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.

A Metaphorical Mugging

Dr. Wes submitted a typically brilliant column to Real Change today . No. That's not right. His columns are brilliant about 37% of the time. Another 42% of his columns are glibly witty in a half-assed sort of way, and the other 21% of his columns are complete shit, and would never see print if we weren't relying upon them to fill space.

But genius a little over a third of the time is better than most of us manage, so we keep him around. Besides, he's the guy who feeds the cat. And he writes for free.

Soon enough, his column will be up on Adventures in Bloggery or at Real Change, but in the meanwhile, here's the gist: Genshiro Kawamoto, the Hawaiian billionaire who's recently made headlines by letting homeless native Hawaiian families move into mansions for token rent or for free, is an irresistible metaphor.

Here's a guy who became insanely wealthy by ruthlessly dispossessing the poor of their land and driving up the cost of housing through rampant real estate speculation, who's now decided it's time to give a little something back.

It's sort of like if I beat you with a tire iron, stole everything you owned, and then sent you a get well card with a $50 Starbucks gift certificate. You might buy a muffin and a coffee with the gift card, since you wouldn't have any other money, but you might still be a little resentful about the mugging.

Or, say you're the federal government. And you've funded public housing at a level designed to eventually produce system-wide failure, viciously attacked all programs that offer assistance to the poor, and invented a hundred creative ways for your friends to make a buck off of poverty, from legitimating extortionate interest rates to desperate people to building a prison-industrial-complex that preys disproportionately upon people of color, and then you've claimed to be "ending homelessness" because you've tossed out some token funding that, in many cases, gets funneled to your base of right-wing Christian supporters who run faith-based social services agencies.

Just supposing.

In most instances, the person who gets to shake the hand that holds the money out doesn't really care what the other hand is up to, or even where else the hand with the money has been.

Metaphorically speaking, that is.