Who Wouldn't Want To Sleep Here?

Casey McNerthney at the Seattle PI called me last night after being driven around around a bit by Sgt. Gracy to get today's story on homeless people refusing shelter. I like Casey. He's a good reporter who's done right by the homeless more than once. For some reason, however, my rather clear explanation of why people avoid shelter didn't really get into his story, although I do appreciate the bit that did.

City, county and federal officials need to do more, according to Tim Harris, executive director of the Real Change newspaper.

"To say that there needs to be more of an investment in services is a radical understatement," he said. "They spend money where they see value, and they don't think homeless people have that much value."

To be fair, "some homeless people" were quoted saying pretty much what I told him. People are afraid of getting lice, and shelters are demoralizing. City Human Services press flak David Takami gets some of the rest, although he seems to find it much more mysterious than it actually is. "Some don't want to sleep next to somebody else. Some people have mental health problems that make it an issue."

This is ball park, but doesn't really get to the brokenness of the system, and why some would rather just avoid it altogether. Both Takami and the police are quoted as saying "the goal is to help homeless people become self-sufficient -- paying bills and maintaining a home." Shelters, apparently, help people do this, and being literally on the streets, they say, does not.

This is fiction. Shelters don't have the resources to provide real services. Not most of the ones for single homeless people anyway. And many of the people they contain have been permanantly written off, never to come back. The system is radically underfunded and overcrowded, and fundamentally broken. To say that shelters are somehow "a pathway" to rejoining the mainstream is to participate in a collective fairytale that denies the reality of what's going on.

If McNerthney really wants to know why people don't want to be in shelters, he should spend a night at DESC on one of the mats on the floor, four inches from the guy with the deep cough that won't stop. If he's smart, he'll put anything of value in his shoes and keep those under his pillow. If he's lucky, he won't get any of the bugs that are around.

I used to only really hear that about lice and bedbugs at Union Gospel. It's been a consistent complaint for years, and apparently they either don't care or can't get it under control. But now I hear it all the time about DESC too. There's an infestation, and people don't want to go there.

To listen to Sgt. Gracey and David Takami talk, you'd think that the shelters have legions of social workers, and to walk in the door is to enroll in some sort of homeless makeover program, where one learns the intricacies of personal hygeine and money management, gains soft and hard job skill training, overcomes their addictions and mental illnesses, and is placed on a smooth road toward becoming a housed member of the working, if not middle, class.

Bullshit. They're warehouses for the broken, written-off, detrius of the global economy. There are not a lot of jobs out there for, say, a 49 year old black felon who lacks a high school education, or a 60 year old unskilled laborer with a bad back, or a border-line retarded thirty-year-old who's been on the street since he was fourteen and is now addicted to crack, or the woman whose customer service skills have been honed by fifteen years of nickel and dime street prostitution, and so forth.

So we pack them in where we don't see them, and offer the minimal conditions necessary to sustain life. Then we boot them out at 5 or 6 a.m., so they can disperse before the real citizens get downtown so they won't have to see the undiluted misery of so much human wreckage discharged to the streets for yet another day.

Large shelters are total institutions for those whom most people would rather not see. The line staff are heroic, but underpaid, overworked, and completely stressed. There is nothing reasonable about what's expected of them, and this translates to what they are able to do. The best of them are saints, but most are as human as the rest of us and become numbed to the extreme misery of what they see. Under these conditions, true empathy becomes unsustainable.

Those who have the wherewithal to fend for themselves outdoors often choose to do so. To me, this isn't a mysterious, inexplicable choice. It's a matter of finding personal dignity in the fact of everyday survival, as opposed to surrendering to dehumanizing misery and the loss of personal agency. If I were homeless, it's what I'd do. It's a rational choice.

If the city wants people to go to shelters, they need to invest in these places to bring them past the tipping point of offering more to homeless people than they take away. There are both physical and moral dimensions to this.

A decent shelter should offer some sense of community. There should be meetings, activities, and the sharing of food. Large, institutional settings don't lend themselves to this. They foster, instead, a sort of defensive isolation.

A decent shelter should be a homebase, where possessions can be stored and real respite from the hardships of the street can be found. They should offer some semblence of personal space. A real bed, for example, that one can return to each night, and at least a few feet from the next person over

A decent shelter should not restrict one's personal liberty anymore than necessary. One should not have to subject themselves to a 10 hour lockdown to sleep indoors.

A decent shelter should operate on a small enough scale for people to know each other. A decent shelter should have a client to staff ratio that gives people some small chance of getting real help. All most shelter staff have time for is the bare essentials, and barely even that. Basically, the priority is to see that no one gets hurt. This isn't a "pathway." It's a tar pit.

People who have a hard time sleeping on sheets with a threadcount of less than 300 don't get to judge homeless people who opt out of shelter. They simply have no idea of what they're talking about.

If the city wants people to go to shelters so damn bad, they should invest the resources to make them places people would choose to be. This isn't rocket science.

So forget the bullshit "helping" rhetoric. Very few people are being helped, and there isn't a lot right now to help them toward. The affordable housing that's supposed to be the solution isn't there. The waiting lists, if you can get on them, are years long. Try getting a gravely mentally ill homeless person some services sometime. You learn fast that things are very, very bad. And they are going to get worse.

If the city wants to help people who don't go to the shelters, here's an idea. First, do no harm. Then, why not just ask what they want? You might learn something.

I Bleed For The Homeless

I am perhaps insane. This thought dawned this morning as I fought my way up a 90 degree incline through waist high thickets of thorns. This was the lower Queen Anne greenbelt. Homeless campsites were being cleared here today. I apparently wanted to be there very, very badly.

My decision to show up was on the spontaneous side. Our organizing project met last night and briefly considered whether we could muster a response within the next twelve hours. We could not. We would put out a press release to try and counter the City spin. That's what we could do. We have other priorities. I agreed to write it. Many affiliations Freeman, Debbie from Jobs with Justice, and David Bloom of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness all emailed me quotes and contact info. I figured I'd do it in the morning.

I stayed up until two writing. This in itself is not unusual. I am a man obsessed. My cracked molar was bothering me. The infection still hasn't resolved. I seem to be heading toward root canal. Joy. I took a couple of Ibuprofen, swished with my special rinse, and went to bed. Things started seriously throbbing and by three I was up to take my second to last Vicodin. I was very awake.

The morning would be tight, I thought. I'll knock out the press release now. I curled up on the couch with my laptop and a quilt and went to work. By a bit after six, I was wrapping up. It had been light for awhile. The Queen Anne press event was at 7:30. I could print the thing out, arrive in time for the circus and hand it to reporters directly. I shaved so as not to frighten people, made coffee, popped my Adderall, and was on the road by 7:15. Within a half hour, I was parked in the Super Supplements lot on Elliott Avenue and heading up a trail.

Three homeless people were sitting on lawn chairs and a blanket, enjoying the industrial lookout over Puget Sound. There was a Latino guy who spoke decent English, a heavy-set late-middle-aged woman, and a rangy toothless old fart in the lawn chair. I asked if they'd seen any one. They had not.

"Hey, I know you," growled the toothless one. "You're that Real Change guy. I seen your picture. I wanna ask you something. Why you gotta be making money off the homeless? Money, money, it's all you want. It's all you care about."

"Dude," I said, "you have no fucking idea what you're talking about. We have staff. They like to get paid. We run on a shoestring."

"No, I see it in the paper. You want donations, donations, donations. You shouldn't have your hand out all the time. Take, take, take. You know what I say to you?" He raised a finger to point at me. "GET A GOD-DAMN JOB!"

This pretty much made my morning. The others were laughing. So was I. "OK then," I said. "I'm going to see if I can find anyone." I headed up a trail toward several small nests of camps. The trail ended and I climbed through brush. When I crested onto the back yards of some really nice houses, I decided to head back down and try heading north and then up. As I passed my employment counselor, I handed him a press release. In an hour or two, his camp would be history. Rarely are press releases so prescient.

I went all the way down and a few blocks over and picked up a trail. It petered out into thick brush covered in thorns. I'd been here before and knew that if I just headed up and north, I'd again encounter well-defined trails and the upper encampments. This was where City officials and the press had to be. By then it was getting toward 8:30. I was late. My inner bulldog took over. I was fighting my way up the steep and muddy incline, sometimes on hands and knees. My hands were bleeding from multiple tiny cuts. My cardigan was covered with thorny plant bits that had gotten caught. I was drenched in sweat and not smelling so good.

"I must really love the fucking homeless," I thought. I found the trail. My stomach felt as though I'd just sprinted two miles. I gasped for breath. I puked my morning coffee and frozen waffle to the side of the trail in about five quick gushes.

"I must really love the fucking homeless," I thought again. This amused me to no end. I saw trucks and men in full haz-mat suits with respirators and goggles. I had arrived.

There was Mayoral press flak David Takami, some guy from the Queen Anne Community Council, a woman I didn't recognize who glared daggers, the Parks facilities manager I met on my last tour through, and Sgt. Paul Gracy from West Precinct. They regarded me as one might an annoying but potentially dangerous rodent. Gracy was the first to ask who I was. "Tim Harris from Real Change," I said. "And you're Sgt. Gracy." He admitted to the fact. I said something about all the equipment and personnel and he said something about how very expensive this clean-up would be. About $150,000 to $200,000 before it was over.

This is roughly the sum that has been devoted to outreach and twenty additional shelter beds. Sort of puts it in perspective.

I walked up the hill and saw Linda Brill from King 5. She'd just interviewed me in my office last week. She went to shake my bloody hand and thought better of it. I told her about puking on the side of the trail and made a joke about needing a breath mint. This turned out to be a conversation stopper. She was out of there. Four television stations had arrived, got their shots, and gone. This sort of penetrating journalism apparently doesn't take very long. I fell in with the photographers with the Seattle Times and the PI. They were complaining about how limited their access was, which was weird, since this was a media event. They brushed through to where the action was and I followed.

We pushed into a trail where a well-sealed cold weather dome tent sat at the end. It was a nicely maintained camp. One of the haz-mat guys sliced it open with a machete. "Haven't these people ever heard of a fucking zipper," I thought? We snapped away. A Parks guy began to bellow that all non-Parks personnel needed to leave the area immediately for our own safety. There were just the three of us and we were only a few feet from him. It seemed rude. We kept shooting as we backed out.

Down the trail, a number a haz-mat guys milled. PI-guy asked one a question and he said, "You know we're not supposed to talk to you." I asked if this was a Department of Corrections work crew and the floodgates blew open.

"No," he spat. We're all Parks employees, we all have other jobs, and we're being rotated into this away from our work. I'm a certified arborist. I should be nurturing plants and identifying species." Then he started talking about how his encounters with homeless people in parks had undermined his sympathy. They were crazy, addicted, drunk, and rude. Other than this, he seemed like a nice guy. He wandered away to sit on a log with another worker. He asked that he speak to him in his native Bulgarian.

P-I guy and I walked down the trail to an encampment that had largely pulled up stakes and gone. A blue tarp lay on the ground with other random items. Some tent poles. A cheap IKEA-looking bookshelf. I made a joke about not expecting to encounter Swedish architecture.

We made our way back up the trail where a half-dozen personnel focused on clearing the tent that had been macheted open. Garbage bags were piling up. On top was a color pencil drawing. I asked the Parks Supervisor if this was garbage and if I could have it. She said yes. The other photographers and I marveled at its artistry, and speculated whether this was a self-portrait. A man with a worn face, surrounded by nature.

No one knew what the resident looked like. He had been uninterested in offers of help from outreach workers. That morning he'd been told at 7 a.m. he had to go. His entire life now laid in garbage bags at our feet. There were three bags that had been deemed personal items. These went to storage. There were around twenty that had been defined as trash. These went into a garbage truck.

Someone had made the choice to carefully lay the artwork face-up on top of the piles of garbage bags. There was an African-American man who seemed unhappier about all of this than the rest, and no one looked much like they were enjoying themselves. He didn't want to be photographed. I suspected him.

"There's your next cover for Real Change," he said.

PI guy gave me a ride to my car. He was cool. My hands stung and my fingers were numbed by what felt like hundreds of microscopic nettles. On the way home, I stopped at a drugstore. Faced with a bewildering array of ointments, I asked a pharmacist for advice. He said nothing would help much. I basically just had to wait it out.

Charles Brown, the reporter from the Times, called to ask what I'd seen. We argued about whether full haz-mat suits with respirators and goggles were necessary. I said this was part of the media show. I found myself close to tears as I described what it was like to watch a human being's entire existence disappear into twenty garbage bags. This was, I said, a person, not some variety of exotic hazardous waste. He didn't use any of this. His story followed the standard format for these things, which is to uncritically accept the City's framing and to prominently reference bottles of urine and hypodermic needles.

He did, however, plug the June 8-9 Tent City we're organizing at City Hall, and for that I am grateful. I have photos. I'm well past 40 hours with no sleep. I'll post them tomorrow.

Shhh! Don't Tell the Advocates!

A May 18 memo that identified priorities for police action against homeless encampments got surfaced by a recent public disclosure request. A later list had a different set of priorities that included more purely urban encampments. These tend to be below freeways and visible from downtown highrises. Hard to tell where the focus is now, with so many clearances happening. Worse, the State, through the Department of Transportation, seems to have stepped up the pace of campsite clearances as well. Whatever level of coordination exists between city and state remains a mystery for now, but they seem mutually committed to placing all public space off-limits to survival activity.

Here's some questions that the document raises for me.

• With campsites busting out all over the city (remember, this is just a list of the "worst" sites) and the shelters full, where were all of these people supposed to go? My sense is that no one in the Mayor's office much cared, and that they still don't.

• Why was the City pursuing a clearance policy this aggressive with no protocols to guide them? Through the summer and fall, clearances were performed with little to no warning, no guidelines regarding possessions, no outreach, and no provision of alternatives. While the new protocols are quite clear on tightening the law to criminalize the use of public space for survival, they are equally open-ended and exception-ridden when it comes to the City's responsibility to campers. The goal seems to be to maintain the gloves off approach, while pretending to meet the concerns of advocates.
  

• This list was generated by Parks Security Supervisor Larry Campbell in response to a request from Sgt. Paul Gracy. Where did Gracy's orders come from? Tim Ceis knows better than to put things like that in an email. And why the sudden interest? The City's been saying that over 2006-2007, street homelessness went down.
  

• From the "This type of focus may create additional attention from homeless advocates," statement at the end, it's pretty clear that this was a below the radar operation. Yet it also implies an escalation. When did the Mayor's secret campsite clearance policy really start?
  

So many public disclosure requests to make. So little time.

Compassion or Class War?

Saul Williams has remade U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday as an anthem against class war being waged on the homeless. I'm thinking the city portrayed here is probably LA, but it could be pretty much anywhere. As our cities have become islands of affluence, campsite clearances have become business as usual, and it's always trotted out as compassion. Municipalities share tactics and rhetoric, and over time, refine the process. Real Change has, for example, obtained documentation of Sargent Gracy's trip to LA to meet with Chief Bratton last year to learn from that city and San Diego.

So, this week's poll. Is the Mayor's new policy on campsite clearances about compassion, or class war? As always, vote at top right.

The results are in, and produced our most lopsided polling margin to date. Class war beat out compassion as a descriptor of the Mayor's policy by a resounding forty to two! Who were those people? Patricia? Craig?

Ask Greg: Do the Homeless Shit in the Woods?

Dear Greg,

I know this is an uncomfortable topic, but I heard that the last homeless count found at least 1,600 people trying to survive outside of Seattle’s ridiculously stretched homeless shelter system. Where do these people shit? In the woods?

Grossed Out

Dear Grossed Out,

Seattle is a partner in the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County, and has committed to no longer simply manage the problem but to put an end to it.

Since this effort began in 2005, the City has invested $28 million to create 559 new permanent housing units for homeless people. Working with partners like King County and United Way, we have collectively produced 1,000 new housing units for chronically homeless persons.

Just this year, Adrienne Quinn and I rewarded our friend Paul Lambrose for his political reliability with a noncompetitive $3.5 million in City funds for yet another Plymouth project. Who’s gonna complain? Right?

The City of Seattle spends approximately $40 million each year to support housing, programs and services for homeless people. While this is less than half of what we placed in the City budget for South Lake Union infrastructure this year to sweeten the deal for mega-billionaire Paul Allen, you’ve got to admit it sounds like a hell of a lot of dough.

Probably more than these people are worth.

While we are seriously behind in meeting Ten Year Plan Goals, and have made numerous policy decisions that benefit developers but substantially aggravate the housing affordability crisis, we prefer to not talk about that.

We’d rather talk about homeless people shitting in the woods. Ew. Gross.

Our Ten Year Plan calls us to collect reams and reams of data on all aspects of the problem. No longer do we rely on hearsay and conjecture. Due to the award winning investigative reporting of Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur and the tireless detective work of West Precinct’s Sgt. Paul Gracy, we have a clear picture of the problem.

We now know that homeless people are shitting in the woods in greater and greater numbers, spreading the risk of hepatitis, AIDS, avian flu, and the common cold. They often pitch their tents just a beer can’s toss from their disgusting piles of trash. These people are lazy, filthy, and diseased, and, as you said, just plain gross.

After several decades of “tolerance” and “compassion,” Seattle has finally arrived at the solution that these people cannot be allowed. Especially when there are other cities and states with lower real estate values whose greenbelts, bridges, and viaducts might be more amenable.

Fortunately, the number of homeless persons in Seattle appears to be diminishing. Thank you for your interest in homelessness issues and for writing to us on this important topic.

Sincerely,
Greg Nickels,
Mayor of Seattle

Biggest Crimebuster? Sgt. Gracy or Dick Tracy?

OK. Let's try this again. Seattle Community Policing Team head Sgt. Paul Gracy says homeless campsite clearances have been suspended for now, but that he personally is tromping around in the greenbelts with camera and notebook in hand to document cases of littering and other possibly illegal behavior. Which leads us to this week's revised poll. Who's the biggest crimebuster around? The generally genial Sgt. Paul Gracy, or comic book supercop Dick Tracy? You decide. Vote at top right of this blog.

Detective Dick Tracy, by nearly a 5-1 margin, was declared a bigger Crimebuster that greenbelt enthusiast Sgt. Paul Gracy. Congratulations to the Dick!