The Stranger: My Dad With A Nose Ring?

Today The Stranger ran their article on the filing of Initiative 100, Jailbreak: Activists fight jail, but do they stand a chance? As you might tell from the headline, it was a little disappointing. Reporter Jonah Spangenthal-Lee did some of the earliest and most critical reporting on Seattle's proposed new jail, so I had high hopes for something decent. Instead, his article focused on the siting controversy, and gave a mere paragraph to the issues of race and class disparity the initiative addresses.

Even more disappointing was the Strangeresque note of dismissive superiority on which the article ended:

The fate of I-100 remains to be seen. In 2002, Harris pushed an initiative to increase funding for homeless shelters to $400 million a year; that initiative was ultimately shelved when the group cut a deal with the city to increase shelter funding. So far, Harris says, organizers have collected "several hundred signatures." That's a long way from the 25,000 they'll need if they want to make a vote on the jail a reality.

In the first place, he's sloppy wrong. $400 million is ten times the current annual city spending for homelessness and housing combined. Don't they have editors there? The initiative goal was to add 400 shelter beds. We gained the required signatures and qualified for the ballot on a budget of around $15,000. The deal with the city council added 200 shelter beds and ensured that the Seattle Housing Levy would focus on those at below 30% of median income. And this at a time when the bottom had fallen out of the General Fund and human services were very much on the defensive. We cut a deal from a position of power and poor people won. A little fucking respect, please.

Moreover, the fact that only "a few hundred signatures" have been collected mere days after the City Clerk's approval of a ballot title is hardly evidence of impending failure. More than 300 fired up people attended last week's panel discussion on this issue, and our campaign launch event is still more than two weeks away, on Thursday, February 19th, 7:30-9 am at Town Hall. Had Spangenthal-Lee wanted to be helpful, he might have mentioned this. If this is what progressive activists can expect from the boys at Seattle's premiere alt-newspaper, it's a damn good thing Real Change's circulation keeps growing.

Their photographer Kelly, on the other hand, totally rocked. When I whipped out my three-foot industrial bakers whisk, she was way into it, but took the straight shot just before leaving in case the art director wasn't so fun-loving. The whisk got vetoed, but at least one of them made the website.

The Stranger, and I say this as a friend, ought to loosen up, have more fun, check their facts, and get behind something that matters. They're starting to remind me of my dad.

Vegan Road Rage

I've been following the whole Critical Mass thing and I have to say that people are pretty hilarious.

If you've been off the grid or normally don't have time for such things, Real Change and The Stranger have had the best reporting. Basically, the big rolling fuck you to anyone who drives a car known as Critical Mass did one of their drive throughs and a driver got annoyed and decided to run a few of them over. There was an ugly scene, and then the driver somehow avoided being charged with attempted vehicular homicide, which is essentially what someone who attempts to run a human being over with his car should get, even if said human being is a bit snarky.

It's the details that make me smile.

Cyclists roll up to block an intersection for the group, as is typical in these things. Driver tells cyclist he's late for a reservation. Cyclist retorts that if he'd left fifteen minutes ago, he'd be on time. Driver floors it. Cyclist takes ride on hood.

It gets better. Driver later tells police he floored the vehicle in self-defense because the skinny fucking vegans threatened to overturn his car.

Not surprisingly, skinny fucking vegans don't take this very well. In fact, they take it very badly. The driver pulls over after half a block, realizing he'd just done something incredibly impulsive and stupid. He's freaked out and in tears.

Skinny fucking vegans beat him up. They smash his windows. They beat him bloody with a bike lock. They slash his tires.

I figure there were at least three factors that predispositioned the skinny fucking vegans to act like jerks. First, as I have said, Critical Mass is basically one big self-righteously rolling fuck you. Adrenaline is part of the deal. Second(ly), the guy floors it and provokes every fight or flight response they've got. We're talkin' pure reptilian brain here. Finally, they're a mob — and I mean this in the best sense of the word — and operated under mob psychology. The guy's lucky these were skinny fucking vegans, or he'd of been killed.

Hilariously, one protester later said: We slashed his tires "to stop an out of control driver from hurting anyone else."

That's really good.

Driver, I think, should have been charged. Cops might hate Critical Mass, but that's no excuse. It's not reasonable to run people over just because they're sort of being assholes. But no one here looks real good. If I were any of these people, I'd want to pretend the whole thing never happened.

Deconstructing Patricia

I had the rare treat of following Seattle Human Services head Patricia McInturff on KUOW's The Conversation today. Given that my cold is going bronchial and I'm running on about 3 hours sleep, I did OK. I said "you know" too much, but hit my basic talking points. The city lies. What they say and what they do are very different. The "there is shelter available" line is a lie. These phantom "outreach workers" she keeps talking about seem to only exist in some parallel universe that few of us have seen. And to consistently describe those who struggle to survive outside as diseased, drug addicted, waste-producing, vermin attracting, criminals is to stoke the engines of ignorance and hate. Even when you call it compassion.

If you listen closely, you can hear the moment I decide to ignore Ross Reynolds' very interesting question to spend my dwindling time undermining the City's credibility.

Few realize that, in the absence of an approved policy, the City is continuing to aggressively clear sites just as before, with little to no notice or accountability. Real Change vendors have come in the last two days in a row with reports of returning to camp to find all of their survival gear and other belongings gone. No notice. No retrieval of belongings. and certainly no "outreach workers" or "shelter referrals."

So let's look at all that unused shelter capacity of which she spoke so assuredly. According to her latest newsletter there's 75 severe weather beds at City Hall and 25 for women at the Frye. Our analysis of those numbers shows City Hall Overflow with an average of 9 beds being open, and the women's beds being, on average, at capacity. During very severe weather, she says, there's a no-turnaway policy. What this actually means is that they start packing people into the rec room at the Union Hotel as well. Cool.

Between 2:30 and 5:30 am the Morning of January 5th, more than 2,600 people were counted surviving outside. 140 were counted in the overflow beds, which seems to have pretty much chewed up all that "capacity" she keeps talking about. The notion that they're checking to see if beds exist before clearing a camp, which she actually said, is ludicrous. I mean, how would that work? They clear the camps during the day. No one knows what few beds will be available where until they show up looking for shelter that night.

Let's see. What else.

She did this really cool thing with the phrase "personal property," which to most people sounds like the property that a person has. Not so. It's ID. Perhaps photos. Eyeglasses. Prescriptions. When you get right down to it, the list is really quite small.

An Encampment Workgroup Memo that turned up in one of our myriad public disclosure requests is quite clear on this point. "Any sleeping equipment (sleeping bags, cardboard, tents) found in the ROW may be disposed of immediately." This is obfuscated in the final with some lawyerly language about disposing of any "soft goods" that "may be contaminated with unknown substances."

This remains my favorite phrase in the document.

Interestingly, she did not say that the City now handles reports of encampments on a case-by-case basis, as she told the City Council last month and recently re-iterated in a communication to Nick Licata. This is probably because she got the December 11 email from Customer Service Bureau Director Darby DuComb.

"I am worried that we are getting confused.

TC want us to respond to all clean ups requested by anyone from within the City or from external customers. We are NOT reviewing them on a case-by-case basis, we are responding as usual."

Thanks for clearing that up Darby. TC is of course Tim Ceis.

What else. She seemed positively shocked to hear that advocates discovered language in the proposal that would deputize anyone the city chooses with the power to hand out camping citations.

Let me help. It's on page 11 of 14 in the Rules document, in the Notices of Exclusion Section, under paragraph 6.3.1, related to "Delegation."

6.3.1.2 The authorizing official may also delegate to others the authority to enforce on City Property these and any other applicable written or posted rules, and to issue notices of exclusion for violations.

Seems pretty clear to me. But I'm not a liar.

But the Big Lie is that the Mayor discovered that there were various departments with policies at odds with each other, and in his wisdom, directed his staff to seek consistency and compassion.

The internal documents clearly show that the Mayor's office had directed all City departments to aggressively clear encampments, and that the absence of a policy to guide this meant the gloves were completely off. It wasn't until their secret policy was uncovered that they bothered to consult City legal at all.

But here's the thing. The gloves are still off. Nothing has changed. This is their pathetic attempt to bring the law in line with existing practice, not, as would be perhaps more typical, the other way around. The painting up top, by the way, is by Rose Greenway, and is called The Liar comes bearing illusions, which we bear willingly.

But all in all, this was a good press day. In addition to a good airing of the issue on KUOW, The Stranger's Erica Barnett gets all weepy over Monday's hearing, and the Seattle PI's Editorial Board made some people I know positively giddy today with their take no prisoners 48 Hours to Scatter.

The urge to clean up parks and other areas serving as de-facto squats is an understandable one. No one likes to be faced with the misery of others. Hygiene and public safety issues with the living conditions of the homeless are certainly credible. But there's got to be a better way to address those concerns without making already-suffering human being feel like refuse. ...

City leaders should come up with a plan that focuses on making life for the homeless more, not less tolerable while building more shelters and housing for them.

The People Have Spoken.

OK, I admit it. I'm a little obsessed with the panhandling thing. Since Kate Elston made a cartoon of my position in the Post Intelligencer a few weeks ago, I've become this straw man for the opposition to hold up and say, "Well, surely you don't agree with him!" The Stranger's SLOG, following Elston, has me calling Downtown Seattle Association's Have a Heart Give Smart program "a war on the poor," a claim that is overheated at best, as the DSA's lobbyist was delighted to point out. A young appellate lawyer with a degree from Yale who lives and works downtown and thinks he knows more about homelessness than I do (people like him know more than the rest of us about everything) blogs that my position is "absurd," and some Republican poli-sci prof from Houston has dismissed me as the "latte left."

This is annoying.

Panhandling is suffering made visible, and that's why it makes people so uncomfortable. I think most of us could stand to be a lot less comfortable, content, and complacent. Panhandlers have something to teach us about the world and about ourselves.

All of this got me wondering about what else is being said. Are there other downtown yuppies blogging about how annoying it is to be asked for change? I searched the Technorati blog engine for references to "Seattle panhandling" and discovered the answer to be "not really."

• Some guy who describes himself as "politically and socially conservative Catholic who enjoys the silly side of life" goes on for a bit, and dignifies the DSA's Peg Dreisinger's assertions with the term "research." It doesn't take much to convince some people.
• Another low point comes from some asshole Harvard Law graduate, who blogs at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute that New York panhandlers make $60 an hour and don't even open savings accounts. This sends him into a tight-assed little rage.
• Someone on MySpace is planning to be homeless for 48 hours this month, but has already decided that "every chance they get when panhandling they use to get abusive substances." It is also a well-known fact that MySpace is where the English language goes to curl up and die.
• Again on MySpace is a story from Bellevue about a woman pulling up next to someone in a 90s T-bird to ask for a few dollars for gas. Incredibly, she gives it to her. Another soft touch on MySpace, this one from Bothell, discusses karma and resisting the urge to judge. It's a nice little essay. A Capitol Hill MySpace blogger has responded to the P-I article too, and has a thoughtful position as well.
• A guy from North Dakota who moved here four months ago notices a post-Hempfest surge in panhandling. "They're like an annual locust - a plague on the city after the largest "protest-ival" is over," he says. "I'm not sure what bothers me more, the little kids in strollers at Hempfest or the leftover stoners." Being from South Dakota myself, allow me to say, "Welcome, brother."
• A quite lovely post on panhandling as an opportunity to practice compassion comes from a woman in San Fransisco. I think she kind of nails it. This from her post:
  

"i saw a woman tonight in front of walgreens on polk street. she was a slight pile of dirty clothes with a head and tiny feet in socks sticking out. she was sobbing, begging, lamenting. she had lost her shit, basically. her face looked so old and she had gray dirty hair, eyes swollen from crying and splotches. she was holding herself and rocking back and forth. i've been to that walgreens a million times and every time ignored the people begging out front. tonight i gave her about a couple of dollars in change. if a beer is going to make this night bearable for her, then i'm not going to deny her that. how many of us actually use our change anyway. every home i've ever visited has some kind of jar full of change. people stockpile it for years and then cash it in. most of us would not miss it."

Real Change's Biggest Fan

There is a very drunk woman about 1:15 into this Stranger video of the International Beerfest who is a little confused about who she loves.