to the United States for solutions on homelessness?

As Michael Shapcott explains: "So, what's wrong with this picture? While Mangano has been piling up frequent flier points visiting every part of the US to convince state and local governments that they need to take up the responsibility for a "housing first" policy for the homeless, his political boss — President Bush — has been gutting the US federal government's funding for housing. This year alone, there are massive cuts to seniors' supportive housing and disabled housing funding. The US federal housing program for people with AIDS will help about 67,000 people this year — yet an estimated 500,000 people living with HIV / AIDS desperately need housing help.

The problem is so bad that even the rather staid Joint Centre for Housing Studies at Harvard University has proclaimed in its latest annual State of the Nation's Housing that affordable housing and homelessness have reached their worst levels ever, and funding cuts by the federal government are the chief culprit.

Crowe points out that homeless people in cities across America are under attack from law enforcement approaches that target sitting and sleeping in public, feeding people, using parks, panhandling, and other public activities to create an urban environment that is hostile to the visible poor, and says that Canada is beginning to catch America's cold.

In Canada it's the same thing. We are witnessing an almost fetishized emphasis on research, including street counts and investigations into panhandlers' needs, new by-laws against panhandling and by-laws restricting where homeless people can sleep, reduction of funding to programs that do outreach to people who are homeless, and a withdrawal of funding for emergency day and night shelters. Toronto alone has lost over 300 shelter beds just this past winter and it continues to rely on its Streets to Homes program as an answer to visible street homelessness. There are many reports that people who are housed through this program suffer greatly from hunger and isolation and remain at great risk of becoming or do become homeless again.

As we struggle to come to grips with homeless policy in America and break the USICH's growing hegemony over the issue of homelessness, maybe we need to keep a better eye on Canada. They're certainly looking out for us.

The Toothless Yappy Dog Press Conference

Next month is the Twentieth Anniversary of McKinney and the Inside the Beltway Gang is planning to mark the occasion with a press conference and a lobbying stunt that features bittersweet chunks of chocolate and a list of ten things legislators could do this year to end homelessness.

Clever. This call to arms will probably last about a minute for each point on the list. Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

McKinney-Vento is the federal legislation that funds shelter and various homeless services, and is the most significant "win" that homeless advocates can claim. WRAP released a report earlier this year that draws the surprisingly obvious conclusion that you can't replace the loss of $52 billion in federal housing dollars and mitigate the breathtaking hostility to the poor that is shown each year by federal budget priorities with less than $2 billion in McKinney-Vento funding and call that progress.

It never ceases to amaze me how the feds can wave little scraps of money around at "advocates" and service providers and immediately have them running around like yappy little dogs in heat.

Make that dogs in heat who have forgotten how to bark, or bite.

To me, the high point of advocacy was October 1989, when the Housing Now! march brought around 300,000 people to Washington, homeless and advocate alike. I'm less interested in commemorating McKinney-Vento in 2007 than in reinventing the spirit of Housing Now! by 2009. Since then, lobbyists for the homeless in DC haven't brought much of anyone along with them. That needs to change.

The beltway driven, non-confrontational, accommodationist, technocratic, homeless-fearing, ten-year-plan-worshipping politics of the present haven't won us much of anything, other than a broad consensus that the feds are officially off the hook for poverty and homelessness.

Chunks of bittersweet chocolate. Pathetic. It would be more to the point to give them something that smells like dead people.

McKinney-Vento keeps us divided against ourselves and isolated from our allies in the broader labor and anti-poverty movements. Each year, homeless advocates gear up to defend the various pieces of our ridiculously teeny pie against the encroachment of the other subpopulations. Lately it's been the chronically homeless against the families. Soon, we'll be defending homeless kids in schools. Or arguing over whether McKinney should be used to fund housing.

We are right where they want us. Divided, isolated, and largely following the lead of the US Interagency Council of Homelessness to focus on individual dysfunction, and not the systemic inequality that has resulted from decades of disastrous federal policy.

Clever lobbyist gags aren't going to fix this. Homeless advocates should take the occasion of McKinney's twentieth anniversary to ask ourselves "How did we all get to be such salivating dogs as to allow Phillip-fucking-Mangano to pass himself off as the second coming of Mitch Snyder?"

That, I think, would be much more appropriate to the moment.

The Sock Puppet Rebellion

The Consumer Advisory Council (CAC) of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is going ape-shit this week because, with all due respect and I say this as a friend, Bill Block sometimes has the political sensitivity of a turnip.

First, a little background. The Committee to End Homelessness in King County has three main groups that meet. There's the mucky-muck Governing Board, which has a few rich business people, some top level human services administrators, a handful of electeds, a United Way President, and a former Governor. They make the decisions. Then you have the Interagency Council. Other than homeless people themselves, these people have the most knowledge and experience because they work in it everyday. They advise the Governing Board, but mostly lack the means to hold them accountable. Then there's the Consumer Advisory Council, made up of those who have actually been homeless. No one has to listen to them at all, but everyone agrees they're an important part of the plan.

Listening to the voice of the homeless is a key piece of Ten Year Planning efforts everywhere. Philip Mangano does it all the time. It lends an aura of saintliness, which he finds useful in numerous situations.

But having a voice and having power are different things entirely. More on that later.

You may have noticed that I used the phrase "the homeless" just now. That was wrong of me. I know this because I've been working in this issue for twenty years and realize that some people find that phraseology to be objectifying and prefer the term "homeless people," or the more cumbersome, "those experiencing homelessness." I also know it because it's in the 15 page handout Bill Block gave members of the Consumer Advisory Council to help them talk about this issue.

The CAC has been feeling kind of stabby over their obviously tokenistic role for awhile. They have no defined relationship, for example, to the Interagency Council, which is where, supposedly, recommendations get formed. Until a few months ago, they had no representation on the Governing Board either. They meet with Bill, and Bill conveys their concerns.

The CAC decided awhile ago that this arrangement lacked a certain, shall we say, formality, and the Governing Board responded by selecting a formerly homeless person to represent them. This person had everything she needed to be effective in this role except any real relationship to the CAC. So that just pissed them off more.

So then the Governing Board said, "OK, we can handle two consumer representatives on our 24 person board. We hand picked the first one. Send us three choices, and we'll hand pick another from those. If we don't like any of the choices, you'll have to send us more candidates from which to hand pick."

That was the deal. The CAC, ingrates that they are, have rebelled against the colonial overlords to insist on choosing their own representative. Dr. Wes Browning, who is probably smarter than anyone on the Governing Board except for Ron Sims, who is really fucking smart, is smart enough to be mostly amused by all of this, but also pissed enough to want to quit the CAC if CEHKC doesn't stop treating them like the total tokens that they probably are.

But that's not why people are freaking out. Apparently, a homeless speakers bureau is forming out of the CAC, and Bill Block helpfully provided them 15 pages of talking points, along with a CEHKC PowerPoint that he'd like them to use. This is where the turnip analogy comes up.

When Paul Boden of the Western Regional Advocacy Project was here recently, he told a story about when he was homeless and some advocates invited him to speak at a rally. He talked to his friends, and prepared for his big moment. When it was time, he was handed his speech.

This is sort of like that. But it's worse. Because in his turnipy way, Bill has managed to piss off not only the CAC, but also SHARE and WHEEL, who run the Tent City encampments as well as numerous other homeless self-managed shelters. Here's sample Question and Answer #2 (out of 24). This being a blog and not a book, I won't get into a critique of the whole handout.

Q: Tent city isn't a long-term solution. Why is this?

A: The purpose of the plan is to change from just providing shelter to providing long-term housing. There won't be a necessity for shelters or tent cities when the plan succeeds. I should also note that, in context, the tent cities are only a small fraction of the shelter beds in our system. The two tent cities only house 150-200 people (of 2,500 in the shelter system). So in some ways tent city is not really about shelter. What tent city has accomplished is educating communities that homeless people not just "are like us," they are us. Community members have the opportunity to realize that the people living in tent cities are moms, dads, and grandmas just like us. There is extensive testimony from people who have recognized that people who have become homeless are not a different "species." Viewing homeless people as neighbors has been a productive part of tent city.

So, if you're wondering what's wrong with this, it's not the "people who are experiencing homelessness are people too" rap that starts about half way through. The part that has people doing the war dance is the denial that Tent City is anything other than a public education campaign.

Here's the thing. If CEHKC was listening to homeless people at all, they'd know that when planners talk about closing shelters, it freaks people out. That's because there is presently a 2:1 ration of people needing shelter to available beds, and little to no evidence that homelessness is actually being reduced.

People who stay at Tent City do not regard themselves as props. They are people who would otherwise not be sheltered at all. This is especially true in this Brave New 10YP World in which no new shelter is politically possible.

But that's not in the script, is it?

In other news, here's something from yesterday's Seattle Times.

Isaac Palmer, 62, was apparently inside a sleeping bag concealed by blackberry bushes in South Seattle when he was run over by a state Department of Transportation (DOT) contract worker. The King County Medical Examiner's Office said Tuesday that the death was caused by tractor-mounted brush-clearing machinery. ...

After striking Palmer, the subcontractor saw his body roll out of the blackberry brambles toward an access road, according to a Seattle police report. Palmer died almost immediately after the 11:40 a.m. Saturday accident, the report said.

"Everybody believed the site was clear," East said, adding that the area is popular with transients. "This person had crawled into a sleeping bag and burrowed his way amongst the blackberry bushes. He wasn't visible to anybody."

In the days before the accident, police, DOT employees and contract crews were in the area working and advising transients about the upcoming work, East said. They were told to abide by the no-trespassing signs and leave the DOT-owned area.

Lick My Decals Off, Baby

People who know me realize I have other obsessions besides a burning contempt for Philip Mangano. Homer, for instance. And Captain Beefheart. My blog's name comes from a thing he does at the end of Shiny Beast. I couldn't really say why I find it so damn amusing.

I'm just weird. Really, really weird.

This ad was produced in 1971 to promote one of his earlier albums, and has a Dada genius to it that most will never appreciate. The television station in LA wouldn't touch it, so the spot never ran. Fortunately this cultural artifact survives on YouTube.

I found this statement from the record company at the Beefheart website.

In the eyes of Warner/Reprise, the commercial is anything but obscene "We knew the station might not understand what we were doing, but we didn't suspect they'd turn us down cold. ... It's unfortunate that the station should be so frightened by it."

For more posts on Captain Beefheart, click here.

Speaking of Phil ...

It's been a great source of amusement to me that if one Googles "Philip Mangano," high among the various awards, adulatory articles, official statements, and even a page of ridiculous quotations, are a few of my blog posts, which have been slightly more critical. At one point I was in the number seven spot.

Imagine my surprise when a softball interview we ran when he was first appointed homelessness czar in 2002 suddenly appeared today way up in the number five position! In those first few months, we gave him the benefit of the doubt. Six months later I had a different opinion. I don't think Phil will be going out to dinner with me again any time soon.

Obviously, Google rankings can be manipulated. The world's most popular search engine looks at the number of links to a page to assess its popularity. Links from "important" pages weigh even more heavily. Someone probably went to some trouble to boost our adulatory puff piece of a five-year-old interview to its stellar #5 ranking. We've returned the favor by editing the page. Next time Google's spider bot runs, the language in that number 5 spot will change a bit.

If you have a website or blog, you can help keep a little truth in Google by linking to the page yourself. Let's see if we can boost its ranking right up to number one! The article from StreetSheet in the number four spot deserves a higher ranking as well. You might even pass this on to a friend. Yeah. I'm petty. But at least I'm having fun.