Covering Up Homelessness, CEO-Style.

One of the ways in which the people that are ending homelessness like to pretend they're succeeding is to talk about opening and closing front and back doors, a image that, to me, always brings to mind a very large, crowded and windy hallway, probably with florescent lighting and substandard ventilation.

What they mean by this is that institutions that deal with poor people — mental health centers, prisons and jails, hospitals, and foster care systems — should all take responsibility for their own poor, as opposed to shoveling them off for containment in emergency shelters. This is one of the ways in which Ten Year Plans hope to accomplish their goal of ending homelessness by simply being smarter: Get other systems to expend their resources.

The assumption here is that homelessness, in large part, is all just a big misunderstanding, and with just a bit of inter-agency cooperation and some help from the private and nonprofit sectors, we'll be able to clear it all up. The problem, of course, is that the other systems serving poor people are broken too. Worse, in times of widespread budget deficits and growing numbers of expendable poor, those systems are subject to funding cuts as well.

The technocratic do-gooders will do almost anything to avoid facing up to the logic of their own system: poor people are expendable. During a time when Democratic Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire's own budget calls for eliminating the $339 a month General Assistance - Unemployable benefit for the 9,000 or so people who need it to live, the truth of this should be rather obvious, no?

But this is just too unpleasant by half. This is why some "homeless advocates" need to convey success, no matter what the evidence. While the news is filled with burgeoning tent cities, freezing homeless people, depleted food banks, and families in cars and such, the USICH website is simply bursting with good news. Street and chronic homelessness are down:

The street/chronic decrease represents a reduction of more than 52,000 people living on our streets or languishing in our shelters. Given an average length of stay in homelessness of 5 years, the reduction represents more than 260,000 years of homelessness coming to an end. That means quantifiable cost savings in health and law enforcement systems in cities across the country.

Wow. 260,000 years of homelessness has ended. That's quantifiably amazing.

Even better, the CEOs, with their high standards of accountability and savvy business acumen, have taken charge:

In the past year, more jurisdictional CEO's are committed to 10 Year Plans. When the year began 529 mayors and county executives had committed in 321 plans. At the end of this year these number had increased to over 860 CEO's and more than 355 plans.

Impressive. In just one year there was a 10.6% increase in Ten Year Plans, but this was accompanied by a 62% increase in CEO involvement! At this rate, can the end of homelessness be far off? Heck, no!

But wait, somethings wrong! It appears that new institutions that deal with poor people have turned to shelter-dumping as well. KOMO reports that last Sunday, the downtown Seattle Greyhound station sent a busload of stranded passengers, kids and all, to the severe weather emergency overflow shelter at Seattle Center, and when it became apparent that the shelter was unprepared, the bus just drove away. Kind of gives new meaning to "Go Greyhound!"

As the economy worsens, look for other businesses that serve the downscale consumer to follow suit. Southwest and Frontier will be the first among the major discount airlines to implement Greyhound's revolutionary cost saving strategy.

These bottom-line savvy innovations are not limited to the discount transportation industry. Taco Bell lobbyists are no doubt working the halls of Congress to bring back the government surplus food program, and hope to soon have finely grated surplus cheese subsidies supplied to their 5,845 U.S. locations. I also expect that corporate buyers for Payless Shoes and Ross Dress For Less to soon be scouring the racks of Goodwill for slightly distressed items that can be sold at 800% mark-up.

According to Kraven F. Ückwadde, a Taco Bell senior executive and one of the newest CEOs to join the fight to end homelessness, "The dynamic nature of American capitalism demands that businesses adapt. When you wake up one day to find that your cheese has moved, you either give the consumer less fucking cheese, or you find a way to get the cheese at someone elses expense. We make $2 billion a year just by covering up bad food with free hot sauce. If that's what it takes to keep the profits coming, we can cover up homelessness as well."

Denial Is a Strategic Option

Apparently, the Washington State Interagency Council on Homelessness had their quarterly meeting today, and Paul Carlson — Phil Mangano's man in the Northwest over at the USICH — was there to defend the inside the beltway party line.

The WA-ICH was formed two years ago by Governor Gregoire to "create greater levels of interagency coordination and to coordinate state agency efforts with the efforts of state and local entities addressing homelessness." They seem to be doing a great job, and to have a realistic sense of what might be done right now, although the state budget picture might take some of the wind out of their sails. While today's minutes are not yet on their website, last May's offer a glimpse of realists strategically getting things done. Here's the bullets from the Re-entry Housing Program presentation.

• Efficiencies alone will not result in reducing homelessness by 50%.
• If we are going to move things forward where do we focus to maximize impact?
• This is a way to end homelessness for one demographic group - people coming out of institutions who have severe disabilities. It is well documented that by reducing recidivism and the associated impact on local hospitals, etc., costs are avoided.
• The DSHS Program for Assertive Community Treatment (PACT) team is a proven model from providing intensive services, however there is no funding for housing.
• High need/high risk offenders who are released from prisons and jails need housing and intensive services. However there is no PACT team equivalent for this group. Will there be an “ask” for an investment in the needed services?
• For veterans, full access to veteran benefits is essential.
• There may be a tie in to the local Community Health Centers.
• There is a definite tie in to the local Community Justice Centers.

Good stuff. The links between homelessness, incarceration, and the disproportionate impact on people of color make this work a place where a handful of bureaucrats can make the world a good bit more rational and just.

Paul was, by all reports, a pretty decent guy before he went over to the dark side. His most recent pre-DC post was as a dweeby but good natured technocrat at Seattle's Office of Housing. Since his migration to DC, however, Paul has helped Phil spread the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness gospel with what can only be described as evangelical fervor.

In some ways, it's an easy sell. People want to believe that homelessness can be ended without addressing all that structural change stuff like inequality and the cooptation of government by the wealthy. You get good data, shift some resources around, work the cost-benefit arguments, and wa-lah, political will materializes and homelessness ends. Easy-peasy.

Part of the data collection process is to ensure said data offers the numbers to support ones case, and Paul has developed a reputation as Mangano's dog in the fight against an accurate count. At recent issue is whether the federal definition should expand to include those in "transitional housing." This would mean resources becoming available, for example, to the 903,000 kids who attend public school under the Dept. of Education definition of homeless, but do not otherwise qualify for homeless assistance. Current federal definition excludes those homeless who are doubled up or living in poverty hotels.

When the question arose of whether the Washington State definition should include transitional housing, Paul spoke. You don't want to do this, he said, "because it's going to be really hard for you to meet your target of cutting homelessness by half if you keep counting them as homeless."

This, obviously, speaks volumes about the federal strategy to "end homelessness."

A representative from Veterans Affairs said what others were thinking. "Well, that would be very artificial. They are homeless, so we will count them as homeless, and we'll just have to reduce homelessness in real ways."

Note to Paul: We here in Washington still cling to that whole "reality-based" thing. While it doesn't make your boss look as good as, say, lying, it tends to actually help people more. Think about it.

The Politics of Illusion

McKinney-Vento, the Federal statute that allocates funding to programs serving homeless people, is up for reauthorization, and the fight this time, as always, is over the definition of who, exactly, is homeless, and the political consequences of that number.

Most people don't realize that different bureaucracies go by different definitions. The Department of Education definition of "homeless" includes families that are doubled up or living in short term poverty hotel situations. As a result, there are 903,000 homeless kids who receive protections that allow them to attend public schools despite their lack of formal residency. A letter from the National Education Association to members of Congress reads as follows:

The Department of Education definition of homelessness reflects the realities of family and youth homelessness. Public schools are the cornerstone of communities; no other entity has the same level of daily contact with children, youth, and families. Schools see the scope and the depth of housing problems in every community in the nation, and therefore are among the most accurate barometers of family and youth homelessness. Schools serve children whose families cannot get into shelters because they are full, or non-existent. Schools also serve children and youth who are excluded from shelters because of eligibility rules.

Homeless children and youth are at grave risk of educational failure and dropping out of school. Children who are moving from place to place – and are tired, hungry, sick, and traumatized – face significant barriers to academic success. Yet, the narrow definition proposed in the mark will undercut public school efforts to help these children. The definition will make it harder for schools and other agencies to work together and will prevent vulnerable children and youth from receiving the services they need to come to school ready and able to learn.

By aligning HUD’s definition more closely with the Department of Education, communities will be better equipped to serve these vulnerable children and youth. Again, we urge the Committee to adopt the Biggert-Davis amendment to include in the HUD definition children and youth who are verified as homeless by public schools.

Were HUD to adopt the Department of Education definition, these homeless families would be eligible for housing assistance and other benefits that might ease their way to stability. This, despite the strong efforts of progressive homeless advocates, looks unlikely. The National Alliance to End Homelessness, the 800-pound gorilla of homeless advocacy that serves as an almost quasi-governmental agency in pushing the Bush Administration Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness agenda, is opposed.

Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the 10YP paradigm's intellectual architects, says why in the current issue of Time Magazine.

"There's a very large housing problem in this country," he says. "But shoehorning new people into the homeless category isn't going to make a hill of beans of difference. It's only going to dilute what we're doing." He points to the U.S. budget for homelessness, which is just $1.5 billion a year. That's barely enough to help fund the Housing First push; it's not going to bail out families caught up in the foreclosure crisis.

Great. The problem is too big to solve given current resources. So let's maintain the illusion that we're winning the war on homelessness at the expense of children. Throw 'em to the goddamn wolves.

Speaking of illusions, yesterday I wrote about the Good News from HUD, reported in the NYT, that chronic homelessness is down by 30% since 2005. Rejoice!

I spoke to a reporter today and offered four good reasons for why the HUD number is total bullshit.

1.) The McKinney definition of "chronically homeless" narrowed over this period. It's the oldest trick in the world, but still a good one.

2.) When I was a homeless advocate in Boston, we always did an action at the Federal Building on January 21st, statistically the coldest day in the year. In 2006, the Feds mandated that, for consistency's sake, all One Night Counts be performed during the same period, during the third week of January. Counts dropped. Victory was declared.

3.) In the context of escalating and systematic harassment by police in cities everywhere, all of which routinely profess their great commitment to "ending homelessness" through their Ten Year Plans, homeless people have simply made themselves harder to find. When you know a cop might come around to steal your blanket, the logical response is to hide.

4.) There is tremendous institutional incentive to lie. This is what the concept of "political will to end homelessness" has become: an exercise in bureaucratic legerdemain to deliver numbers that look like success, whatever the actual reality may be. This, theoretically, keeps the funds flowing. There are serious problems with this as a long-term strategy that will most likely fail. You can only lie for so long before the truth becomes apparent, and the hard end of this road is probably closer than any of us thinks.

I harsh a lot on Ten Year Plans. The irony is that I believe the principal of Housing First works. As an advocate, I've said that housing is the solution to homelessness for more than twenty years. But it has to be funded. The Feds are AWOL from the table and retreating, and localities can't do it on their own. Seattle's 10YP, which is missing its goals by approximately half, is one of the success stories. This does not bode well.

But this, relatively speaking, is a minor problem. The larger issue is that narrow, social service solutions to homelessness that evade inconvenient issues of poverty and inequality are incapable of capturing a political constituency that can build for power.

To frame homelessness in terms of the most dysfunctional 10-15%, and constantly describe them as mentally ill people, drunks, and drug addicts who are an expensive burden that must be met one way or another, is stigmatizing and self-defeating. When defending this definition comes at the expense of helping kids, the evil is multiplied.

But here's the worst. Homeless advocacy has been co-opted by the bureaucratic-managerial class, and the promise of Ten Year Plans offer cover to municipalities as they criminalize visible poverty. United States Interagency Council on Homelessness head Philip Mangano should not be allowed to fly around the country posing as some technocratic version of Saint Frances of Assisi.

When mass homelessness was last solved, it was through programs that also expanded access to the middle class and led to thirty years of economic growth and declining inequality. Guaranteed FHA loans. Public Housing. The GI Bill. Work programs to build infrastructure. Regulatory government that curbed corporate and individual greed.

The real solutions haven't changed.

Homelessness will never be defined away, and those of us who care about homelessness as the extreme and dehumanizing result of poverty and inequality need to be clear about who's side we're on. The politics of illusion might look good from a distance, but from the perspective of the street, they don't do shit.

Lies, Lies, and More Lies

"What fucking stable housing? There is no stable housing! My housing isn't even stable." This was my friend Revel's response then I read her this line from today's New York Times, which reports a 30% decrease in chronic homelessness from 2005-2007.

Housing officials say the statistics, which are collected annually from more than 3,800 cities and counties, may reflect better data collection and some variation in the number of communities reporting. But officials also attribute much of the decline to a policy shift promoted by Congress and the administration that has focused federal and local resources on finding stable housing for homeless people suffering from drug addiction, mental illness or physical disabilities, long deemed the hardest to help in the homeless population.

This great victory is based on numbers such as this, which report that Seattle decreased chronic homelessness by 20% over 2006-2007. There isn't a single advocate in Seattle who believes this to be remotely true. While housing first works, everyone knows there isn't nearly enough. Here in Seattle, we're missing Ten Year Plan targets for housing production by half, and we're doing better than most.

This is about narrowed definitions, municipal strategies that criminalize poverty, and an eagerness to lie in the service of the illusion that things are basically OK, and that the most vulnerable are being taken care of.

I don't really fucking think so.

I was going to write s whole book on this, but my friend Israel saved me the trouble. The ED of Street Roots in Portland has a blog too, and he said it just as well as I can. Read his post, Lies, Lies, and More Lies.

Go With God

Tonight, I attended the annual dinner of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, which this year honored Reverend David Bloom's more than thirty years of service to our community. David laid the groundwork for the ITFH somewhere between his work at the Church Council of Greater Seattle and one of his numerous faux "retirements" while he was employed as the "Faith Community Organizer" at Real Change. While that position wound up being something we couldn't sustain, David's work led to the first Building the Political Will to End Homelessness conference and the deepened involvement of congregations in homeless advocacy and service provision. Over the years, I've learned that seeds that at first don't seem to take can send down roots that remain hidden for years. Then, one day, there's a new tree for people to climb on.

It feels as though the faith community is on the verge of a turning point of sorts. The Church Council of Greater Seattle has new leadership in veteran community organizer Michael Ramos, and is more committed to their social justice mission than ever. More and more congregations are supporting SHARE/WHEEL's tent city work by hosting the encampment on their property. Numerous congregations have aligned with the Sound Alliance organizing effort for economic justice. The Archdiocesan Housing Authority is organizing churches for legislative advocacy on housing issues. Rich Lang over at Trinity is working with faith community allies to engage more deeply in this work and move through charity toward justice. The Rauschenbusch Center for Spirit and Action has roared to life and is starting to hold public speak-outs in Westlake Center.

Tonight David spoke of the difference between optimism and hope. He is not optimistic, he said, over our prospects of ending homelessness. This pessimism is well-founded. Bullshit pronouncements from the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness aside, things have been getting worse for approximately thirty years, and that trend line shows little prospect of changing.

There is, however, reason for hope. Optimism under these circumstances is just whistling through the graveyard. Hope, on the other hand, is an exercise in prophetic imagination. Hope is visionary, and is less about belief than will. Hope, said Emily Dickinson, is "the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all."

When Michael Ramos spoke on behalf of the Church Council at Camp4Unity last June, it gave me hope. That hope is sustained and furthered whenever I see people or institutions extend themselves in the service of justice. We're not winning yet, but the tide, it seems, is beginning to turn. Michael's speech is reproduced below.

In the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, we read, “God says, this rather is the fasting that I wish; releasing those bound unjustly, setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke. Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and homeless. Then, your light shall go forth like the dawn and your wound shall be quickly healed.”

The Church Council of Greater Seattle mourns the deaths of the more than 250 women and men who were homeless and who have died in recent years. A county and city as prosperous as ours can only be considered great when we are moved with radical compassion such that the most displaced are valued with the most affluent, and that our very selves are offered as a bridge to mend the unconscionable gap between rich and poor in our midst. Homelessness is, from a faith and human perspective, a scandal that calls for a conversion of heart in all of us, lest we grow complacent and tolerant. Behind each death is a name and a life, that that to the Women in Black, Church of Mary Magadalene and Real Change, matter. In memory of these people, let us stand so that others may not fall.

Our faith traditions call us to prioritize those who are poor. The measure of our economic and social decisions is our impact on those who are most vulnerable. What is done FOR the people most affected? What is done TO the people most affected? How do they take part in the decisions that affect them? When more than 2,600 people can be counted on the streets in our county as homeless on a given night, a 15% increase in the same areas over last year, we must ask ourselves how we are addressing this priority. When one night in May, 42 people are turned away from Operation Nightwatch, a final sanctuary for those without a place to stay, the crisis is lack of shelter, not a few tents in the woods. The principle must guide the policy must guide the practice. The people who are marginalized, neglected, abandoned, homeless need to be made the basic criteria for a continuum of care that provides for shelter first even while we create new sources of housing.

As a key partner in the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County, we too believe that housing is a right and that we need to come together to provide the home and the support services for each in need. More than 150 of our congregations demonstrate their commitment to this vision each year, as well as our own programs. Yet, when there is nowhere else to go, even the legitimate health and safety considerations for our public spaces must yield to the demand for survival of those who camp in order to live. As sweeps become a matter of policy, it is these people who bear an inherent dignity who must have a say.

We appreciate the 20 additional shelter beds and the case managers who visit the tent encampments. But, the primary concern for safe shelter has not been adequately addressed. We ask the city to revisit the Tent Encampment policy so that the loopholes in it not serve as an excuse for further harm to those with whom we ought to be concerned. That would be a thoughtful follow-up to another memorial for those whom society judges, but whom we uphold and affirm as people whom God deems worthy and valuable in his sight.

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.