Homelessness, Incarceration, and the Future

For more than two decades, I’ve struggled with creating an approach to homeless advocacy and organizing that does the issue justice. Over this time, there are four truths that have become more than obvious.

One: Homelessness is about the problem of surplus people in a global economy. The collapse and overseas exportation of most American manufacturing has hit the market for less educated and relatively unskilled labor hard. Communities that face racial discrimination have been hit hardest. This clear fact of our economy goes largely unacknowledged.

Two: The bottom 10-20 percent of those who struggle to survive in our economy have been more or less permanently marginalized. There is little expectation that a demand for their labor will ever return. There is an historic pattern of erosion of government support for those at the bottom. As a result, the past three decades have seen an exponential growth in incarceration and emergency sheltering. In times of growing economic desperation, even the most minimal supports that presently exist will increasingly come under attack.

Three: Homelessness and incarceration are fundamentally dehumanizing. Those who endure life at the outer margins of the economy are stigmatized and rendered invisible. They are a frightening reminder of the systemic failures of capitalism, and our response, all too often, is to distance ourselves through victim-blaming and denial. The conditions of the incarceration industry and mass homelessness erode feelings of self-worth and diminish our own capacity to regard those who endure the conditions of these institutions as beings who are fully human.

Four: Approaches to “ending homelessness” that ignore these realities cannot succeed. Until we acknowledge that America has a growing and largely permanent class of throwaway people, and make the connections between structural unemployment, racism, criminalization, and the erosion of even the most minimal safety net for the poor and disabled, “homeless advocacy” will, at best, continue to win the occasional battle while the war rages on. Despite our well-intentioned best efforts, the casualties will mount.

Since the advent of globalization, inequality in America has radically widened, and the trend is accelerating. Class war is being waged upon the very poor by the very rich, and the frontiers of this conflict are expanding to create new levels of vulnerability for an eroding middle class.

The realities of regressive taxation, unsustainable military spending, and government priorities that reflect the capture of democracy by corporate interests mean that the middle class and those who struggle at the margins have a common interest in systemic reform that places the realities of race and class front and center.

Bureaucratic, siloed approaches to ending homelessness, while necessary, are insufficient. We must look toward the more imaginative and holistic organizing opportunities that, all too often, are hidden in plain sight.

Here in Seattle, city plans for the creation of a new municipal jail brings together issues of race, class, a failed education system, economic marginalization, and misguided government spending priorities in a rather neat package. Thus far, public discussion of this issue has been mostly limited to the problem of where this facility is to be located. The larger question of a renewed civic commitment to a failed policy of expanding incarceration has gone largely unaddressed. This reflects a sad failure of moral and political imagination by Seattle’s homeless advocates and, more importantly, the broader progressive community.

The city’s unwavering commitment to expanded incarceration comes when we can least afford it. During a time of increasing economic uncertainty and large deficits at every level of government, the new facility will cost $220 million to build and $19 million annually to operate. Meanwhile, Seattle schools slated for closure are located mostly in our city’s communities of color.

The Department of Justice’s own statistics on incarceration are a travesty, and speak to the role of incarceration as a form of economic containment. One in 99 Americans are presently behind bars, and one in 33 live under the supervision of the penal system. An African American high school dropout has a two in three chance of winding up behind bars by the age of 35.

The Seattle school system’s high school graduation rate for African Americans is a mere 52 percent.

This reality of incarceration being a rite of passage for males who live in economically disadvantaged communities is a relatively new phenomenon, resulting from 30 years of war on crime and drugs. Incarceration rates bear little apparent relationship to crime rates, and are driven by the politics of fear and race.

Such racialized rates of incarceration feed a downward spiral of economic opportunity within already disadvantaged minority communities.

Meanwhile, according to the city’s own statistics, the demand for incarceration has abated. The jail population has declined by 38 percent while overall population has risen by eight percent.

Why, then, the rush to build?

Real motivations, given the opacity of city planning processes, are unclear. Perhaps the promise of new jobs in construction and incarceration play some role. Perhaps the increasingly repressive approach to immigration and limited Immigrations and Customs Enforcement facility space is in the mix somewhere. Perhaps the projected increase of community emphasis policing in Seattle, which focuses on low-level drug and poverty crime, anticipates new demand for misdemeanant jail beds.

A glance at the current environment offers an ominous look at the future. State level budget cuts threaten the closure of King County’s one drug and alcohol treatment center that serves the very poor. The governor’s budget threatens to zero out General Assistance - Unemployed. The GAU program offers a paltry $339 a month to around 9,000 people who have successfully navigated the challenging process of documenting that they, one way or another, are too disabled to work and have no other sources of income.

This barbaric approach to economic hard times will, unavoidably, create more instances of poverty crime and will undermine public safety for all of us. The primary victims of increased crime will be the very poor.

At the same time, homelessness in Seattle and King County is growing and becoming more racialized. The 2008 One Night Count documented a 15 percent increase in homelessness over the previous year. During this snapshot early morning January 2008 count, 5,800 people were in emergency and transitional shelter, and another 2,300 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.

It’s been said that the definition of insanity is to continue doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Seattle’s new municipal jail is a bricks and mortar commitment to continued structural racism and the economic marginalization of the most poor. It’s time to stop the insanity. Attend the Real Change forum on the new municipal jail and commit to being part of a new solution to poverty, homelessness, and structural racism in Seattle.

"Question Inevitability: A Community Perspective on Alternatives to a New Jail" will take place at Seattle University's Pigott Auditorium from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 28. This forum by the Real Change Organizing Project will include a broad panel of respected and committed activists and experts on incarceration and its effect on communities.

Panelists include:
Silja J.A. Talvi , noted essayist and investigative journalist and author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System.

Aaron Dixon, co-founder of the Seattle Black Panthers and 2006 Senate candidate for the Green Party.

King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, active on issues of social and economic injustice for over 40 years.

Alexes Harris, who has worked with the highly successful Clean Dreams pre-arrest diversion program, a real alternative to incarceration.

Tim Harris, executive director and founder of Real Change

Jesse Hagopian, a middle school teacher in Seattle Public Schools and a co-founder of Educators, Students, and Parents for a better Vision of the Seattle schools (ESP Vision).

Lipstick On A Pig

There was a time when I believed in what I’ve come to think of as Seattle Exceptionalism. This was the belief that while other cities around the nation become upscale islands of affluence that pursue the interests of the most affluent at the expense of the most desperate, we, here in eco-obsessed, liberal, and excessively polite Seattle would never go there.

Within the largely depoliticized, often victim-blaming framework through which homelessness is commonly understood, it’s easy to miss that the modern period of homelessness is largely a product of economic restructuring. Since 1973, inequality has only widened. This trend has accelerated most precipitously at the very top and the very bottom.

The urban landscape has changed. The logic of deindustrialization and the two-tiered economy has spawned a widespread reinvention of the city. Urban centers now exist as centers of upscale consumption and culture for those who can pay the price. Those who have been left out of the economy altogether are widely viewed as unsightly and dangerous indicators of social disorder. This victim-blaming ideology has become the common sense of our time.

With this, certain strategies have become typical. Most cities now have “urban ambassadors” who move the homeless along. Panhandling ordinances have proliferated. Sweeps of homeless encampments are commonplace. Feeding people in public is widely outlawed. Public toilets are defined as vectors of crime and removed. The meanness keeps getting meaner.

And yet, even as cities from Los Angeles to Boston and Dallas to Tampa continually upped the ante on attacking the very poor, I thought Seattle was different. I was wrong.

The Mayor is fond of trumpeting Seattle’s commitment to “ending homelessness,” even as he ruthlessly attacks homeless campers without providing viable survival alternatives.

This pig is wearing a lot of lipstick and eyeliner, but it’s still a pig.

The Beast Is Loose Upon The Earth

As Seattle's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness stumbles blindly toward 2014, the logic of ending homelessness without addressing poverty and inequality has hit a wall.

This blindness includes wholesale abdication to the market forces that have reduced Seattle’s affordable housing stock several times faster than the non-profit sector and local government can keep up. We are losing ground.

The blindness also extends to the wage side of the equation. One in four workers in King County earn less than a living wage. New jobs are mostly divided between low-end, poverty wage work and knowledge worker occupations that pay $75K or more annually. Economic security has become increasingly elusive.

While the connections between poverty, homelessness, race, and the revolving door of the prison industry is increasingly well understood, the racialization of poverty continues to deepen.

Federal priorities are a disaster. More than $35 billion in cuts to the federal housing budget since 2004 have been driven by tax cuts, rising healthcare costs, and the enormous cost of an unjust and misbegotten war. This pattern shows little sign of altering.

Yet, we act as though we can somehow mitigate the wreckage and turn things around with smarter service provision and “Housing First” for the 10-15% of the homeless who are in deepest distress. This will work for some, and with resources, it might work with many.

But housing is not the only broken system.

Child welfare. Education. Transportation. Criminal Justice. Healthcare. Make your own list. It’s all broken. And the solution, goes the mantra, is to cut taxes. Especially for the rich.

Seattle's obsession with reducing visible poverty is a gift to the wealthy delivered at the expense of the most desperately poor. The pretense of there being sufficient help for those targeted by sweeps and other heightened policing strategies is too thin to bear weight. Various establishment players lend credence to the illusion, whether by their silence or their active support.

The Mayor’s “punish the poor” sweeps strategy is a quick and immoral fix to the structural problem of growing poverty, because the Ten Year Plan isn’t getting the poor out of sight fast enough.

It can’t. Getting 950 units of housing up every year, given the resources available, the expenses involved, and the NIMBY attitudes that prevail when housing is an investment to be protected are daunting enough. But homelessness isn’t just about housing. It’s about the failure of multiple interdependent systems.

Why is it that those who seek ever more nuanced understandings of the screwed up poor rarely direct that curiosity toward the production of poverty itself?

The argument for the visionless and narrowly technocratic Ten Year Plan strategy is that growing poverty is beyond our control. We should focus our attention on what can be done. This is both a political choice and a losing strategy. You will be outflanked and forever clearing the wreckage.

Homelessness is a fucking moral outrage. We need to be shouting that from the rooftops. We should not be collaborating in the hiding of the visible poor by any means necessary. We should be screaming, “Yes, here they are! What kind of a society allows this!”

A homeless advocacy paradigm that falls silent when sleeping in public spaces is criminalized does not deserve our support. Advocacy that focuses nearly all of its energy on depoliticized service provision but attends housing lobby day once a year barely deserves the name. Advocacy that doesn’t care to ask why people are poor and who benefits can do no more than ameliorate.

And it will never get better. Not unless we do something different.

There will never be enough services in a world without justice. You want bottom? Look at a third world mega-slum. Services don’t exist. This is what happens when the rich completely vanquish the poor.

Our organizing needs to reduce the distance between those who need and those who serve. We need to break down the labels that define homeless people as a tribe apart. We need to embrace each other as soldiers in the war on poverty. Take chances together. Care for one another. Envision a different world together. And build the power it takes to make a movement.

The Mayor's Plan: Sad, Wrong, and Immoral

How is one to respond when the most beautiful, affluent, and liberal city in America outlaws basic human survival? What are we to feel? What words could measure up to the sadness of this moment?

The Mayor’s staff has described their draft policy on homeless encampments as “consistent and compassionate.” Consistent, perhaps. But compassion requires action based upon understanding and empathy.

This is not that.

Seattle has joined the ranks of cities across America whose growing affluence will no longer tolerate the sight of extreme poverty. As urban living attracts those who can pay the price, the visible poor have come under attack in communities from LA to Boston.

Within a few blocks of Pike Place Market, construction cranes mark four developments that will house 505 new condos with an average value of $2 million each. This represents about one-tenth of new downtown condo development.

As the move-in dates approach, repression of visible poverty has dramatically escalated.

Until sometime last year, the City of Seattle mostly left homeless encampments alone until complaints forced action. This was as it should be. Last year’s one night homeless count — held in the dead middle of a cold January night — revealed about 1,600 people surviving on the streets. They slept in doorways and in cars. They rode the night buses. They walked to keep warm. They huddled underneath blankets and inside sleeping bags.

They made do without shelter because the shelters were full.

And then, for reasons that have yet to be made public, City policy shifted. Since at least May, by order of the Mayor’s office, homeless encampments have been systematically destroyed with minimal notification and no regard for the wellbeing or the belongings of the campers.

Once this policy came to light — after Real Change surfaced documentation through a series of Public Disclosure Requests — a blind-sided City Council asked the Mayor’s Office for an explanation. What they received were lies about vacancies in the shelter system, false assurances that most clearances would halt, and empty promises about an open process to create policy.

As we reported last week, the campaign to aggressively clear campsites never slowed. And now we have the policy, formulated behind closed doors and offered for a two-week public comment period and one public hearing that will almost surely be ignored.

The draft policy, which criminalizes overnight sleeping on any public land, is far worse than any of us anticipated.

The Parks Exclusion Ordinance, passed originally to keep City Parks family-friendly, will be extended to every scrap of public property in the City. The power to issue exclusion citations on the basis of mere suspicion is broadly delegated. Exclusion order violations will bring criminal penalties.

Desperately poor people who need services will leave the city. And this is the exact intent.

The policy’s tight language leaves no ambiguity as to what activities are now illegal, but where City responsibilities are concerned — in matters of notification, outreach, storage of possessions, and provision of alternatives — the wording becomes extraordinarily open ended and filled with exceptions.

“Suspicion” of illegal activity nullifies a requirement for 48-hours notice. A judgment by a clean-up crewmember that belongings “may be contaminated by unknown substances” is enough to warrant their summary destruction. The talk of additional shelter for those who are evicted is so vague as to be unenforceable. Outreach is discussed, but no resources are committed and no responsibility assigned.

This policy is no more than the legal justification of an existing immoral practice.

Even more sadly, the Committee to End Homelessness in King County has steadfastly refused to take a position on this, the most significant shift in city policy toward the homeless in memory.

Given that the Mayor is on the CEHKC Governing Board, this is less than surprising, but that doesn’t make it right. Those who claim political and moral leadership for “ending homelessness” in King County are complicit in their silence.

It is unacceptable to allow the work of ending homelessness to be confused with the systematic practice of eradicating the evidence. By harassing homeless campers out of the city, we only deepen their misery and decrease the odds that they will ever find the services they need.
This week, Seattle will hold the Annual One Night Homeless Count. More than 700 volunteers will fan out through the city in the middle of the night to assess whether we’re winning or losing the war.

By turning the fight against homelessness into an attack upon the homeless themselves, the Mayor has undermined the integrity of the longest-running, most sophisticated homeless count effort in the nation.

This is profoundly sad. And sadder still if he gets away with it.

The City’s draft proposal on homeless encampment removal and information about the hearing and public comment process may be found at www.seattle.gov/humanservices. The Public Hearing is January 28, 6:00 pm, in the Seattle Center’s Rainier Room. Sign-up for testimony is between 5 and 6 pm.

The Betrayal of Christ

Somewhere along the last few weeks, the Ten Year Plan paradigm for ending homelessness sort of fell apart for me. The resources aren't there, and we don't live in some static bizarro world where 600 units of low-income housing means 600 more needy people housed, pure and simple.

We're being told that we've got homelessness on the run, and that it's not about poverty or inequality. Not really. It's about fucked-up dysfunctional people, and charity. It's about those who are the biggest drain on society. And our spiritual obligation to help the needy.

Apparently, the Bush administration gives a crap about these poor people, mainly because they cost so much. Most other poor people are pretty much on their own.

Homeless families, kids, and working-poor homeless have disappeared. The rural homeless are gone. No one sees them anymore.

There has been an odd convergence of focus on chronic homelessness and increased surveillance and repression of street homeless. Cities are passing tougher laws and exploring new strategies to aggressively encourage some people to go away.

It's all about getting them off the street, one way or another.

We've come to accept that homelessness is a technical and complicated issue, and few non-professionals can even understand it. And to half-believe that it's not about power.

It feels like we're in one of those creative moments where homeless advocacy needs to be re-invented and reunited with poverty — and everyone knows it — and we're not really sure what's next. But a lot of people are talking, and something is happening.

Some people maybe in Kansas might think the Bush administration is ending homelessness, but nobody here does. So what now?

Our very own Anitra Freeman gave the keynote last week at the State Coalition for the Homeless conference, opposite Nan Roman. She kicked ass.

It's Increasing Inequality, Stupid!

When I wrote the Director's Corner for today's Real Change, I thought it would take maybe twenty minutes. I'd been circling around these ideas for several weeks, so getting it down to about 230 words, I thought, would be a snap. More than two hours later, I still didn't have it right. Here's where it landed as we went to print:

Homelessness has, I think, been framed as an issue in a way that deliberately excludes potential allies. This is a bigger problem than most of us realize.

It’s organizing 101. In the absence of a mobilized constituency, only the change that is acceptable to those in power gets made.

In the past several decades, homeless advocates have made many mistakes. We traded away federal funding for housing for the McKinney Act. As a result, a serious grassroots demand for housing hasn’t been raised since the late-80s. McKinney has turned homeless advocacy into an insider’s game, and steered our activism into more non-threatening avenues.

As such, taking action to “end homelessness” is of interest mainly to human service advocates, government functionaries, and a handful of church folk who have a biblical injunction to love the poor. This needs to change.

The idea that homeless people themselves should be involved in the struggle against poverty is mostly a matter of lip service. No one, really, has helped them to organize for power. The very idea sends chills down the average service provider’s spine.

Somewhere along the line, idea of aligning with other constituencies to build a powerful movement for economic justice that addresses the self-interest of the least wealthy 60-80 percent of us has gotten away from us.

Let’s get real. “Ending Homelessness” means challenging inequality. Anything less is really about something else.

When I showed this to our editor, he mentioned that one of our Advisory Board members had already expressed some concern about where I seemed to be taking things. There is only so much energy to go around, he said. There is barely a constituency for homelessness. Were we to broaden our lens to include other issues, he argued, we would lose focus and accomplish nothing.

Anitra Freeman has a different reaction. She's been talking to one of Seattle's labor movement elders who told her that back in her day, organized labor made common cause with the homeless, and together they won unemployment insurance. This single issue segregation, she thought, was bad for everyone.

The recently concluded legislative session in Olympia is instructive. An increase to the State Housing Trust Fund passed. Good news. But mild legislation that would have slowed the rate of condo-conversions and strengthened the rights of tenants died. Healthcare and schools won big, but predatory lenders got through unscathed.

Fear of over-reach blowback next election cycle is part of the explanation, but Democrats did act boldly in some areas, so that's not all that this was about.

The pattern, I think, is this: broad constituencies with powerful backing prevailed. But when a poor people's issue that affects a narrower band of folks goes up against a powerful, well-funded lobby, we lose. Even when Democrats hold two-thirds of the seats, there's a large budget surplus, and it's not an election year.

Either we find a way to broaden our base and build for power, or we simply accept that any anti-poverty legislation that threatens someone elses right to make a buck however they can is pretty much DOA.

Rents in Seattle are at their highest level in 20 years. A person of average income here ($52K annually) only earns about half of what they need to enter the housing market as a buyer. Homelessness, says the United Way, is people's number three issue, after schools and traffic.

It seems like there is probably broad agreement that increased inequality is bad for most of us. I think it's time to try something new.