Song of a Queen Bee

I've was reading E.B. White's The Second Tree From The Corner when I ran across Song of a Queen Bee, first published in The New Yorker in 1945. I tried to do it justice by altering my reading of the main poem to approximate my notion of a "ravishing, rollicking, young queen bee." White, by the way, was fired from the Seattle Times in 1923, after working there just 11 months. By 1927, he had joined the staff of The New Yorker, where he remained for the next six decades.

Below is a linked image that, now having deeply reflected on this matter of queen bee sex, seems a metaphor for all that is wrong with the scientific age.

Nickelsville Talking Point

You gotta hand it to the Nickels people. They know how to stay on message. Every time Greg opens his mouth on Nickelsville, he says something like, "I respect their right to make a political statement," or "It's obvious it's a political demonstration." Karen Zaugg Black, his spokesperson, is in the PI tonight saying, "We certainly recognize that this is a political demonstration." Here she is again in the Times: "What I heard the mayor say today was that people have political demonstrations to make a point about an issue, and I respect that."

These people should spend more time talking to the people in the camp. Homeless campers don't give a crap about politics. What they want is a safe place to stay, and a supportive community where they have a voice.

Is that political? I think it's pretty much what we all want

Erik Lacitis, the Mayor's boy at the Times, went all meta on the Mayor's message, and interviewed three consultants who agreed that the "public relations stunt" was poorly timed, since the crashing economy would focus people's attention on their own pain. As Cathy Allen put it, "The people you know who are hurting are far more important than the people you don't know who are hurting."

I think the consultants are wrong on this one. The media, except for Lacitis and one dishonest op-ed by his newspaper, has been extraordinarily sympathetic. The encampment has continued to expose the lie that homeless people in Seattle are taken care of, and the Mayor will look like the shit that he is when he bulldozes the camp.

The convergence of an economy on the skids and a tent city full of people who are experiencing hard times, I think, makes us a little more likely to consider homelessness through the lens of our own economic vulnerability. In other words, I think the timing makes people more sympathetic, not less.

Lacitis also took pains to cover the Mayor's other talking points: Seattle does more to help the homeless than anyone, and anyone who wants shelter can get it.

This is, of course, a lie. John Iwasaki's PI article mentions that 12 men and 12 women were turned away from Nightwatch the night Nickelsville went up. That means the shelters were full enough that 24 people who were trying to get in could not. This is the case more often than not, which is why lots of people stop trying to get into shelter and sleep out instead.

This is hardly a big secret to anyone who deals with homelessness and doesn't, figuratively speaking, have his lips around the Mayor's dick.

Nickelsville is visible evidence that city policy on homelessness — which entails holding the line against new shelter while punishing those who are left to sleep outside for trying to survive — fails miserably when it comes to meeting the need that exists. The Mayor's dismissal of the tent city as a "political statement" is itself a politically calculated evasion.

Tim Ceis came by the camp tonight to say that clearances would begin between six and seven am in the morning. Someone else will have to be there for me. I'll be taking my kids to school.

Seattle's Corporate Lapdog Weighs In, Again

Last December, Apesmas Lament asked whether the Seattle Times' editorial board was most akin to a Fat Ugly Hog or a Corporate Lapdog and readers responded. The Corporate Lapdog emerged victorious by a decisive 38-7 margin.

This morning's op-ed describes Nickelsville as a transparent political ploy that "Seattle doesn't deserve" and called for it's immediate destruction. The editorial was typical in its intellectual dishonesty and disregard for fact.

Noone should be surprised. Their record is nothing if not consistent. Last December, the Times first weighed in on the homeless encampments issue with the eloquent Squatters Be Gone, which took homeless people who survive outside of Seattle's overburdened shelter system to task for the "easy permissiveness" of their rule-breaking life style. Last January, they again sounded this theme, saying that homeless people camped in greenbelts were exercising the "Huckleberry Finn option." In a play on the city's branding of homeless sweeps as "humane and consistent" they approvingly described the Mayor's new policy as "humane and insistent." Clever. Last June, this newspaper again distinguished itself by dismissing SHARE/WHEEL's eastside survival encampment as "pointless."

At no point in any of these editorials did the Times board come to grips with basic fact. 2,631 people were counted outside of a packed shelter system on a freezing January night this year. Operation Nightwatch, the shelter referral point of last resort is turning people away in record numbers. There isn't enough shelter. Where are people supposed to go?

Happily, the Seattle Times editorial board doesn't always tell its reporters and columnists what and how to write. Columnist Danny Westneat has asked the question about as pointedly as possible. Nicole Brodeur's columns have become more sympathetic over the past year, and reporters Jonathan Martin, John Iwasaki, Sharon Chan, Eric Lacitis, Mike Carter, Drew DeSilver, and Sean Rose have all reported honestly and conscientiously on the homeless sweeps issue.

But the editorials have been uniformly one-sided, heartless, and oblivious to fact. Today's is typical. There is no acknowledgement that the shelters are full and that homeless people need to be somewhere. It confuses the claim that the city is "offering" shelter to campers with the fiction that enough shelter has actually been "provided." It paints the Mayor as noble, caring, and put upon, and homeless people and their organizers as sneaky, lazy, and politically motivated. Nickelsville, they say in a truly Ayn Randian moment, is a bid for "entitlement."

Homeless people in Seattle. They're so entitled. The Times really hates that.

The Seattle Times editorial board doesn't give a shit about homeless people. Fortunately, others do. If you're looking for a good reason to not give up on the human race, go to the West Seattle blog to see the Highland Park Action Committee extend a welcome to their new neighbors. The video of neighborhood activist Dorsol Plants' speech on why Nickelsville is necessary makes me want to send him flowers.

Seattle Times Editorial Board: Pointless

A Response to "Tent City: Pointless"

The Seattle Times "Editorial Board," which in the last six months has denigrated extreme poverty as "exercising the Huck Finn option," dismissed compassion for the poor as "sentimentality," and characterized homeless people's survival encampments as "tiresome," has migrated so far to the right in recent years as to make the Nazi Party look like the Democratic Leadership Council. A handful of elitist windbags sucking up to power and money. What is the point?

It cannot be to accurately inform the public. As a source of information, this so-called "newspaper's" editorial page is about as accurate as Donald Trump's Ouija Board, in that it's sole purpose is to intuit what the well-off want to hear and to treat matters of life and death like a parlor game. There is no regard for truth to be found here.

There will always be those who bend over backwards for the Mayor no matter what. We call them "ass-kissing hacks."

While many of the Seattle Times' reporters and columnists have proven themselves capable of grasping simple facts and engaging in occasional acts of empathy, The Seattle Times editorial board seems to have crawled up inside of Greg Nickels' ass and died.

The point of it is politics. It is to have well-housed people feel no guilt over the existence of homelessness.

As a newspaper, they have squandered whatever credibility they may have ever had. They have become tiresome. There are other newspapers. Read those instead.

Editorial boards who have no regard for truth and seem to enjoy beating up on those who have absolutely fucking nothing have no place in a civilized society. These are dangerous times, and a free press is the life-blood of true Democracy. Too bad the Times has sold out.

Blame the Urine Soaked Homeless

Kudos to Jonathan Martin at the Seattle Times for one of the fastest turn-arounds in the history of print journalism. We spoke this morning a little after 10 a.m., and by 2:30 today, Seattle crews trashed nearly everything, homeless advocates complain, was up on their website. In a moment of elegant understatement, Seattle Parks Department spokesman Dewey Potter said, "It's fair to say we have some improvements to make."

Ya think?

Here's the entire warehouse inventory for the last two months of sweeps, which she released to the press today.

Leather jacket, beige shorts, brown duffel bag, scissors, 2 pair socks, blanket, assorted hygeine products, radio, quilt, green Novara mountain bike, purpe Shimano mountain bike, 2 Real change vendor IDs, tripod, Portastudio sound mixer board, sleeping bag, pillow, 760 pumpmaster pellet gun. Schwinn mountain bike (retrieved), small hand tools, retrieved. shovel, flashlight, saw, catfood 7 cans.

How sparsely random. It's a Dadaist poem.

This represents the whole of what was saved from six different area sweeps, one of which, alone, yielded twenty-one tons of "debris."

The article is filled with lovely quotes, but the one that made me inappropriately scream out loud was the following, in which Potter follows standard City procedure by referring the the urine-soaked essential nature of homeless people.

Potter said about five duffel bags of belongs were bagged and tagged by date during the recent cleanup. But a crew chief in charge of determining what was salvageable "found they were so contaminated with urine she had to back away and the bags were tossed," said Potter.

Let's think about this a moment. Twenty-one tons of stuff got tossed during this sweep, or "clean-up," as the City prefers, so they chose to select out five urine-soaked duffel bags for storage? The "had to back away" part is a great image. After that, I suppose, there was nothing left to do but douse the bio-hazard bags with gasoline and light them on fire.

I remember Potter from the public hearing on the new protocols last February, where sixty-five people lined up to trash the protocols and no one spoke in their favor. She was the one with the stricken expression.

I guess she got over it.

Above, in honor of peeing homeless people everywhere, is Danny Barnes with his epic Pee Pee the Sailor. Below, in honor of our craven Mayor, is a cartoon that recently appeared in the Queen Anne and Magnolia News.

Why I Was Arrested

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Can Fool Some of the People ...

The City's full-court press propaganda offensive on homeless encampments is developing new cracks. While the TV media can generally be counted on to accept the City's framing of the issue (Seattle is ending homelessness — encampments are dens of filth, drug abuse, and criminality — the "clean-ups" are consistent and humane — concerns of advocates have been met) and to faithfully broadcast whatever shocking images the city offers, print and radio have become more critical.

This, as you are no doubt aware, isn't universally true. I started to read the Seattle Time's third and latest travesty of an editorial and decided to stop before I was overtaken with murderous rage. They're hopeless. But Danny Westneat wrote a column recently in that paper that admirably asked the key question: With the numbers going up and the line on shelter being held, where are people supposed to go? I always follow this sentence with the word "Hello?," but few in City Hall seem capable of listening. In my opinion, he nailed it. Nicole Brodeur, who just last November penned a dehumanizing piece of shit, has redeemed herself recently as well.

Robert Jamison followed suit yesterday in the PI, and did us the favor of mentioning the Camp4Unity tent City we're doing on City Hall Plaza tonight. He goes even further to take on the history of City duplicity on this issue, the failure to follow their own protocols, the moral bankruptcy of a policy that steadfastly refuses to address the inconvenient math of twenty new shelter beds for 2,600 or so people, and the complete absence of accountability by the City. I generally follow this string of observations with the word, "fuckers!"

In Seattle, where city shelter beds are full, the homeless have few choices. They can sleep on cold, hard sidewalks. Or they can find a freeway underpass or a park -- and risk being swept away by city muscle.

A middle ground has to be found, but Mayor Greg Nickels -- deft and articulate when it comes to dealing with condo developers and wealthy streetcar advocates -- is tongue-tied and tone-deaf to the down-and-out.

That's why homeless advocates are firing back.

They're camping out this weekend at City Hall Plaza at Fourth and James to make a statement: The homeless shouldn't be treated like garbage.

Fuckers. John Iwasaki, who I once called a hack after he turned a city press release into "news," seems to have developed newfound critical facilities as well. To see this sort of thing outside the pages of Real Change does my battle-scarred and deeply pissed off heart good. I'm hoping to see more of it in the coming months.

Letter to Seattle Times

I witnessed the recent Queen Anne campsite clearances and would like to point out that the photograph of a picture on top of garbage bags that ran with Charles Brown's story was very misleadingly captioned. It said some items are bagged and tagged for retrieval for up to 60 days. This sounds quite humane.

A well-maintained campsite was entered at 7 a.m. and its resident of three years was ordered to leave. His valuable tent, which he’d carefully closed completely before going, was opened with a machete. Of his possessions, three bags were marked for retrieval. Twenty were defined as garbage. A gallery quality drawing was declared trash and placed among the items for disposal featured in the photo.

I know. I asked. “It’s trash,” they said. “Take it.”

A civilized society doesn't say to a man who has made a home in the woods for three years, "You have 72 hours to go or your life goes into a dumpster." You learn who he is, build a relationship, and find the right solution. Mayoral press flak David Takami got the close quote: "This is not a punitive thing." Oh really? Then what would you call it?

Bad News Always Gets Buried

Anybody who's been around for more than ten minutes knows governments release bad news late on Friday. The story then runs on Saturday, when newspaper circulation is lowest. This is best accomplished by releasing a blizzard of paper at the last possible moment. A brief press release and "fact sheet" are helpfully provided to frame things for the reporter in a hurry.

We thought the City was going to do this last week. Reporters were expecting the new protocols on Friday when the City unexpectedly postponed the release. The Mayor's executive order, which includes the procedures document, was filed with the City Clerk the following Monday. The 20-page administrative rules document, which backs up the procedures wth more detailed legalese, were signed by all the affected department heads on Monday as well.

So, why then did they wait until four days later and at the last minute on Friday to release the news? Sharon Chan at the Seattle Times had a paper copy at 2:00 pm, as promised by the City Friday morning, but had no electronic copy to forward. No one else had the documents until the City uploaded them to their website an hour and a half later, which left advocates less than an hour to absorb forty-some detailed pages of material and formulate a response.

How's this for a process? Create a unilateral policy with a two week period for public comment. Respond to the comments with some concessions, but then put a whole bunch of other bad stuff in there that no one's ever seen before. Release the policy at the close of a Friday and call it a done deal.

None of the bad news was in the press release. This spoke of meeting the "thoughtful" concerns offered by advocates with another day's notice, additional time for outreach, and twenty new shelter beds at the Compass Center with improved policies on storage of possessions.

That doesn't sound so bad. One could even say this was a win for advocacy. Their opening position, after all, was that storage was out of the question, that 48 hours was sufficient time for outreach, and that there would be no new shelter.

It seems like they've come a long way.

The new stuff, however, makes it even worse than before. Here's the crap that floats to the top.

The Threshold of Three
A distinction is drawn between "unauthorized camping" and an "unauthorized encampment," which means three or more people within 300 feet of each other. The protocols apply to "unauthorized encampments." Yet, all camping on public property is illegal and subject to issuance of an exclusion notice or arrest for criminal trespass. This means that the procedures don't apply to campers who are not in groups. The City could have evicted Treeman and destroyed his property with no notice and have been in compliance with their policy. This is very bad, and it is new.

The Recurring Encampment Clause
This is also new, and very, very bad. Once a site is cleared, it will be monitored for a recurrence of campsites. Should an area have three recurrences within a period of 60 days, it will be placed into a new status, where no outreach or notice is required before issuing citations and destroying belongings. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where, within six months, the majority of key sites have been cleared for automatic removal without notice.

Zero-Tolerance
Any campsite that is identified either by a city employee or by a call to the Community Service Bureau is immediately slated for removal. The issue of whether any problems are being caused is immaterial.

One Citation = Vulnerability to Arrest
Anyone who has already received one citation anywhere has no immunity to arrest when trying to retrieve possessions or access outreach services from a site that has been slated for removal. Also new. Also very bad.

So, lets review. Less than three campers and the City has no responsibility to warn, hold belongings, or help. More than three documented instances of encampments within 60 days, and the City can also do whatever it likes.

So sleeping on your own means you have no rights. But after a while, sleeping in groups probably means you have no rights either. And, if you have received one citation already, you have no rights. Do you see where this is going?

This is a compassionate policy designed to help people? I don't think so. This is a lawyerly means of criminalizing survival while evading the responsibility we have to offer help. Were it possible for me to be more disgusted with the Nickels Administration, this would have done it.

Both the Seattle Times and Seattle PI put up brief stories on their websites Friday afternoon that merely summarized the City press release, but Sharon Chan and Angela Galloway offered good ink to advocates in their Saturday stories. Sharon's is actually quite good, and I'm not just saying that because she quotes me. Galloway uncritically accepts Marty McComber's line that nothing's changed, this has been happening for 15 years, and we're just making life better for homeless people.

It's an appalling lie, but a very useful one.

Both stories accepted the City's frame, as the largely supine dailies almost always do. "City listens to advocates and softens policy." Galloway's lead quote is McInturff saying how "delighted" she is. Few of us share her enthusiasm.

A more accurate frame would be "City sneaks broadly undermining loopholes into final protocols in preparation for all out war on poor."

Stigmatizing the Homeless

Just today, I was thinking about all the shit I say to reporters that almost never makes it into print. Here's one time that I can't complain. Robert Dobbs at Tacoma's Weekly Volcano reports on that city's failure to make progress on Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness goals (chronic homelessness up 27% since 2007) and the aggressive crackdown on visible poverty that has overtaken efforts to help.

Refreshingly, Tacoma calls their sweeps policy the Encampment Elimination Program. At least this smelly city to the south doesn't leave you guessing as to what they're about. For the first time in the history of print media, my core concern with the chronic homeless focus actually made it into someone's story. You'll never see this in the Seattle Times.

“The thing that I keep struggling to get my head around is how distant appearances and reality are when it comes to city policy around homelessness,” says Harris. “Everyone has embraced the rhetoric around ending homelessness, but I see very little of it in terms of what is coming to prevail. What this really comes down to is reducing visible homelessness. ” ...

“I don’t think people understand what the 10-year plan is all about,” he says. “Why would the (federal) administration that seems to be (the) most hostile to poor people in 70 years take on this task of solving homelessness? The answer is that it’s not really about solving the issue. Truth is, the chronic homeless make up a very small percentage of the overall population. This is really about visible homelessness. You have this federally backed strategy that is essentially a template for a very sophisticated propaganda model. It’s a way of reframing homelessness to focus on the most visible and dysfunctional and most easy to blame.”

That is one of the most damaging aspects of the 10-year plan, says Harris — it makes the homeless easy to dismiss. Once you stigmatize a population, “it’s pretty easy to do whatever you want to them.”

After decades of advocates stressing that homelessness has many faces and most people don't fit the stereotype, federal funding priorities and local development-driven imperatives to hide poverty have combined to make homelessness all about the drunks, addicts, and crazy people. And the major media is always willing to toe the city line: We're sick of their unsightly misery, and we don't have to tolerate it. They're service-resistant vectors of criminal activity. So screw them, in a compassionate Seattle sort of way.

Speaking of screwing homeless people, the Downtown Seattle Association's long-held dream of shutting down Seattle's public toilets may now come to pass. This has been on their agenda for at least two years, but Tom Rassmussen, citing the lack of evidence that this is really a problem, gave them no traction with City Council. Well, things change. The Department of Public Utilities has generated the report they need to make it into a problem, and they've got Sally Clark on board and a new, more compliant, council. The panhandling legislation can't be far away. See Sharon Chan's Seattle Times story, which also gets my problem with this right.

Tim Harris, executive director for homeless-activist newspaper Real Change, wants the city not only to keep the automated toilets, but also to add portable toilets. Removing toilets would force people to relieve themselves in streets and alleys, Harris said.

"If you don't provide alternatives and viable alternatives, then it's not fair to blame people for activities that they have little choice but to engage in," he said.

Apparently, the plan is to somehow get local businesses and government buildings to staff and more prominently feature the availability of their toilets. Yep. That's the plan. And it will cost just as much as keeping the ones we have.

I actually went into this whole conspiratorial rant about how they'll take the toilets away, and then when the whole downtown smells like a Belltown alley on a hot summer day and there's shit on every doorstep, we'll hear all about the filthy, disgusting, homeless people who are too lazy to even find their way to the bathroom.

But for some reason she didn't use that.

I had high hopes for the Seattle Metropolitan story on the Seattle sweeps that came out in their new April issue, but it turned out to be a rather bland overview and to offer little new.

McInturff said she was "moved" by the three hours of entirely one-sided testimony at January's public hearing. They may tweak the 48-hour notification, and rethink the $25 limitation on goods they're willing to store. Wow. Look at those big-ass crocodile tears running all down her face. They apparently chose not to hear the "throw this heinous piece of crap out, start over, and listen to us this time" theme.

Seattle Metro, having the luxury of magazine-style journalism, should have been the ones to do something in-depth. But instead they accepted the city's frame and pretty much went brain-dead from there, as is standard media practice. I'd link, but they kept it off their website.

Finally, my friend Silja Talvi got a great piece into the April In These Times that covers the Seattle sweeps issue as a stark example of national trends and linking it to the development boom. She calls it a homeless eradication program. Nice phrase. I'd like to see it stick. They didn't have the story online when I checked, but maybe they will sometime.

Ten Tents My Ass

These north and south partial views of the City Hall encampment last week, shot at night by Doug McKeehan when most people were inside their tents sleeping, give a sense of how many people braved the steady rain to participate in the overnight portion of the event. Organizers counted 48 tents plus various plastic-wrapped sleeping bags and cardboard boxes. They estimate that 150-175 people stayed overnight, and at least 50 additional participants helped with daytime visibility protests. Sharon Chan of the Seattle Times dropped by at 5:30 for the dinner and reported ten tents in her story the next day.

When Sharon called me at home for a quote, she asked how many would be staying the night. We'd been seeing huge interest and feeling real momentum, but most people who planned on staying hadn't officially committed. So, basically, I had no idea. "Two-hundred," I confidently replied.

"We're sending a photographer, but if I get there and see twenty people, there won't be a story," she said.

So I guess we dodged that bullet.

Her story was notable in that human services Director Patricia McInturff said she "doesn't like the term 'sweeps.'"

"They're unauthorized encampments," she said. "The city has been cleaning up unauthorized encampments for 20 years. I think the new protocol is a giant step forward" with its inclusion of outreach, storage options and additional shelter.

Well, Patricia, if the City hadn't accelerated the pace by a factor of maybe twenty, and if the outreach, storage, and shelter you refer to had some reality to them, then you'd be right.

But as things are, you're a lying sack of shit and we're not stupid. They're sweeps. We know it. You know it. For once in your life, just tell the truth. Preferably, before you retire.

It takes a lot of people to pull something like this off. Operation Sack Lunch took care of the evening meal and helped with hospitality. The Real Change staff and Rachael and Natalie in particular put in heroic efforts during the preceding weeks. Board member David Bloom rounded up the ecumenical meal servers. Real Change vendors were there in force and helped spread the word, and whole bunches of RCOP members took leadership in the weeks and days leading up to the protest. Paul Boden from WRAP flew up from San Francisco and lent a hand as a seasoned pro over Thursday and Friday (Rachael handed him the press calls). And then there was the woman who dropped off a box of tangerines and wished us the best and all the others like her who did their small part.

In short, people pulled together and pulled it off. Last December, when we promised we'd be back, there were less than fifty of us overnight. This time, there were more than one-hundred-fifty. We're building power. The City's lies don't fool us, and we're not going away any time soon.

On the Cutting Room Floor

This morning's Seattle Times picked up yesterday's Los Angeles Times story by Northwest Regional reporter Stuart Glascock that describes the proliferation of anti-panhandling ordinances in Tacoma, Auburn, and soon, Federal Way. The story focuses on how Tacoma and Auburn have already used their laws to shut down Real Change vendors in those cities, and our plans to push back against this erosion of the First Amendment.

But an interesting thing happened on the way to the front page of the Seattle Times. Outside of some minor editing and re-arrangement for local emphasis, two paragraphs from the LA Times story were deleted. The omission of the second paragraph is especially revealing.

In addition to Real Change, papers in New York; Oakland; Portland, Ore.; Sacramento; San Diego and Washington are among the 37 members of the North American Street Newspaper Assn.

Strict anti-panhandling laws are part of a broader tendency to criminalize homelessness, said Tulin Ozdeger, civil rights program director for the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty in Washington. "If cities are using laws to restrict homeless people from employing themselves, it really shows a discriminatory approach to people who are homeless," Ozdeger said.

These paragraphs are missing from the web version as well. Given that the Seattle Times is a staunch supporter of the Mayor's plan to criminalize homelessness with sweeping new anti-camping rules, one can see why they might not want to go there.

The Huckleberry Finn Option?

The Seattle Times weighed in with yet another hard-hearted and one-sided editorial last Wednesday loving the Mayor's campsite clearance policy and characterizing those homeless who are camped outside in the rain and cold as exercising the "Huckleberry Finn option."

What cold and dark planet do these people live on?

To illustrate, at left is Huck Finn. What a scamp! He probably just conned some kid into painting a fence for him. All day, he's romping through the woods, shooting small animals, constructing rafts, lying lazily in the sun, and avoiding work. At right is Grimes Poznikov, a once wildly popular San Fransisco street performer who was recently discovered living in a garbage dump during the homeless sweeps in that city.

One morning this week at Poznikov's campsite, the former Automatic Human Jukebox crawled out from under his piano when he heard his name called by a Chronicle reporter. He seemed dazed by the sunlight and oblivious to the stink of urine and trash around him. He was dressed in women's clothing.

Pointing to a missing front tooth, which he said police knocked out during one of his many contacts with them, Poznikov said he can't play the trumpet anymore. He hawked the instrument at a pawn shop in 1996. Instead, at age 56, he now plays chaotic chords on a waterlogged piano with broken strings for other homeless campers and resident rats. Of course, he said, he misses the crowds at Fisherman's Wharf. "Well, it's sad," he said, turning his head away to hide his watery green eyes. After a long pause, he added, "But what can you do?" To his homeless neighbors, he's part crazy and part genius, he's a little bit generous and a little bit confrontational.

He recently fished a turkey out of a trash can and gave it to a neighbor for Thanksgiving, and he gives piano concerts at midnight. But he also drinks, says he smokes some pot and calls passers-by "Nazis."

Who wouldn't want to be this guy? Free food. Nothin' but the stars over his head. Livin' in the great outdoors. Sweet!

Seattle Times: Fat Ugly Hog, or Corporate Lapdog?

There are some who say that these weekly polls are a big waste of time, but consider the big picture. In the past five weeks we have established karmic insignificance of fruit flies, the relative holiness of the Dalai Lama and Barack Obama, that Dorothy Day is twice as sexy as Simone Weil, and that the Ogre Spider has more amazing eyes than Winona Ryder. We have also learned that, in a bar fight, Don Rickles would kick the pudgy ass of Greg Nickles, and, by the slimmest of margins to date, we see that Seattle Human Services head Patricia McInturff has the Mayor’s back, but isn’t necessarily on crack.

This week, what animal does the Seattle Times most closely represent in their recent op-ed on the homeless campsite issue, a fat ugly hog, or a corporate lapdog? As always, the poll is at top right of this blog.

The results are in. Out of 1,035 visitors last week, 45 weighed in on this earth shattering and definitive poll. By the most decisive margin yet, it's corporate lapdog, 38-7. Thanks for helping to clarify.

A Season of Holiday Hate

Given the confluence of a recent grossly uninformed Seattle Times "Squatters, Be Gone" editorial, Nicole Brodeur’s recent revelations that the homeless are to be hated and feared, and yet another alarmist op-ed regarding the extremely sudden scourge of armed homeless drug addicts, C.R. Douglas’ very Seattle Crosscut piece asking whether it might be time to crack down, and the tasteless yuck fest at the expense of those who don’t have shit that appeared issue before last in the Seattle Weekly, I’m beginning to wonder whether the holiday season has been rededicated to hating the homeless? Hey Seattle, let’s start a new tradition!

When Real Change moved the Mayor’s official-but-lets-preserve-deniability policy of homeless sweeps to front and center by surfacing hard proof through our FOIA requests, we knew that we ran the risk of creating a backlash. The Mayor’s office, along with the top parks and human service honchos on city payroll, has responded with a lying disinformation campaign that is based in the denial of plain facts and the tight control of information.

Meanwhile, the smear campaign is on. In a city where the shelters turn people away every night, those who survive outside are being depicted as subhuman, diseased criminals. Alongside this, the phony compassion rhetoric wilts to slime like two month-old lettuce.

Pushback begets pushback. Week after next, homeless people are going to see who their friends are. Details on Monday.

Housing? What Housing? An Odyssey.

Over the past several months, activists in Seattle have moved heaven and earth to prevent Burien from demolishing 162 units of affordable family housing at Lora Lake. But what if the City of Seattle spent $11 million to buy 24 acres of property with 66 units of functioning affordable family housing, only to tear it all down for green space? And then no one seemed to notice or care?

This is the question I set out to answer when Wednesday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that a City Council Parks Committee hearing was scheduled that afternoon to approve a move to do just that.

I was doing about ten things when I got this email from Bob Young at the Seattle Times. "I can't help but wonder: an impressive campaign is mounted to preserve affordable housing near a runway, why not preserve affordable housing in a large city park, with peace, quiet, lots of greenery and clean air? Am I missing something?"

Good question. I read the article, and then I read it again, and again.

The deal would remove 66 "Capehart" duplexes and homes in a small Navy development that has housed military families in Seattle for nearly 50 years. Military families live in them today.

The proposal, which comes after 2 1/2 years of negotiating between Seattle and the Navy, raises mixed emotions. Park advocates are thrilled at the prospect of more green space, but others say the small homes could be better used as housing for displaced veterans.

But it is a separate plan -- to sell 26 elegant, historic houses that military families also are living in -- that is getting the most attention.

The Navy wants to sell those homes, and the city isn't interested in buying them. They could go to private owners.

How could something like this come out of nowhere and be heading for a City Council Hearing that same afternoon without so much as a peep from anyone?

I spoke to Sharon Chan at the Seattle Times.

Yes, the idea of the city paying $11 million to tear down 66 units of family housing to create more greenspace in Magnolia's Discovery Park is incomprehensible, and, no, I hadn't heard anything before this morning, and no, it didn't seem to be on anyone's radar.

What the fuck?

I drove home at noon. Nobody was on the road. It was like a post Labor Day neutron bomb had gone off. My four year-old was home sick, and I'd gone into work at seven so my wife Carolyn could go in the afternoon. Downtown to Shoreline in twenty minutes. It was a new record. Mica had been to the Doctor this morning. He thought it might be pneumonia and prescribed antibiotics.

She was sitting on the couch getting nebulized with Albuterol when Carolyn and I switched off. I nuked half an omelet and some hash browns from yesterday's breakfast and started calling people who might know something. Mica and I shared the leftovers while I Googled around on my laptop and found this from a little over a year ago ...

Prime property to be available -- with great view

After 40 years in Magnolia, the Fort Lawton Army Reserve Center is being closed, putting a rolling swath of land, several buildings and one of the best views in Seattle up for grabs by interested agencies and organizations.

The rare opportunity has sparked interest from groups that help the homeless, which will be given priority in acquiring the property. But the land offering also has been noticed by fans of Discovery Park, who see it as a chance to expand the park's open area, and by neighbors who worry that future uses could bring more traffic."

People who live in this area will be very interested in what happens to that property," said Heidi Carpine, who lives across the street from the reserve center. "All the owners have put in a lot of money into upgrading their houses; it has become a beautiful, safe neighborhood. I know everyone is going to be very alert to what is decided for that property.

The phone rang. It was John Fox at the Seattle Displacement Coalition getting back. He'd talked to Sharon at the Times too. He didn't know much more than I did. He remembered something about LIHI putting in a proposal, but for some reason it went nowhere. He couldn't go to the hearing. Yep. It was fucked. Seattle. What can you do?

I looked at the Council website. The Parks Committee is chaired by Dave Della and has Richard Conlin, Sally Clark, and Jan Drago. Not exactly our list of champions. I tried calling to see if there would be public testimony but no one at City Hall was picking up phones today.

I looked at Mica, who was happily taking bits of omelet off my fork as I fed her like she was a one-year-old. A sick kid is a good excuse to relive the baby years. "Do you want to go somewhere with daddy," I said? She nodded. She was looking pretty good. No fever. No coughing. I asked her again. She looked genuinely excited at the prospect.

I-5 was dead. We took it to James, parked in the Municipal Building garage, and were at City Council Chambers by five minutes of two. There were maybe twenty people there, and most of them for something else. Only three other people signed up to speak about Discovery Park, and one of them meant to sign a different sheet. Dave Della was the only Council member there.

Mica and I sat down next to a nice lady who had seen the article in the paper and was there out of curiosity. "Are you teaching her about civics?" she asked, smiling at Mica. "Yes," I said. "I think it's important for her to feel betrayed by democracy before she gets to be seven."

It was a conversation-stopper.

I was beginning to feel like the kid who showed to school on a snow day. Where the hell was everybody? I looked up to see Bill Block, the head of the Coalition to End Homelessness in King County.

We chatted as Mica sat on my lap, happy as a clam. He was there on a minor matter in his role as a Board member of Seattle Center. Bill didn't know anything about Discovery Park. "Haven't researched it," he said. He did his thing and was gone. It was soon my turn to speak. Mica walked up to the mike with me, holding my hand.

Dave Della stared.

"I can't believe this," I said. "We have an affordable housing problem in this city. We have a workforce housing problem in this city. And we're talking about spending $11 million to tear down 66 units of perfectly good housing, and nobody is here to testify. No one even seems to know. And you're the only council member here."

Della stared.

"And we're tearing it down to create more green space? In Discovery Park? Like more green space is our most pressing problem? And 26 units of officers housing, sitting in Discovery Park overlooking the Sound is going to a private developer for $16 million? Who do you have to know to get that deal? And the City says they're not interested? Why not? Maybe no one's here now, but you'll hear about this," I said.

"You'll hear about this?" I felt ridiculous before I even sat back down for having said something so completely cliché and, for all I know, untrue. Mica crawled into my lap. I didn't even use my whole two minutes.

Michael Ruby from Friends of Discovery Park rose and gave a gracious two minutes on how this was absolutely the right decision and the culmination of a wonderful process, and then asked to see me outside. Mica and I went. She was looking positively chipper about the whole thing.

Michael and I sat next to each other on a small bench in the foyer as he told me that he had been following this issue since 1954. He looked as though that may be true. He explained that the Friends of Discovery Park had once felt "exactly as I do now," but they'd examined the housing and found it to be on the verge of collapse. They'd sadly come to accept that reverting the land to green space was the best option for all. He hoped we'd get to talk again sometime.

I bought Mica a chocolate donut at the Muni building Starbucks, ate half of it myself, and wondered if I had slipped into some sort of bizarro-world, where affordable housing gets torn down for green space and no one notices or cares.

We drove home. I got hold of Sharon Lee at LIHI and asked her what the fuck? She said they'd put in a proposal to build housing on decommissioned Fort Lawton land in a partnership with United Tribes and Archdiocesan Housing Authority, and that the City was basically not returning her calls. After a confusing few minutes, we realized she was talking about administrative buildings on the east side of the park. I was talking about family housing out on the western tip. She didn't know anything about that.

"How can this be," I asked. "How can housing get torn down without anyone knowing. Without anyone getting a chance to preserve it. What the fuck?"

"I don't know," she said. "I have to go."

I called Sharon Chan to see what she'd figured out and ranted for awhile as her fingers clicked on the other end.

"How can this be," I asked.

"I have to go," she said.

Mica and I left to retrieve her twin sister from a first day at the new preschool a few blocks away. When I got back, I sat glued to my laptop while the girls performed water volume experiments on the kitchen floor which involved some cups and the refrigerator's filtered water spigot. It's their favorite appliance.

I found the 35-year Discovery Park Master Plan, last updated in 1986, which contained this paragraph.

It is essential that Capehart Housing site eventually become part of Discovery Park. This area is far within and very central to the interior of the Park. The housing is totally incompatible with the Park philosophy and the Long Range Development Plan. It is proposed that the housing ultimately be removed and the site converted to a meadow open space interspersed with thickets and coniferous forest.

Capehart housing is the 66 units, built in the early 60s, in which military families are now living. They will continue to live there until 2009, when American Eagle Communities — the ginormously-huge company that has the contract, among many, many others, to manage all decommissioned military properties in Washington State — will tear down the housing and deliver an empty lot in exchange for Seattle's $11 million.

That's part of the deal. American Eagle does the tear down while the ownership is in their hands. Clever.

It was basically a done deal more than three years ago. The officers housing, also handled by American Eagle, is being sold to a private company who is getting a sweet deal on fine turn of the century homes with a sweeping view of the Cascades and the Sound. One of these appears at the top of this post. There are thirteen of these, and thirteen senior NCO houses made of brick.

The whole lot of 26 has been appraised for $16 million. Historic Seattle, according to my new friend Michael Ruby, is interested, but can't come within spitting range of that price. The private company can.

The city says they're completely uninterested in the property. Someone's going to make a shit load of money. No one cares. They're too busy beating up on Burien to notice when right here, under our noses, an upscale neighborhood gets an enhanced amenity and private capital makes a killing, while housing — yet more housing — disappears off the map.