I Embrace Socialism

My interview with the Socialist Worker published yesterday, and was a rare opportunity to describe my notions of how homelessness and incarceration link as issues and the overall landscape of our times. They did a really nice job of going to the core of a very long interview and making me sound smart. I'm beginning to get past my innate bias against the silliness of the sectarian left and am learning to love the International Socialists. God help me. Here's an excerpt:

IF SEATTLE continues down this road of criminalizing poverty and decides to go ahead with the new jail, what should we expect in the future?

WHAT'S FUNDAMENTALLY at stake here and everywhere is our vision of the future. We're sliding down a path of a continual increase in the numbers of incarcerated and homeless, continual impoverishment on the lower end of the scale, continual erosion of the middle class and the increased economic vulnerability that comes along with that. More vulnerability to falling over the edge, into that class of people who exist in the land of no return.

There is a lot of mystification around the homelessness issue. You get these complete BS reports out of Washington and the Department of Housing and Urban Development that have all this rosy news about how homelessness is being ended. Anybody who is on the ground dealing with homelessness and seeing the reality knows that there are more people, that the desperation has increased, that things are worse now than they have ever been. This rosy view that things are working is a big smokescreen to placate people.

Homelessness cannot be ended without addressing the root causes that are driving it, that have to do with the economies of labor, and who wins and who loses in this system. The government isn't going to address that, because it can't without threatening itself.

So the response that you see is one of appearing to address homelessness that is really about maintaining their own political legitimacy. They cannot ignore the moral crisis of homelessness without appearing unjust and illegitimate. They cannot address the crisis of homelessness without going to these root causes, which they're institutionally ill-equipped to do anything about.

A theologian named Walter Bruggeman says that situations of cultural acceptance breed accommodating complacency. I think that is the core insight that applies to the times we live in.

As a culture, we have accommodated ourselves to what, at a glance, should be a completely unacceptable reality. There are institutions in place whose primary purpose is to make that accommodation acceptable, to lull us into the sense that things are more or less okay, that the system is functioning normally, and that there is a kind of benign welfare state that is doing its best to take care of people.

That is all an ideological smokescreen. The reality is that about 10 percent of us have been completely written off, thrown to the wolves and have no alternative but to continually cycle through survival systems. Just bare subsistence survival activity--the desperation of which would blow most people's minds if they really understood it--vulnerability to incarceration, and very little prospect of ever escaping that system. That is the core reality of our time, that anybody who has a sense of universal love and concern for their fellow human beings should be completely outraged by.

What we see in the Third World should give us all nightmares. There's been radical growth of urban slums in the Third World over the last two decades--also a response to the global economy, where globalization has driven the rural poor into the containment of the urban slums. The larger ones are 25-40 million people who are living in these shantytowns, where people are living in toxic waste dumps of low-value land, which means floodplains, earthquake-prone slopes, cities built on shit, literally. Smells horrible, no infrastructure, rampant disease. It is a vision of Dante's hell.

The reason we don't have more of that here--although I do think we're starting to see it--is that some of those contested urban spaces are still being contested. And the containment systems are less visible, but are equally horrendous--for instance, the conditions within the prison system, where rape is casually accepted as an unofficial method of dehumanization, of discipline really.

The expansion of maximum-security institutions, in which people are subjected to a form of ongoing torture; the acceptance of dehumanizing conditions within emergency shelter systems--they're different containment systems that dehumanize in different ways.

So one future is continuing along that trajectory. And the economic collapse in the U.S. offers the potential that that curve will again shoot up. In recent years, the rates of growth in incarceration and homelessness have declined slightly--they haven't stopped growing, but they're growing less rapidly.

But our capacity to mitigate this disaster through the provision of human services--which at least offers some sort of a lifeline to those who are most vulnerable--is being reduced, and horrendous cuts are on the table. So we're very likely to see an acceleration in all these trends.

Seattle's Slimy Underbelly Gets A Good Licking

You know things have been crazy busy for me when I go nearly a week without posting anything at all. The stakes at work and home have been unusually high lately. Added to that is the recent notion that regular sleep, or at least making the attempt, may lead to higher productivity. I have not, however, been without ideas.

Last Friday, for instance. I was in my favorite coffee shop talking to my favorite barista on the planet when we got on the topic of drug stories. I shared that the last time I did hallucinogenics was in 1989, and that a small round piece of white quartz pulsed with life in the palm of my hand. The experience was much more than that. On that day, I achieved the Holy Grail of drug experimentation: a bona fide inexpressible moment of mystical insight that stayed with me the rest of my life.

But I had coffee to get and things to get back to and didn't go into all of that. I let it go at the quartz.

In return, my unnamed friend told me about a time she was at a Vashon Island Fair and met some hacky-sack playing moccasin-making hippy named Yum. She sat gazing intermittently into Yum's gorgeously dilated pupils as he put the final touches of turqoise on her new footwear. He asked if she'd like to try some shrooms. "Yes," she said. "Why ... yes!"

As soon as the bits of dried fungus hit her stomach, she thought of something, and it went kind of like this: "What the hell have I done? I'm a mom! I have a seven year-old running around here!"

I tried to imagine myself in that position. Scary. "Shit," I ventured. "If you don't do too much, at least mushrooms are a high where you can kind of maintain. What happened?"

"I hoped so too," she said. "But then I started getting these kind of waves coming in." She moved her palms back and forth beside her head to illustrate. I kind of knew what she meant, but not really. It didn't matter. I was hooked into the story.

"And?"

"I went with my kid to this fenced in area where there were trees and other kids and things for him to play on, where he couldn't really get into trouble, and just outside of that was an exhibit booth on biodiesel fuel. I cornered the lady there and had the most intense conversation about biodiesel you could ever imagine."

"So, basically," I laughed, "you found the straightest, most boring person in the vicinity, and had her talk you down without her even knowing it."

"Yeah," she said, "that's exactly what I did. After awhile, I felt better and things were OK."

When I walked back to Real Change I dropped in on our editor, and he said something about how when he rides his bike in, the homeless camps in certain parking areas underneath certain overpasses were getting huge.

"I wonder," he said, "what the people in those expensive cars who want to park there think when they can't get a parking space because people live there instead?"

"Who knows," I said. "Most of them probably don't think anything, if they even notice. They're oblivious. They probably just get annoyed and park somewhere else. They're in their little comfort-bubble, and are more worried about the state of J-pod or the size of their carbon footprint."

"It's the slimy underbelly of Seattle liberalism," said Adam.

"Mmmmm," I drooled. "Slimy underbelly."

"Maybe," I continued, getting inspired, "they're licking the thing! And the slimy underbelly is like one of those psychoactive toads! And it changes how they see everything. Mayor Nickels transforms from repulsive pig who kicks around the poor to being a noble environmentalist in a hybrid SUV, and all the people in tents and on the streets start to look like recreational backpackers. And whenever that good feeling starts to fade, out comes the toad, and they lick it again and again until they feel better."

"Yeah," laughed Adam. "It's just like that."

I went back to work, visualizing toad-licking men in nice cars, expensive shirts and designer eye-wear, and thought that maybe it isn't that big of a stretch.

Is Nickels Running This Town As A Police State?

Yesterday, as we are all aware, was ObamaDay. Unicorns with rainbows shooting out their asses grazed on the Whitehouse lawn to herald the new dawn. OK, I'm being facetious. I'm happy. Very, very happy. But my sense of elation is balanced by an competing sense of doom.

Tuesday morning, as I drove to Trinity United Methodist to join my friend Rich's flock in catching the festivities on TV, a dense fog limited visibility to around 200 yards. I was again struck by how the world always seems to offer up the right metaphor at the right time. The economy's gone to hell and local and state governments appear poised to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor. The feds are no better. The Mid-East situation seems perfectly calibrated to the Mayan Calendar, and I just know my transmission's going to go one of these days. I can see about a block in front of me. Beyond that? Who knows? Might be blue skies. Might be a twelve car pile-up with me in the middle.

The good news, I recently read, is that the US prison population only rose by a mere 2.5% last year, which is what passes as progress these days. Crime, by the way, fell by 4%. More good news.

In the afternoon, I made my way to Westlake Center to speak at an Inauguration Day student march and rally that was making its way down from Seattle Community College. I arrived before the march to find the police prepared for virtually any terrorist scenario one might imagine.

A black Command Vehicle, which looked like a cross between a tank and a semi, was parked near the Starbucks. About ten riot-gear clad cops — half of which had ominous black knit gear on their heads that revealed eyes and nose only and made them look like ninja gym rats — stood casually shooting the shit, awaiting The Threat. Plainclothes cops were everywhere as well, and not trying real hard to be inconspicuous. As the march made its way down Pike, a phalanx of police motorcycles came before and after. Bicycle cops diligently hemmed in the sides to ensure public safety. There were maybe 100 marchers. It was a sad spectacle. I estimated the overall student to cop ratio at around 2-1.

Democracy, apparently, scares the shit out of these guys.

I joked about this when I spoke. "What?" I said. "Were they afraid you were going to loot the Starbucks for their herbal teas?"

My speech was about Real Change's campaigns against the homeless sweeps and the new municipal jail. The root issue here, I said, is surplus people in a global economy, and a system that writes off the less skilled and educated as a form of human waste that just can't compete and therefore needs to be dehumanized, criminalized, and eventually imprisoned.

I don't really expect this problem to be on the Obama Top Ten issue list, but then, he's only been in office for the better part of an afternoon.

I congratulated them for "taking it to the streets," but said they needed to up the student to cop ratio to around 10-1 next time to make a more respectable showing. Taking it to the streets matters I said, because poor people only get taken care of when one or two conditions are met.

The first is when there's an expectation that the market will once again need the very poor for their labor. Under these circumstances, their stock rises, and they get to live.

Noone really expects this to happen, I said, so scratch that.

The second is when people are organized to the extent that they actually offer some sort of a threat to the system, which is why we really need better than a 2-1 student cop ratio. It might be ObamaDay, but the cops and the prisons are ready for us nonetheless. We shouldn't kid ourselves. The bar for organizing has been set rather high. Are you up for the challenge?

— Photos by Revel

The Sweeps Campaign. Time to Reassess.

One year after launching a campaign to oppose and reverse the city’s zero-tolerance policy of public camping, how does the landscape look? What has changed? How should the Real Change Organizing Project's strategy adapt over the coming year to current realities? Your feedback is welcome. Anonymity, if that's necessary, is OK and understood.

• Over the course of our campaign, we have demonstrated deep public skepticism, outrage, and opposition to city policy on public camping.
• Protocols have been created to guide the sweeps that are rendered largely meaningless by their own loopholes and the city’s failure to adhere to their own guidelines, particularly in the area of storage of possessions.
• We have assisted SKCCH and Columbia Legal in documenting the City’s failure to follow their own protocols in preparation for a potential legal strategy.
• We have found that insufficient political will exists in the City Council to hold the Mayor accountable regarding protocol implementation. Public Safety and Human Services Chair Tim Burgess has resisted attempts to create meaningful oversight.
• CEHKC, the decision-making body for city policy on homelessness, has consistently refused to take a position on this issue. Claims of affordable housing and shelter with services as an alternative to camping and a “pathway” out of homelessness are consistently made by CEHKC in concert with the Nickels administration to justify the sweeps policy.
• CEHKC’s Ten Year Plan strategy for ending homelessness has lost credibility due to their failure to meet housing goals, dismal prospects for future funding, and the increasingly apparent limits on internal democracy.
• 70 additional shelter beds have been set aside to accommodate displaced campers. The extent to which these “extra” beds simply displace other homeless from shelter or actually offer new capacity is unclear.
• Seattle Center has been opened as additional severe weather capacity in response to pressure regarding the survival realities of homelessness in Seattle.
• The city has funded human services outreach to campers. The extent to which this outreach is backed by meaningful capacity remains very unclear.
• The media narrative — that homeless campers threaten public safety and exist in conditions of disease, addiction, and filth — has been challenged by a counter-narrative of inadequate public resources for the destitute and, with the Nickelsville camp, of homeless people doing for themselves despite the hostility of city officials.
• A report has been issued documenting that the city’s PR strategy on the sweeps is intentionally grounded in a “discourse of filth and contagion.”
• Leadership in the faith community and the Church Council have stood up to city bullying to offer safe haven to Nickelsville.
• Service providers witness daily evidence of the hardship and misery created by the city’s commitment to ongoing, routine sweeps, despite clear evidence of inadequate alternatives.
• City PR strategy has focused on distorting the facts to reassure the public that meaningful alternatives exist, and that City efforts are carefully calibrated to offer the maximum possible response, and to stigmatize homeless campers as lawless outsiders who inexplicably refuse to cooperate in the city’s efforts to help,
• We have, through our protest and efforts to provide material support to homeless campers, found that broad public opposition and skepticism exists regarding city strategy.
• We have been largely unsuccessful in leveraging that support to create meaningful system change to stop the sweeps and offer meaningful survival alternatives.
• Outside of one recent meeting between City officials and faith leaders, which ended in impasse, the City has consistently refused dialogue.

Strategic Questions for RCOP:

• How do we most effectively continue to broaden opposition to the City’s zero-tolerance of public camping?
• How do we effectively counter the city’s twin strategy of dehumanizing homeless campers and delegitimating their survival efforts with empty claims of reasonable alternatives?
• City policy and human services response has narrowly focused attention on shelter and service availability. How do we effectively broaden the issue to address growing suffering in the face of a declining economy and growing inequality, affordable housing lost, inadequate public health resources, and issues of racism, criminalization of the poor, and declining civil rights?
• A City frame has developed that says responsible and compassionate efforts to end homelessness and provide alternatives to public camping are underway, and opposition is “political” and driven by advocates who will simply never be satisfied. How do we effectively respond?
• What is RCOP’s unique role within the broad spectrum of opposition and concern regarding conditions for homeless people in Seattle?
• Where does power reside, and where are the leverage points to hold power accountable?

Power Grows From The Pages Of Your Checkbook

Over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the golden rule of grassroots fundraising: If you tell the truth, take the risks that the times demand, and operate from a place of integrity, the money will follow. But only if you ask. We asked, and you came through.

Today’s mail brought another $2,925 in support for our work, bringing the total raised in donations since November 1 to $219,046.54. Our $180,000 Winter Fund Drive goal has officially been smashed. An unusually difficult year is at an end, and Real Change is operating from a place of health and strength. Our debt is retired. Our landlord gets his last six months’ rent. You made it happen, and we thank you.

You get that Real Change works; that we engage our vendors, readers, and allies in addressing the issues that directly affect all of us. You get that our capacity to mobilize is based in our fifteen-year history of walking alongside those who have the least, and in the growing web of relationships that is Real Change.

You get that the time to organize is now, and that with your help, a different reality is possible. 2009 brings its own challenges. With your help, we’ll meet those as well.


Race and Poverty in Seattle

Mass homelessness is a structural fact of the economy, and is the visible result of three decades of increasing inequality, combined with social policies that maintain rather than reduce poverty.

Homelessness in Seattle and King County is growing and becoming more racialized. The 2008 One Night Count documented a 15% increase in homelessness over the previous year. During this snapshot early morning January count, 5,800 people were in emergency and transitional shelter, and another 2,300 homeless were found surviving outside on a night when the shelters were full. The count also documents that although Blacks make up just five percent of county residents, they make up 40 percent of King County’s homeless. This number is up four percent from just two years prior.

As the effects of the sub-prime loan collapse continue to ripple through the economy, creating budget deficits at all levels of government, essential survival services are at risk of being cut back or eliminated at the time when they are needed most.

As inequality in Seattle has widened, city policy on homelessness has shifted to the reduction of visible poverty and a focus on criminalization. Sadly, this has brought a zero-tolerance approach to public camping with the provision of few viable alternatives. This policy of homeless sweeps has been promoted by the city through what a team of University of Washington academics has described as “a discourse of filth and contagion.” The Mayor’s focus on proactively identifying and eliminating homeless campsites from public spaces has dramatically increased the stress and desperation of street survival. Protocols designed to assure the public that these policies are humane and responsible offer little real protection to homeless campers.

The past three decades of growing homelessness and incarceration are related to the realities of a global economy that has eliminated most of the opportunities for “unskilled” work and created a largely unrecognized pool of structurally unemployed. This includes the more than five-fold increase in incarceration that has taken place since 1980, an increase that has placed one in ninety-nine Americans behind bars and left an African-American male high school dropout with a two in three chance of being imprisoned by the age of thirty-five. Seattle’s high school graduation rate for African Americans is a mere 52%.

Seattle is moving ahead with plans to build a new municipal jail to accommodate anticipated increases in incarceration. The facility will cost at least $210 million to build and another $19 million annually to operate. Money that could be used to rebuild lives will instead deepen the cycle of poverty for the most disadvantaged in our society

Seattle’s new jail is an expensive commitment to the structural racism that will surely deepen poverty in disadvantaged communities. There are alternatives — but none will happen without a grassroots fight for a better way forward.


Opportunities and Challenges

Real Change is engaged in two related campaigns to defend those who have the least. Since we uncovered the Mayor’s secret homeless sweeps last year, we have been the leading voice for better survival solutions in Seattle. Over the past year, we’ve held four overnight protest encampments at City Hall. We’ve mobilized large numbers of people for public hearings, documented consistent violations of the city’s own policy, and provided major support to the Nickelsville survival encampment that has gained the strong support of Seattle’s faith community.

Our No New Jail Campaign has challenged the Mayor’s assertion of inevitability, and elevated the jail issue from a NIMBY-based discussion of site alternatives to a community-wide debate over the role of incarceration in perpetuating race-based inequality. We are organizing a broad-based and powerful coalition to take action on this issue, and will hold a large public forum on the new jail this January.

Real Change believes that single-issue, siloed approaches to homelessness have only led to structures of mitigation that are inadequate to the obviously growing problem. In the absence of a large, activist constituency to defend the poor and economically vulnerable, human services are subject to reduction during these times of state, county, and city budget deficits.

The Real Change newspaper and Organizing Project addresses root issues of growing inequality, racial income disparity, declining housing affordability, and attacks upon basic civil rights by growing a powerful and vocal base of activists to take action on these issues. We believe that the hope that exists for structural solutions to poverty and inequality can only be realized through a powerful grassroots activism that unites constituencies across issue and class.

Real Change is well positioned for leadership on these issues. More than a thousand annual supporters of our work provide the majority of our financial support. Our independence gives Real Change enormous freedom to pursue our mission in a manner that is uncompromised by funding sources. We accountable to our base, and our base supports what we do.

Yet, Real Change still faces serious capacity issues on three fronts. Large increases in the numbers of vendors we serve, driven by the increased need and desperation on the street, have challenged our ability to adequately respond. In the face of this rising direct need, our grassroots activism is difficult to sustain. Finally, Real Change’s limited administrative capacity reduces our ability to effectively manage the resources we already have, and more aggressively grow our grassroots support.

To meet the challenges of organizing an activist response while meeting the growing direct need, Real Change needs to grow over 2009 in the following areas:

Vendor Staffing: Inadequate vendor staffing limits our ability to effectively serve the more than 350 vendors we now see each month. Real Change works to connect vendors who express a desire for services with providers that can meet their needs. Our ability to do this effectively is limited by staffing and the capacity to effectively engage the many volunteers who support our work. (Cost: $32K)

Equipment and Space: Our fifteen-year location at 2129 Second Avenue meets our needs as an inexpensive, stable location that is friendly to those we serve. The 2,000 square foot space, however, is no longer adequate to our growing staff and clientele, and the resulting pressures limit our effectiveness. Our aging technology — computers, servers, software, phone systems, etc. — need to come into this century. Over the next year, Real Change must redesign the space and upgrade the tech systems. (Cost $30K)

Administrative Infrastructure: Real Change needs an operations manager to coordinate staff management, more effectively measure and track progress toward goals and milestones, and manage the administrative details of a growing organization. This will free up the ED to organize, build community, and grow the grassroots support needed to sustain and grow our work. (Cost $45K).

Production and Online Support: Real Change newspaper staff (2.5 FTE’s) are challenged by the demands of weekly production and lack the capacity to ramp up for the more multi-media approach that a dynamic internet presence requires. A staff position that focuses on newspaper production, maintaining a multi-media website, and producing a coordinated Real Change e-newsletter will grow our readership, increase grassroots support of our work, offer a professional public face to our activism, and enhance the quality of our core service. (Cost: $40K).

At the close of 2008, Real Change is strong and healthy. We are rooted an expanding base of grassroots support and a stable foundation of earned income that grows with our circulation. We are taking the risks, telling the truth, and organizing for power. Your support makes that possible.

2009 is a new year, and many challenges remain. With your continued and growing support, we will rise. Please make your gift to Real Change today. Visit our website at realchangenews.org, or mail your donation to Real Change, 2129 2nd Ave, Seattle, WA 98121.

Night of Mercy

Last week, Real Change held our fourth campout at City Hall to protest the homeless sweeps. I wasn't there this time. Being sick and hanging out in twenty degree weather overnight in the rain and snow didn't seem like such a great idea. Some, however, don't have the luxury of this choice. Real Change put out the word that we need survival gear to replace that which the city routinely steals, and the response has been overwhelming. That night alone, we gave away around two tons of blankets, sleeping bags, coats and warm clothing. The donations are still coming in. People get it, even if the Mayor doesn't. Professor Gail Stygall of the University of Washington was on hand to talk about the report released that day, documenting the city's campaign of dehumanization on the homeless sweeps issue. Once again, that report is available here. The video of the event is by Revel Smith, the second speaker shown.

Who Wouldn't Want To Sleep Here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Thought Journalism Meant Asking Questions?

Tonight I was looking for coverage of Real Change's fourth protest encampment at City in the last year, and found this odd story on KOMO. "The City of Seattle says that police and social workers will be out tonight helping the homeless find a warm place to stay, but some of the homeless are protesting. Bryan? Why the protest?"

Bizarrely, tonight the KOMO story transcription renders this on their website as "And some of the homeless are smirking"

Pop Quiz #1: Is this a.) A simple transcription error? b.) Someone who's bored, getting high on the job, and pissed that they make $9 an hour? or c.) An intentional editorial comment by someone who knows that no one really reads these things and even fewer people care? Answer: We'll never know, but I'm thinking some combination of b and c.

The story continues. "Well, you know, Mary, normally, City Hall Park is just filled with the homeless. But not tonight! It's too cold! The city says that's because they're keeping three emergency shelters open, at City Hall, the Frye Hotel, and out at the Seattle Center. But guess what? The homeless say Thats ... Not ... Enough!"

Bryan Johnson moves from his dramatic intro to a three second B-roll of some tents while he says there are people at City Hall protesting the homeless sweeps. He then gets Real Change staffer Natalie Novak to say there's at least 2,361 outside of the shelters and to repeat after him, "471 ain't goin' ta do it!"

I've watched this thing three times, and I honestly can't tell whether reporter Bryan Johnson thinks we're a bunch of whiners or that we have a legitimate beef. What I do know is that his story obediently followed both the lead and the frame that the city helpfully provided.

I know this for at least two reasons. The first is that every time Real Change does a protest encampment, the City issues a preemptive press release to instruct the media on what to report. The other is that as soon as I saw the number "471" materialize out of nowhere, I thought "City Press Release!" I looked up December 16, and there it was, just in time.

NEWS ADVISORY
SUBJECT: City Keeps Emergency Shelters Open During Cold Snap
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 12/16/2008 4:30:00 PM	FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT: Alex Fryer (206) 684-8358

City Keeps Emergency Shelters Open During Cold Snap

SEATTLE – As freezing temperatures continue, the city of Seattle is keeping two severe weather overnight shelters and one “overflow” shelter for homeless people open through the duration of the cold snap. Given current weather forecasts, this means the shelters will remain open through Friday, Dec. 19, and potentially into next week.

Shelters, jails, hospitals, the Crisis Clinic and Operation Nightwatch notify homeless of the additional services. In addition, Seattle police officers in a van equipped with blankets approach homeless people and ask them if they need shelter for the night and help them with transportation as needed.

Since the first day of operation through Monday, a total of 471 people have stayed at these shelters.

“We will continue to provide emergency beds as needed, to make sure our city’s most vulnerable have a warm place to stay during these icy nights,” said Mayor Greg Nickels. “We urge the homeless to keep safe and take advantage of the services we are offering.”

Beginning on Friday, Dec. 12, the city opened severe weather shelters at City Hall and the Frye Hotel. On Saturday, Dec. 13, the city opened an additional overflow shelter at Seattle Center.

• The co-ed City Hall shelter is located on Fourth Avenue between James and Cherry Streets. Shelter doors open at 9 p.m. People seeking shelter should arrive no earlier than 8:30 p.m. Capacity is 75 people.

• The women-only shelter is located at the Frye Hotel at Third Avenue and Yesler Street and can be accessed through the Women’s Referral Center, located at 2030 Third Avenue between 7 and 7:30 p.m. Capacity is 25 people.

• The overflow severe weather shelter is located at Seattle Center Pavilion B and is open at 9 p.m. Capacity is 75 people.

During the day, Seattle residents can find warm, public space at Parks Department community centers, the Seattle Center and libraries. The Greenwood Senior Center is also opening its doors at 525 N. Greenwood Ave. from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to anyone who needs a respite from the cold.

City of Seattle severe weather shelters open in the event of two or more days of heavy rain, or when the temperatures reach 32 degrees or colder or when snow is on the ground.

People in need of emergency shelter should call the community service hotline at 2-1-1.

Get the Nickels Newsletter and the mayor’s inside view on transportation, public safety, economic opportunity and healthy communities at mayor.seattle.gov

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A close reading offers much to admire. Note for example, how the phrase "since the first day of operation" is employed to discourage anyone from doing the math. The answer is 471 people served over 4 days. Nightwatch was still turning people away on Friday night, so the city finally kicked up and opened Seattle Center. That detail gets sort of buried. Note also that it takes two consecutive nights of heavy rain for the severe weather shelters to open. The homeless are tough. They can easily handle one night of being cold and wet. They're not really like us. Also, the shelters don't open unless the temperature drops to 32 degrees. Not 33 degrees. People line up, watching the doors, hoping it's cold enough. When it isn't, they wander off, just like they've got nowhere to go.

Pop Quiz #2: In a 35 degree temperature, how hard does the wind have to blow to produce a below freezing wind chill? Answer: According to the National Weather Service, just 5 mph.

Pop Quiz #3: If 471 different people compete for the 625 total number of opportunities over the whole of 4 nights to sleep on a severe weather indoor mat, how many of these people got to stay inside for a second of the four nights? Answer: 154

Extra Credit: Where, then, did these people go on the other 2 nights? Answer: Who cares?

So they did not actually serve "a total of 471 people." As we see, that number doesn't make sense, which is why they obfuscate the math. I'm thinking that 471 is the total number of mats-on-the-floor severe weather accommodations provided over the 4 days, at a bit under 120 people served per night. 471 people served just sounds more impressive. The cold precision of the number offers the illusion of truth and accuracy.

The last city press release on homelessness was nearly two months ago, so today, which happened to be the day of the City Hall protest, we were clearly due. The last, issued on October 30, was More Housing for Chronically Homeless. In typical City of Seattle/Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness fashion, the release doesn't actually say there is more housing. It says there was an announcement of a funding partnership to secure a site, so that when the money to build this housing is raised, there will be a place to put it. The release doesn't actually say when the housing will be completed. I'm guessing around 5-6 years from now.

Pop Quiz #4: If a homeless person is 3-4 more times more at risk of death than the general population, and a "chronically homeless" person runs even an greater risk of death, how many of any random set of 60 chronically homeless people that were alive on October 30, 2008, will be dead by the time this housing is actually built? Answer: Too many.

Anyway, I digress. Those of you who share my fascination with city press strategy and the running dog lackeys of the fifth estate who lap it up will love, love, love, this media analysis of Seattle's homeless sweeps, released this week by a multi-disciplinary team of academics at the University of Washington. They find that the City of Seattle — lovable, liberal, Seattle — has deliberately created a "discourse of filth and contagion" to justify the elimination of homeless campsites, and the media has willingly and consistently followed their lead. There's some good news in there too, but you need to read more than halfway through to find it. Most reporters won't get that far.

Pop Quiz #5: If you define a person as less than human, and equate them with disease and filth, what can you get away with doing to them? Answer: You don't want to go there.

Please Suh, May I Have Two Please?

This is a world class city? Brad Wong's PI article, City Helps To Warm Homeless, makes me want to scream, or cry, or perhaps curl into a little ball and sleep for a very long time. My favorite quote came from Union Gospel Mission communications staff Sharon Thomas-Hearns, who said the agency helped 100 people with blankets, hot chocolate, and other warm things over Saturday and Sunday.

"People were so cold that they wanted two blankets."

What is this? Fucking Dickens?

According to Wong, the city's opened up the Frye and City Hall to max out their overflow mats. Tents at Nickelsville have snow on them. Mars Hill had 125 people lined up around the block for a sandwich and a coat. And so forth. Real Change even got into the act this weekend and sent a truck full of coats and blankets over to Nickelsville. We neglected to alert the media.

This Tuesday night, a small encampment will be held at City Hall, where some intrepid souls will stay overnight to manage our survival gear giveaway. The stuff's been pouring in, but we've been giving it away almost as fast. Desperate people keep coming in the door saying they're cold, and that the City's stolen their blankets, tents, and sleeping bags and such.

This is too sad and pathetic for words.

Wong's story, I think, is supposed to be about a generous city reaching out to help. Is this the best we can do? Blankets? Hot chocolate? A hundred extra mats on the floor?

It's nice that the homeless people on Wong's story are so grateful, but I think more would probably get done if they were surly and pissed off. God knows they have a right.

The Best Fundraising Pitch Ever

I wrote this as a hybrid editorial/fund drive ask for Real Change this week, and think I'll submit it to The Society of Professional Journalists this year just to see if it's possible to get an editorial writing award for a fundraising pitch. That would be so cool.



Hard, Hard Times
Real Change offers direct opportunity while we push for structural change. Don’t make us choose. Support the Winter Fund Drive

This holiday season, the shopping is subdued. We’re all worried for the future. Things are going to be hard and everybody knows it.

During Real Change’s Winter Fund Drive this year, the stakes are unusually high. We need to reach our $180,000 goal to be able to sustain both our organizing and the increased demand we experience from our vendors. In the past year, the number of vendors we serve has risen by more than twenty percent. The sorts of scenes that were once rare in our office — psychotic episodes, suicide attempts, fights and other threatening behavior — have become almost commonplace.

Homelessness is growing, and the conditions have become unbelievably desperate.

Recent federal cuts to Medicare mean that many disabled people on fixed-incomes now pay $200 or more each month for their healthcare out of their meager social security checks. For these, the choice between healthcare and bare survival is no choice at all. For some, this will mean the end. Their precarious hold on some sort of life with dignity will break. And these are the “deserving” poor.

There is a serious possibility that this February, Washington state will eliminate the GAU program (General Assistance – Unemployable) altogether. For 9,000 people — many of who are waiting the two to three years it often takes to qualify for social security disability benefits — this paltry $339 a month is the difference between life and death. But budgets must be balanced and poor people are not a powerful constituency. The machine rolls on.

Here in Seattle, the many homeless who sleep in public — outside of the at-capacity emergency shelter system — are subject to arrest and the seizure and destruction of their property. This has been happening for more than a year and it’s no longer news, but we see it everyday. People who are barely hanging on come into Real Change out of the cold and tell us their gear has been thrown away, again.

Why? They live with the misfortune of having to be somewhere in a city that has administratively legislated that somewhere out of existence.

We are on a very ugly trajectory. The poor haven’t just been abandoned. That was the eighties and nineties. Now, we’re being ground into the dirt.


Up From the Grassroots

And yet, November brought us hope. Things won’t be easy, but there is a political mandate for a new direction. These are hard, hard times, but for the first time in decades, real change is possible.

And not a moment too soon. Inequality in America has grown for three decades to stratospheric highs and unimaginably abysmal lows.

Change is possible, but only if we make it happen.

Over the past century, we have seen movements for economic justice win gains for both the poor and the broad middle class. None of this came easily. The labor movement and the civil rights movement paid for their gains in blood. Progress was made against poverty over the sixties and seventies when the demand was forcefully made. Without protest politics, there are no real gains.

Economic justice rarely happens just because it’s the right thing to do. Economic justice is a matter of power, and it happens when movements form out of necessity; when the pressures in people’s lives build to the breaking point and need for change is so great that the movements they create force concessions from entrenched power and money.

This winter, we face economic crisis on the national level and budget deficits at all local levels of government. If we let them, these budgets will be balanced on the backs of those hurting most: single moms with kids, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill, the sick, the addicted.

Change is coming, but it’s not here yet. The stakes are high, and we need your help. Real Change has raised $114,498 toward our goal since November 1 of this year, and we have just three more weeks to raise the rest.


Two Campaigns, One Problem

The problem, simply put, is that inequality in America has become so extreme that the bottom has fallen out of sight. Beyond Seattle’s 5,800 emergency and transitional shelter beds that were available this year, there were at least another 2,300 people who, more or less invisibly, slept outside.

Beyond the official unemployment statistics, which are worse than they’ve been in decades, are the “discouraged” workers who have stopped looking and dropped off the charts. And behind these are those who have been fodder for the more than five-fold increase in incarceration since 1980 — the poor, the black, the brown — an increase that has placed one in ninety-nine Americans behind bars and left an African-American male high school dropout with a two in three chance of being imprisoned by the age of thirty-five. Seattle’s high school graduation rate for African Americans is a mere 52%.

Racial disproportionality in incarceration on this scale leads to the further impoverishment of economically disadvantaged communities. The 2008 homeless One Night Count documents that 58 percent of homeless people in King County are persons of color. Countywide, people of color make up less than 25 percent of the general population. Although Blacks make up just five percent of county residents, they make up 40 percent of King County’s homeless. This number is up four percent from just two years prior.

As inequality widens and urban living becomes the lifestyle choice of the affluent, visible poverty is criminalized. Begging, sitting, lying, sleeping, and even serving free food in public have all been outlawed. City after city has passed laws to drive the unsightly poor out of town and out of sight. When they don’t go, they accumulate citations. These citations are often ignored out of fear and inability to cope, and these become warrants. The warrants turn into jail time.

Eventually, the jails fill and you need more of them. They’re not cheap. The one the Mayor wants will cost $210 million to build and another $19 million annually to operate. Money that could be used to rebuild lives will instead deepen the cycle of poverty for the most disadvantaged in our society

Seattle’s new jail is an expensive commitment to the structural racism that will surely deepen poverty in disadvantaged communities. There are alternatives — but none will happen without a strong and unified struggle for a better way forward.

Real Change is engaged in two related campaigns to defend those who have the least. Since we uncovered the Mayor’s secret homeless sweeps last year, we have been the leading voice for better survival solutions in Seattle. This December 16, our City Hall Campout and Survival Gear Give-away will mark our fourth overnight protest encampment in one year. We’ve mobilized large numbers of people for public hearings, documented consistent violations of the city’s own policy, and backed the Nickelsville survival encampment that has gained the strong support of Seattle’s faith community.

Our No New Jail Campaign has challenged the Mayor’s assertion of inevitability, and elevated the jail issue from a NIMBY-based discussion of site alternatives to a community-wide debate over the role of incarceration in perpetuating race-based inequality. We are organizing a broad-based and powerful coalition to take action on this issue, and will hold a large public forum on the new jail this January.

Real Change is caught between two challenges. On the one hand, we provide a valuable direct service in a time of rising need. On the other, we have a responsibility to push hard for structural change. Both take resources. Real Change needs the capacity to not have to choose one or the other.

Please support the Winter Fund Drive. Our broad and growing base of grassroots support gives us the freedom and clout to play an uncompromised and leading role in demanding the change we all need. Mail your gift to Real Change, 2129 2nd Ave., Seattle, WA 98121, or visit our website at realchangenews.org to make a secure on-line donation. We’re in this together, and we’re playing to win.

Nothing Is Meaningless

I dropped by Nickelsville today hoping to get Aaron Stephen Beaucage reading Nothing Is Meaningless, the spoken word piece he did at the Nickelsville benefit last month, on video. Needless to say, things worked out. He recited the thing from memory, fast. Apparently he's been practicing. Sadly, slam poets and social critics are notoriously underappreciated and underpaid. Afterwards, we went back to his car so he could write down his email adress. As the sidepanel of the white Dodge van slid open, there was his computer and printer sitting on a makeshift desk. His car was a lot cleaner than mine, and he lives in his. What's my excuse?

Rising Waters

I attended a secret meeting on homelessness last Friday. Many members of the inner cabal were in attendance. I didn't even have to crash the thing. The press was not invited, as there were delicate matters under discussion. How screwed are homeless people? Who is screwing them? And so forth.

Therefore, I can only discuss this meeting by cloaking the proceedings in extreme allegory. I have chosen the river babies trope, which has the metaphorical happiness of being infinitely extendable. The following events may or may not have occurred.

It was noon, and the Kingdom smelled of portabello paninis. The Juridical Commission on Criblessness was in Seattle to review the local plight of the Riverbabies. Gathered with the Commission were many of the leading advocates and caretakers for the Riverbabies. Or of the Riverbabies, as was now the preferred term.

Riverbabynessness — from the early days, when just a few people were pulling babies out of the stream, all the way through to the large well-lit open rooms, which played Brahms while babies laid teeny toe to adorable head throughout the vast facility — had continued to grow. There still wasn't enough room. The babies were coming faster than anyone knew how to handle. Families First, once the goal for all babies, was now the fate of maybe one in ten. Many of these were speaking in complete sentences before finally joining a family. Most people simply didn't have the additional means to help, and those who did mostly didn't like babies.

The Kingdom was overextended and badly managed. The Skypeople, about 1% of the realm, reveled in vast piles of gold while the Invisibles, the bottom 15% or so, lived in conditions of utter misery. For most of the kingdom, life was filled with worry and risk.

The Riverbabies were now overflowing the banks and getting lodged out in the weeds. These were called the Outliers. There was the incident where a gang of youths used one as a soccer ball. A brief public outcry occurred, and then everyone stopped caring again. Most people had become very accustomed to the Riverbabies, to the point of hardly noticing them. The Outliers and the Riverbabies were outwardly indistinguishable. It was their surroundings that made the difference. An indoor Riverbaby was legal. An outdoor Riverbaby was not.

The King's Riverbaby sweeps had been in the press a lot lately, and the King himself was increasingly forced to defend his policies. It didn't help that he had grown more swollen with each passing day of regal tenancy. His neck poured up over his collar in angry waves of exfoliated pink flesh, rising into a doughy ball of obscenely pouty lips, flapping jowls, and bulbous nose. The King's tiny flat gray eyes swam in small seas of bright pink nestled against the fleshy shores of his brow. They alternated between frightened and bored as they darted about, often finally fixing in a defiant glare that still seemed somehow dead. The expensive haircut strangely accentuated the oddness of the King's bullet-shaped head, which resembled a slug fired into a block of wood and retrieved as evidence.

A recent Riverbaby Uprising had drawn much attention to the King's edict, and people were once again beginning to notice the Problem, as it was commonly called. After all, the waters were continually rising. Some would walk to the banks nearly everyday, commenting nervously to one another on how the depths had just claimed some new point of interest. A fence post. A field. A parked car. An unlucky cow.

Various squires of the King, both loyal and disloyal, were there before the Commission, as were the key shysters and proles, and, of course, the star baby tenders, allies, and agitators. Discussion was mostly polite. They nibbled on inexpensively catered sandwiches and drank urns of coffee with their brownie triangles. A few of the villagers didn't seem to know why they were there. Some of the more loquacious tenders prattled on about the details of tendenceship, oblivious to the waters that would soon swamp their feeble efforts.

The core facts regarding the Riverbaby sweeps were read. Upbeat assurances of progress on the Problem were offered by the Top Tender. Many tenders still adhered to a Riverbaby creed based upon a belief in the Number Ten. The Top Tender was the chief local exponent of this belief system which had swept the Kingdom hence and hither.

One of the agitators asked the Top Tender why the Outliers were of such little regard to Ten Worshippers. The Top Tender replied that while individual Ten Worshippers might have their own opinions, his belief system had no democratic process that allowed for resolution of differences or airing of controversy. This may anger some of the Ten Worshippers, he wordlessly implied, and gravely fracture the Tendence Coalition, which, sadly, was failing miserably in its meticulously meretricious yet metrically misleading goals. Eventually, the Top Tender remembered that the Tendence Coalition had set a standard for the King based on the King's standard, and boldly announced his bright thought, assured that those assembled would thricely applaud and dance a jig. None did.

A Juridical Commissioner noted — once many of the inner cabal scurried to other appointments and the others had resorted to chatting semi-furtively among themselves — that this was the way of the Ten Worshippers in most Kingdoms. The Outliers make the SkyPeople uncomfortable, and are thereby the enemy of the King, for the King is of the Skypeople and not of the rest of us. Ten Worshippers are often loath to offend the King. For the King is mighty, and holds their fate within his pudgy yet powerful hands.

Why Protest Politics Matters.

Today was the Real Change breakfast. The slide show above ran at the beginning and close, and is by Revel with music by me.

Sherman ran a lovely and funny extended metaphor that drew upon his ever deepening life as a frequent flyer. John Bayly, the Real Change vendor who made the pitch, did the best job I've ever seen, anywhere. We had about 450 people there and raised at least $71,500. We're still counting.

I talked about hope, reality, and the importance of protest politics.

This is one version of the future, I said: Grassroots activism grows. The political climate changes. There's a major investment in clean energy, and we put people to work. We finally get out of Iraq, and we figure out how to do health care. A bunch of bad executive orders get reversed. We get a few supreme court justices, and so forth.

But then, what about inequality, which has increased steadily since 73. The pace of that is only accelerating, especially at the top and bottom-most ends.

How much political will will it take to decrease inequality, I asked? I mean, ending homelessness; that's one thing we can all get around the table on, but reducing inequality? That's communism. And, as Sherman noted this morning, you're not allowed to call in sick on communism. Too few others are picking up the slack.

Here’s another version of the future, I said. Obama does what he can, but the economy continues to slide. Localities face budget deficits year after year. The war goes on. It turns out to be surprisingly intractable. No meaningful health care reform is passed because people think Obama’s going to do everything for us and they mostly let the insurance and drug companies dictate the terms. Tax reform is mild, and the financial system gets some tweaks, but mostly continues to run without transparency or accountability. Inequality continues to widen. Homelessness grows, as has been the trend since the 70’s. Local budgets are tight. The political will to end homelessness fades and grows more jaded. Poor people are increasingly criminalized. Seattle’s new jail, after just four years, is operating at capacity. Racial disproportionality in the prison and homeless populations keeps increasing. And so forth.

The difference, I said, will depend upon the strength of grassroots organizing.

Last night, I thought about protest politics, and what I was going to say about why the work matters. After all, we haven't exactly stopped the homeless sweeps yet; although we have made the practices a good deal more visible and forced the Mayor to at least a pretense of accountability. But there's been another win that might allow for a win later.

We shifted the frame. Protest politics changes the frame.

City framing on the homeless sweeps issue was clear, if not original: Camping is illegal. The plan is consistent and compassionate. This is a ten year plan, not a two year plan. Hypodermic needles, human feces, and bottles of urine are everywhere. Insert number tons of garbage removed here. The greenbelts have become places of danger and filth, and we should fear the filthy, dangerous people.

We changed that. Right around June 8-9, during Camp4Unity and the arrests in the street, the media was starting to get more critical, and we shoved it over the top. Our own good press sort of astonished us. We were seen as in the right, and the City was shown to have a problem to solve, and the sweeps were not a help.

The city lost control of the frame and a new one was born.

There’s nowhere for people to go. People are doing something to help themselves. Why not help them? Pink tents are cool. Brenden Foster said "They're probably starving, and we should help them." Homelessness is growing. The ripples of the economic meltdown are spreading, and the response is known to be inadequate.

The Mayor is now seen as persecuting homeless people without providing real alternatives. Were he at all accountable, we'd be winning.

With the city poised to ram it's vertical municipal jail down our throats, new feats of reframing are required.

The jail will cost $220M to build and $19M to operate, at minimum. This kind of money is better spent on upstream solutions. Our city jail numbers are down 38% while overall population is up 8%. Yet, the Mayor is slamming it through. the new jail represents the continuation of a failed strategy: reliance upon incarceration for the mitigation of urban ills. It doesn't work. It just deepens poverty. And yet, here we are, poised to spend millions in the service of ruining lives when we should be putting resources into rebuilding them.

The city frame is that the jail is inevitable. The downward trends in jail population, they argue, are unsustainable, and will reverse. There’s no alternative. The question is before the electorate is merely one of where to put the thing.

The new jail is a bricks and mortar commitment to a dismal future for the poor. 1 in 99 Americans is already behind bars. 1 in 9 Black males aged 20-24 are in jail. A Black male high school drop-out has a 2 in 3 chance of landing in prison by age 35. These sorts of numbers decimate communities, and create ever deepening spirals of poverty.

We have a narrow window where we can still say enough is enough and change the frame. And it won't be done by asking quietly. You can bet on that.

The Listening Campaign

It’s November. The wet, rainy season is here, and the business of survival for Seattle’s homeless has become that much more grim. November also marks the beginning of the Real Change winter fund drive. We’ve set an ambitious goal of raising $180,000 by the end of December. It’s a lot of money, but we have a lot of friends.

This has been a year of intense activism at Real Change. We’ve seen the level of desperation on the streets rise dramatically. We’ve taken risks and pushed ourselves to nearly the breaking point. We’ve fought hard to defend those who survive outside of Seattle’s over-capacity emergency shelter system against the Mayor’s brutal policy of homeless sweeps. We’ve built alliances across issues, linking Seattle’s new jail to homelessness, growing inequality, poverty, and race.

We’ve taken strong stands, and we’ve made a few enemies, but we’ve made a lot more friends. This month, for example, we were honored by Jobs with Justice for our work in "leading the movement for social justice." The winter fund drive is an opportunity to learn from you. How can we deepen our grassroots support and be even more effective? How can we broaden our allies?

Is our organizing, our newspaper, and the caring community that we help create worth your support? What would make it better?


A Brief Parable

Last week, a number of us here at Real Change went to court to deal with last June’s Civil Disobedience demonstration at City Hall. There was an overnight encampment to protest the Mayor’s homeless sweeps policy — our third in nine months — followed by fifteen homeless people and advocates going into the street.

The event was a media grand slam, and marked a decided turning point in press coverage of the issue. Three months later, we received our sentences of 24-hours community service.

When Rev. Liljenstolpe, one of the fifteen arrested, spoke to the city employee who handles such things, he explained how we’d been allowed to choose any non-profit we wanted, except for Real Change.

“Oh, Real Change,” she said without irony. “They’re bad.” How so, he asked?

“They do a lot more than they say they do.”


Building for Power

Real Change has always been an activist organization. Our mission is to provide opportunity and a voice to low-income people while taking action to end poverty and homelessness. Over the past year, however, the stakes have been higher, and the organizing has been different.

The Real Change Organizing Project, launched in November of last year, leverages our strongest assets — our vendors and readers and our institutional capacity to engage and mobilize — into a valuable resource for economic justice organizing.

We agree with the Mayor on one thing: no one should have to live in a tent. Yet, the shelters are full, and everyone knows it. Affordable housing has grown increasingly scarce, the economy is tanking, and those at the bottom — those who will seldom find work and even then only at a poverty wage — have been relegated to a distant, invisible netherworld of misery and pain.

We have organized relentlessly. While Seattle has hurtled down the path of growing inequality, we have defended those who have nothing. We understand that the growing economic vulnerability of the middle class and the abandonment of the poor are, at bottom, the same issue.


Making the Connections

In a time of declining economic opportunity, our newly launched No New Jail campaign makes the links between the disproportionality of people of color in our homeless shelters and prisons and the growing trend toward the criminalization of the poor.

The $220 million the city plans to spend on the construction of a new jail, and the $19 million or more that will be spent to operate this facility, is better spent upstream on programs that rebuild lives. According to the Department of Justice’s own statistics, one in ninety-nine Americans is already behind bars.

We don’t see these people. They are the wreckage of a system that abandons and punishes its most vulnerable and least privileged, and relegates them to lives of reduced economic opportunity.

The No New Jail campaign builds an economic justice movement across race and class. We recognize that homelessness, incarceration, reduced economic opportunity, declining social services, and the growing racialization of poverty are all linked. When the Mayor criminalizes outdoor survival, cuts programs that offer support to those most at risk, and says a new jail for misdemeanor criminals is inevitable, we clearly see the connections.

We envision a movement for economic justice that places the needs of the most vulnerable at the center and builds for power based on mutual self-interest. None of Seattle’s neighborhoods wants a new jail. We understand that increased incarceration is and expensive and ineffective solution to the problems in our streets. There is a better way forward.


We’re Listening

We believe that those of us who work for economic and racial justice can unite with the Seattle neighborhoods to elevate this issue and force the city to consider more enlightened alternatives.

Over the next year, here’s what you can expect from Real Change:

• We will continue to aggressively fight the Mayor’s cruel policy of homeless sweeps, and demand that the city provide real alternatives to outdoor survival.
• We will build and support a movement for economic justice by engaging new activists, cultivating allies, and building relationships based upon our mutual self-interest.
• We will make the links between declining economic opportunity, the racialization of poverty, reduced social services, and increased incarceration.
• We will help meet the survival needs of Seattle’s most vulnerable by providing opportunity to more than 350 Real Change vendors each month.
• We will engage those vendors and their customers in the important work of building a united movement for economic and racial justice.

The work is happening. We need your support, and we want to know how we can be more effective. Over the two months of our winter fund drive, my first priority as Real Change Executive Director is to hear from you. Our grassroots base of readers, vendors, and other allies is our life’s blood. We need to know what you think.

Call me at 441-3247 x202. We can talk on the phone, or if you’d rather, meet in person. Email me at director@realchangenews.org with your ideas and feedback. Go to realchangeorganizingproject.blogspot.com to find out when our next meeting is and come see our work for yourself.

Real Change needs three things to be at our most effective over 2009: an effective strategy, the resources to organize, and a whole lot of friends. All of this depends on you. Real Change is an enormous asset in the fight for economic justice. Help us make the most of what we have.

It’s not to late to join Real Change and Sherman Alexie for breakfast this November 12th at the UW Husky Ballroom. Tickets are $50. Help us make this event the show of grassroots support that we need. Email development@realchangenews.org for details.

Nickelsville Talks Back To Mayor Greg Nickels

Astonishingly, Mayor Greg Nickels went to the Seattle Channel's Ask The Mayor to say that the people staying at Nickelsville aren't even homeless. They're mostly "advocates," he said, who have homes of their own. The incredulous expression on C.R. Douglas' face is worth the price of admission alone. Revel and I went to Nickelsville the next day in search of the fake homeless.

Flogging the "Dissent Decree."

The Mayor got flushed out on Nickelsville today on Steve Scher's Weekday. Phone calls from reporters have been unreturned, but Steve gets him for a standing monthly gig and was happy to press hard. The thing was so fucking entertaining I transcribed it, with commentary. The flattering photo is from today. I recognize KUOW's wall. They put him up against the wall and shot him. This is long, so I'll tell you now: the point is somewhere in the last three paragraphs.


Part The First: Only One Allowed!

OK. Some more questions. I'm going to let Shirley ask this question, to get me started. Shirley's in Everett. Hi Shirley?

Hi, I was going to ask they Mayor when he's planning to meet the people at Nickelsville. They're not on city property any longer, and in light of all the economic situations, we only know that the plight of the homeless is going to increase, and we also know that these people are anxious to help themselves. Their tents are easy to maintain, and they'd really like to talk to the Mayor about a permanent site that they can use to help people be safe and off the streets. Thank you.

Well, I have offered to meet with the Church Council, and also the funders of the shelter services that are available in Seattle and King County, and I think it's good that we're going to have a broader conversation about shelter. 94% of all the shelter beds that are in King County are in Seattle. And we think that it is long past time that this is shared more equally throughout our county and throughout our region because homelessness is not something that starts or ends in the City of Seattle. (What? Is this a slam on Everett? No. This is the standard city transferal of responsibility talking point, but if he does meet with the Church Council, it will be the first time the Nickels administration has ever met with advocates to dialogue on the issue of homeless encampments and the city sweeps. This makes it a bit of an occasion, and kind of a big deal, if it's true.)

We currently have an, um, ahh, agreement, a court approved agreement with the folks who have organized this encampment that says that there will be one tent city in the City of Seattle. And when they have lived up to their, uh, part of the agreement, then we will be happy to sit down with the advocates who are behind this protest (pronounces word advocates as though it tastes sour). But while they are still illegally encamping, whether it's on public or private property, we're not gonna engage directly with 'em. (What? He doesn't negotiate with terrorists? He doesn't negotiate. Period.)

Why not?

Because, aghhh, you know, I think, we all respect the (pause) political process, the ability of people to commit civil disobedience. I don't think that that's the time you talk about these issues. You talk about these issues in a respectful manner while everyone is observing the rules that are in place. (There are points at which the interview veers into the surreal.)

I notice you don't want to call it Nickelsville. (Gets anguished chuckle from Mayor). Um, they're in our neighborhood. They're just down the street. Is there a place, in this modern time, for semi-permanent shantytowns?

Well, you know, the protests here are about what we have done in terms of the illegal encampments in greenbelts and in parks that we have been cleaning up. And it started almost a year ago when we took a look at the city's practices. The city's been cleaning up those encampments for years, and what we discovered was that there weren't any rules, there weren't any guidelines for how you do it. Each department kind of went out and cleaned up their own property and it was kind of hit or miss, whether everyone got noticed, or whether anyones belongings were kept, so I thought it was important that everyone understand what the rules are. We'll give 72 hours notice, we'll offer everyone shelter and services so that they can reconnect to the community, and we'll collect personal valuables and keep them in a central location for a period of time so that people can come and collect them. We thought that was much more humane than what had been going on prior to that. (Unreal. The city policy was about belated legal diligence and ass covering when they were called on systematically targeting camps for removal without notice, assistance, or accountability.)

So now, the argument is that we should allow encampments as a permanent part of our community. And , and, and I just don't think that it is humane to allow people camping out, ah, in that fashion. I think that we have a responsibility, certainly, for immediate shelter for human beings. And I am adding a million dollars to this budget on top of the fo-o-orty million that we put into homeless services.

We are building housing through the third Seattle Housing levy, and I will be leading the effort next year. We are particularly concerned about housing the people who have been on the streets for a long time. People who are chronic alcoholics, people who are mentally ill or addicted to other substances. And I think that permanent housing is the humane approach, and Seattle has been incredibly compassionate in that regard. (Grows agitated). I don't think that it is a good idea to have semi-permanent camps! In our parks or our other public places. (To the Mayor's credit, he actually answers the question in the last sentence.)

When we come back, I want to come back to the question of whether there is room for a controlled camp along the lines of tent city.

And there is one. One! One! And that's the agreement, and we're not going to negotiate beyond that, until people are following the agreements they made previously. (Yeah. You already said that.)

Okay, you and I will negotiate. We'll negotiate here.

(Break. Steve pitches the fund drive, and the Mayor gets all loose and cracks a joke about not wanting to encourage civil disobedience).


Part the Second: Would You Just Die Already?

Let me read you this email. "The homeless encampment Nickelsville is now located on a church lot in the University District. What's the city's stance on this? This affects me personally because my daughter's pre-school uses the parking lot they are in. We will be driving literally into their encampment twice a day." But I just want to get the philosophy here. What's the philosophy about what you're saying about not wanting people living in parks or public spaces? I go to a public space every morning to walk my dog, and every morning on the weekends, there's a guy sleeping in this one place, and he's got his little encampment and he's got his plastic bottles, and everything he wants to make himself a little home. Well, it's a public space, so I understand the reason why that's not really appropriate. But, if folks are saying, "we want to set up a self-governing institution within the city." Five of them. I'm just throwing out a number. Is there something philosophical to that, where, in troubled times, the federal government has abandoned much of its efforts, all of it's falling upon the cities, counties, state to some extent, is there something that says, "We need to work with these homeless to regulate themselves and also give them a safe, non-park, place to be?"

Well, I agree with at least part of that. I think we do have an obligation as a society to give people shelter. I think that is absolutely true. Self-governing communities of shantytowns or tent cities or what have you, I don't think that is the right direction. I think we have an obligation as a community to welcome people back into the community and open the door back into the community, as opposed to having separate and unequal communities. They don't have power, they don't have water. We have standards set for our buildings for a reason, and that is health and safety. (Did he just pull opposing the discredited concept of separate but equal out of his ass as the philosophical underpinning of his policy? How noble. Oh, and it's the building codes. Tent cities don't meet building codes, and therefore must be illegal.)

But you know that that they say I don't want to go into a shelter because it's crowded, it's dirty, I get harassed, I get attacked ...

Well, there are people who don't want to live in homes, in structures. Those folks I don't think are particularly the challenge we face. They can make their own choices and their own decisions, and I don't think that we need to give them license to do that anyplace they care to in our city. I do think we need to keep the door open to anyone who wants shelter. And that's why when we go out and enforce on these encampments, we offer everyone shelter. We guarantee them shelter. And particularly, we need to be moving people from shelter to permanent housing. (I think he just said, the choices here are to either go into one of our filled past capacity shelters, or die.)

Are beds left empty at the end of the night?

(audible squirm) Ahhh-um, sometimes they are and sometimes they're not. And that's why on really cold nights we open up additional shelters. We have more beds that are available, and we go out and we seek people, so that they're not outside in dangerous weather conditions. uhhh-ahhh, there are some, there are some, some, places we have holes in the system, and that's why one of the things I have in this budget which believe the council will approve is a voucher system, so that if a police officer runs into a family with children, there is a voucher for a motel room so that no child s sleeping on the streets of our city, ever! (Ok. So, how about if you don't have a kid on hand? If the Mayor is unclear on the shelter availability situation, maybe he could start reading Rick Renolds' blog. There's bigger "holes in the system" than this.)

You said that you support the renewal of the housing levy, but you're never going to be able to build enough shelters for all the people who are homeless, are you? I know there's a goal: 2016.

There is a goal, and I think there is the political will to achieve that goal. It can't just be on the City of Seattle though. (I'm beginning to see signs of pathology in Nickels' adherence to the 10YP Belief System.)

Does it feel like it is?

It does feel like it is! (I believe!)

If I call Nickelsville, will I find that those people are from all around Puget Sound?

Well certainly! In the news articles you'll see that people have moved here to get a job, maybe getting a job but not having shelter. So, yeah. You have people from all over, not just the county and the state, but all over the United States who you will see in these circumstances. That doesn't mean we can't reach out our hand and help them to find appropriate shelter, but I think this country, as wealthy as it is, even though it doesn't seem that way in the last two or three weeks perhaps, has an obligation to have a roof over every body's head. (The dodge, again, and the unbearable emptiness of words.)

Lynn in Northgate wanted to know about the toilet facilities in the outdoor camps. Like who cleans them and looks out for them?

Well, again, they're not authorized, there are no regulations that guide that, when we sent City crews into what's called the Jungle, the greenbelt along I-5 in Beacon Hill, we ended up taking out tons of garbage, um, syringes, human waste, gallon jugs of human urine, and, in addition, in the Jungle, when they were cleaning up in mid-September. they found a human body. A fellah that had been murdered. That's the third homicide we have had in those encampments in that area. And we had a very serious rape in June as well, so these are not safe, regulated places. These are not appropriate places ... (The correct answer to the question would have been, "The Honeybucket people." But instead he delivers the standard dehumanizing hypodermic/feces/urine trinity city talking point.)

But you're not equating that with the tent cities, or even the Nickelsvilles, are you?

(Nickels makes a sound here like he's trying to dislodge a piece of pork fat from his trachea). The protest is against what we have done with encampments, which is to set up criteria, and standards, and rules, and then go about enforcing those. So that's the genesis of it. Now, the activists involved in this want to take that a step further and have the city agree that we're going to have these self-governed camps in public properties around the city. (The city line on Nickelsville from day one has been this is a "protest" by "activists," and to dismiss the notion that some people might actually need shelter.)

What's your plan for this one that's now settled at the University District church?

Mmmmm! They moved there, I believe it was Friday afternoon. We'll be having conversations with the church and well be having conversations internally as to that status. I don't have a ...

But you don't want it to stay there? You said there's one legal one?

We have an agreement, and we want to see the proponents of this, the advocates for this, live up to the agreement that they entered into.

So, so, do they have a time frame?

Ahhh, we have not yet set a time frame. We will. We need to go over our, um, what the status of this is on church property. We, I, we don't have an answer for that. (This really is the beauty part. Will the city cross that line? They're still deciding.)

I can't imagine you want to be going in there with police and arresting people again.

We don't want to be doing that at all. We don't want to be doing that at all. We would like this group to, ahhh, live up to the agreement that they entered into, the uhh, dissent, uh, decree.

(He actually said this. I listened twice to be sure I heard right. The dissent decree. I believe he meant to say, "consent decree," which was the agreement the City made with SHARE/WHEEL in 2001 to allow a tent city so long as there would not be another. It seems to me like seven years later might be a good time to revisit this decree to see if it still makes sense. But maybe decrees are for life? I don't know. My decree experience is rather limited.)

At which point, Steve changed the subject and tossed a few softballs about dodge ball leagues using city parks and Seattle's vanishing crosswalks, which a palpably relieved Mayor fielded with aplomb. Steve gave him a big plus for his crosswalk work near Green Lake and ended on an up note heading back to the KUOW fund drive. "we'll let the Mayor escape. ... Some people are saying I'm getting punchy ..."