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.

Projects of Reassurance

As I mentioned last week, I've been reading Timothy Gibson's Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle, and this relatively obscure four-year old urban planning textbook has pretty much rocked my world.

Over the past thirty years, says Gibson, new technologies have forced cities everywhere to reinvent themselves in order to remain viable within the new globalized economy. Seattle, with its thriving centers of upscale consumption, diverse cultural offerings, stunning natural assets, and thriving downtown core, has fared better than most.

This, however, has come at a cost. As elites have managed to sell corporate and developer interests as being somehow identical to the needs of "Seattle," the city has become increasingly geared to the upper-income consumers and workers that this development was designed to attract. Thus, we have a downtown condo boom where at least 4,500 new units of downtown housing are slated to become available over the next three years at an average price of $750,000, and a housing affordability crisis where the eighty percent of us with more normal incomes are, more and more, left to go elsewhere.

This rehabilitation of our urban landscape is as much psychological as it is physical.

In pop culture terms, our city has transitioned from the gritty scenes of Cinderella Liberty, where James Caan haunts Seattle's working class bars and rooming houses and tragically falls in love with a good hearted prostitute, to the cloying Sleepless in Seattle, where Tom Hanks, an architect, meets Meg Ryan, a journalist, and they presumably go on to spawn above average children and live happily ever after in a land where everyone in sight is a middle-class professional or better.

Within the popular imagination, many still visualize our urban centers as something akin to Dirty Harry meets Blade Runner. A few years ago, my wife and I went to a concert downtown with her parents, who usually divide their time between Riverside, CA, and Issaquah, WA. The show let out, and they insisted, as a matter of safety, upon giving us a ride from Benaroya Hall to the Nordstrom parking garage six blocks away.

They are more normal, I think, than we are.

For cities to succeed and attract the consumers that business desires, says Gibson, people need to be convinced that the waters are safe. This depends upon something he calls "projects of reassurance." These are the various tools that have been developed in cities across the country to suppress the inconvenient urban poor.

As our cities have become centers of upscale consumptions, downtown interests have worked to gain the same sort of control over the built environment that a suburban mall might enjoy. This typically looks like heightened policing, new laws aimed at the visible poor, the privatization of public space, and the expansion of private security.

And we are easily convinced that this is both normal and in our best interests.

Much of the time, it seems that those of us who are active on issues of homelessness and poverty are working with concepts that are fifteen to twenty years out of date. This means that we're forever playing catch-up, as the reality of our times continues to operate several steps beyond our reach. We need to smarten up and figure out what time it is.

The City Spectacular

Sometimes, the extent to which I'm capable of missing the obvious blows my mind. This week, I've been working my way through Securing the Spectacular City, an analysis of the political economy of Seattle development that is modeled a bit on what Mike Davis did with Los Angeles in his City of Quartz. It had actually never occurred to me that the trend toward cities as upscale islands of wealth might be related to globalization, but now that Timothy Gibson points it out, I'm feeling like someone who's been napping for the last decade of so.

Gibson describes how changes in technology, most notably the shipping container and the internet, put an end to the Fordist idea that the purchasing power of the worker was linked to the overall success of the economy. Demand-side economics were replaced by supply-side economics, or the idea that tax breaks, R&D subsidies, and other incentives to corporations would spur production, and that benefits would trickle down in the form of jobs and lower prices. The technology allowed corporations to take production anywhere they like, and globalization became the way of the world. As locales compete to create the best "business environment" for manufacturing and services to locate, unions, the power to tax, and the ability to regulate all lose out as regions engage in a "race to the bottom" to attract footloose capital.

While none of this is news (Reich, for example, describes the same processes in his new book, and the outlines were becoming clear twenty years ago), I'd never really considered what this meant for American cities. While some cities, like Cleveland or Newark, never recovered from deindustrialization, others have found their place as glittering command and control centers for the new globalized capitalism. While manufacturing processes have decentralized, the complex coordination of this needs to occur somewhere. Moreover, most large corporations subcontract major pieces of their work, like accounting, legal, and marketing, out to other businesses to maximize their flexibility and keep costs down. Urban centers who are able to offer a business core where all of these services are localized will win the competition to woo global capital.

The most successful cities then are those who have managed to position themselves at the crossroads of global markets and present themselves as attractive, dynamic, places for creative, educated, upper-income professionals to make their homes. Seattle has succeeded fabulously. Gibson describes in some detail the history of recent Seattle development and how building cultural meccas such as Benaroya Hall rolled over other priorities, such as building a hygiene center for homeless people at the Glen Hotel property.

The question this raises is this: is our history of making Seattle an attractive haven for global capital at the expense of homeless and low-income people the way it has to be? It certainly makes sense of our pre-occupation with eliminating visible homelessness. As an urban condo boom is poised to flood the downtown with upper-income professionals, the wheels are grinding to eliminate any elements who might make the newcomers feel unsafe.

Police, for example, seem to have greatly escalated their harassment of homeless campers who exceed the capacity of Seattle's shelter system. The message that they are unwelcome in this city, while not explicit, is nonetheless being made clear. Meanwhile, lower-income people are being pushed out by rising rents all the time.

Are compassion and economic diversity necessary casualties to Seattle's success as a "world class" city? Or is there another way? Is there an alternative to pushing homeless and low income people out of the city and off the radar?