Nickelsville Talking Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smart, Brave, and True

Just when I was beginning to despair that no Seattle reporter would ever really get the sweeps story right, along comes Angela Galloway in today's PI with Seattle Homeless Camp Policy Under Fire: critics see loopholes in rights protections. Galloway deserves major props for taking a second shot at a story the City buried in last Saturday's paper and hitting all the right points.

Broad exceptions to the application of the protocols mean that campers will be evicted without the benefit of rights or process.

This plan has little or nothing to do with ending homelessness, and is punitive and arbitrary.

And then, my favorite quote. Alison Eisinger, on the unfortunate sartorial habits of the Emperor: "It is facile in the extreme to pretend that the 10-year plan is a solution to a problem that affects thousands of people tonight."

Thank God someone finally said it. Anyone who's really paying attention knows that the plan holds few immediate solutions, and that its long-term prospects are dicey at best. To hide behind the Ten Year Plan while criminalizing survival activity is the height of lying hypocrisy.

Eisinger goes on in her reasonable way.

All homeless people have the rights to shelter and services. Further, some people might unwittingly set up camp in recently swept locations, she said.

"When the city puts forward a protocol that is supposed to be designed to help people get off the streets, what we expect to see is a protocol that doesn't punish people for going places where they believe they will be safe," Eisinger said.

Whenever a Nickels administration person gets called on the inconvenient math of very limited space for a large number of unsheltered homeless, the answer runs something like this: "Well, we have a Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, because we believe that housing connected to services and not shelter is the answer. It's a Ten Year Plan, not a Two Year Plan. Seattle spends more than $40 million annually on housing and homelessness. 1811 Eastlake ... Plymouth ... blah blah blah. We're committed to ending homelessness and believe we're on track."

This is the rhetorical equivalent of fairy dust. Just a small sprinkle magically makes homeless people disappear.

The key issues of when the protocol applies are now out in the open, and the city is defending their right to take people's stuff without offering warning or services.

Patricia McInturff, director of the city's Human Services Department, said the rules were intended to apply to encampments that hit a "critical mass" of people, not small groups or single individuals illegally camping.

"Certainly, these people are welcome to go to a shelter," said McInturff, who is leaving the department this week. "But it doesn't trigger me calling an outreach team to go out to a neighborhood and post advanced notice for one person."

"How we deal with individuals is something that can be discussed in another setting -- and may or may not be," McInturff said. "But this policy is about encampments."

This is all quite clarifying.

Tim Burgess appears to have closed ranks with the Mayor on this one, despite the fact that none of the issues that once concerned him have been resolved. At least we now know where people stand.

McInturff''s retirement begins today, and her quotes are those of someone who is a) tired of lying, b) a good soldier to the end, and c) already ceasing to really give a crap. Most people I've talked to think there's a straight line between her taking the heat for Greg on this policy and her precipitously announced retirement plans. Many think that the good stuff that exists in this plan is her work, and that she stood up to the face of true evil, as represented by Tim Ceis and Marilyn Littlejohn.

As Patricia heads off into the sunset toward her Hawaii lanai, it scares me to know that, at some deep, carefully submerged level, she was what passes for an ally in this administration.

Serendipitously, the story appears online next to the Dalai Lama photo gallery.

Galloway got it right. She is my new hero. Journalism with integrity lives at the PI.

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.

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.

Fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way

This morning, I arrived at work to find this action shot from last week's rally and encampment at City Hall in my email. A little truth in advertising is probably required. This is a Photoshop job. I usually only wear my superhero outfit late at night, and in certain bars. Also, I rarely, if ever, attempt to defeat evil on my own. Evil is defeated best by well-organized groups where the potential for leadership exists for everyone. The other thing is that I've never actually assaulted the Deputy Mayor, and, as a general tactic, employ the Superhero Headlock only as a last resort and as a matter of self-defense. Rainbows, do, however, follow me wherever I go. Maybe it's because I sweat so much. Some things you just accept.

The Smirk

Due to the wonders of video technology, we were able to capture the precise moment when Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis smirked at a homeless women who asked him to explain what the City is doing about the rising numbers of homeless dying on the streets. The moment came at the tail end of a media ambush during our rally and camp-out last week, and was basically his cue to get the hell out of Dodge. The video itself will hopefully be posted soon.

As his gortex-clad back receded into the distance, the woman who asked the question was in tears of rage and humiliation. "He doesn't even feel like he needs to answer the question," she said.

She has a point. The City's big on metrics, but how about this one: More people are dying on the streets now than ever before. Explain that?

If I hear one more opportunistic bureaucrat say we've decided to "end homelessness and stop managing it" as an excuse for leaving people out to freeze in the cold and harassing them in the meanwhile, I think I'm going to have to organize a piss-in on someone's front lawn.

The Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness always had the potential of providing political cover to those who would like to cut back on homeless shelter and look compassionate at the same time, but it's still amazing to see the strategy so ruthlessly pursued.

Ceis, by the way, says more shelter is on the way. With three TV cameras on him, he responded "Yes," when the Interfaith Taskforce on Homelessness' Bill Kirlin-Hackett asked, "Given our lack of shelter space to house those being removed from camps, we'll need to see more shelter space provided, won't we?"

We should have this on tape as well. Do words have meaning? We'll see.

It's Rude to Gloat, But ...

While the Nickels administration has been fairly effective at describing homeless encampments as dangerous, disease breeding havens for the drug-using criminal class in the print media, and in the Seattle Times in particular, yesterday's coverage of the Real Change Organizing Project protest encampment and rally was, from a City perspective, way off script.

Radio play was remarkably sympathetic and in-depth. Liam Moriarty's excellent KPLU coverage came in addition to a shorter piece within their regular newshour, so that was a two-fer. Our Organizing Director Rachael Myers went head to head with City Human Services Director Patricia McInturff on KUOW's popular news talk show The Conversation. Both delivered their messages like the seasoned pros they are, but the call-ins that followed leaned very heavily Rachael's way. I did twenty minutes on KIRO710's popular Dave Ross show, and was able to deliver some of the deeper context that's been missing so far. The interview on this clip follows Ross' opening monologue on the perplexities of the "pay it forward" coffee craze. There was a nasty bit on Dory Monson's KIRO Talk Show, but that's predictable. Peter Steinbrueck took that one on. A braver man than I. When I checked, the podcast wasn't up yet.

Television coverage was just as good. Q13's coverage was sympathetic in the extreme, and caught a good bit of the amusing Tim Ceis ambush yesterday morning. Michelle Millman at KIROtv did us right, and KING5 did a strong piece as well. While Ken Schram's KOMO monologue on symbolic help to the homeless wasn't part of our coverage, you'll want to watch it anyway. In the print realm, the PI ran a balanced piece with a photo on page one that wasn't bad at all, even if they did completely follow the City's framing. They also won my love and respect by printing an amazingly on-target guest editorial by a former greenbelt camper. The Seattle Times resisted the temptations of pack journalism and blew us off altogether. Guess my corporate lapdog poll hit a nerve.

Ceis and Desist

Last night, I overnighted with around forty other folks, about half of whom were homeless, at the City Hall encampment held by the Real Change Organizing project. Somewhere between 11 and 4 am I got some sleep. I don't know how people do it. Even with the benefit of a sleeping bag, air pad, and dome tent, my night in the cold and rain was physically miserable.

For the 1,600 or so people in Seattle whose needs are unmet by the shelter and housing options that are available this isn't a one night lark. It's their reality. The fact that people are dying on our streets is unsurprising.

At the rally against campsite clearances we held to kick off the camp, Seattle King County Coalition for the Homeless Director Alison Eisinger asked a very good question. Why, when the city is doing so much to end homelessness, would the Mayor's office treat us, their allies in the homeless advocacy community, as the enemy? I think what she actually said was, "Why would they want to piss us off?"

She was of course talking about the Human Service Department's high-handed and duplitious response to being called on their secret policy of campsite clearances, and their ensuing scramble to manage the media attention, legal liability, and political pressure that followed.

My guess is that there's pressure coming from somewhere else. I have some guesses also as to where. The downtown condo boom is attracting a wave of affluence to the downtown, as more and more who can afford the pleasures of urban living opt to do so. In the few blocks around Pike Pace Market, 505 new condos will come on line within the next two years with an average value of $2 million each. Over the next three years, 5,000 or so new condos will open downtown. The premise is that those who opt for the urban lifestyle will not be made uncomfortable by some of the harsher realities that prevail.

This represents an enormous amount of investment, presumably by powerful people who have allies, all of whom know the value of a campaign contribution.

Which gives Mayor Nickels a two-year time-line, both to the next election and the move in date for the new Xanadu. This doesn't align very well with projected progress on "ending homelessness." So other tactics are necessary, and the commitment to these tactics is firm.

So some counter-pressure is called for.

A funny thing happened this morning. Last night, a well-decorated officer told one of our leaders that the Deputy Mayor would be by to talk with us at 9:00 AM. Mayor's staff called again after sunrise to confirm. We had a message of our own, formulated in the giddy morning hours shortly after the first Starbucks opened at 5:30 AM.

We alerted the media that Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis was coming to talk to us, and that we had an announcement for him.

I need to backtrack here to say I've only had two other interactions with Ceis. Once last summer, I interrupted an interview that Sharon Chan of the PI was doing to show her a finger puppet I'd been playing with. The time before was just after Nickels came into office. He'd requested a meeting after Real Change ran a critical piece on his boss. Amazingly, he told me that unless we allowed prior to publication opportunity to comment on articles, our access would be very limited.

We'd never had access, so I wasn't all that impressed by the threat.

So anyway, Tim arrived, and an awkward conversation ensued.

Ceis: So you guys have some petitions to deliver or something.

Us: No. That's at noon.

Ceis: But you said you had petitions. That's why I'm here.

Us: We said we would deliver petitions at noon. You called us. No one said anything about petitions.

Ceis: Well, I won't be there. Neither will the Mayor.

Us: Well, the petitions aren't ready yet, so we'll just give them to who ever's there.

Ceis: You can give them to the secretary.

Us: Fine.

Ceis: Is there anything else you wanted to say (by now, about three television cameras have homed in on our utterly mundane conversation).

Us: Yes. We're going to be back every three months, until the City has ended homelessness.

Ceis: You can go through Fleets and Facilities to apply for a City Hall Plaza public event permit.

Us: We'll be here, either way.

At this point, the cameras had tightened in. We backed out of the circle, leaving Ceis to be captured by a phalanx of TV reporters who wanted to know how the City was responding to advocates concerns.

We didn't plan an ambush. We really thought Ceis would have something to say. We figured he'd be expecting media and didn't want to disappoint. When the reporters were done, David Bloom and Bill Kirlin-Hackett of the Interfaith Taskforce on Homelessness respectfully continued the grilling. Then, as a homeless woman asked what they were going to do about people dying on the streets (those numbers keep going up) Ceis smirked and fled, and we offered our side of the story.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand," said Frederick Douglas. "Never has, and never will." We're building a demand-side response to the supply-side economy. Ceis is a guy who knows a little about hardball. Think of us as the opposing team.

— photo by Revel Smith

The Straw Man Gets a Workout

I remember a great story I heard a number of years ago from an activist with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Apparently, there was a very pro-environment candidate for office who wasn't so hot on the whole human needs thing. He was dogged during his campaign by Tree Man.

A guy in a tree suit showed up everywhere the candidate did holding his sign. "Would you care for me if I was a tree?"

City Council voted to finalize the Capehart Housing acquisition in Discovery Park on Monday, which was a surprise to approximately nobody. It was good to see political leadership from Sally Clark and Peter Steinbrueck that upgraded the one-to-one housing replacement language and made it non-contingent on the Fort Lawton deal going through.

I was surprised to see Tom Rassmussen quoted in the Post-Intelligencer describing the inappropriateness of the park for "people in transition."

An editorial in the PI makes the same point.

We did have some concerns, however, about access to shops and transportation.

For example, the nearest bus stop we could find was close to a mile away and basic drugstore supplies required a trip of more than two miles. It appears that the Seattle City Council agreed, and voted to knock down the homes.

Have these people ever been to a ghetto? But even this is beside the point. Perhaps some people have argued for use of the housing for homeless people, but most folks I know feel that the housing should be maintained as workforce housing until its useful life is exhausted. Tom is arguing against a position nobody supports.

Most people who know about housing — and I count Rassmussen in this category — know that there is a relationship between availability of workforce housing and housing for the very poor. As available options become scarce, those on the bottom rungs of the market start getting knocked off. We all get this.

This is why the Capehart housing should be preserved for however long this is possible.

We've seen portrayals, most notably by Tim Ceis, of this housing as some sort of rotting from within, asbestos-laden, lead paint hazard that any sane person would pretty much tear down on sight, but this is belied by the fact that the families who will live there into 2009 find it perfectly habitable. In fact, everyone who sees it tends to describe it with the same word. "Nice."

There has been a false dichotomization of this issue along the lines of park and green space supporters versus homeless advocates. I don't see it that way. No one I know is making the argument that housing, once built, should never come down. And certainly no one is arguing that housing should be rebuilt on the Capehart site.

Contrary to the Post-Intelligencer's editorial yesterday, there isn't anything in Monday's decision to move ahead with purchase that necessarily commits the City to immediate demolition of the Capehart housing.

The question is whether this housing gets bulldozed in 2009, when the last family moves out, or whether another decade or so of use can be squeezed from this resource at a time when housing affordability in Seattle is at a crisis point.

In the end, no matter what, nature wins. The housing comes down and the park space expands. What needs to be considered is whether this can be a win for people as well as the trees.

From what I understand, there are some potential issues here having to do with the City's authority to provide housing that is above the low-income level, but one would think that this could somehow be worked out. Times like these call for creative solutions. It seems that some sort of compromise can still be achieved, if the will is there.