Quick! Hide the Poor. The Rich Are Coming.

Ask most people if public begging is a problem in Seattle and they'll say no. Compared to most cities, they'll say, the panhandlers are low key, polite, and not especially numerous. I admit to drawing from a sample of less than ten here, so this isn't exactly science, but for normal people, the panhandling "problem" isn't really a big issue.

And yet the Downtown Seattle Association can't stop talking about it. Why? While press flak Anita Woo talks about how panhandling drives away convention center business, this can't be the whole story. Business downtown is booming. Ask anyone.

So what's really going on here?

The DSA being a forward looking group of folks, I'd say the answer lies in the future. We need to look at what's being built.

As downtown Seattle becomes an enclave of urban affluence, with new developments sprouting up like forty story mushrooms beneath the biggest wettest cow pie you've ever seen, price tags range from expensive to stratospheric. And as the well-to-do discover urban living, they bring their suburban comfort zones along for the ride.

One barrier to downtown living is the perception that it might not be safe. With big money betting on the idea that the super rich — along with the merely affluent — will make the downtown their home, the DSA's preoccupation with squelching visible poverty makes a bit more sense.

A quick look at the new downtown reveals what's at stake.

There’s the Escala at 4th and Virginia, slated to open in 2009. "Anticipate perfection. Embrace elegance. Experience grandeur," says their website. This 30 story glass tower at 4th and Virginia has 275 condos for sale, going for a million dollars or more each. Amenities include a 24,000 foot members-only club, with a private theater, fitness area, restaurants, and wine caves where residents might store their private collections in convenient locked cases. The website's virtual tour seems to indicate that each unit comes with its own trophy wife at no extra charge.

The Cristalla, just a half a block down the street from our office, has units that go for over $3.5 million. In these, a column of water drops from the ceiling to fill the generously sized bath tub. When Real Change moved in back in '94, Belltown was pleasantly seedy. Now, the seedy have been priced out by the greedy, and we're hanging on by our fingernails, possessed of the sure knowledge that our very excellent deal will one day come to an end.

The Four Seasons, going in at 1st and Union, bills itself as "Seattle's Signature Address," and will feature 36 private residences above a luxury hotel. Condos are priced from $2.5 million to more than $10 million. Ironically, the proximity of the Pike Place Market, the preservation of which was considered a victory for the little guy, is listed along with the Seattle Art Museum as a key amenity for the uber-rich urban dweller.

Nearby, at the Fifteen Twenty One Second Avenue Building ("designed exclusively for the confident few"), units are selling for an average of $1.8 million each. Obscenely enough, this 143-unit development is sited where the Green Tortoise Youth Hostel once was, where bunks without amenities could be had for a few dollars a night. The "confident few" are slated to begin moving in sometime around December 2008. While most high end downtown living is mixed in with condos for the merely affluent, this project distinguishes itself as an island of extreme wealth unto itself, where only the rich need apply.

You get the idea. With all this wealth comes a vision for the sort of downtown where no one ever has to feel uncomfortable. No one who’s rich, that is.

It'll be sort of like New York. But without the diversity or the people.

While prognostication is always a tricky business, some things we know. The DSA will drive toward the criminalization of panhandling, the elimination of outdoor feeding, and the removal of public toilets. While the political will for such steps does not yet exist, they're working on it.

Meanwhile, the priority for "ending homelessness" will focus on that ten percent or so of homeless people who constitute the visible urban poor, otherwise known as the "chronic homeless." This, being the federal policy priority, is where the money is, and the "advocates" have lined up to cooperate.

No matter what the issue — homelessness, education, the environment, whatever — federal funding levels are a precise calibration of maximal cooptation at minimal price. Homelessness goes for around $1.6 billion right now. Cheap.

Sadly, the philanthropic and religious communities don't seem to have discerned that the Bush administration, with their Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness, may not simply have the best interests of poor folk in mind.

If federal policy on homelessness didn't align with the interests of wealthy real estate developers, it would be a bit surprising, wouldn't it?

But that's not a comfortable thought. Better to bask in our own righteousness than to ask who benefits. Questions like that don't sit well with the folks who hand out the money.

When the DSA inevitably makes their move to criminalize panhandling in Seattle with time, place, and manner restrictions similar to those passed in Tacoma, it'll be revealing to see which side some people are on.

Silence is complicity, and having nothing to say while poor people are being further criminalized will not be a comfortable option. Not if I can help it.

Moments in Time

Today, in my ongoing series of posts of no consequence, I bring you a mossy montage of images from the half-mile Moments in Time kiddie trail that starts a few hundred yards from our cabin. I’ve been pretty much laid out with a cold since the day I arrived, although it seems to be getting better.

So, this is about my speed.

We are, however, sitting in the middle of a mountain rainforest, so even the lame trails are pretty amazing. Lots of crazy moss and ferns and big-ass trees. I went out with a digital camera and my little cheap-o Canon home video recorder and stitched this together in iMovie today with a nice little thing in E minor behind it. Seasoned nature photographer that I am, I only fell on my ass twice as I was backing up to get a better shot.

Near the beginning is a picture of a bench on a rocky little beach with a spectacular view, even on a cloudy morning. That’s where I phoned into Dave Ross’ Show on KIRO 710 this morning to talk about panhandling. Like everyone else, I always think of the stuff I should of said later on, but I think it was fine. My main goal was to call out the Downtown Seattle Association’s love affair with Tacoma’s panhandling laws and their stealth campaign to bring this to Seattle. If you listen to the broadcast, (2nd hour, Dave Ross Show, 8/22) you’ll notice that DSA press flak Anita Woo doesn’t deny this is where they’re heading.

They’re being very, very circumspect about this. Maybe they’re thinking two-to-three year campaign. Start with panhandling education. Keep landing press hits every three to four months to create the impression that panhandling in Seattle is actually a major issue. Wait for the City Council elections and look for five toadies to push the thing through. City Attorney Tom Carr already sounds like he’s on board.

Whenever they get around to it, I think they’ll find that Seattle ain’t Tacoma. Downtown Seattle is succeeding fabulously. If they think they need to beat up on poor people to broaden that profit margin a bit more, I’m more than happy to give them a run for their money, the greedy fucks.

Zero Tolerance for Dehumanization

Today the police brought formal charges against my friends Rainee and Bruce. I can't remember the last time I've felt so angry about anything. The details surrounding their case are so outrageous that it's hard to accept that they are in great danger, but they may well be.

They could go to prison, lose their daughter, and have everything that they've struggled to achieve destroyed. But they probably won't. Their counsel is the lead medical marijuana lawyer in the area, and the media, Real Change included, seems to be taking a keen interest. For now, I'm optimistic.

"How could anybody do that to someone?"

The answer lies in the word "someone." Drug users, like homeless people, are considered subhuman. So we're not dealing with "someone" at all. We're dealing with the dehumanized Other, who does not merit our empathy.

Heather left a comment on last week's Drug Users in Belltown post directing me to an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled Your Brain on Drug Addicts. As it turns out, I'm a subscriber, and the article was in the pile below my coffee table.

Here's what it says. Brain imaging studies confirm what many of us already know. For most people, drug addicts and homeless people do not trigger empathy. They trigger disgust. They don't really even register as people.

With co-author Susan T. Fiske, also of Princeton, Harris chose which out-groups to show on the basis of stereotypes about them and the emotions they evoke. Fiske previously noted that the stereotypes of out-groups vary on two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warm and competent groups like American Olympic athletes inspire pride. Warm groups that are deemed unable to act on their warmth, such as the elderly or disabled, elicit pity. Cold groups that are nevertheless competent, such as the rich, induce envy. And groups that are low on both warmth and incompetence – drug addicts and homeless people – arouse disgust.

Fiske and Harris showed photographs of these four kinds of outgroups to 10 Princeton undergraduates as they lay in an fMRI scanner. To 12 other Princeton undergraduates they presented photographs of inanimate objects that aroused the same emotions as did the out-groups – for example, a sports car to induce envy, or an overflowing toilet to evoke disgust. They found that the pictures of the objects, homeless people, and drug addicts did not excite the mPFC, although they did activate brain regions associated with emotions.

So there it is. Were one actually dealing with another human being, the idea of manipulating an eight-year old who's beloved grandfather had just died to bust a couple who grow prescription medical marijuana for pain control would be unthinkable.

But if you're used to thinking of drug users as disgusting subhuman creatures who must be eliminated, then anything goes.

This is the issue that drew me to homelessness in the first place. Homeless people are widely regarded as subhuman. So are addicts and prisoners. When you have an expendable group of people who arouse disgust, terrible things can happen. The dehumanization of anyone leads to the dehumanization of us all.

Speaking of which ...

This week I fielded two press calls about downtown homelessness. The Downtown Seattle Association, as I said before, is on a new propaganda offensive over panhandling and public toilets. They are trying desperately to whip up some righteous indignation.

Thus far, they're not getting a lot of traction. But you can bet that they're not giving up. As the relationship between city and suburb changes, with cities becoming the new nucleus of upscale density, visible poverty is more unwelcome in urban centers everywhere.

Thus the fixation on "chronic" homelessness, and the companion stick approach, an escalation in the policing of the urban poor.

Being the angry sort of guy that I am these days, I'm finding diplomacy less and less appropriate to the moment. Last winter I had numerous conversations with the DSA's Peg Dreisenger and Anita Woo about the panhandling education campaign they had in the works. They were being reasonable, and so was I. I'm not wild about panhandling either.

They wanted an endorsement, but I wouldn't go that far. If they did their campaign in a way that focused on positive alternatives, as opposed to negative stereotypes, I said, I would not organize against them. They arrived at Have a Heart, Give Smart, and were rewarded with my public neutrality. I liked their brochure.

During our last meeting, Anita Woo, the DSA's communications staffer, told a story about a woman panhandler who was spotted hopping into her SUV to make a quick call on her Blackberry.

I laughed at her.

"You can't tell that story," I said. "It's like Ronald Reagan and his Cadillac driving Black welfare queens. It's apocryphal bullshit." We all laughed nervously.

She went on the radio during the launch of the campaign and told just that story. She punched away at all the buttons that the lit itself avoided. They're making a lot of money off of credulous do-gooders. It's all a big lucrative scam. They're mostly addicts. Etcetera. It's like they couldn't wait to take the fucking gloves off.

That was last January. Since then, they've escalated. Their position now is that, despite their panhandling education campaign, downtown begging is up by thirty-eight percent!

Woo trotted out the Blackberry story to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter just last week. You gotta love a good story.

Here's another one.

The DSA is also opposed to handing out sandwiches on the street. Here's a handy DSA guide to public policy: if it's visible downtown poverty, they want it to go away.

We were talking about downtown feeding, and Peggy Dreisenger, the affable manager of DSA's street program, told me the real reason one doesn't feed the poor.

Chronically homeless people have, through their years of alcohol and drug abuse, undermined the viability of their digestive organs. If one, therefore, feeds one of these wretches a sandwich, their body will reject it. They will throw up in the nearest bush, curbside, or sidewalk, and someone, probably one of her employees, will have to clean it up.

The do-gooders, she said, don't understand this.

I contained my amazement, walked back to Real Change, and told our editor what she had said. He knew. She'd said the same thing to him several weeks prior.

Since then, I've had the opportunity to ask the opinions of various health care professionals, each of whom were appalled at the story.

This story is about one thing. Dehumanization. This isn't something we should tolerate. Politeness, even here in Seattle, has its limits.