 |
Timothy Harris
Executive Director |
As the 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 earns less than the 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 unpopular 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 percent of the homeless who are in deepest distress. Our focus on reducing visible poverty is a gift to those who benefit from growing inequality that comes at the expense of the most desperate.
The Mayor’s “punish the poor” sweeps strategy is a quick and immoral fix to the structural problem of growing poverty.
The argument for the visionless and narrowly technocratic Ten Year Plan strategy is that these other issues are beyond our control. We should focus our attention on what can be done. This is both a political choice and a losing strategy.
Organizing across class for economic justice isn’t easy and doesn’t offer immediate
answers, but the longer we delay, the more entrenched these problems become. |
