Seattle is an extraordinary city. A compassionate city. A liberal city. A city committed to ending homelessness. Our Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is among the best in the nation. A broad and deep community of activists, advocates, and service providers have built an unusually comprehensive response to homelessness and poverty. Local government — city, county, and state — has demonstrated a strong commitment to providing the resources to end homelessness.
The grassroots response, as well, is impressive. SHARE/WHEEL has made homelessness visible and actively challenged us for more than a decade to grapple with the reality of poverty in the region. Their self-managed Tent City model is an inspiration for us all to do better in meeting the enormous need. Real Change, as the most successful and activist street paper in North America, has challenged people’s stereotypes regarding the very poor while keeping the issues before the public. And while the power of organized labor has declined everywhere, Seattle’s blue-collar roots can still be seen in the strength of our own labor movement.
Despite all of this, we are losing ground. A downtown development boom to meet the needs of upper-income people is in full swing, with more than 4,500 new condos coming on line over the next three years at an average price of $750,000. Meanwhile, rental prices are climbing at unprecedented rates and vacancies are at historic lows. Seattle is losing at least two units of affordable housing each year to market forces for every new unit created through the non-profit and government sectors. Income inequality is widening at an alarming rate.
The organized constituencies that exist to defend the interests of low-income people are insufficient to challenge the “Seattle consensus.” This is our long-standing pattern as a city of saying yes to corporate interests while engaging in palliative strategies to blunt the desperation of the poor with shelter, services, and low-income housing.
While “building the political will to end homelessness” has been an often-repeated phrase in Seattle for a number of years, there is no ongoing opportunity for non-specialists — housed and homeless alike — to engage, strategize, and build for power.
When strategies to “end homelessness” are driven by some of the most powerful people in our community — the governing board of the Committee to End Homelessness includes top level politicians, United Way, and major downtown business interests — sometimes the uncomfortable questions just don’t get asked. Top-down power needs to be held accountable by bottom-up organizing.
A New Vehicle for Activism
Real Change’s greatest asset is our ability to engage and build relationships across class lines. Our 270 or more homeless and very low-income vendors who sell the newspaper each month are out on the streets everyday, building relationships with our broad readership that tends toward middle- and upper-income professionals.
We all have a stake in working toward root solutions to issues of declining housing affordability and increased inequality. We all have a stake in protecting our civil and human rights, especially for those of us who have the least.
The contradiction in Seattle’s “plan to end homelessness” has always been that the powerful governing board, which representes a variety of institutional players, is allowed to set the limits of our approach to solving homelessness. The resulting strategies often fall far short of advocating for fundamental change.
Effective organizing and advocacy is about reaching out and sharing power. We can never succeed in ending homelessness without genuinely including poor people themselves in this effort. Those of us with a shared interest in housing affordability, economic justice, and supporting human and civil rights need to ally with those who are most vulnerable to build power for the common good.
Real Change is building an organizing project that focuses on these issues while developing new activists who are looking to do more than send an occasional email or perhaps testify once in a while at a hearing. We will create an activist community that builds relationships, understanding, and power across class lines and sets its own agenda for action.
In doing so, we hope to build some fire from below. To end homelessness, we need more than powerful people. We need the power of the people.
Over time, we will build a campaign structure that addresses housing affordability, wage issues and inequality, and human and civil rights. Over the short-term, we will engage on the issues where grassroots energy is most needed. Initial organizing will focus on the city’s systematic and covert policy of harassing homeless campers without providing any realistic alternatives.
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