The Squandering of America

Last Sunday, I had the privilege of interviewing Robert Kuttner, whose new book, The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity is the perfect companion piece to Robert Reich’s Supercapitalism. While these two American Prospect superstars have some minor chicken and egg differences over what’s behind our current period of growing inequality and declining democracy, their perspectives have far more in common than not. Both agree that the window of opportunity after which things become infinitely harder to change is closing fast.

Kuttner was in town for his Sunday Town Hall reading, and we talked for about half an hour in the swank lobby of the Alexis Hotel as curious people came by to take free Sunday papers from our coffee table. It was an exciting interview. I hope to see the thing in print over the next few weeks. I know that Angela Davis is in line ahead of me.

His analysis is basically that opportunity and a certain amount of equality are foundational American values that would be much better served by some moderate form of a managed economy than by the current environment of radical free market ideology. Like Reich, he identifies a period — for him it's 1948 to 1973 — during which a balance of power between business, government, and mass-based organizations led by labor gave us 3.8% average annual growth and steadily declining levels of inequality. The common good was well served by this system.

Recession and the OPEC oil shocks of the 70s offered a leg up to business and financial interests that were chafing at regulatory restriction and looking to reduce the power of organized labor. Things began to shift significantly under Carter, and with Reagan, the new rules became our explicit national policy. Taxes and regulatory controls were out. Homelessness and cuts in social spending were in. Inequality has steadily increased since 1973, and we now have the widest income disparity this country has seen since the twenties.

Due to the enormous influence of wealth in politics (Kuttner describes how democratic participation is very much alive and well among the elites) both political parties have largely turned their back on the concerns of ordinary Americans. The days when the Democratic Party had the back of the middle class are long gone. It gets in the way of fundraising. Ordinary Americans, therefore, have also turned their backs on politics. Expectations that government might actually improve our lives are so low that most people hardly bother. This, he says, is a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.

One ray of hope is that the six Democratic candidates that defeated Republican incumbents in 2006 all ran as economic populists. Kuttner describes how he’s advised John Edwards that his use of poverty as a campaign issue should be broadened to include the concerns of the increasingly economically vulnerable bottom 75-80% of the population. Edwards has ignored this advice to his peril. Obama, on the other hand, seems to get it. Bill Clinton’s economic populism seemed to evaporate right around the time Maya Angelou finished reading her inaugural poem. Hopefully, things will be different this time.

Kuttner describes our current situation as a bit of a race. Conditions in the financial sector are very reminiscent of the twenties, when there was little accountability, transparency, or regulation, and the current subprime mortgage crisis has the potential to escalate into broader financial collapse. Kuttner’s analysis of the financial sector is what makes this book “a slog,” as one reviewer put it, but the writing is as lucid as it is detailed, and he succeeds brilliantly in conveying just how dangerously out of hand things have become

The difference between now and the 1929 crash is that the Federal Reserve now plays a bailout role that mitigates the potential damage. Kuttner and Reich both argue that this creates a situation of “moral hazard.” Financial speculators — driven to take big risks by an environment that demands unrealistic rates of appreciation as a matter of course — know that the Fed will keep the whole floating crap game going. Kuttner argues that this creates a downward spiral of greater risk, and that government must come to understand its obligation to regulate the financial sector, as opposed to just bailing it out when the whole economy threatens to tank.

His solution? Mass-based organizing, typified by the sort of work ACORN and the IAF have led in many regions of the country. Only a reinvigorated grass-roots politics that reclaims democracy and addresses the economic interests of the squeezed middle class, the working poor, and those left out of the economy altogether, is capable of holding government accountable to the people and overcoming the raw power of money. In his view, campaign finance reform is where we end up, not where we begin, because under the current conditions, getting big money out of politics just isn’t possible.

The bad news is that time is running out. The severe economic shock of a real economic crash could clear the way for the sort of demagoguery that might lead to harsh political repression of pro-democracy organizing. And there are multiple scenarios under which this sort of financial collapse might occur. This next election, it seems, is for most, if not all, of the marbles.

The Limits of the Altruistic Imagination

Speaking of humoring delusions, I've started reading John Ehrenreich's classic 1985 history of the social work movement to get clearer in the relationship between service provision and organizing. The Altruistic Imagination is required reading for anyone who finds themselves perplexed by that sort of thing. I'm barely twenty pages into the thing and having Aha! moments all over the place.

Social work was born at a time of tremendous economic dislocation. The factory system of labor inverted the relationship between urban and rural areas, and women, children, and immigrant labor were all pressed into service as cheap labor by the industrialists of the age. The margin for survival was thin, and for the poor, which was most people, the entire family had to work. Blacks were largely kept in the south through a variety of means to function as cheap agricultural labor.

By the early 1900's, a revolutionary situation had developed, and reform was being championed by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt in order to preserve the capitalist system.

"First, to create a rational social order, it was necessary to curtail what Teddy Roosevelt had called "the dull, purblind folly" of the rich, that is, giant corporations had to be regulated. The corporations were not about to regulate themselves. Some corporate leaders — people like Mark Hanna, Andrew Carnegie, and August W. Belmont — did understand that a more moderate stance toward workers and consumers was in the long-run self-interest of the capitalist class. Without it endemic unrest, if not outright revolution, was inescapable. But no one corporation could carry out such sweeping societal reforms alone, and in any case, the fear of giving a competitive advantage to the other corporations inhibited them. The task of reform, of moderating corporate behavior, has to be carried out on a unified nationwide or statewide basis or not at all."

This is remarkable in that it is precisely what Robert Reich argues in his new book Supercapitalism. The socially responsible corporation is, he says, an oxymoron, and the rules of the game dictate one loyalty and that's to the investors. He describes the various campaigns that target a single corporation for "unethical" behavior as "detour and frolic," and calls us to pressure government to once again take up it's regulatory role. Corporate reform, he says, is only possible on a level playing field when ethical behavior is expected of all players alike.

Another interesting insight deals with how social work's focus as a field is generally on either individual dysfunction or broad social reform, and that these go in and out of fashion depending on the broader political context. When there is a grassroots social movement pushing for structural reform, the emphasis within social work tends to follow suit. During more conservative times, the focus narrows to fixing people's problems. Ehrenreich's book addresses how both are possible and how we needn't see this either/or dynamic as a given.

Finally, he talks about how social change, especially as imagined by service providers, often represents an assertion of middle-class values and power to mediate the problem as defined by the professionals. This often looks quite different from how poor people themselves would address the issues.

"The third characteristic approach of the progressives to stabilizing the social order took the form of creating class-bridging, unifying, harmonizing ideologies. This is best represented in the very idea of "the public" and the "public interest," ideas that gained currency during this period. This had, in fact, a double meaning. In part, "the public" was none other than the new middle class itself, representing itself as the entire society. Thus the classic progressive tripartite panel, with representatives of "labor," "capital," and "the public": It should be clear that after subtracting labor and capital, the only "public" left is the middle class. …
Other characteristic progressive ideals, reflecting the occupational and political roles of the new middle class as rationalizers, harmonizers, mediators and planners, embracing the value-neutrality of knowledge, the beneficence of science, technology, and expertise, and the desirability of efficiency and order in all things. … Above all, the goal was class harmony."

Hmmm. Sounds a little like something we've been seeing a lot of.

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?

Mr. Smith Needs to Kick Some Ass.

Every once in a great while a book comes out that perfectly defines the moment we're in. In 1988, Bennett and Harrison's The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America documented how a globalized economy and Reagan-era deregulation had ushered in a new era of growing inequality. While one could argue with the viability of their solutions, if one sought to understand what was happening in America at the time, this was the book. Nearly twenty years later, Robert Reich's Supercapitalism is the must read sequel.

While Bennett and Harrison placed much of the blame for growing inequality on corporate greed, deregulation, and a growing hostility to organized labor, Reich says all of these things are secondary to the real issue: in a supercharged hyper-competitive capitalism — where consumers vote with their feet for the lowest prices and investors can seek the highest rate of return with a click of a button — corporations must seek efficiencies wherever possible.

But while the successes of capitalism have led to low prices and high rates of return for investors, the impact upon democracy has been disastrous. Corporations have turned to the public sector as one more means to seek competitive advantage, and as their enormous resources and political clout have come to dominate the legislative arena, the legitimate public interest has been eclipsed. Democracy has become incapable of defending the greater good.

The solution, says Reich, is to stop expecting corporations to act like anything other than the amoral profit-seeking entities that they are. We need to get corporations and corporate money out of the political process, and force government to regulate capitalism to promote the public good. All else, in Reich's memorable phrase, "is detour and frolic."

As consumers and investors, we need to grapple with the fact that low prices and high returns on investment come with hidden costs to society, and that trade-offs are involved. These trade-offs, he says, can only be negotiated through the democratic process.

Some of Reich's more surprising conclusions are that the idea of the socially responsible corporation is, at bottom, an oxymoron, and that campaigns against particular corporations, such as the Nike and Walmart efforts, are misguided and, in the long run, doomed to failure.

Corporations he reminds us, are responsible only to their shareholders. Social responsibility, given the unforgiving logic of the marketplace, makes sense only to the degree that it adds shareholder value or pre-empts regulatory threat. The public interest cannot, by the rules of the game, enter into the calculation.

The Body Shop's Anita Roddick, he points out, was forced into an advisory role by investor pressure, and Ben & Jerry's was taken over by Unilever. He describes how Starkist tried to net dolphin free tuna, but consumers wouldn't pay the extra cost, so they had to stop, and how Nike, under intense public pressure, reformed its labor practices, but could not sustain these changes over time.

The only way to enforce the social good, says Reich, is to change the rules for everyone, and this means imposing regulation across the board.

When we, as investors and consumers, expect corporations to give us low prices, high returns, and socially responsible behavior, he says, we are being confused and hypocritical. There is a trade-off here, and corporations are incapable of negotiating the middle ground. The public good can only be enforced by government, and for this to happen, we need to reassert citizen control over democracy.

Ultimately, he argues, capitalism and democracy need to be separated. Corporations, he argues, are not people, and should not have political representation, and democracy should not be reduced to just one more means of enhancing shareholder value.

There is, of course, a chicken and egg problem here. How do you get politicians to regulate corporations when corporate money dominates politics? The answer, while not easy, is at least clear: we need campaign finance reform and a resurgence of citizen activism that doesn't get sidetracked by misguided campaigns for corporate responsibility. Holding our electeds responsible is much more to the point.

At bottom, it come down to this: corporations are not accountable to the broad public. Not even in theory. But politicians are, and this is where we need to begin.

Why Don't You Just Say What You Mean?

Below is the text of my keynote speech last night at Temple Beth Am for the H2R Fundraiser. No wonder no one ever asks me to speak anymore.

I was going to speak extemporaneously, but then Sally told me I couldn’t swear, and I thought I’d be better off tonight with a written speech.

The other thing she said was, “Oh, and no Jew jokes.” Not a problem, I thought. No swearing, no Jew jokes. Got it. I can do that.

And then I run into her at the Interfaith Task Force Building Political Will conference a few weeks ago and she says, “and don’t talk about Jesus.”

At this point I’m wondering if maybe she’s having some second thoughts. Like, she thinks I’m going to conclude by asking you all to look in your hearts and consider, “What would Jesus Do?”

So a few days ago, I thought I’d play with her.

We’re talking about directions here and she’s trying to explain the weird intersection at 80th and 26th or something and I say, “Sally, I’ll find it. I’ll just look for the big steeple with the cross.”

And there’s this moment of silence. And she says, “Tim, that is wrong on so many levels.”

But thanks for having me anyway.

I don’t get that many speaking gigs anymore, since I contracted Tourette’s earlier this year.

I hope, a half hour from now, that you’re not regretting the invitation.

I’ve been writing a lot lately, and that’s led to a lot of thinking, and anyone who in these times thinks much is pretty angry.

So I’m here tonight as an angry person

I’m angry because I see the feds claiming to end homelessness while they attack programs that serve the poor, and continue to walk way from their commitments to housing.

I’m angry because I see homelessness framed mostly as a matter of helping dysfunctional people, as opposed to changing a broken system.

I see homeless advocacy that doesn’t really include the voices of poor people or support the organizing we need to see.

I see a “movement to end homelessness” that embraces cost-benefit analysis in order to minimize the expense society must bear for the poor.

A movement that mostly avoids the big picture because we’d rather be “making a real difference” by being immediate and practical, and besides, we’ve tried that whole ending poverty and inequality thing before and it didn’t work.

I see a two-tiered economy, what Barbrara Ehrenreich once dubbed the Kmart/Bloomingdales economy, in which the educated middle class on up does better and better, and other working people struggle more and more to make ends meet. As the middle class continues to erode and face more economic insecurity, we are becoming the Value Village/Tiffanies economy.

I see the people who sell Real Change. About 60% claim some form of disability, and the help available to them is pathetic. I see functional nine year olds coping year after year in a shelter system they can’t escape.

There is a three to six year wait for public housing, and lots of road blocks designed to knock you off that list.

If you’re dirt poor, and more and more people are, you have to be suicidal or homicidal to get mental health treatment.

Options for substance abuse treatment are pathetically under-funded and largely short term, and too often people leave treatment to face the same hopelessness that drove them to drugs in the first place.

And here’s where I go from being angry to being downright bitter. The rhetoric is that in all of this, we’ve chosen to End Homelessness, and not just maintain the structures of mitigation. And we do this by institutionalizing new, but more localized, structures of mitigation.

We say we’re taking a structural approach to ending homelessness, and yet the structures of poverty and inequality itself go largely undiscussed in our work, much less directly challenged.

I believe homelessness can be ended. We’ve ended it before.

Most people think of mass homelessness as something that arose in the late 70s and early 80s, but this isn’t right. We’ve seen this several times before, also in times of massive economic dislocation.

In the 1870s, Civil War demobilization and the advent of the factory system of labor created a huge class of hungry men who rode the new railways in search of work. The old, home-based and largely rural systems of production were disrupted and replaced by an urbanized factory system that did little to lift people out of poverty. There were two depressions in the late 1800’s.

A great tramp army roamed America. The dean of Yale law school, Francis Wayland, said that the homeless and jobless man of his time was a “spectacle of a lazy, shiftless, sauntering or swaggering, ill-conditioned, irreclaimable, incorrigible, cowardly, utterly depraved savage.”

A skid row infrastructure, most fully realized in Chicago’s “main stem”, saw the market opportunity presented by these migrant laborers, and created cheap housing, cheap restaurants, bars, thrift stores and pawnshops, to meet their needs. Areas like this arose in cities across the country.

Much of this was knocked down by urban renewal, our domestic post-war version of the Marshall Plan.

Most of us have seen pictures of the huge homeless shantytown that existed south of Seattle’s skid road during the Great depression of the thirties and forties.

And most of us think it was the New Deal that ended the depression. It wasn’t. The New Deal helped in many ways, but it was the war that emptied America’s shantytowns and also spelled the end of places like Chicago’s main stem.

The war created full employment, and when it ended, government did not want to repeat the post-civil war experience of relegating hordes of hungry, disillusioned men, now trained in the use of small arms, to the street.

And so we got the GI bill, which was one of the greatest engines of class mobility this country has ever seen. We got public housing, cheap credit and federal lending to feed the suburban boom. And we got an understanding between labor, government, and big business that growing the middle class was in everyone’s interest.

Robert Reich’s new book, Supercapitalism describes the period of 1945-1975 as the not quite so golden age: we had McCarthyism, racism, oppression of women, cultural monotony and uniformity, yet, there was a linkage of democracy and capitalism, and an acted upon belief in the common good which took inequality to historic lows.

When you look at the structural forces that ended homelessness in the forties, you see the mirror image of present structural realities now: there is a two-tiered economy, widening inequality, schools that reinforce the class system, higher education made less attainable, and an assault on the very idea of public housing. Robert Reich argues that democracy and capitalism have come unlinked, and that while the market is very responsive to consumers and investors, the structures of democracy that promote the common good have atrophied and become largely useless.

Most of you are probably familiar with the roots of contemporary homelessness in the late 70s and early 80s. The effects of urban renewal and the systematic destruction of cheap housing caught up to us just as the feds decided to get out of the housing business and begin the long process of de-funding HUD, which continues even now.

There was deinstitutionalization, which with the best of intentions dumped thousands of mentally ill people on the city streets without providing the promised alternatives. And deindustrialization, brought on by new infrastructures that accelerated the mobility of capital and turned our economy from one based in manufacturing to one that created mostly service industry jobs for the working class, and jobs for the educated middle class in the burgeoning information-based economy.

There was Reagan era supply-side economics with its slashing of the social services safety net.

And housing itself made the great leap from being a necessary place to live to being a speculative commodity, and the first of the many urban condo booms to come began to happen, eliminating great swaths of affordable housing in its wake.

The shelter system arose as an emergency response. As founders of Seattle’s DESC — created 30 years ago to meet the needs of the mentally ill, addicted, and vulnerable homeless that other shelters were ill-equipped to handle, will often say — the E in DESC stood for Emergency. They thought they were dealing with a unique crisis that would, in less than a decade, pass.

It didn’t. The perfect storm of the 70’s was a structural realignment, much like earlier economic disruptions of the late 1800s and the twenties and thirties of our own century. Over the 80’s homelessness in American cities tripled and quadrupled, and through the 90s and until recently rose by double digit percentages pretty much each year. We’ve been locked ever since in the Emergency response paradigm.

But the Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness say they’re out to change all that. And I have to ask, really? Are they really?

The National Alliance to End Homelessness puts number of homeless in a year at 2.5 to 3.5 million. Their one night snapshot number is 730,000.

Every year, I eagerly anticipate the Conference of Mayors report, which usually arrives in February. Rate of growth slowed in recent years from double digits, but in 2006, we were still up by 5%, and 9% for families. 86% of cities are turning away homeless families that seek shelter.

Here in Seattle, the meaning of our own most recent homeless count is a matter of contention.

The official 2007 Annual One Night Count of People Who Are Homeless in King County, WA, prepared by the Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless, found 7,839 people homeless in King County at that particular point in time. 2,159 were literally on the street, like, there’s one riding the bus all night, and there’s one walking with bags at 3 am. That's 2,159 people.

This report shows homelessness decreasing in similar count areas by 4% from last year. The previous year saw around a 3% decrease. Yet, as the report authors are quick to point out, we shouldn’t make too much of this. The first year that decreases were reported, the timing of the count was moved from October to the last Thursday in January to meet federal guidelines.

Also, there was this observation, also in the 2007 report: “The neighborhood where we counted seems more inhospitable to homeless this year than last. There are more gated, locked and brightly lit areas. People last year were sleeping and this year they were walking or sitting in bus stops."

Turn-aways at emergency shelters are as high as they’ve ever been. I’ve recently heard that 40 women each night are being turned out to the street, and the numbers of men are up as well, but harder to measure. These are split between multiple sites.

But not everyone is so careful with their numbers. The United Way of King County, in their recent press release announcing their goal to raise $25 million to build 1,000 units of housing for chronically homeless people, said homelessness in Seattle had decreased by 10% two years in a row. This 10% decrease per year puts us pretty much on track for meeting the ten year goal, shows success, and gives contributors a reason to hope that their money will indeed accomplish the stated goal.

The federal US Interagency Council on Homelessness quickly added the United Way statistic to the many other ten year plan success stories on their website. The more nuanced Coalition for the Homeless version went unreported there.

People often say to me, Tim, why do you hate the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness so much? And I don’t, really. It’s just that the giant sucking sound you hear is all of the energy that could be directed toward organizing that is being exclusively put toward direct services.

And I also say, well, to understand that, you have to think of it as a zen koan.

This is an imponderable, you know, the sound of one hand clapping. That sort of thing. An apparent absurdity, that if you think about it long enough, you break through into a new clarity and a fresh way of seeing the world.

So the koan here is, where does the Bush administration, arguably the most hostile administration of this century to the interests of the American poor, get off in making deep cuts to poor peoples programs and continuing to gut federal housing programs, while holding the stated objective of ending homelessness in Ten Years?

Between 2002 and 2006, there has been a $70 million increase in funding for McKinney-Vento, the federal package of legislation that funds homeless relief. Yet over 2004-2006, a shorter period, HUD funding has decreased by $3.3 Billion, with another $2 billion in cuts in the works. Other programs, serving the poor have seen deep cuts as well.

I’ve come to regard federal funding as a precise calculation of maximum cooptation for the minimum amount of money. It’s like they’ve developed a special slide rule to figure it out. Homelessness, through McKinney-Vento, goes for about $1.6B now. The cost of the Iraq war are calculated by the Democratic party at about $195 million a day. So the funding for ending homelessness is a little better than a week of Iraq.

My own break through moment came when I reread a 1986 article by Columbia professor Peter Marcuse called Neutralizing Homelessness. In this, Marcuse identifies the ideological bones of the federal response on which the present day policy response hangs.

Marcuse says that the widespread existence of homelessness in a society as affluent as our own is a moral outrage that challenges the legitimacy of the social and economic order itself. Homelessness, therefore, must be ideologically neutralized.

"If government does not deal with homelessness," says Marcuse, "it appears illegitimate and unjust; if it does try seriously to alleviate homelessness, it breaks the link between work and reward that legitimizes wage labor. Neither horn of the dilemma is a comfortable resting place."

The way to respond, then, is to talk a great deal about ending homelessness, while taking no effective action to actually solve the problem.

It’s like a fat man running. There’s little progress, but huge amounts of apparent effort.

Solutions, therefore, are "aimed more at dealing with ordinary (housed) people's reactions to homelessness than with homelessness itself."

Marcuse outlines four basic ways in which this happens:

DENY: Find creative ways to lowball the numbers. Narrow the definition so as to exclude. Minimize. Maybe hold your street homeless counts in late January

BLAME THE VICTIM: Focus public attention on the most stigmatized members of the homeless (mentally ill, addicted, alcoholic) and place the blame on character defects, as opposed to structural unemployment and unaffordable housing. I’ve spent twenty years trying to get across that homelessness isn’t just about the visible drunks and crazy people. That most homeless are families and working poor people, only to have that undone by those who use the terms chronic homeless, street homeless, and homeless interchangeably, and in doing so collapse the distinction.

SPECIALIZE: Drill deep into data and subpopulations. Marcuse quotes neo-conservative Thomas Mann saying solutions to homelessness should be in the form of "separate policies for separate subpopulations" rather than focusing on universals such as housing, wages, and access to social services.

ISOLATE: Ghettoizing homeless people outside of mainstream society in shelters and such while criminalizing public displays of extreme poverty with no-sitting ordinances, forbidding public feeding, criminalizing park sleeping, etcetera, all of which are on the rise nationwide.

Sadly, his prescriptive solutions of twenty years ago didn't really take. The militant Union of the Homeless that so inspired him in 1988 pretty much flamed out within a few years. A direct-action based demand for housing mostly ended with the 1990 suicide of Mitch Snyder. The National Coalition for the Homeless, which once carried the torch for a more structural approach to homelessness, is a shadow of its former self, and has been entirely eclipsed by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, which operates hand in glove with the Bush administration's United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Here in Seattle, we’re seeing the same trends that are occurring everywhere else, but in a more extreme form. According to the 2000 census, incomes in Seattle rose over the ‘90s by 56 percent for the wealthiest fifth, while incomes for the bottom fifth fell by 7.4 percent. 52.6 percent of Seattle residents reported paying more than a third of their income in rent, a proportion exceeded only by Boston.

Our progress toward the Ten Year Plan goal of adding or expanding upon 950 units of low-income housing a year is being trumped by market forces, as condo development and rising rents takes affordable housing off the market about twice as fast as it can be produced. Seattle is becoming a city of rich and poor.

In a five block area near the Pike Place Market that developers refer to as Seattle Gold Coast, there are 4 condo developments scheduled to be completed in the next two years, offering 505 new units of housing at an average price of over $2 million each. One must earn about $90K a year to afford homeownership in Seattle. You need to make about $19 an hour to comfortably afford the current price of a rental.

So what would I have you do?

First we have to do what we are doing, and then some. The response can’t be separated into charity over here and justice over there. These responses need to be linked. I’m not arguing that we walk away from acts of mercy to fight some vague class war. I am arguing that we need to take more political risks, and reach out across class to fund and build a social justice movement.

And we have to, when appropriate, dare to bite the hand that fees us.

I hate to pick on United Way. There’s much that’s good about what they do. They are raising $25 million dollars to fund housing for chronically homeless people, but where’s the funding for organizing poor and homeless people with their allies?

That’s not what foundations and government are interested in. Charity is a lot less complicated, risky, and controversial.

So organizations like Real Change, SHARE/WHEEL, and the Tenant’s Union starve for funding while the Mayor hands $3.5 million to Plymouth Housing Group to build housing for chronic homeless people without even pretending to have a process.

Plymouth does a lot of great things, but boat rocking isn’t one of them.

We need our United Ways. We need our Plymouths. But we need organizing too, and we have to stop thinking of it as some sort of afterthought to perhaps be considered once the other bases are thoroughly covered.

We have to, again, look to the last time homeless was ended in America. Access to education. A major federal investment in housing. A government, business, and community alliance that worked toward the common good, and ensured that the benefit of some didn’t come unduly at the expense of others.

The path toward truly ending homelessness is the path forward for all of us.

History shows that government responds to mass movements, especially when those who are most affected have become disruptive and have allies in the broad middle class: This was true once of labor and could be again. It was true of the civil rights movement. It was true of the anti-poverty movement that led to the reforms of the Great Society that, before sidetracked by Vietnam war, were effective in reducing poverty and inequality

The closest we’ve come to this in the movement to end homelessness was Housing Now!, organized in 1987 by Mitch Snyders’ CCNV. There was a loud and disruptive grassroots movement that included the poor and homeless, and it gave us McKinney-Vento.

Our problem was that we saw this as an end, as opposed to a beginning. We got tired. We became timid. We allowed homeless advocacy to be professionalized and sidelined into technocratic service provision, cut off from the wider anti-poverty movement.

The American Prospect this year did a special issue on poverty, which was remarkable in that it didn’t mention homelessness once.

This issue, which was once seen as the tip of the iceberg, the canary in the coal mine — choose your own metaphor — is now orphaned and sidelined as a narrow social services issue. And the moral outrage that homelessness in an affluent society represents has been sidelined right along with it.

This is a failure of moral and political imagination.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities talks about how funding for the war, line item give-ways to corporate interests, and tax breaks aimed mostly at the wealthy, undermine the possibility of increased federal funding for housing. They say we can no longer afford housing advocacy that ignores these larger issues. They say policy choices must start to target weak claims on funding, and not weak clients.

We can end poverty, they say, but everything has to go back on the table. The current approach assumes everyone keeps the cards that we have, and that game is totally rigged.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this opportunity to talk about why, after 13 years in Seattle and more than two decades of organizing to end homelessness, I still think that street papers in general and Real Change in particular is one of the most powerful organizing models I’ve seen.

As a newspaper, we’re able to support and engage with the broader movement for social justice. We’re able to meet the immediate and sometimes desperate needs of our vendors for an income with dignity, while giving them an opportunity to work for social justice themselves. We stand with one foot in our community of about 270 homeless and very low-income vendors that sell the paper each month, and the other foot in our mostly educated and affluent readership.

The longer we do this the more we understand that our effectiveness is based in the power of those reader/vendor relationships.

Our challenge, and the challenge for all of us, is to build the space where those relationships can come together in a truly cross class movement for economic justice. This space, for the most part, doesn’t even exist now. Real Change is a beginning. SHARE/WHEEL is a beginning. There are also huge rumblings happening in the broader advocacy movement, and things are starting to shift. But the real work, truth be told, has barely started.

We don’t have all the answers, and are struggling ourselves to find the right way forward, but we need you there with us, helping to light the way. Thank You.

An Argument for Cheap Housing

Lately, I've been wondering whether there really is, within this political universe, anything meaningful to be done about the widespread decline in housing affordability. Here in Seattle, as I've written before, the condo market is white hot, with tall skinny towers going up throughout the downtown and around 4,500 units of housing lost to condo conversions from 2005 to date.

Great gushing rivers of capital have flowed to Seattle because our market — with its projected job growth and a pricing equilibrium that favors condo buying over housing rental — is just about the sweetest spot an investor could possibly hope for.

That's capitalism, and much as we shake our tiny fists in its direction, it pretty much does what it's gonna do.

My recent read of Robert Reich's Supercapitalism has reminded me of the rules. I even find myself slightly regretting my jabs at luxury housing developer J. Ronald Terwilliger a few weeks ago. The system is geared to deliver the best prices to consumers and the most return to investors, and is unforgiving in its consistency. This makes his advocacy for workforce housing, his multi-million dollar housing philanthropy, and his leadership in Habitat for Humanity something extraordinary. The only way he could go further is to choose to not be a capitalist, in which case someone more ruthless would quickly take his place.

Last year, Councilmember Tom Rassmussen took the lead on a Statehouse bill that would have slightly slowed condo conversions and offered more assistance to those displaced. While the legislation was widely considered timid, even this failed to make it out of committee. House Speaker Frank Chopp, who is probably as strong an ally of human services as could survive in that position, says the bill died because it just wasn't sufficiently on his radar. I'm sure it didn't escape the attention of the developers, but perhaps they forgot to mention anything to Frank.

Whatever. This year, Frank says he'll do better, and advocates will rally around a second attempt.

While there is value in getting this on the books, the problem is that this year is too late. The horse is well out of the barn and across the pasture, and with rental vacancies at an historic low and rents at an all time high and climbing, capital has unerringly sniffed out demand and shifted toward rental housing construction. My big time developer friend tells me the condo thing is basically done. Aside from a few minor projects here and there, Seattle condo construction stops with what's in the pipeline now. Those rentals, however, won't be built for the lower end of the market. There's no money there. Or at least not as much.

Sadly, the odds of any real federal intervention in the housing problem are exceedingly low. Capitol Hill is dominated by financial interests who don't exactly favor the idea of government subsidizing the lower end of the market with public housing and Section 8 vouchers. This has led to three decades of starving the beast and continued cuts to HUD funding, even as the feds pretend to end homelessness. It has also led to the remarkable situation of more than three federal housing dollars to subsidize middle-class homeownership for every dollar spent on housing for the poor.

Add to that the fact that the capacity of government to mitigate poverty has been severely eroded by the war, tax breaks to the wealthy, and corporate welfare, and the prospects for relief become dim indeed. With local and state resources we have been able to make a dent in the housing crisis, but gains in affordable housing stock are more than trumped by continuous market losses.

So what's left? As I'm fond of saying, in a system where housing is produced for profit, those who can provide no profit get no housing. Unless, of course, conditions somehow change to make investment and construction in the lower end of the market more attractive. Urban renewal wiped out hundreds of thousands of units of "substandard" housing stock because people "shouldn't have to live that way." But no real alternatives were developed in its place, and we've grown accustomed to people living in conditions that are, in fact, far worse.

So what would be this look like? If we were able to build K-Mart housing to add another option to the generally Nordstrom quality stock being built, would this be stigmatizing? More so than homelessness? Would neighborhoods allow such housing to be created. Would the reduction in quality actually translate into lowered consumer cost, or would it simply mean more developer profit? Could the trade-off be legally enforced?

If government were able to find the mean between meeting necessary building code concerns for health and safety and lowering standards to make increased private investment pencil out, would more housing get built and more people be housed less vulnerably than they are now? If so, why aren't we doing it?

Obviously, there are arguments to be made against this from both the right and the left, so hardly anybody ever goes there. But what if we did? Click on the photo up top to see a thought-provoking 80s project in Taiwan.

Supercapitalism and the Poor

This week I've been reading Robert Reich's Supercapitalism, which argues that capitalism and democracy have basically come unhinged. Democracy may need capitalism, he says, but the evidence that capitalism needs democracy is less and less convincing all the time. While the market has become remarkably responsive to consumers and investors, the mechanisms that promote a sense of the common good have been fatally weakened. Legislative battles, he says, are almost always fights between huge corporate interests that dress themselves up as upholding the public interest for rhetorical effect. But whatever real public interest that exists and attempts to make itself felt is generally radically outgunned by superior resources and clout, and is a mere sideshow to this self-interested clash of corporate titans.

It's a sobering view of the world, and one that begs a number of uncomfortable questions about how the market responds or does not respond to poverty. There is the prison-industrial-complex, of course, which is increasingly privatized and predatory all the time. There is also the payday loan industry, which has proven notoriously difficult to regulate. When one looks at these issues through the lens of not only who benefits, but also who weighs in and how much do they pay and to whom, then things start getting more clear. Depressing, but clear.

The market responses to the housing issue are interesting to look at as well. How did we get to the point, for example, that more than three federal housing dollars go to subsidizing homeownership through tax breaks for every dollar that houses the poor? When the feds decided to get out of the housing business and began to disinvest in public housing in the late-70s, who were the corporate interests that stood to benefit from that and what role did they play? Its more than interesting that federal disinvestment coincided with the shift to approaching housing as a speculative commodity.

It's been said that in a system where housing is produced for profit, those who can provide no profit get no housing. At least they don't get it consistently. And when they do, they generally pay way too much for it.

But they provide profits in so many other ways. As objects of predatory lending. As consumers of overpriced and substandard housing. As widgets that get processed through our prisons and jails, our substandard schools, and our poverty industries on a per body basis. You could add to the list.