The Herons Come Home To Roost

One of our Real Change vendors once told me how she loves selling the paper in Magnolia. "All of the people are beautiful," she said. I asked what she meant and she gave me poetry. "All the men have pink skin and white hair and the most beautiful shoes you can imagine."

And, apparently, they don't want homeless people around. They might scare away the Blue Heron.

The eruption in Magnolia reported in last Saturday's Post-Intelligencer by Sanjay Bhatt isn't a surprise to us. Real Change's Cyd Gillis reported on the first of four neighborhood planning meetings concerning proposals for homeless housing at Fort Lawton three weeks prior, and the reaction wasn't much different then.

Along with neighborhood concerns over housing for Native elders and families who had experienced domestic violence coming out of transitional housing — could Girl Scouts, they asked, be assured safety while selling cookies door to door— Gillis reported that the various proposals on the table were moving past the selection process toward finalization.

United All Tribes ambitiously proposed a mixed-income housing development that includes a Native American College and 169 units of permanent housing for homeless seniors, families and single adults. DESC's proposal would have put 75 units of housing there for chronically homeless people. The watered down mix the City seems to now favor would work with United All Tribes and the YWCA to create a range of affordable housing that includes at least 66 units of housing for homeless elders and families who are leaving transitional housing.

The choice of 66 is interesting in itself. This is the number of Capehart Housing units that will revert to Discovery Park green space sometime after the last military family moves out in 2009. Councilmembers Peter Steinbrueck and Sally Clark strengthened some wimpy language in the final Capehart acquisition deal last September to ensure one-to-one replacement of the doomed housing.

Bhatt's article had numerous lovely details.

At one community meeting, some residents wondered whether homeless housing at the fort would attract wife-beaters, sex offenders and crack addicts. They rolled their eyes when city officials asserted that such housing increases property values. They worried about the impact on schools and scoffed at the idea of homeless people shopping at the closest grocery — which sells pheasant-and-rosemary pâté for $9.99 and ground coffee for up to $18 a pound.

"We're the ones who live here, and we want to have a nice, safe neighborhood to live in," Donald Raz, a King County deputy prosecutor and Magnolia resident, said later.

Like most affluent neighborhoods in Seattle, Magnolia doesn't have any housing for homeless people mainly because land is too expensive for social-service agencies to buy.

The quotes from Block and Quinn were especially interesting.

"What is it that makes homeless people different enough that they don't 'fit' in that neighborhood?" asks Bill Block, project director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, a coalition of agencies, businesses and churches. "Affluent people become homeless."

I suppose they ocassionally do. But mostly, in this economy, they become more affluent. I'm guessing that Bill's attempt to sell formerly homeless people as being just like the exfoliated folk of Magnolia went over about like a dead baby joke at a baptism. Is economic diversity so threatening we need to pretend it doesn't exist?

But the Buried Treasure Quote of the Week Award goes to Quinn.

"Fundamentally they [federal officials] understand that with homeless housing, you can't have so much out there that you can't sell the fair-market value housing," said Adrienne Quinn, director of Seattle's Office of Housing. "We're trying to achieve that balance," she said.

Did she really just say that? Did someone dose her Dasani with sodium pentathol? I mean, this is extraordinary.

Perhaps what she meant was that federal officials would not knowingly undermine property values by overly imposing homeless housing on any one community. But this is also a refreshingly honest take on the laws of supply and demand. If you provide too much housing for poor people, it undermines the market scarcity that drives up cost (or viewed from the other side, profit). It seems odd that anyone could believe we're anywhere near that point, but I guess one can never be too careful..

Is anyone surprised that Magnolia, which has fewer poor people and lower rates of charitable giving than most any neighborhood in the city, is afraid of the homeless? Given the City's recent media litany regarding homeless criminality on City public lands, we should expect reactions like theirs everywhere.

You can't stigmatize homeless people as drug addicted vectors of disease and moral decay on one day, and on the next say they're just like the top income-quintile folk of Magnolia. The cognitive dissonance will make people's heads explode.

The recent City propaganda campaign around homeless camping exploits fear that is there for the taking. Homeless people, in much of the middle-class imagination, symbolize much more than an implied absence of housing affordability. Peter Marcuse's landmark Neutralizing Homelessness essay dwells on this point. "The homeless are alienation incarnate," he says, and disturb our sense of the appropriately public and private.

Timothy Gibson, in Securing the Spectacular City, expands upon Marcuse's observation.

The spectacle of homeless citizens attending to themselves in public is disturbing in its own right. In other words, when the homeless are forced to attend to their private needs in parks, alleys, and sidewalks, public spaces begin to take on aspects of "home:" they now become places to sleep, to drink, to make love, to use the toilet, and so on. In modern bourgeois societies, this is activity "out of place." This activity inverts the distinction between public and private spaces that is fundamental to middle-class notions of citizenship and propriety. Such activities can therefore signal to urban residents the "order of things" has been unraveled—that is this place at least, things are falling apart. ...

For many urban residents, the homeless have thus become something of an urban "indicator species" for social disorder, "diagnostic of the presumed ill-health" of urban life and the need to gain control and rationalize urban public space.

The City didn't invent fear of homeless people as Other. In their quest to turn downtown Seattle into a squeaky clean vision of urban living — something akin to an upscale suburban mall but with better food and more atmosphere — they just used the tools at hand. When Magnolia gives in to irrational fear regarding potential strangers in their midst, it's a case of the Blue Herons coming home to roost.

The Straw Man Gets a Workout

I remember a great story I heard a number of years ago from an activist with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Apparently, there was a very pro-environment candidate for office who wasn't so hot on the whole human needs thing. He was dogged during his campaign by Tree Man.

A guy in a tree suit showed up everywhere the candidate did holding his sign. "Would you care for me if I was a tree?"

City Council voted to finalize the Capehart Housing acquisition in Discovery Park on Monday, which was a surprise to approximately nobody. It was good to see political leadership from Sally Clark and Peter Steinbrueck that upgraded the one-to-one housing replacement language and made it non-contingent on the Fort Lawton deal going through.

I was surprised to see Tom Rassmussen quoted in the Post-Intelligencer describing the inappropriateness of the park for "people in transition."

An editorial in the PI makes the same point.

We did have some concerns, however, about access to shops and transportation.

For example, the nearest bus stop we could find was close to a mile away and basic drugstore supplies required a trip of more than two miles. It appears that the Seattle City Council agreed, and voted to knock down the homes.

Have these people ever been to a ghetto? But even this is beside the point. Perhaps some people have argued for use of the housing for homeless people, but most folks I know feel that the housing should be maintained as workforce housing until its useful life is exhausted. Tom is arguing against a position nobody supports.

Most people who know about housing — and I count Rassmussen in this category — know that there is a relationship between availability of workforce housing and housing for the very poor. As available options become scarce, those on the bottom rungs of the market start getting knocked off. We all get this.

This is why the Capehart housing should be preserved for however long this is possible.

We've seen portrayals, most notably by Tim Ceis, of this housing as some sort of rotting from within, asbestos-laden, lead paint hazard that any sane person would pretty much tear down on sight, but this is belied by the fact that the families who will live there into 2009 find it perfectly habitable. In fact, everyone who sees it tends to describe it with the same word. "Nice."

There has been a false dichotomization of this issue along the lines of park and green space supporters versus homeless advocates. I don't see it that way. No one I know is making the argument that housing, once built, should never come down. And certainly no one is arguing that housing should be rebuilt on the Capehart site.

Contrary to the Post-Intelligencer's editorial yesterday, there isn't anything in Monday's decision to move ahead with purchase that necessarily commits the City to immediate demolition of the Capehart housing.

The question is whether this housing gets bulldozed in 2009, when the last family moves out, or whether another decade or so of use can be squeezed from this resource at a time when housing affordability in Seattle is at a crisis point.

In the end, no matter what, nature wins. The housing comes down and the park space expands. What needs to be considered is whether this can be a win for people as well as the trees.

From what I understand, there are some potential issues here having to do with the City's authority to provide housing that is above the low-income level, but one would think that this could somehow be worked out. Times like these call for creative solutions. It seems that some sort of compromise can still be achieved, if the will is there.

Thoughts on the City Council Race

This seems like as good a time as any to reiterate that Apesma's Lament is my personal writer's blog, and that I reserve the right to maintain an identity of my own, independent of the guy that works at Real Change. More importantly, this blog is maintained with my own funds on my own time, so I can say whatever the fuck I want. So there.

Which brings us to this morning's City Council Candidates Forum, sponsored by the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, featuring Jean Godden, Venus Velasquez, Bruce Harrell, Tom Rasmussen, Dave Della, Tim Burgess, Sally Clark, and Judy Fenton. The SKCCH website will soon have full questionnaire results from these and other candidates, including those running for office in King County outside of Seattle.

First, who is running against who? Godden, sadly, may now be running unopposed. Joe Szwaja was expected but didn't show and didn't phone in. (This turns out to be untrue. Joe is still in the race, and the no show was due to a communications error with campaign staff). The rumor is that a recent meeting with community supporters to parse the ramifications of Susan Paynter's "When Did Joe Stop Beating His Wife" column didn't go so well. That's too bad. Szwaja is someone who progressives recruited to run based on a long track record of proven values and service. Apparently, some have changed their minds. It's an old saying, but it's true. When the left holds a firing squad, they stand in a circle.

Venus and Bruce are squaring off over human services champion Peter Steinbrueck's seat. Human Services Chair Tom Rasmussen is running unopposed. Burgess is taking on Della, and the sadly clueless Fenton says she's running because Clark needs an opponent. Whatever.

So, what was new and surprising or at least entertaining about this morning? Let's start with Godden. She's charming and somewhat beloved. You hate to beat up on her because it never feels like a fair fight. She graciously recognized me as I stood in the back as Real Change, which caused our real reporter, Cydney Gillis, who was covering the event from the second row on Jean's side, to turn in my direction and snarl.

Godden's best line was that we should "reuse, recycle, and refit available buildings" to create affordable housing. But, seeing as how she doesn't really do anything, those words don't mean all that much. She'll likely coast to victory, and will continue to be a mostly reliable ally of the downtown interests while trying to also do right by the poor and homeless. Things could be worse.

The Harrell/Velasquez showdown was much more interesting. Ironically, Harrell, as an attorney, is a much stronger communicator than Velasquez is as a communications consultant. My sense is that she has the better politics, while he is probably the stronger candidate. He was Obamaesque. In comparison, she seemed almost sullen. Maybe she's just not a morning person.

But, you know? I don't give a crap. She says that she'll continue Peter's legacy of being a human services champion and I believe her. She said when the B&O tax revenue downturn hits and things get tight, she's in our corner, and that she favors dedicated funding for human services so we're not dependent upon the vagaries of the general fund. And she referred to Seattle's "class war" four times in her closing statement, which kind of cinched it for me. Harrell makes a better impression, and uses lines like, "I believe power has to be kept in check," but there's nothing in his background to make me believe that, once in office, he'll be a reliable ally of the poor. And we've seen plenty of that.

Speaking of unreliable allies, David Della seemed kind of dazed and kept talking about how very, very complicated homelessness is. It must be hard to come before a room of human service advocates knowing that you're widely resented for having turned your back on the people who got you elected. That must suck. Della talked incessantly about the multi-family tax credit, as if this idea were somehow adequate to the tidal wave of inequality that now engulfs our city. He did, however, say he'd vote to protect core services, whatever that means. Burgess didn't seem so bad, but all of his statements were careful and hedged, as were Della's. I don't get the sense that either of them deserve our support, but these are the choices we have.

I have to say that both Rassmussen and Clark are growing on me. When Fenton said she'd prioritize mentally ill homeless people over alcoholics, Tom drew himself up to deliver an indignant little speech about the difficulties of people's lives. While going after Fenton was a little like kicking a retarded puppy, it was still very endearing. He also acknowledged the dark side of the ten year pan to end homelessness with a pledge to sustain emergency service levels until it is clear that the need has decreased as well. This, to me, was unexpected and welcome news. When Tom first became the Human Services chair, lots of people found the rigidity of his instant expertise more than a little annoying, but he seems to have grown into it and to have real passion for the issues. He seems more solid, and it's nice to see.

Clark seemed smart, well-informed, and very genuine, and offered a variety of thoughtful strategies for moving things forward. She was honest about her support for workforce housing as well as low-income housing, and put her concerns with the potential for a divisive fight right out on the table. She even showed flashes of humility and humor. Clark definitely seems like someone we should work more with.

Conventional wisdom is that this election is unlikely to shake up the balance of power in the Council, and that there aren't any big changes on the horizon. That seems about right to me, although I found myself feeling more hopeful after the forum than before. When a cynical guy like me sees reason to hope, that's probably a good sign.