RC Blog
NASNA to lay off executive director
Like it? Share it!
In all the time he managed Real Change’s vendor services, I never once saw Israel Bayer on the brink of tears. But, then, he’s never had to tell a roomful of publishers and editors of struggling street newspapers that they’re about to lose one of the few resources they have at their disposal.
Bayer said yesterday that NASNA, an affiliated group of street newspapers sold by the homeless, is laying off its executive director and sole staff member, Andy Freeze. The news was rough on some members attending the organization’s annual conference this week at Chicago’s DePaul University and they pushed back.
Bayer is the board chairman of NASNA, the North American Association of Street Newspapers, which started 15 years ago to help support and launch similar publications. This year’s two-day conference has more than 80 participants from some of the 31 newspapers and magazines that belong to NASNA across the United States and Canada, a number of whom have just started or are preparing to start new publications.
In December 2008, NASNA hired Freeze as its first staff member and, a month later, opened an office in Washington, D.C. Since then, he has helped start three new papers—Toledo Streets, Philadelphia’s One Step Away and the Nashville Contributor—with others in the wings.
Bayer, executive director of Portland’s Street Roots, told conference delegates that NASNA is laying off Freeze at the end of August due to the recession and a lack of funds. The position had been funded with grants from the Ethics & Excellence Journalism Foundation that are now expended, with no new funds in sight to replace them.
In two days of meetings prior to the conference, Bayer said NASNA’s board members had come up with a plan for maintaining all of NASNA’s services and its website themselves, with the organization’s defacto headquarters to be Street Roots’ offices in Portland.
Many delegates expressed shock at the news, questioning why the board hadn’t let its member papers know sooner so that they could have raised money. They then passed an impromptu resolution demanding that the board come up with a dollar figure for what it would take to maintain Freeze’s position until year’s end—a number the board was asked to present in a meeting set later today.
To raise money, some delegates suggested that NASNA’s member newspapers—many of which are all-volunteer operations—pay higher dues to the organization. NASNA currently charges $50 to $2,000 a year for a membership, based on a newspaper’s income.
Even if money could be raised to keep Freeze on through year’s end, board member Serge Lareault, publisher of Montreal’s L’Itineraire, said it wouldn’t buy enough time to raise the real money needed—upwards of $150,000—to keep NASNA’s office open and staffed after January.
Bayer and others stressed that NASNA had existed for years as a volunteer operation and would survive. In the meantime, “we are trying to look for long-term sustainability,” Bayer said.
“I’m shocked to find you’re laying off your executive director. I’m shocked to hear that everybody from this side didn’t know that was happening,” said Bruce Gimbel, a minister and shelter provider who is starting a street newspaper in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. “That wouldn’t have happened at my organization because I would have notified all my constituents [that] we need people to step up.”
“I probably would have paid $1,000 to be at this conference in order to gain [the] $5,000 worth of information, which so far what I feel I’ve gained,” he said. “NASNA is our organization. If you don’t see value in NASNA like I see value, you need to go away.”
“I see a lot of people throwing a lot of punches and I respect that,” Bayer said, his voice cracking. But “we’re in the middle of a recession [and] homelessness is on the rise.”
“If we can come together as a group and there are some solid resolutions ... to help NASNA move forward, we’re all ears,” Bayer said. But “I just want to remind people that we’re all in this together.”
Midyear budget cuts spare human services—for now
Like it? Share it!
Mayor McGinn lowered the boom on city departments today, releasing a roster of $12.4 million in midyear budget cuts in an effort to close the general-fund shortfall that Seattle is facing in 2010 as a result of evaporating tax revenue.
The good news: The mayor is calling for $246,000 in cuts from the Human Services Department, but no actual service reductions are expected—at least not this year.
Next year, the city is facing a $56 million shortfall for which McGinn says he’s looking at cutting between 5 and 10 percent of the human services budget, along with 1-5 percent from the police and fire departments and roughly 10-15 percent from every other agency.
“Obviously, it’s the 2011 budget that’s going to be the challenge,” says Kip Tokuda, acting director of HSD. But, for now, “we’re going to get by relatively unscathed,” he says, by cutting back on travel and training without laying off any staff.
Overall, the city will cut a total of 13 people, representing 9 fulltime positions, as of July 20. Another 45 jobs will be left unfilled, including not hiring 21 planned new police officers—a move that saves $2.1 million but is sure to disappoint Belltown and Pioneer Square community activists who have called for more police on the beat.
The next biggest cuts will come from parks ($1.7 million) and libraries ($1.2 million). In addition to cutting the Parks Department’s travel and training budget—which raised controversy for now-resigned Parks Superintendent Tim Gallagher—there will be reductions in park maintenance and closures or shorter hours at wading pools. Libraries will take hits in staffing for public services, custodial and technology and lose $500,000 in funding for buying materials.
The mayor’s midyear budget update also says the Seattle Department of Transportation came up $6.6 million short this year. One reason is that SDOT depleted its gas tax reserves earlier than planned in 2009. The other? Apparently, the department has spent a bundle on homeless encampment cleanups that, needless to say, it could have saved if the city had left the homeless alone.
Where the cops have gone
Like it? Share it!
Alert readers of Real Change know that we have not run Streetwatch, our weekly catalog of police incidents involving the homeless, for a few weeks now.
Charles Mudede, the grandaddy of all police-blot watchers, notes with perfect accuracy that SPD’s new policy broadcasts only a teeny sliver of the massive volumes of paperwork generated by the department’s staff. The incidents posted online “represent an ideal of police work: cops and robbers.”
Our Streetwatch column, in its 10-year run, has been a place to air some of the various happenings, tragic and banal, that transpire for people on Seattle’s streets. One of its items germinated assistant editor Rosette Royale’s nationally award-winning three-part series. It’s seldom been pretty: in them, the homeless are victims of rape and assault. They are perps – most frequently, they beat or hit each other. And they are victims if not in fact than in circumstance: they are trespassed, trespassed, stopped on suspicion of lurking, and trespassed again. And the accounts provided are of course one-sided: they are the stories the police have set down.
For all that, Streetwatch has been the product of an open and progressive policy: the police would simply make recent incidents available on compact disc (they used to print it all out) for viewing by computer at the local precinct. I acknowledge the use of putting incidents online – but not of drastically narrowing the scope of what’s available.
We won’t publish a column culled from only a portion of the police’s work – it’s akin to looking for your lost wallet under the streetlamps.
Staff in the department’s Media Relations unit have assured me that more information would be posted over time. That’s not a satisfying response. What? When? Who’s responsible? What are the minimum standards for what gets posted and what is left offline?
For now, the new system has rendered Streetwatch untenable. I’m determined to bring it back again. So I’ll continue to request that the police re-open the filing cabinet.
Stay tuned for more.
Real Change a partner in organizing Seattle Unity Forum
Like it? Share it!
Seattle Unity Forum
Saturday, June 26th, 10 am - 2 pm
Seattle University School of Law, Room C1
(refreshments provided)
If ever there was a time for a strategic alliance of activists across barriers of race, class, and issue, it is now. Seattle’s potential for a series of broad progressive wins is greater that at any other time in recent memory.
Elected leadership has shown unprecedented willingness to challenge the downtown establishment. The Police Chief selection process has centered on the issue of who can best depolarize relations between communities of color and law enforcement. A bid by the downtown establishment to further criminalize homelessness was recently turned back by a broad coalition of groups led by Real Change, NAACP, and the ACLU, and hinged on the courageous and key support of Mayor McGinn and Councilmember Mike O’Brien, activists known mostly for their work on environmental sustainability.
Please join forum sponsors Real Change, United African Public Affairs Committee, Sierra Club (Seattle Chapter) and the Center for Global Justice and Access to Justice Institute at the Seattle University School of Law on Saturday, June 26th, 10-2, for an exploratory forum that brings together communities of color, sustainabilty, and social justice activists for an open-ended dialogue that results in achievable, immediate steps toward greater unity and political clout across what have too often been divergent constituencies.
PSCA Drops Appeal On Real Change Use Permit
Like it? Share it!
Today, Real Change and the Pioneer Square Community Association issued the following joint press release.
Real Change and the Pioneer Square Community Association (PSCA) are pleased to announce that they have resolved their issues related to the City of Seattle use permit for the New England Building in Pioneer Square. PSCA has withdrawn its appeal of the City of Seattle decision. The two organizations look forward to working together for the common benefit of Pioneer Square, supporting a vibrant neighborhood for all.
Leslie Smith, Executive Director of the PSCA, said of the settlement, “We had a constructive dialogue. Real Change listened thoughtfully to our concerns around the City’s use permit and agreed to work with us in a spirit of cooperation. We look forward to Real Change’s contributions to the vitality of the Pioneer Square Neighborhood.” Tim Harris, Executive Director of Real Change also welcomed the settlement, saying, “Real Change is happy to be past the conflict and to return full focus to our mission. We are proud to be part of the diversity of Pioneer Square and look forward to being engaged members of the community.”
Real Change is a 501 C-3 organization that creates opportunity and a voice for low income people while taking action to end homelessness and poverty.
The Pioneer Square Community Association is a 501 C-3 organization devoted to the betterment of Pioneer Square through advocacy, programming, marketing and community action.
Real Change staff earn journalism awards
Like it? Share it!
A longtime publisher from Port Townsend spoke at a Society of Professional Journalists awards banquet I attended a few years back, and he solemnly told the audience that the journalism awards given out that night weren’t won, they were earned.
You win the lottery, you win at the poker table. Earnings are what’s due for the work you did.
Real Change staff won earned four awards in the 2009 regional contest of the Society of Professional Journalists last weekend, which covers daily and non-daily newspapers, alternative weeklies, radio and television broadcasters and online media. The awards were announced at the May 22 annual banquet of the Society of Professional Journalists’ regional contest. Real Change competed against non-daily papers from Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.
Staff reporter Cydney Gillis won earned first-place awards in three categories: in Arts Reporting and Criticism for “Pike Place Market artists losing designated lofts” (April 8-14); in Social Issues Reporting for “Affordable Rentals takes $250 from homeless couple” (Aug. 5-11); and in Education Reporting for “Parents call changes at Seattle’s Indian Heritage School a whitewash,” (Sept. 30 – Oct. 4). Assistant Editor Rosette Royale won earned a second-place award in the Personalities Reporting category for “A fast for peace, recounted in number and deed” (Sept. 16-22).
You can look over this PDF for the contest’s complete results.
City Council upholds veto of panhandling ordinance
Like it? Share it!
In a 4-4 vote this afternoon—apparently enough to do the job—the Seattle City Council sustained Mayor Mike McGinn’s veto of a panhandling ordinance that would have allowed the police to issue $50 tickets to aggressive beggars.
Real Change, the ACLU, NAACP and other organizations had argued that the ordinance, proposed by Tim Burgess, chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, would have given the police a blank check to move along any beggar and that there was no reason to create a new law when Seattle already prohibits aggressive panhandling.
Councilmembers Nick Licata, Bruce Harrell, Tom Rasmussen and Mike O’Brien repeated their earlier votes against the measure. Council President Richard Conlin was absent.
Home free? Not quite.
Like it? Share it!
Imagine our sense of relief when on April 24th, the Pioneer Square Historic Preservation board voted to approve the use of our new home over the objections raised by the Pioneer Square Community Association (PSCA) who just don’t think that Real Change “belongs” in Pioneer Square. We were further relieved when on May 3rd the Historic Preservation Board again voted in our favor, approving the minor façade alteration necessitated by the construction of 2 bathrooms for our vendors. In April, a team from Real Change participated in the PSCA’s Pioneer Square clean-up. We will be good neighbors in Pioneer Square and our vendors will benefit tremendously from the new space. Moving boxes have arrived and our Belltown office is littered with the tell-tale signs of relocation.
Home free? Not quite yet.
Late last week, Leslie Smith, Executive Director of the Pioneer Square Community Association, filed an appeal to the Hearing Examiner on May 13 regarding the Pioneer Square Preservation Board’s decision to allow Real Change’s use of space on the first and second floors of the New England Building at 219 Main. You can read their appeal here.
We do not believe that the PSCA will prevail. We will move this weekend, as planned, and reopen in Pioneer Square on Monday, May 24. A support rally is being organized for 5 pm that day in Occidental Park. We’d love to see you there. Please RSVP on Facebook or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to let us know you are planning to attend.
More details for my detail oriented readers out there:
The appeal of our move, which could take up to 90 days to finalize, seeks to overturn an April 21 Preservation Board land use decision. At the April hearing, PSCA Board President and Samis Land Company Senior Property Manager Adam Hasson failed to convince fellow Preservation Board members that Real Change is a wholesaler, a prohibited use in Pioneer Square. The Preservation Board voted to approve Real Change’s use as office space. At a second Preservation Board hearing on May 3, to review a first floor window alteration associated with the construction of two bathrooms, Hasson cast the lone vote in opposition to approval, stating of our relocation “This is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.” He says that Real Change just does not belong in Pioneer Square.
The PSCA appeal argues that Real Change is a wholesaler of newspapers and thereby prohibited from locating in Pioneer Square and that planned skills-building workshops for vendors is also a prohibited use of space. Real Change sees no substance or merit to either argument. The PSCA appeal exposes Real Change to considerable financial risk. Hearing Examiner decisions are binding and final. More that $60,000 has been spent to remodel the space and Real Change is bound to a five-year lease at the new location. PSCA Executive Director Leslie Smith has rejected all attempts by Real Change to engage in dialogue regarding her concerns.
The Pioneer Square Community Association is controlled by real estate interests and does not speak for all of Pioneer Square.
“Ding dong, the jail is dead”
Like it? Share it!
Turns out the rumor was right: King County Executive Dow Constantine was joined by Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and elected officials from Shoreline and Kirkland this morning to announce they’re calling off plans for a new $226 million misdemeanant jail that Seattle had intended to share with the county’s North/East Cities.
Instead, the county is offering the cities a new contract for 150 beds a year at the King County Jail between 2017 and 2020. That would extend a deal struck last year in which the cities will lease 300 beds a year between 2012 and 2016.
One reason for the move, Constantine said, is the downward trend in the King County Jail’s population—something that jail opponents attribute to the success of jail diversion programs that offer people treatment and services at lower cost than incarceration.
“We heard you. We listened to you,” McGinn said of the public input. “You want us to be thoughtful, you want us to work together, you want us to work on alternatives to incarceration.”
That doesn’t mean a new jail won’t be built someday, but Shoreline Mayor Keith McGlashan said the environmental impact study that had been started on a potential jail site in Shoreline has been canceled. McGinn said he will recommend that other northeast cities where potential jail sites had been identified—Bellevue, Clyde Hill, Kirkland, Redmond and Yarrow Point—stop their jail siting processes as well, ending an effort that started when the county told the cities it would run out of room and stop housing their inmates in 2012.
By then, a group of seven South County cities plans to open a new misdemeanant jail that is already under construction. In the meantime, Constantine said, he’s launching a regional jail planning group in which the county will work with the cities on sharing jail space and resources to meet needs in the future.
“We are going to plan for the day when we need new jail space and we’re going to approach that in a rationale, methodical way,” he said. “I think the last process started because the county made a sudden declaration” that its jail beds would be full. “We don’t want that to happen again.”
The Regional Justice Center in Kent has room to build additional units, he said—something he said should be considered as an option for the future. In the meantime, Councilmember Nick Licata said, pre-booking jail alternatives such as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion—the name for two pilot projects that The Defender Association’s Racial Disparity Project is working to launch this year in Belltown and Skyway—will keep jail numbers down. “With this extension to 2020, we have pulled the plug on the siting process and I can almost hear the cheers now,” Licata said.
Situation gets darker in Land of Midnight Sun
Like it? Share it!
Sometimes, reputations can come on as subtle as whisper. First people talk about someone — or some place — and, before anyone realizes it, that’s what you’re known for. Anchorage, Alaska may be going through such a moment.
Of course, most people associate Alaska with cold and being the largest city in The Last Frontier. Some even know that it ain’t that far from Wasila, Sarah Palin’s old stomping grounds. But these days, Anchorage is becoming known as the last place you’d want to be if you’re homeless a person who’s struggling with alcoholism. Last October, the NY Times printed “Homeless Deaths Rise, and Anchorage Copes,” which discussed the deaths of 13 homeless people from the spring of 2009 until last fall.
Now comes this: The number of deaths of homeless people there has risen to 21 in the past 12 months, according to the Associated Press’ “Anchorage outdoor deaths mount among homeless.” It’s one of those articles that makes you shake your head: It gives out sad information, which no one can really account for, though people try.
Part of the issue is the changing weather. Then there are alcoholism rates among Native populations. And then there’s a little bit of the NIMBY attitude.
But of local interest is significant (virtual) ink spent on praising the success of Seattle’s own 1811 Eastlake building, which offers housing to 75 homeless men and women caught in a downward spiral of alcoholism, a spiral that’s kept them either on the streets or in the ER.
Of course, Anchorage doesn’t have to be known as the City where Homeless People — especially Natives who are alcoholic — Keep Dying. Maybe a rep from the 1811 should pay a visit to Anchorage. And maybe some writer will go up there and spend some time and tell us a (sad) story from the land of the Midnight Sun. Maybe a story that shines a light on the dark times in the city will help change a rep-in-the-making that could start weighing Anchorage down.
Plans for new jail canceled, Shoreline group says
Like it? Share it!
Take it for what it is at the moment—an unconfirmed rumor—but a group called No Shoreline Jail is reporting on its website that King County Executive Dow Constantine will make an announcement Thursday that the county and its northeast cities, including Seattle, have canceled plans to build a new municipal jail, apparently for lack of need, something the anti-jail activists have argued all along.
Mike Hall in a new spot
Like it? Share it!
I was in the neighborhood today, so I stopped in at the gorgeously re-appointed Elliott Bay Book Co., voted with my dollars for independent booksellers, and had a nice chat with Real Change vendor Mike Hall, who’s straddling turfs these days between 1st and Main (our future destination) and 10th Avenue between Pike and Pine.
Mike recently earned one of the bookstore’s beautiful wooden stools on which he rests near the front door. “You’ve been here 11 years,” he was told; it was about time.
How’s business at the new digs? Good, he says. And he sees a surprising number of Pioneer Square neighbors up on the hill, coming into their longtime bookstore.
Word to the wise he shared with me: The red-striped curb cut right outside the bookstore’s front door may look inhospitable, but it’s OK to pull up to the curb. “People tell me there’s nowhere to park up here,” he says, but there is, steps away from Mike. And if you were any closer to the books, it’d be a drive-thru.
McGinn: It’s time to put the brakes on Seattle’s deep-bore tunnel
Like it? Share it!
Every week or so, Mayor Mike McGinn invites reporters up to his loft at City Hall for an informal Q&A. Today’s came with not one, but two visual aids, both aimed squarely at the deep-bore tunnel that’s supposed to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct in downtown Seattle.
One was a whiteboard scrawled, if you will, with a “tunnel timeline of no return,” which the mayor wants everyone to know is upon us, now, in May. There’s no exact date, but here’s the upshot: May 14 is technically the deadline by which the city need to finish negotiating an agreement with the state Department of Transportation so that WSDOT can start requesting bids. Once the agreement is done, it will codify, once and for all, who’s responsible for any cost overruns on the project, which our previous mayor just had to have, come hell or high water.
The City Council agreed with Mayor Nickels, passing an interim agreement to move forward with the tunnel, which is slated to be built under First Avenue largely along the area of the Pike Place Market. But councilmembers will still have to vote on the final WSDOT agreement sometime this month, and McGinn is hoping against hope that they’ll vote no if the document puts Seattle on the hook for overruns, which is how state legislators set it up when they allocated $2.4 billion for the bore.
McGinn, of course, is convinced overruns will come, to the point of overrunning the city’s entire budget. He used a second visual aid—a set of slides—to drive home the point with some startling numbers based on a study of 258 large infrastructure projects done by Oxford planning professor Bent Flyvbjerg. Just a few of the highlights, arranged Harper’s Index-style:
1) 90% of the “mega-projects” studied exceeded their budgets.
2) The average cost overrun on tunnels and bridges was 34%.
3) The cost overrun of King County’s Brightwater sewage tunnel so far: 24%.
4) The cost overrun of Sound Transit’s Beacon Hill tunnel: 30%.
5) The cost overrun of the downtown bus tunnel: 56%.
6) The more complicated the project, the higher the cost overrun.
7) Seattle’s 1.7 miles of intended tunnel is a long shot through a lot of unknown soil conditions.
8) A cost overrun of just 1% would be $31 million.
9) A cost overrun of 50% would be $1.5 billion—more than the entire city general fund that pays for police, firefighters, human services and everything else.
If the council approves the final WSDOT agreement, McGinn said he’d veto it. But the council could override that. But, given that state lawmakers would have to pass new legislation to completely remove Seattle’s liability for overruns—which the mayor said he’d like to see the state pick up (!)—a reporter asked McGinn if he wasn’t just trying to cover his know-you-what by saying the city can still back out.
“You see that?” McGinn said, pointing to a slide with an overrun figure of $1.5 billion. “I as mayor and the councilmembers will have to deal with that. I don’t get to cover my ass on that”—a disaster, he said, that can be foreseen and avoided if the council stands with him.
“Don’t you you wish somebody at WaMu had said, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t make those subprime loans?’” McGinn said of Seattle’s failed savings and loan. “This is our chance to be saying maybe we shouldn’t commit ourselves to paying these cost overruns, because the consequences are real and they’re serious.”
A budget earful: You can’t recreate if you can’t eat, homeless activists say
Like it? Share it!
Mayor Mike McGinn sat with city councilmembers last night in a joint budget hearing—the kind of thing that Seattleites never saw Mayor Nickels do. The news he shared at the beginning of the meeting, however, wasn’t good. Nor were the four hours of sad begging from members of the public concerned they’re going to lose their parks, pools, community centers and human services, with some sharp lines drawn between parents, children and seniors who don’t want to lose their parks programs and social services advocates pleading for the poor and hungry.
“I love my P-Patches, I love taking my daughter to the library,” said Laurie Eckardt, program director for Belltown’s Dorothy Day House, a 41-unit building for formerly homeless women, but “I think it’s our moral covenant to represent and support the most vulnerable in our community. We have an eight-month waiting list.”
Heading into midyear, the city of Seattle is already $12 million short on its 2010 adopted budget, McGinn said, which is going to require some immediate reductions. Things get worse from here. In 2011, the projected deficit is $56 million—a revenue hole brought to you by the Great Recession, with no end in sight: Compared to past downturns, “what we’re looking at is a much slower economic recovery,” McGinn told an overflowing cafeteria room at North Seattle Community College.
For the midyear course correction, the mayor said he’s asked all departments but police, fire and human services to come up with 3 percent in cuts. To prepare for the biennial 2011-2012 budget, McGinn said, departments would have to take a 6 to 7 percent across-the-board cut, but he’s considering “a mix of reduction in services and areas of tax or revenue increases”—an idea that speaker Fred Rowley endorsed in order to maintain funding for parks, which he said is often viewed as expendable compared with public safety services.
“It’s always been framed as an argument of guns versus butter,” Rowley said. But “it’s not a matter of police versus parks. We need a good robust parks program as much as we need police. Maybe we need to think about raising taxes. I’m good with that ... Let’s just do what we have to do.”
Robert Hansen, fighting hatred with humor
Like it? Share it!
Robert Hansen. What a good-hearted man with a wicked sense of humor. In the 5+ years I’ve been here, we had countless conversations punctuated by untold laughs and smiles. But we also talked, sometimes of serious issues, when I saw him at my neighborhood PCC in Seward Park, where he sold the paper. Occasionally, those convos centered on his interactions with solicitors for a certain political candidate who shared the sidewalk with him and who shall remain nameless: at least his last name won’t be mentioned. But his first name is Lyndon.
One day in April, solicitors for this candidate showed up at the PCC with a poster of Obama as Hitler. It’s a totally offensive image, made all the more so at this particular PCC since the store sits in a sizable Jewish neighborhood. Customers, rightly, complained to the solicitors about the image. One customer, taking civil disobedience — and a Magic Marker — into his own hands, went home and crafted a retaliatory sign. He returned, standing silently behind the solicitors’ table. Robert couldn’t wait to tell me that someone had fought offense with humor. He chuckled and smiled at the witty nature of a lone protester.
Someone took pictures of the protester’s sign and emailed them to Robert. Just last week, Robert gave me his email address and password so I could see them myself. I haven’t looked because I felt uncomfortable having access to his email account. But now, given that he kept prodding me on a daily basis to see the images, and that he’s left this mortal coil, I looked. And now I share them, aware that Robert would have a big smile on his face knowing that people saw what he saw, on that day when one man used humor to fight anti-Semitism and hatred.
Keep smiling, Robert…
Longtime vendor Robert Hansen, 1951-2010
Like it? Share it!
UPDATE: A public memorial service for Robert takes place Friday, May 14, 1-2 p.m., at the plaza in front of City Hall, 600 Fourth Avenue. We’re seeking customers and friends of Robert’s from Seward Park or downtown to share their memories. E-mail or call us, 206-441-3247 ext.207, to volunteer.
We learned today of the death of Robert Hansen, a longtime vendor of the newspaper downtown and in the Rainier Valley.
To read a 2007 profile of Robert, click here.
Hansen helped to sort out conflicts between Real Change vendors; he spoke to city and state officials about economic justice issues; and he led vendors in the weekly task of unloading a cargo van full of the new issue. He called Tuesday from Swedish Medical Center to let us know that he wouldn’t be making the Wednesday morning delivery.
Born in Seattle and raised in the Rainier Valley, after high school at Rainier Beach Robert spent 15 years hawking food and beverages in the stands at the Kingdome. Years later, he could still reel off the barks he’d use to attract business: “Ice cold beer! Freeze your teeth, give your tongue a sleigh ride,” he’d say as he strode through the stands with a tray of cups. He worked as a baker, a laborer, a meat processor and a cook. He sold newspapers throughout much of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Within six months of Real Change’s first edition in August 1994, he began selling the paper. He was a frequent presence at the Seward Park PCC, downtown near the seats of local government, and at the weekly Columbia City Farmers Market.
After a stint at Swedish last week for internal bleeding — it may have been his kidney, says his mother, or it may have been his prostate — he was discharged on Tuesday, April 27. Doctor’s orders prescribed seven days of bed rest. His body was found Thursday evening, April 29, in his pickup truck on Sixth Avenue South and S. Massachusetts Street, in the industrial SoDo district. The King County Medical Examiner estimates that he died Wednesday, April 28. Robert was 58. In addition to his mother, survivors include a son, Robert Jr., of Seattle and a younger sister in Grand Junction, Colo.
Teaching assistants threaten to strike at University of Washington
Like it? Share it!
Members of the union that represents 4,500 teaching and research assistants at the University of Washington voted last night to authorize a strike if they cannot reach an agreement in the contract negotiations that started in March.
The 4,500 employees, which include TAs, RAs, staff assistants and tutors, are represented by United Auto Workers Local 4121, which is seeking what members call a modest wage increase and protections against layoffs in the wake of a second year of state funding cuts to the university and a second tuition increase of 14 percent set to start this fall.
Last year, the university cut more than 700 employees. This year, union members say the UW plans to cut some 447 TA “quarters”—roughly, more than 100 year-round positions. With the UAW’s contract set to expire tomorrow, a campus group that supports the union, the UW Student Worker Coalition, plans a one-day campus strike on Monday to protest what the teaching assistants call unfair bargaining practices by the university.
At a rally held today on campus—which included students marching to UW President Mark Emmert’s office and delivering black balloons—union members said they had just learned that the university’s administration switched insurance plans in 2002. When it did, the university started overpaying its yearly premiums, said Devon McCurdy, a teaching assistant in the UW’s history department.
“Over the past eight years,” McCurdy told a group of about 20 grads and undergrads before the march started, “they’ve overpaid by about $10 million.”
“The wage increases that we’re asking for are comparatively small. They can be paid for with that $10 million,” he said, but “the university ... would rather give the money to the insurance companies than to some of its hardest-working, lowest-paid employees.”
Phil Neff, a research assistant in international studies, said the annual salary for TAs and RAs, who do the bulk of the university’s teaching, paper-grading and research work, is about $15,000, if they get an appointed to a position each quarter.
A spokesperson for the UW did not immediately return a phone call regarding the insurance issue. In a previous interview with Real Change on the UAW’s bargaining demands, UW spokesperson Bob Roseth said state funding cuts are making things difficult for everyone at the university.
“Nobody here is receiving pay increases,” Roseth said, “not the president, the faculty [or] the staff.”
We need help with our move
Like it? Share it!
We are going full steam ahead with our move now and would love a little extra help in a couple of areas.
If you would like to help with any of the following email Polly at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
1. People to help vendors call, email and send postcards announcing their change of address on Wednesday May 5, 12 and 19.
2. An unpacking team on Saturday, May 22nd at the new Pioneer Sq. site (snacks provided!)
3. A cleaning team on Saturday, May 29th at the old Belltown site (snacks provided!)
4. During the first week in the new space, May 24-28th, I’d love to have an extra volunteer per day, from around 10am-2pm just to help us all adjust to the new space and all the changes.
5. We’re going to have an extra vendor meeting on Thursday May 20th from 12:30-2:30 pm and it would be great to have a couple of volunteers to help vendors with change-of-address questions and process.
One of the great things about our new space is will we have more room to do classes and workshops with vendors, so if you have any skills you want to teach, let me know.
It really does take a community to move an office.
Thank you,
Polly
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Mayor McGinn vetoes aggressive panhandling ordinance
Like it? Share it!
It’s an interesting headline, but, as City Councilmember Bruce Harrell pointed out at the mayor’s veto ceremony today at City Hall, it does not mean that the four councilmembers who voted against Tim Burgess’s aggressive solicitation ordinance support street bullying.
To the contrary: Harrell, one of the four councilmembers who voted against the measure, said today that he wants to see an honest debate on the issue in the future. But that’s not what Seattle got, he said, from Burgess’s proposal, which would have allowed police to give people asking for money on the street a $50 ticket if the officers—or complaining business owners, say—deemed their behavior intimidating.
“I continue to believe the debate was a dishonest debate,” Harrell told a room of about 100 homeless and civil rights advocates at City Hall. Those who opposed the measure are just as interested in public safety as those who supported it, he said, but the proponents’ argument that Seattle’s current law against aggressive panhandling was insufficient just didn’t wash.
“This was a bad law,” Harrell said—one that isn’t quite yet dead yet, Rev. David Bloom said. Sometime in the next 30 days, the council will take a final vote in which it could override the mayor’s veto if any of the opponents change their vote. A last-minute change of heart by Councilmember Mike O’Brien, who did not attend the veto ceremony, is how Monday’s council vote came out 5-4, a split that lacks the two-thirds majority needed to countermand the mayor.
“We need to continue to support those [four] councilmembers, because they are under tremendous pressure” to change their vote, Bloom said. “All it would take, folks, is one vote.”
Remembering Michael Garcia: A vendor, an activist, a staff member
Like it? Share it!
This last week marked the 1-year anniversary of the death of a friend of mine, Michael Garcia. A vendor, an activist, a Real Change staff member; Michael was a man who tragically died suddenly just as all the pieces of his life came together and he was finally doing what he was born to do.
As a young teen in foster care, a fireworks accident blew off several of his fingertips. There were surgeries. Painkillers led to heroin, years on the street, and eventually, prison. While incarcerated, Michael decided to make something of himself and sought education. His dream, he told me, was to work in the field of waste water management and he was certified to do so while in prison.
There were, however, barriers after his release from prison. His poverty. His battle with Hepatitis C. His felony record. Michael was engaged in an epic struggle toward what, for many of us, would seem a humble goal.
He was deeply compassionate, quietly brilliant, and utterly committed to improving the lives of others. Michael was an amazing staff member, doing the work from a place of passion and understanding. “For most of my life, I was a fuck-up,” he said. “Now I’m making up for lost time.”
The Real Change movie, Turning Points closes with his powerful life story.
Michael drives it all home in his own words:
“I want to see some justice done to these people out here, not only because I’m one of them, but because we’ve all together in this thing called life and we have to look out for each other”
We are excited that as Real Change moves onto the next phase of our life and growth, that we have the opportunity to honor Michael Garcia with a lasting tribute. Our new Vendor Learning Center in Pioneer Square opens on May 24th and we are naming it after Michael. He would be thrilled. Please donate now to help fund this new resource for vendors and be part of a community tribute to a great man. And take a few minutes to think about the fragility of life and how we all need to, like Michael, do what we can, while we can.
Sincerely yours,
Timothy Harris Executive Director Real Change
Stimulus jobs at minimum wage? No way, protesters tell housing authority
Like it? Share it!
The smaller the room, the better to hear the protesters: More than 20 people crammed into the Tukwila offices of the King County Housing Authority this morning to give the agency’s board of directors a piece of their mind about how the agency is spending federal stimulus funds to weatherize its rental units—by filling the jobs with minimum-wage workers who make $8.55 an hour instead of the living wage they say the Obama Administration intended.
“You can’t support a 3-year-old on $8.55 an hour,” Yirim Seck told the board at KCHA’s Tukwila offices. “We know this stimulus money is here. When can we get a piece of that?”
Seck and others in the group, organized by a Seattle nonprofit called Got Green, took two weeks of job training last fall through a program developed by Got Green and the Laborers Union aimed at getting out-of-work people ready for weatherization jobs anticipated via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed last year. The organization that the housing authority has contracted to do the work, Got Green says, pays minimum wage and provides no stepping stone to further advancement or career-building.
Got Green founder Michael Woo told the board that dollars for economic stimulus and job creation should work together and that the housing authority should apply language in HUD regulations that give hiring priority to low-income people and public-housing residents—something King County Housing Authority Executive Director Stephen Norman said the agency was working to expand.
CORRECTION: The weatherization tasks that Got Green’s trainees want to do are currently provided for free to the King County Housing Authority by the Washington Energy Corps, a stimulus-funded state employment program that pays $8.55 an hour.
O’Brien changes vote—panhandling ordinance is dead
Like it? Share it!
The Seattle City Council meeting is still in progress. Councilmember Mike O’Brien just stood up to say his piece. After soul-searching over the weekend, he said, he’s changed his vote—he’s voting against Tim Burgess’s anti-panhandling ordinance. When the vote is taken in a few moments, he’ll be joining Nick Licata, Bruce Harrell and Tom Rasmussen, who have already made strong statements against the bill.
That makes the vote 5-4. It passes, but the supporters no longer have the votes to override the veto that Mayor McGinn has promised. Opponents of the panhandling ordinance have won. It’s defeated.
Mayor says he’ll veto panhandling law regardless of council vote
Like it? Share it!
If you were already outraged at the idea of police ticketing Girls Scouts for selling cookies, let me make it worse: If the Seattle City Council votes this afternoon to pass the anti-solicitation ordinance put forward by Councilman Tim Burgess, even your Salvation Army Santa could get a $50 ticket.
If the hapless Santa didn’t have the money and tried to fight the ticket, he would not be entitled to a free lawyer. And if the notice for his court date didn’t reach him in time up at the North Pole and he missed his hearing, the court could issue a warrant for his arrest and, once nabbed, order him to take drug or alcohol treatment—all without Santa ever being put on trial or found guilty of committing a single, actual crime.
Those are just some of the points that opponents of the legislation, including Councilmember Nick Licata and civil rights attorneys from the ACLU and NAACP, made last Wednesday at a press conference where they tore the constitutionality of Burgess’s ordinance to shreds for the lack of due process and serious errors outlined in a report by the Seattle Human Rights Commission.
The good news is that progressive Seattle can be proud of electing Mayor Mike McGinn: Over the weekend, The Stranger’s Dominic Holden reported that McGinn plans to veto the measure regardless of the outcome of today’s 2 p.m. council vote – a change just from Friday, when he said he’d veto the measure if only five councilmembers voted for it.
“There’s potential for abuse of it,” McGinn told reporters at his office on Friday, and “I’ve been listening to the concerns raised.”
“The human rights commission voted 9-0 against it. A lot of voices have spoken up in the last few days saying that they believe it’s scapegoating the poor, that it’s not really going to address the problem, it’s more of a symbolic issue, (a) statement ... and just, on balance, I don’t think it’s the right path forward.”
The only people who would get the $50 ticket and ultimately be removed from the streets of Seattle, Licata and the civil rights attorneys said last week, are people of color and the homeless who have been reduced to begging—people who might as well live at the North Pole for all the political clout they have to fight Burgess and his backers at the Downtown Seattle Association, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce.
Burgess, who chairs the council’s Public Safety Committee, has insisted the statute won’t touch panhandlers or solicitors who are exercising their First Amendment right to ask for money, only “aggressive” types who ask at cash machines or parking meters, won’t take no for an answer or follow people down the street.
As ACLU Legislative Director Shankar Narayan pointed out on Wednesday, however, Seattle already has an aggressive panhandling law that prohibits this type of behavior. The difference is a complainant is required. Under Burgess’s law, police officers could write the $50 tickets based on whether a “reasonable person” would be intimidated by a panhandler’s behavior—with or without a “reasonable person” being there to actually complain.
Before Burgess started promoting the ordinance last fall, Licata said, e-mails to the council complaining about aggressive panhandling were “few and far between”—the exact words that I recorded David Dillman, chief operating officer of the Downtown Seattle Association, saying on Feb. 25 when describing to me how frequent aggressive panhandlers are in the downtown area.
But that’s the beauty of how Burgess wrote the ordinance: In its language and the survey data it cites of Seattleites’ views on panhandling – not necessarily aggressive panhandling – it completely confuses the constitutional right to beg with the crime of extortion, a masterful stroke that has brought Seattle to the brink of curbing everyone’s right to ask for a donation, sign up members for their organization or gather signatures on the street.
“This is being portrayed as a kinder, gentler kind of enforcement, but it’s really not,” Narayan said. “In fact, what we will have now is speed, certainty and severity” under a law that is “simply unsupported by the evidence.”
In San Francisco, which passed a similar law in 2004, Narayan said, the vast majority of tickets have been issued to people of color, with no perceptible impact on panhandling whatsover.
Burgess is not swayed. The surveys and e-mails from citizens fully document the need for the law, he says. “I find it ironic,” he said in a phone interview Thursday, that “when we try to lessen the penalties and move [aggressive panhandlers] out of the criminal realm, the circular argument is that you’ll charge some of them with criminal violations.”
“I just don’t buy their argument,” Burgess said.
Like McGinn, a lot of people in recent days have decided they don’t buy his. In addition to the Seattle Human Rights Commission, Democrats in the city’s 34th, 36th, 37th, and 46th Legislative Districts have passed resolutions opposing the legislation. Former Seattle Councilmember Jim Street, King County Councilmember Larry Gossett and state Senators Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Joe McDermott have also come out against the bill.
Besides Licata, Councilmembers Tom Rasmussen and Bruce Harrell are also expected to vote no.
“The subjectivity in this particular ordinance will be remarkable,” Seattle NAACP President James Bible said Wednesday. “It will justify inequitable treatment. It will justify officers approaching people without any real actual reason.”
“Due process is absolutely lost,” he said, and “yes, Santa Claus, could get a ticket.”
Tim Harris on NW Nights with Frank Shiers
Like it? Share it!
On Thursday night Tim Harris chatted with local conservative radio host Frank Shiers about Tim Burgess’ Aggressive Solicitation Ordinance, on KIRO 97.3 FM.
Click Here to listen to Tim Harris on NW Nights with Frank Shiers
The Aggressive Solicitation Ordinance has attracted significant attention, and is scheduled for a full council vote on Monday, April 19th. The ordinance would authorize police to give $50 tickets to those they observe begging from people at a cash machine or parking meter, using profanity or yelling, or following people down the street, among other behavior.
News from our sister streetpaper
Like it? Share it!
Portland’s Street Roots—a sister paper in a regional NW city to which Seattle bears some resemblance—has a great new issue, including a real coup: an interview with Jon Stewart, the “Walter Cronkite of the Onion generation.” You can see the first page on their well-done blog, which includes an exclusive interview with New York City. That’s right, New York City.
Sound unreal? Yes, it is, and so is the interview with Stewart himself.
It fooled me too at first: I asked SR editor Joanne Zuhl for permission to republish, and got this reply:
Sorry Adam, but check the date…. :) Yes, it’s April Fools!
.
SR has pulled one over on editors mightier than myself: last April’s imagined dialogue with George W. Bush prompted the Associated Press to call their office and ask how they had gotten to the former prez. The yearly spoof sells extremely well, says executive director Israel Bayer, and gives his staff some well-deserved rest from the newsgathering grind.
Congratulations to our Assistant Editor Rosette Royale
Like it? Share it!
Real Change Assistant Editor Rosette Royale was recently selected for a very competitive fellowship from the Seattle University Journalism Fellowships on Family Homelessness. Rosette will be producing a two-part print series and series of video diaries tentatively titled: “Invisible Life of an American Family.”
It is a three month fellowship that will explore the lives and experiences of a homeless family in Washington state. Funding for the fellowship is provided by The Gates Foundation through the Washington Families Fund.
Rosette has worked at Real Change for five years and was recently awarded a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for his three-part feature story, “The man who stood on the bridge.”
Governor vetoes section of GAU reform bill
Like it? Share it!
An addendum to yesterday’s report on legislation that reforms the state’s General Assistance-Unemployable program for the disabled: The governor signed the bill, but vetoed a section of it that would have required the state to give those leaving or being dropped from the program priority to enroll in the state’s Basic Health coverage for low-income households.
Under GAU, which the bill renames the Disability Lifeline, the state provides $339 a month and medical coverage to those who are temporarily disabled and cannot work. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), sought to put those leaving the program on the Basic Health Plan so as not to penalize them for getting better or getting a job.
With some 93,000 people already signed up for Basic Health’s waiting list, the governor saw it differently. In a statement she issued on the partial veto, she said, in essence, that the state can’t afford to cover extra people who are ineligible for the Disability Lifeline. That part of the bill, she said, “would limit the Health Care Authority’s ability to efficiently manage enrollment to the appropriated budget, maintain a balanced risk pool, and is detrimental to the longer-term viability of the Basic Health Plan.”
Excuse the interruption, but…
Like it? Share it!
One of the many undertold stories during the legislative session that keeps dragging on and on was college students’ visit to the State Senate, in the middle of business, with an updated rendition of Amazing Grace that reads quite well:
Song Sung by Evergreen College Students on March 4, 2010 from the Galley of the State Senate
Lyrics by Victoria Larkin
Amazing Grace no longer flows,
Dammed up by greed so crude.
I once could eat, but now I find…
I can’t afford the food.The bright young minds of our country
Now wake to meet their doom;
So why should we apply to school,
When close ahead lies gloom?What will we say in years ahead
When strewn across the land
Are wretches poor in heart and soul,
By greedy robbers damned?Remember, Aristocracy
Made bank from others’ toil.
I say we have the right to fruits
We’ve grown on Nature’s soil.Aloud, lament all ye who hope
To have a better life;
If our priorities don’t change
We all will end in strife.Awaken Creativity,
and doom we may waylay!
Let’s make a plan while we still can
And birth a better day!
The students were escorted out.
For the full story, check out this op-ed by a student organizer on the Olympia Newswire.
He’s so Heavy: Times Square’s homeless “holdout”
Like it? Share it!
Way back when I was en route to college, traveling from Silver Spring, MD, to Waterville, Maine, my family had a stopover in NYC. Total tourists, we visited Times Square. Men ran three-card monty games on upturned wooden crates; neon signs illumined x-rated book stores; pedestrians hurried from corner to corner in great rivers of marching legs. And on the sidewalks: homeless people. More than I had ever seen in one place. My aunt was shocked. Even now, when I mention New York, she talks about the homeless people we saw.
That was back in 1985. Now it’s 2010. And, if you were to go to the Big Crab Apple now, oh, what a different Times Square you’d see: Disney musicals, big-box stores and (relatively) clean streets. And, if the New York Times is to be believed, you’d only see one homeless person: a man named Heavy.
In a recent article, “Times Square’s Homeless Holdout, Not Budging,” the Times pointed out that “[a]s long as there have been homeless people sleeping in Times Square, there have been social workers and city officials trying to persuade them to leave.” Apparently, they’ve all but succeeded. Heavy won’t leave, even after countless attempts by non-profits and the city to get him into shelter.
The text of the article straddles a precarious moral fence: It’s good that people have shelter, isn’t it? Can’t Heavy stay where he is if he doesn’t bother anyone? Are people doing this to help New York City? Or Heavy? Or both?
All questions to ponder, brought about by Times Square’s last “holdout.” Who says homeless people don’t have power?
Gregoire signs General Assistance reform bill, 3,600 people to be cut
Like it? Share it!
It’s been a long, hard road, but Gov. Christine Gregoire signed a bill yesterday put forward by Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), chair of the House’s Human Services Committee, that keeps the state’s primary safety-net program for those who are disabled and cannot work—General Assistance-Unemployable—largely intact and gives it a new name people can understand: Disability Lifeline.
The press release sent out on the signing by the House Democratic Caucus, however, notes that an estimated 3,600 people could lose benefits on Sept. 1 as a result of a temporary two-year benefit limit that Dickerson compromised on with the Senate and the governor to save the program. And it says another 1,100 people could be dropped by June 2011. That’s out of about 18,000 people on the program today, according to one GAU manager—the press release says 17,000.
Using the latter number, one third of all Disability Lifeline recipients could be cut. But Dickerson also wrote into the bill that the Department of Social and Health Services must review the cases of all recipients facing cutoff and move anyone who is eligible for federal disability benefits (Supplemental Security Income) into a related but separate program, now to be called Disability Lifeline-Expedited, that will continue paying them benefits while they wait for SSI.
OLYMPIA—Landmark reforms that aim to preserve and improve large parts of the human-services safety net in Washington were signed into law today by Gov. Chris Gregoire.
The reforms will save the state an estimated $25 million this biennium, according to Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, the lead sponsor of the measure signed today.
“The Security Lifeline reforms signed today will not only preserve essential parts of our safety net for low-income residents and people with disabilities, they will make some services more efficient and cost-effective than ever before,” Dickerson said.
The signing of the bill (House Bill 2782) was a huge victory for Dickerson, Speaker Frank Chopp and House Democrats, who fought to reform the safety net and save medical and income assistance for people who are unable to work because of physical or mental disabilities.
“We knew we had to reform the safety net to save it, and we did,” Dickerson said.
One Security Lifeline reform launches a public-private partnership to create a network of on-line “Opportunity Portals” in local communities. These high-tech portals will help Washingtonians gain access to federal, state and local services they are eligible to receive but are not getting.
Leading philanthropies have agreed to pay the start-up costs of the portals, which could bring hundreds of millions of additional federal dollars into Washington. For example, the portals could help low-income workers access more of the $140 to $170 million in federal Earned Income Tax Credits that are going unclaimed in Washington.
A second reform aims to expand the Basic Food Employment and Training program to three additional community colleges. The program currently serves about 2,000 participants in 12 community colleges in Washington.
The most talked-about reform in the new law will revamp the state general assistance program (GA-U) that currently helps about 17,000 people who are unable to work due to disabilities.
The reformed program, dubbed the “Disability Lifeline,” has time limits and emphasizes faster transitions to employability or federally-funded Social Security Income (SSI) benefits.
Under the new reforms, Disability Lifeline recipients must participate in substance-abuse treatment or vocational rehabilitation, when appropriate. They will also have to accept housing vouchers in lieu of cash grants, when suitable housing is available. Expedited case reviews will hasten transitions to employability or SSI.
The time limits in the Disability Lifeline reforms—benefits are limited to 24 months in a 5-year period—begin Sept. 1 and will be retroactive. An estimated 3,600 people could lose benefits when the time limits kick in. A total of 4,700 recipients could lose benefits by June 2011.
“I think the time limits are too short, but we couldn’t have saved the program without them,” Dickerson said.
House Republicans on the Ways & Means Committee had proposed to terminate the entire program—including medical assistance—on July 1.
“Ending the program altogether would have been a recipe for disaster,” said Dickerson. “More than a third of recipients have severe mental illnesses. Can you imagine the public-safety risks of taking away not only their income but also the medicines they need for their illness?”
In December, Gov. Gregoire had warned that the GA-U program could be eliminated if no new revenues were found to ease the state budget deficit. She later proposed continuing medical benefits but sharply limiting the cash grants, which currently average a little over $300 monthly.
According to Dickerson, about of a third of the people currently on the Disability Lifeline are homeless. Most of the rest are near-homeless.
Pioneer Square Community Association Says No to Real Change
Like it? Share it!
March 29, 2010
The Honorable Mike McGinn,
Mayor City of Seattle
Seattle, WA 98104
Dear Mayor McGinn:
Thank you again for taking the time to tour Pioneer Square on March 18th. Pioneer Square community members were encouraged by your comments and perceptions of the opportunities and issues facing our neighborhood. We look forward to working with your office on an ongoing basis to help revitalize the District.
As we discussed, Pioneer Square has been a generous host to numerous social service providers in our community. However, the neighborhood is extremely under resourced and a “fair share” saturation point of services was exceeded years ago. This fact has been acknowledged and a moratorium on new or additional services has been in effect since 1998 with the publication of the Neighborhood Plan. Unfortunately, Pioneer Square finds it must defend this position time and time again.
Presently, Real Change is planning to relocate to the Historic District. There are heightened concerns within the neighborhood that representatives of this organization have not approached the Pioneer Square Community Association nor have they conducted any outreach within the District.
We realize there are enormous needs, especially in this economy, and further we recognize that many clients may not have any other resources at their disposal. We have strong relationships with service providers in our neighborhood who work with community members to address problems when they arise. That said; Pioneer Square’s economic vitality is impacted by the publics’ perception of safety issues which are exacerbated by line queuing for social service organizations.
The Office of Economic Development, with numerous community stakeholders, is conducting a review to find ways to revitalize this Historic District. In 2002, Urban Preservationist and Principal of PlaceEconomics, Donovan Rypkema, visited our community after the Mardi Gras reveling resulted in a murder the previous year.
At that time, several points were made by Rypkema that referenced street disorder and the neighborhood suffering significant negative perceptions regarding public safety. In December of 2009 Rypkema returned and reiterated the 2002 summary and questioned the lack of progress.
Within the past few years, the neighborhood was tapped to accept the expansion of existing service providers and to absorb the expansion of services at the Morrison Hotel during the construction of Fire Station #10’s Command Center. Legitimate assessments of the projects predicted long term, negative impacts in the neighborhood. As a result the overall perception of safety in the square has diminished.
The moratorium of the Neighborhood Plan needs to be upheld in this case. We feel it is imperative that service providers seek out other neighborhoods of Seattle that have not exceeded their “fair share” of services. We urge you to respect and support our position on this matter.
We would like to work with your office on this issue by setting up a meeting with Real Change, MaKensay Real Estate and our neighborhood organization to provide assistance to Real Change to find other suitable offices outside the District. As the proposed move of Real Change is on a fast track, we hope to hear from your offices as soon as possible.
Sincerely, Leslie G. Smith Interim Executive Director Pioneer Square Community Association
CC: Darryl Smith, Deputy Mayor Neighborhoods Phil Fuji, Deputy Mayor Operations Sally Bagshaw, Council Tim Burgess, Council Sally Clark, Council Richard Conlin, Council President Jean Godden, Council Bruce Harrell, Council Nick Licata, Council Mike O’Brien, Council Tom Rasmussen, Council Steve Johnson, Director, Office of Economic Development John Diaz, Interim Chief, Seattle Police Department Stella Chao, Director, City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods Frank Buchanan, MaKensay Real Estate
Got A Dollar For Sex?
Like it? Share it!
Today I got a sample of what would soon be further criminalized under the Burgess panhandling ordinance.
The plan was to work from home, but a 9:30 reminder of a 10 AM meeting blew that. I jumped in my car and drove downtown as is: unshaven after the weekend, Real Change cap over dirty uncombed hair, dressed in sweatpants and sweatshirt. In other words, looking more homeless than half the homeless people I know.
I pulled into a spot near Real Change on 2nd Ave in Belltown at 10:05. The meter was about twenty feet away. As I walked around to get my parking, an African American man of around 50 stood on the sidewalk for no apparent reason. An idle man. Apparently the job market wasn’t treating him well.
We chatted as I slipped a debit card in the meter and got my ticket. “What happened to your window,” he asked, gesturing to the missing passengers-side rear wing. “Dumb-ass junkie break-in,” I replied.
“Someone broke into THAT!?” he asked.
My 92 Corolla doesn’t exactly inspire car lust. It looks like what it is. A functional shit box car with zero status appeal.
“Yeah. Asshole only got a disposable camera,” I laughed. “Hardly worth the trouble.” He laughed too.
“Got a smoke?” he asked. “AHA!,” I thought. “Strike one. Parking transaction foul.”
I gave him the cigarette and slipped my arm through the open window to unlock the back door and affix my ticket. The lock on the passengers door doesn’t work with my key anymore, so the busted window offers a certain amount of convenience. I may never get that fixed.
The door stood open to the sidewalk when a too-thin woman walked up and politely asked for $8.
“Strike two.” I thought. Man parking car here. Bubble in force. Bad panhandler!
I smiled. If I had $8 extra dollars, I’d buy my kid a toy. Not hand it to a desperate stranger. “Nope,” I said. Don’t have it. Sorry.”
“How about a dollar,” she asked, smiling. We were all smiling. Nonetheless, strike three. Asking again after I’ve said no.
“No, sorry,” I smiled. “No cash.”
The next thing out of her mouth was tragically unexpected.
“Not even for sex?”
I stopped and looked at her. Unusually pretty as Belltown crack hookers go, smiling. Playing with me.
“I’m an out of work hooker,” she explained. “Not even for sex?”
Whoa! Strike four!
“Sorry,” I smiled. “Not even for sex.”
We all laughed, she made one last half-hearted pitch (strike five) and I walked away, a little sad over this woman, who, given a different set of life circumstances, would consider what she just said unimaginable.
No one followed me. Our genial little exchange was at an end.
I imagine the guy that I gave a cigarette may have had a buck or two, and that they worked something out.
When drugs and poverty have reduced so many to this, there is no question that real solutions are called for.
But racking up tickets and rotting uselessly in jail isn’t one of them. That shit’s just mean and helps no one.
Had someone else parked in that spot, at that moment, in the squeaky clean new Seattle that lies just around the corner, there could have been citations. And yet, we were just strangers on a sidewalk, having a friendly talk about what we need and what we can do. People do what they gotta do. The rule should be no harm, no foul.
WHEREAS it is inhumane and immoral to punish people for living outside …
Like it? Share it!
As Cyd Gillis reports in the current issue of Real Change, Seattle’s homeless sweeps are quietly ongoing, and the city protocols that were to guide these are honored mostly in the breach, if at all. It’s not in the news, so it doesn’t exist. Not unless it’s your stuff that gets dumped.
So it’s nice to see folks noticing, especially now, with Councilmember Burgess conflating panhandling and thuggery and talking endlessly of how Seattle always does right by the poor and homeless.
The King County Democrats Central Committee approved the resolution below after it was brought to them by the 36th District Dems. It’s good to see people standing up to say what’s right.
Resolution in Opposition to the Demolition of Homeless Encampments
WHEREAS the Washington State Department of Transportation pursues a policy of demolishing homeless people’s encampments and throwing away their property when there is no alternative shelter; and
WHEREAS this policy fails to honor the rights of the homeless to their property, survival gear and documents, and fails to address the chronic and severe shortage of emergency shelters and services; and
WHEREAS homelessness is a national problem that will likely get worse in the current economy; and
WHEREAS the King County one-night counts for 2008, 2009, and 2010 found approximately 2600 – 2850 people living outside on winter nights when emergency shelters were at or near capacity; and
WHEREAS it is inhumane and immoral to punish people for living outside when there are not enough shelters or affordable housing;
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the King County Democrats call for the Washington State Department of Transportation and other jurisdictions to stop all non-emergency homeless camp sweeps and demolitions; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the King County Democrats urge the Washington State Department of Transportation and other jurisdictions to work with homeless advocacy groups to find more humane ways to address the problem of homelessness; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the King County Democrats send a copy of this resolution to the following:
* Washington State Department of Transportation
* Governor Chris Gregoire
* Judy Clibborn, Chair, House Transportation Committee
* Mary Margaret Haugen, Chair, Senate Transportation Committee
* Dow Constantine, King County Executive
* King County Council Members
* Seattle City Council Members
* Mayor Mike McGinn
* All legislators from King County
Panhandling Hearing Scorecard & Logos
Like it? Share it!
After closely watching yesterday’s Public Safety Committee hearing on the Seattle Channel, I have to say that my first impression of how things went was a bit off base. Power has had a long time to strategize this one, and we were out-organized and out-maneuvered.
For the first hour, people in favor of human decency and keeping urban fear within reasonable check held our own pretty well. Of the 36 who testified, 19 were on our side. Many strong testimonies were given.
Then, Burgess announced that testimonies should be condensed to a minute in recognition of the extended time and long list of speakers. That’s when the Seattle business and corporate interest blitz commenced, including two neighborhood associations, Seattle Monorail, Argosy Cruises, Seattle Hotel Assn., Seattle Metropolitan Credit Union, A mysterious Pioneer Square property manager named Dane, and Starbucks. Their speeches were tight, rehearsed, and with few exceptions, came in under a minute with no signs of the haste that usually accompanies a planned speech being cut in half. The pro-ordinance forces dominated the final 30 some minutes with 14 of 25 speakers.
As Dominic Holden noted at the Stranger SLOG, the opposition to the ordinance came from a broad cross section of citizens and public interests, while Burgess’ support was represented by the usual downtown crowd. I count 61 speakers, 31 of which supported the ordinance, with tactical advantage going to the home team, and helpfully assembled a visual, in case any of us were deluded that this is going to be easy.
News from the Poorhouse
Like it? Share it!
In a recent article in the Seattle Times light was shed on the lack of effectiveness of Washington’s Child Welfare system. A new study found that half the families in the system had problems securing housing and two-thirds were on food stamps. Steps are being taken to try and reform the Child Welfare system and the study – conducted by Partners for Our Children – was the first step in attempts at reformation.
Today obesity is more highly linked with poverty than being underweight. A new study, reported in the New York Times, has revealed that Bronx, New York, has the most severe hunger related problems of any place in the U.S.. 37% of people living in the Bronx lacked money to get necessary food, this is nearly double the nation’s average. The study also showed that people living in the Bronx were 85% more likely to be obese than people living in Manhattan.
It is hard being a veteran, and it’s getting harder. Reported by the Associated Press, The Labor Department recently released data showing that last year 21.1% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan were unemployed. This is far above the national average of 16.6% for people in the same age range (18-24).
While things are bad all over the country, Baltimore looks like one of the hardest hit areas. In a recent poll that was taken it was found that Baltimore County’s homeless population jumped 25% last year and evictions are up by 21%. Experts say they do not see this trend radically reversing any time soon.
In Portland city leaders have been debating whether or not to legalize “homelessness camps” in city parks and on certain church properties. The proposal to legalize these camps is to be on the city council’s desk by the end of March. The move is hailed by homeless advocates as being a step in the right direction.
The Meaning of Immediately
Like it? Share it!
Recent events have led me to consider anew the jesuitical hair from which the unholy existence of the “safety bubble” hangs. This is, of course, the 15’ no-go zone that may one day extend omnidirectionally from any person engaged in a parking or ATM transaction. When the safety bubble crosses paths with a solicitor, be it Larouchie, Save the Children canvasser, or Real Change vendor (because this legislation, remember, is not targeted at anyone, especially panhandlers, and applies across the board), their act of solicitation becomes — poof! — aggressive, with each instance punishable as a $50 civil infraction.
Additionally, if the ask truly is “aggressive,” as opposed to this newly defined faux-aggressive, one could also be charged under the current aggressive panhandling statute, which remains in force as a misdemeanor that carries a $250 fine.
The safety bubble itself however, as previously belabored, delicately hangs from Section 2.A.4.f.iii
iii. immediately before or after conducting a transaction at an ATM or parking pay station, is handling in plain view any money, bank card, receipt, check or other document related to the transaction.
What is this “immediately?” Is it, as Burgess and staff insist, some nebulous instantaneous event, over nearly as quickly as it began? Or does it have legs? How far do those legs extend? Is it until said document is reasonably dispatched to its logical and “immediate” conclusion? Seeing, as how part of the definition is “direct; without intermediary,” that would seem reasonable. In a parking transaction, for example, one takes the ticket from the pay station and “immediately” affixes it to the curbside window of one’s vehicle. Right?
Unsure, I turned to my appallingly underused Oxford Universal Dictionary (1955), which weighs in on the bathroom scale at 8.4 pounds. The concluding example of medieval usage is a minor miracle of serendipity..
Immediately adv. (conj.) ME. [orig. to render. L. immediate adv. (cf. prec. 6).] 1. In an immediate way; by direct agency; directly 2. With no person, thing, or distance intervening in time, space, order, or succession; closely; proximately; directly 1466 3. Without any delay, instantly ME. b. as conj. (ellipt. for immediately that). The moment that 1839. 1. Canow .. was immediatly vnder the dominion of the Tartars HAKLUYT. I, holden of the Crown 1647. 3. He bade me goe immeaditlye 1500.
Call me crazy, but the safety bubble here follows the transaction, or, more basically, the person, even when circumscribed to the “immediate” transaction. So long as one is directly engaged in the transaction without interruption, the bubble exists. Burgess says no, but the language says yes.
Deal would save GAU but cut 1,200
Like it? Share it!
After weeks of negotiations on proposals that were far apart, the House and Senate have crafted a compromise bill to save the $339-a-month cash grant and medical coverage that the temporarily disabled receive through the state’s General Assistance-Unemployable program. But 1,200 people are expected to be cut from the GAU rolls on Sept. 1.
Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), chair of the House Human Services Committee, said earlier today that she had reached an agreement with Sen. Jim Hargrove (D-Hoquiam) on the Security Lifeline Act, legislation that Dickerson originally introduced as House Bill 2782. The bill sought to reform the $188 million program, in part, by renaming it the Disability Lifeline and stepping up the state’s process for determining which recipients are eligible for federal Supplemental Security Income benefits for the disabled.
In the Senate, Hargrove, chair of Human Services & Corrections, amended the bill to turn the $339 monthly grant into a housing voucher, or partial rent payment, with recipients to get only $50 cash per month.
Dickerson declined to provide details of the new bill, saying those would come tomorrow after she and Hargrove meet with the governor to go over the bill’s components. But human services advocates familiar with the new 2782, which should be introduced in the House late Tuesday, say it involves cutting $24 million from the renamed Disability Lifeline program and imposing a 24-month lifetime limit on benefits.
The 24-month limit is retroactive and is expected to immediately cut 1,200 people from the Disability Lifeline rolls as of Sept. 1. Advocates call it a good compromise, however, because the bill would maintain full benefits for the program’s remaining 17,000 recipients.
The governor’s second budget, by comparison, called for reducing GAU grants to $250 a month and imposing a lifetime limit of six months. The two-year limit can be removed in the next legislative session, advocates say.
The compromise bill also includes language to step up transitioning people from GAU to General Assistance-Expected (or Disability Lifeline-Expedited in the future), a category for SSI applicants-in-waiting. Unlike GAU recipients, whose benefits are paid for entirely by the state, GAX recipients receive federal health coverage under the Medicaid program. Once they get SSI, the federal government then reimburses the state for the monthly cash assistance it paid out.
The legislation also incorporates Hargrove’s idea of a creating a new state housing voucher for all new GAU applicants who are homeless and chemically dependent or mentally ill.
Burgess Lied. The Anti-Panhandler Safety Bubble Lives.
Like it? Share it!
At last Tuesday’s Seattle Office of Human Rights forum to discuss Seattle’s new panhandling ordinance, I challenged Councilmember Tim Burgess to meaningfully back up his claim that there is no 15’ “safety bubble” that follows anyone engaged in a parking or ATM transaction, thus turning pretty much any commercial district into a dynamic no-go zone for solicitors of any sort, including Real Change vendors.
Burgess replied unequivocally. The ordinance language, he said, was revisited last week and changed. “There is no safety bubble,” he stoutly declared.
I checked. The safety bubble lives. I see it. Our lawyer friends see it. And yet, Burgess denies its existence. The law, he says, and the 15’ bubble, applies only to transactions immediately conducted at a parking station or an ATM, and does not travel with the person. He’s lying.
Here’s the most current version of the relevant section of the ordinance.
4. “Aggressive solicitation” means the act of engaging in intimidating conduct towards another person in a public place when such conduct is accompanied by an act of solicitation. The mere act of solicitation without intimidation is not aggressive solicitation. Aggressive solicitation includes but is not limited to:
a. intentionally blocking or interfering with a person by any means while making a solicitation, including unreasonably causing the person to take evasive action to avoid physical contact;
b. intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm to a reasonable person while making a solicitation;
c. repeatedly soliciting a person who has given a negative response to a solicitation while remaining within 15 feet of the person;
d. following a person who has given a negative response to a solicitation while repeatedly soliciting the person;
e. providing or delivering, or attempting to provide or deliver, unrequested or unsolicited services prior to or without the consent of the person to whom the service is provided; or
f. soliciting from within 15 feet any person who is using an automated teller machine (ATM) or a public or private parking pay station. For purposes of this paragraph, a person is using an ATM or parking pay station if the person:
i. is waiting in line for an ATM or parking pay station; or
ii. is conducting a transaction on an ATM or at a parking pay station; or
iii. immediately before or after conducting a transaction at an ATM or parking pay station, is handling in plain view any money, bank card, receipt, check or other document related to the transaction.
Real Change reporter Cyd Gillis had an email exchange on this with Nate Dozier, Burgess’ legislative assistant, last week. When she pressed him on the issue of whether the safety zone extends from the person or the machine, here’s what he said.
“Well my understanding of the way it’s now written is the 15 foot reference point is the person, not the machine. I think you could still not solicit from someone who is handling money or a parking sticker “immediately before or after” her or his transaction as that is part of the definition of “using.” I think your question might get into the definition of “immediately,” which I think leaves a pretty narrow window.”
This strikes me as a calculated misdirect. The safety bubble does not depend, as he says, upon some lawyerly distinction regarding the word “immediately.” The safety bubble exists in subparagraph f.iii as a whole, which says that so long as any document related to the transaction remains in one’s hand, that person constitutes a mobile no solicitation zone.
As to the word “immediately,” it obviously means more than 15’ after the center of the safety bubble leaves the parking meter or ATM, or there would be no reason for this clause at all.
To illustrate, say someone uses the Bank of America ATM at Westlake Center, exits right and walks, cash in hand, past the street kids that hang out near the sculpture on the way to the Starbucks across the street.. A kid asks for money. Does s/he get a ticket? Probably depends. That’s a bad law.
So, why the attachment to the safety bubble? Is it really worth all the obfuscation and legal vulnerability to the ordinance?
You’ll have to ask Councilmember Burgess, but here’s my best guess. The safety bubble makes the possible application of the ordinance nearly universal. Each of the 25 known panhandlers on the Downtown Seattle Association’s hit list, and anyone else that law enforcement cares to target, could easily be found in violation and ticketed. Repeatedly. Those tickets would default to misdemeanor warrants. There would be arrests, court appearances, and choices to be made.
The bubble creates options.
Just four of the panhandlers on the DSA list were identified by DSA’s own ambassadors as “aggressive.” With this new “tool,” that won’t matter. Any act of solicitation, when crossed with the safety bubble, becomes a civil infraction.
The ACLU and others are clear that this legislation creates intolerably broad restrictions upon free speech that will not withstand constitutional challenge. Burgess says the ordinance is extremely narrow and targets very specific uncivil behaviors.
My money’s on the ACLU.
Our tax dollars, however, rest with the city, which is too bad. Burgess’ response in a meeting last week to the question of whether litigation to defend bad law is a good use of city money was to say that the city already has a legal fund set aside for these exigencies, so, no problem.
It’s the classic bureaucrat’s dodge. “The money I want to spend on a stupid thing, being in that pile rather than this one, doesn’t really count.” It does. City dollars are city dollars.
This is bad law that will not, as written, withstand constitutional challenge. Burgess’ lawyers from the city think it will. The team of legal support and those who analyze laws like this regularly say they’re wrong.
There will be a legal challenge to this law whether the moving safety bubble lives on or not, but Tim Burgess should make good on his word. If, as he said in a televised public forum, the bubble does not exist as a matter of legislative intent, he needs to make it go away. Immediately.
“Panhandling” panel to talk Tuesday night, March 9
Like it? Share it!
By now, you probably already know: Seattle is considering a new law that will make “aggressive solicitation” — which includes yelling, following someone or asking for money within 15 feet of a parking meter or ATM — an illegal act, one that carries a $50 fine. Councilmember Tim Burgess proposed the ordinance in late February, basing it, he said, on a similar ordinance in Tacoma. Some people have praised the ordinance; others have denounced; still others are on the fence. But it’s hard to have a fully formed opinion if you don’t know the particulars.
So what does the ordinance actually say? And what does the ordinance really mean, not just for the panhandlers, but for the buskers, the Real Change vendors, the GreenPeace-niks and Girl Scouts? On Tues., March 9, from 7 – 8:30 p.m. you’ll have a chance to figure out.
That’s when the Human Rights Commission’s Public Safety Task Force will host a panel at Seattle University School of Law, Sullivan Hall, Room C5, 901 12th Ave. that will examine the proposals’ ins and outs. On board to speak will be Burgess; Jon Scholes, Policy Director of the Downtown Seattle Association; Anita Khandelwal, lawyer for the Defender Association’s Racial Disparity Project; and Real Change Exec. Dir. Timothy Harris.
It’s always impossible to predict what will happen at any panel, but here’s a safe bet: Burgess and Scholes will support the ordinance, Khandelwal and Harris will express grave doubts. And then there will be you, concerned citizen, who, after attending, will be able to put the whole situation into greater context.
Hundreds turn out to protest UW budget cuts
Like it? Share it!
Jessica Boone, UW student. Photo by Jane Austin
Coming around the corner from Red Square to the Quad, I was doubtful. Last year, in the midst of protests against budget cuts at the University of Washington, students and staff had turned out strong numbers in their protests, but, since last fall, continuing events aimed at calling attention to budget cuts have been a bit, well, anemic.
I was stunned, however, to see how many students had come out—perhaps 500 altogether—holding signs stating “No Layoffs,” “Tax the Rich,” and “R.I.P. Our Future.” After a few statements from the organizers, they marched around the lawned courtyard of the Quad, then into Kane Hall, across Red Square and on up University Way, chanting various slogans like “Who’s university? Our university!” and for a brief moment that WTO refrain, “This is what democracy looks like!”
The event was part of a National Day of Action to Defend Education that took place today on dozens of campuses across the nation, including Seattle Central Community College, Evergreen State College and Western Washington University. While the protesters didn’t shut down the campus the way students did today at UC Santa Cruz, it made this old alum very proud when, around 1:30 p.m., students in the top floors of the Art Building (of course!) unfurled a gigantic banner addressed to the university’s president. It read: “Emmert, Another Budget is Possible.”
Last year, in the wake of the Great Recession and state revenue shortfalls, the University of Washington’s budget was cut $73 million, leading the school to lay off 700 workers and increase tuition 14 percent. With tuition slated to go up another 14 percent this fall and more cuts expected, the protesters say the university has lost sight of its public mission—providing an affordable education.
Instead of raising tuition and cutting jobs, the school could start, say members of the UW Student Worker Coalition, which organized the event, by trimming the salaries of administrators who make more than $150,000 a year, with many participants calling UW President Mark Emmert’s $906,000 salary excessive. The coalition is also calling on the university to freeze tuition, halt the work speed-up that it says is affecting custodians (who had 39 positions cut last year, 17 of them direct layoffs), and provide real financial aid instead of loans that bury students in debt.
Jessica Boone, 20, said she is the first in her family to go to college and currently works two jobs to pay for her schooling, but is having a hard time keeping up. She wants to get a degree in sociology and go on to the UW School of Nursing, she said, but is considering enlisting in the Navy as a way to get her nursing degree.
“Mark Emmert makes over $900,000 a year,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll make that in my lifetime.”
Kayla Huddleston, 21, said she’s worried that further cuts to the university’s Office of Minority Affairs, which funds retention and mentorship programs, will deprive more people of color of a chance to get a college education. “If tuition goes up any further, it will be less affordable for those without scholarships,” she said.
“It’s ridiculous we’re balancing the budgets on the backs of students, workers and people of color,” said Steve Hoffman, an electrician at North Seattle Community College and member of the Washington Federation of State Employees, the union of the UW’s trade workers. “There’s a better solution, which is taxing the wealthy and corporate profits.”
News from the Poorhouse
Like it? Share it!
The New York Times reported recently that the Federal Government is overhauling the way it evaluates poverty. The standard formula, which measures only the income of a family, is being supplemented with other factors like the use of food-stamps and the existence of a mortgage. Poverty advocates have argued for years that the nearly 50 year-old poverty formula needed to be changed to more accurately reflect the true poverty numbers in the U.S.
A new study looking at the health of every county in the U.S. was recently released. The most unhealthy county in the nation turned out to be Orangeburg, South Carolina. It was found that the most key factors in determining a person’s lack of health, later on in life, were: Obesity, unemployment and childhood poverty. 22 percent of all Orangeburg residents were assessed as being in poor health 32 percent of all children were assessed as living in poverty.
John McClosky, a geologist at the University of Ulster, said recently that “…earthquakes aren’t killing people, poverty is.” He says this because, as is explained in the article written by The Daily Mail, the lack of earthquake-safe buildings and absent medical care are the cause of far more deaths than the actual events. The recent earthquake in Chili was nearly 1,000 times more powerful than the one which hit Haiti, however, it killed far fewer people because of the country’s more stable economy and infrastructure.
The rate of homeless youths attending public schools has risen in conjunction with the crash of the economy. In New York the situation is extreme with (as of February 26th) 15,495 families with children were living in shelters. The report, released by the NYC Department of Homeless Services, is a sharp reminder that often the people most vulnerable to poverty and homelessness are children.
The proposed “anti-panhandling law”
Like it? Share it!
Today Seattle City Council Member Tim Burgess proposed a law re aggressive solicitation. It will be a new section of the Seattle Municipal Code, 15.48.050. The law is available on his website as a pdf: http://www.seattle.gov/council/burgess/attachments/2010st_disorder_leg_aggressive_solicit.pdf
I’m glad that the law doesn’t call for any new licensing. Most of the provisions look reasonable to me, although I wonder why it is necessary to write a law specifically prohibiting solicitors from engaging in the activities covered. Why can’t these prohibitions also apply to non-solicitors? Why should it be OK for a non-solicitor to block my progress along a sidewalk?
But, never mind, for now. I’ll content myself to just complain about a couple of the provisions that bother me.
Part A. 4. of the proposed law defines some forms of aggressive solicitation. The introductory paragraph says it includes but is not limited to a number of activities that are then listed, 6 in all, a. through f.
The two that concern me are b. “intentionally using physical gestures or profane or abusive language that would cause fear or alarm to a reasonable person while making a solicitation;” and f. which deals with soliciting within 15 feet of an ATM, pay station etc. The problem with b is that it isn’t specific enough and it’s open to abuses. It is a wide open invitation to class discrimination. The very sight of homeless people alarms some otherwise reasonable people. So?
The problem with f is that selling, say, a newspaper, within 15 feet of an ATM, could get you a fine, even if you aren’t even addressing your pitch to the person using the ATM. You could even be facing the other way! It’s too broad.
The IWW’s Revolutionary Culture
Like it? Share it!
I’m newly in love with the IWW after reading Nuclear Power - Clean Energy?
The first new nuclear reactors since 1974 are slated to be built in Atlanta, Georgia:
“The largest investment in clean energy history” promises thousands of jobs, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and an energy production process with zero carbon emissions. Sounds dreamy, doesn’t it? But how “clean” is nuclear power?
Like it? Share it!
A byproduct of nuclear power production is harmful radioactive waste that we currently have no effective means of storing.
Breakdowns in the power production process can expose workers, communities, and surrounding ecosystems to this radiation. While plant safety has improved since Chernobyl, accidents continue to occur.
Nuclear power is generated from uranium, a non-renewable, fossil fuel which is obtained through uranium mining. Uranium is obtained through open-pit and underground mining, often on land previously occupied by indigenous peoples, and produces radioactive waste. This process, too, poses risks, as one New Mexico community experienced “when an earthen dam, operated by the United Nuclear Corp., failed and let loose 94 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the north fork of the Rio Puerco on Navajo Nation lands.”
Uranium is enriched to be used as fuel for nuclear power. However, this capability can be a step toward the highly enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons. Remember the debate around Iran? Our choice to approve nuclear power sends a message to other nations that constructing reactors is desirable, and in fact, the “technology of tomorrow.”
The technology of tomorrow will be paid for in taxpayer dollars, but what is the cost to our health and to the earth?
Black History Month, updated, in pix and vocals
Like it? Share it!
Well, it’s February, and you know what that means, don’t you? Some might claim it heralds the arrival of Punxsutawney Phil and his forecast (it was for six more weeks of winter, as the East Coast, victims of Snowpocalypse, will wearily verify). And that wouldn’t be wrong.
But it’s also Black History Month, that four-week period where elementary schools are rife with reports on people like Rosa Parks or (one of my personal favs) George Washington Carver. And even though there are some cracks to be made about how this country’s celebration of black history occurs in the calendar’s shortest month, some solid education and thoughtful reflection of how things of have changed — and haven’t — can still be found in these 28 days.
Take, for example, this photo essay from The New Yorker. In some 19 portraits, more than 30 people who played pivotal roles in the Civil Rights Movement — or who had relatives who did — are pictured. Charlayne Hunter-Gualt, the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia (and currently a journalist for PBS and NPR), the daughters of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz, and Muhammad Ali are included. The list goes on. It’s an amazing photo spread. And better still, there’s audio with the pix. The whole spread is complemented nicely by an essay by editor David Remnick.
It’s a great testament to the strength and courage of those who stood up to fight when fighting could’ve meant you’d lose your life. And it’s enough to make you wish it was Black History Month every month. And Latino History Month. And Women’s History Month. And Queer History Month. And Native American History Month. And…
Extra, extra: Different ways to see — and hear — the Olympics
Like it? Share it!
Can you see it? There, off in the distance, the Olympic Torch wending its way to Vancouver, for the start of the 2010 Games on Feb. 12. Isn’t it just exciting? Well, maybe if you’re NBC, which has a lock on TV coverage in the U.S., allowing only live online coverage of hockey and curling. Ain’t that sweet?
Still, there are a few other ways to get your coverage of the Games, as they’re called: If you’re going to be in Vancouver, you pick up a copy of one of our sister publications, Megaphone, the city’s street paper. It’s a special double issue, focused on the Downtown Eastside, the much-maligned section of Vancouver that provides a stark contrast to all the glitz, glamour and gold the Games offer. Copies go for $5, and will be on sale throughout the Olympics and the Paralympics, which run from March 12-21.
Or, if you find yourself in Canada and think it’s time to brush on your Objibway or Inuktitut, you have another option: You can watch the Olympics via the country’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, a partnership of several networks that will offer the Games in 22 languages, from Native tongues to the languages of immigrant populations. (The Opening and Closing ceremonies will only be featured in 13 languages.) And while you may not be able to understand Gujarati or Mechif, isn’t it good to know that when U.S. figure skater Johnny Weir competes, many of Canada’s residents will be able to hear about his outré outfits in their own tongue?
More from Jaron Lanier
Like it? Share it!
Rob Alford’s interview with Jaron Lanier in the current issue was about the limitations of technology, from social media platforms to the determinative force of free-for-all content. As always, we had to cut a fascinating conversation down to fit in 1.75 pages of newsprint. Here’s the unabridged transcript of the interview, with Lanier discussing his book’s surprising reception in the computing world.
Lanier, by the way, had just appeared on KUOW’s Weekday program before his conversation with us. Thanks to the KUOW staff for kindly lending us a quiet room in which to record.
My “Structural Objection to Society”
Like it? Share it!
It’s that time of year again. About a thousand people last week in King County hit the bricks in the pre-dawn hours for the federally mandated one-night count.
It’s become a bit of a ritual. Bil Block, the head of the Committee to End Homelessness, will say we are succeeding. Should actual count numbers not support that statement, he will complain that the count is inaccurate. Alison Eisinger, the head of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, will say the number, regardless of up or down, finds way too many people and is, by its nature, an under-count. She will express faith in the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness because she heads a coalition of service providers and they expect that of her. It’s probably safer to say it than not.
And then there will be me, the Man From the Moon, saying that homelessness is an expression of our nation’s relentless descent into deepening inequality, and that the 10YP stops far short of addressing root problems, and therefore cannot on its own succeed.
This year, CR Douglas convened us all on City Inside/Out for the post-count conversation.
Bill was unusually keen this year to steer the discussion from vexing problems of supply and demand to individual successes. An article by NYT columnist Nicholas Kristoff on selling African aid one successful uplifting face at a time has become the new 10YP media strategy du jour. He made a few attempts to go there, but CR kept bringing him back to his core competencies: fudging the numbers to look like progress and sounding optimistic.
Linda Rasmussen from the YWCA sat between us to offer the service provider’s middle ground of “yes there are successes” and “no it is not enough.” To my left sat Paul Guppy of the Washington Policy Center, who seasoned the mix with his anti-tax, “government-solutions-to-poverty-will-always-fail, there is no society, there are only individuals, and we should fear them” message.
For my part, “Is the Ten Year Plan Working?” just sounded like a dumb question. The plan, I said, can only solve homelessness to an extent that is acceptable to those in power, meaning those who don’t exactly love the poor. My job, my mission, is to fire photon torpedoes until the Plan’s system-salving invisibility cloak is finally disabled.
Alison was no help at all. Her interview in the 8 minute set-up piece, was all about the optimism. If she’s heard of pre-count sweeps activity, she didn’t say. Team player.
I was clearly on my own here.
My Man On the Moon standing was clarified when CR Douglas raised the issue of my “structural objection to society” and stole what is usually Bill’s rap: the odds of my revolution happening are pretty much nil. Our stand then must be with the tinkerers and mitigators, for they may not inherit the earth, but at least they shall receive the funding.
Here’s what I think. When people preemptively surrender the possibility of system change as a solution, they pretty much give up the whole game. I’m always astonished by the tendency of mainstream “homeless advocacy” to begin from there. That’s not fighting homelessness, That’s accommodation to radical inequality and social dehumanization. We have to do better.
Olympic torch arrival shines light on Vancouver’s Eastside
Like it? Share it!
Hey, it’s gold medal time. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics start on Feb. 12 and, chances are, if you don’t have tix yet, you’ll probably have to watch the Bobsleigh competition on TV or computer. Of course, if you live there, you might have a better chance of seeing it firsthand.
That’s probably not the case for people who live in Vancouver’s Eastside, a rough-and-tumble district in the city’s urban core. A place where the homeless are visible, where drug deals can be seen and where the impact of poverty is hard to ignore: It’s a place tourists are often told to avoid. After all, who wants to see life’s dark truths, when you can see the pretty-pretty?
Well, here’s a little photo slideshow of the darker side, courtesy of the NYTimes. The pix go with the story, “In the Shadow of the Olympics,” which certainly is worth a read. But you know: Sometimes, pix say it all. And while these may not say everything, they at least say something. Which is better than nothing.
Good news for local homeless youth programs: $7.75M in grants
Like it? Share it!
In the early morning hours of Jan. 29, the One Night Count found 5 percent fewer homeless people in King County than the year before (2,675 people for year 2010, as opposed to 2,827 for year 2009). Of this year’s current total, only 17 people under 18 years of age were counted, in Seattle, Renton and Federal Way. That’s not a lot of young people, but still: Wouldn’t it be better if the number was zero?
Which begs the question: How could that happen? The charitable group Raynier Institute & Foundation may not have the answer, but it might have a partial solution: Provide money to organizations serving this community, so they can offer more housing and shelter to homeless youth. And so the foundation did just that, giving out grants to the tune of $7.75M.
Raynier Institute & Foundation announced on Feb. 4 that YouthCare — which provides a drop-in center, offers emergency, short- and long-term housing, not to mention job training to homeless youth — will receive two grants totaling $3.6M to help create 15 emergency shelter beds, as well as helping to retire a mortgage; and ROOTS — which offers shelter and a free meal to homeless young people between 18 and 25 — will receive two grants amounting to $2.05M, to underwrite services and pay for capital improvements. Another $2.1M will go toward the “Catalyst,” a pilot program co-created by YouthCare and ROOTS that focuses on homeless youth who are most marginalized; the program is currently underway at the Straley House.
Hip hip hooray to the Raynier Institute & Foundation, for giving Seattle a little bit — make that a lot — of good news. Or, as young people like to say: The Raynier Institute & Foundation gets major props.
Still alive: Housing Trust bill and ban on insurers using credit scores
Like it? Share it!
A bill that would have raised a $100 million bond for the Housing Trust Fund, the state’s main source of construction funding for affordable housing, died Monday in the House when Rep. Mark Miloscia’s (D-Federal Way) HB 2906 didn’t make it out of committee. But on Wednesday the legislation was reborn as House Bill 3177, a new bill put forward by Rep. Sharon Nelson (D-Maury Island).
Even though Tuesday was the cutoff for House bills to make it out of their policy committees, Nelson is hoping to buy extra time for the effort by getting the bill referred to one of the House’s fiscal committees, which have until Feb. 9 to vote out legislation. The $100 million bond would be paid back by adding a $62 fee when existing mortgage loans change hands. Without the new revenue, housing advocates say, low-income housing production in the state will come to a halt in the coming year, as the $100 million allocated to the Housing Trust in 2009 is already committed to projects.
The Senate Committee on Financial Institutions, Housing & Insurance also passed a version of the bill sponsored by Sen. Joe McDermott (D-West Seattle), SB 6817, to the Ways & Means Committee on Wednesday. Another bill that would have required banks to give homeowners on unemployment a one-year pass before foreclosure—SB 6694—didn’t make the cut, however, ending hopes this session for stopping foreclosure actions.
The debate over insurance companies using credit scores, education or income levels to set insurance rates is also still alive: Senate Bill 6252, a bill sponsored by Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) to ban the practice, made it out of the Labor, Commerce & Consumer Protection Committee on Wednesday.
“Respect Washington” initiative targets illegal immigrants—again
Like it? Share it!
Here’s a group of people who just won’t take no for an answer. But, according to today’s article in The Seattle Times, they think they stand a better chance this year—after five previous failures—to get enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot that would outlaw providing non-emergency services or benefits to illegal immigrants. Why? In the Great Recession, The Times reports, the initiative’s backers at Respect Washington believe more out-of-work citizens will sign their petitions.
In addition, The Times says, “The measure, I-1056, would require all employers — public and private — to use a free federal employment-verification system, E-Verify, to weed out those ineligible to work legally in the U.S.” Hard to believe that all citizens, particularly Hispanics, would not be looked up in this verification system, which immigrant rights activists have repeatedly pointed out is riddled with errors. Not good news for legal workers of any color.
Nickelsville moving Friday
Like it? Share it!
From our friends living in the tent city named in honor of Seattle’s last mayor:
After a great 90-day stay at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, Nickelsville moves again. This will be our 11th move in 17 months. This time, we’ve been invited to stay at Greater Mt. Baker Baptist Church, led by Pastor Kenneth Ransfer. Join us Friday as we move-out from the old site and set-up community spaces with our new temporary host. We will be at both locations throughout the day.
In the meantime, we are waiting for Mayor Michael McGinn to respond to our request for a meeting. As always, we are grateful for the support we’ve received from the people of Seattle, its churches, and other organizations as we seek our goal: a permanent site that can hold up to 1,000 people. Together we can find a solution.
New Hope Missionary Baptist Church is located at 124 21st Ave. Greater Mt. Baker Baptist Church is at 2425 S. Jackson St. (east of the Red Apple grocery at Jackson and 23rd).
News from the Poorhouse
Like it? Share it!
While the Winter Olympics are soon to begin, another starkly different event is taking place as well. In Vancouver B.C., approximately 500 people will participate in the “Poverty Olympics”. The event, organized by the Carnegie Community Acton Project, is aimed at “…trying to embarrass Canada in the eyes of the world because of the poverty that it’s creating among its own citizens…” The “Poverty Olympics” occur on February 7th and have three mascots – Itchy the Bedbug, Chewy the Rat, and Creepy the Cockroach.
It is common knowledge times are tough in America, and the world, at the moment. However, poverty is now hitting the American middle-class like never before. Today 1 in 5 Americans is unemployed or underemployed, 1 in 9 can’t make their minimum credit-card payments, and 120,000 families a month are filing for bankruptcy. The Commerce Department, this week, released a report saying that it is harder to “live and maintain a middle-class lifestyle than it was 20 years ago…” One of the main reasons sighted for this hardship is the ever-climbing cost of health-care (which has risen 325% in the last 20 years) and sharp increase in the median house price (which has risen 150% in the past 20 years).
Another aspect of the hardships many are feeling currently is illustrated by a poll recently released by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). The study reported that 18.5% of families polled said that they – at some point in the last 12 months – did not have enough money to buy food necessary for the family. This number only represented families without children, for those with children the percentage rose to over 25% who could not obtain necessary food. These increases are the largest in recent history in the United States.
Between 2000 and 2008 the percentage of poor people living in the U.S. rose by 15.4%, nearly twice the growth rate of the overall population. Surprisingly the poverty rate in the suburbs has gone up over 25% in the same time period, and is growing much faster than the national average or the urban poverty rate. The suburbs now contain the largest growing poor population in the United States.
Next Thursday: Come support the Olympia Newswire
Like it? Share it!
It’s been a little less than a month since Real Change formed an editorial partnership with a start-up journalism project to cover critical stories during this year’s state legislative session.
It’s thrilling work. The wire is publishing stories that wouldn’t be otherwise told: of the challenges to public education, to a sustainable tax system, to social programs that meet people’s basic needs for income and health care.
But it needs support. The business model of conventional print journalism has deflated. The nation’s flagship publications are bleeding money: the Washington Post lost $53.8 million in the first quarter of 2009, while the New York Times lost $74.5 million. What we see in Seattle, after the P-I’s closure, is that experienced professionals are chronically underemployed, doing public relations for the institutions they formerly covered, or not working at all. What remains at SeattlePI.com is a few people spread way too thing.
Everyone’s looking for new ways of doing things. Well, here’s one: non-profit public interest journalism that’s focused in its mission and fills a gap.
Please come on out to a special mid-session talk about the high-stakes legislative session with me, Trevor Griffey, George Howland Jr., and Margie Slovan. We’ll talk about how state officials are wrestling with the $2.6 billion deficit: the hard choices they’re confronted with, the contrast between what’s in the interest of a balanced budget and what’s in the interest of our state’s residents.
Please see the Facebook event invite, or, if you’re not FB-ified, here’s the Evite invitation. Or — oh heck, here’s the details:
The Olympia Newswire Presents: A Mid-Session Review/ Preview
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Bar 41 @ B&O Espresso
204 Belmont Ave E (enter from Olive)
Seattle
Co-sponsored by Real Change & Reclaim the Media. It is free and open to all, but donations will be requested.
House bill to ban insurers from using credit scores bites dust; up to Senate
Like it? Share it!
Opponents of using credit scores to set insurance premiums lost a battle to get House Bill 2513 out of committee this morning in the Legislature, but not before putting up a dramatic fight.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Sharon Nelson (D-Maury Island), would have banned the use of credit scores to set insurance rates, a practice the industry says is a good predictor of risk but critics argue is discriminatory to minorities and unwarranted in tough economic times when people can’t make credit card payments due to layoffs.
The bill was set for a vote this morning in the House Committee on Financial Institutions & Insurance, but at the start of the meeting, committee members immediately went into a closed caucus. When they finished, Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos (D-Seattle) put forward a substitute bill that, instead of prohibiting insurance credit scoring in Washington state, would have commissioned a study on the effects of the practice. The study would have been paid for by charging insurance companies a 10-cent fee on driving abstracts, or data, that insurers purchase from the state.
Before a final vote in which the bill was defeated, each committee member weighed in.
“I’m really disappointed in this, that it’s down to a study,” said Rep. John McCoy (D-Everett). For people of color, because of a practice called red-lining, he said, “there are circumstances (in which) institutions won’t make loans to these individuals, so consequently they have to do everything by cash.”
“They don’t have a credit score, they have no rating,” McCoy said, and that creates a situation of more red-lining. “They run into this every day,” he said, “and it’s quite discouraging.”
“I’m disappointed this bill is even in front of us,” said Rep. Jay Rodne (R-North Bend). “Credit scoring has been proven as a reliable acturarial assessment to determine one’s credit risk and one’s risk in general ... We have to start emphasizing personal responsibility in this Legislature.”
The companion, Senate Bill 6252, remains alive for now in the Senate, where it’s scheduled for a vote at 1:30 p.m. in the Committee on Labor and Commerce & Consumer Protection.
No Reason for Pride
Like it? Share it!
What do you call it when, in 2009, the One Night Count of Homeless People in Seattle found 2,827 homeless people outdoors after midnight, for a 2% increase over 2008, but this year found “just” 2,759, for a 5% decrease? A statistically insignificant variation. The difficulties involved in counting homeless people after dark are, no matter how “good” we’ve become at this, daunting at best. A few points up. A few points down. I’d say it’s about the same, as far as we can tell.
To say that this 5% “decline” is evidence that the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is “working” is a bit of a reach. It’s a little like the head of Homeland Security saying the “system worked” when civilian passengers catch a terrorist in the act of lighting explosives on an airplane.
In 2006, the Year the One Night Count began, there were 1,946 people counted outside. Even though the count has expanded to add some new areas, to call a 42% increase since the plan began “success” is just reality-challenged..
“Ending Homelessness” means that, coming up on the midway-point, the number should be down from where it began, not up. Right?
Car campers counted this year were up. 891 were found, compared to last year’s 852. This, even though the sample is small and the numbers lack accuracy, is interesting. While calls for shelter to the city’s 2-1-1 emergency line saw a 11% drop, the two largest categories of callers over 2009, heat and light assistance and rental assistance, went up by 25% and 29% respectively.
What happens when middle class people become homeless? I’ll tell you. They do not show up at Union Gospel or DESC. They stay with friends and family, or, worst comes to worst, they sleep in their car.
As services continue to be pared away during these times of increasing economic vulnerability, the worst is yet to come.
Five percent down
Like it? Share it!
We’re not talking about home loans. This morning SKCCH announced the results of last night’s One Night Count, and
the number of people living on the streets of King County is down 5% since last year.
Five percent fewer people (that’s still 2,759, mind you) without shelter on a dry, relatively balmy night: counting with a group in Kent, I passed a bank sign saying the temperature was 42 degrees.
Maybe Danny Westneat was on to something.
Bankers say no to Housing Trust bill
Like it? Share it!
At a time when the economy is stalled and construction jobs, in particular, have taken a heavy hit, affordable housing advocates say there’s no better time to put money into the state’s Housing Trust Fund, the primary source for affordable housing construction in the state.
HB 2906, sponsored by Rep. Mark Miloscia (D-Federal Way), would do that by issuing a $100 million bond for the Trust Fund. The bond would paid back by charging a $62 document recording fee when a home’s deed of trust is resold. The $62 fee is already collected today at the time a home is purchased, with $48 of the money directed to affordable housing efforts under four previous bills passed by the Legislature since 2002.
In a hearing this morning before the House Local Government & Housing Committee, however, representatives of the state’s banking industry said enough is enough. Marc Gaspard, speaking for both the Washington Mortgage Lenders Association and Washington Financial League, said his organizations had supported the previous efforts at raising recording fees to pay for affordable housing, but it was with the understanding that the fees would not be applied to later deed-of-trust transactions.
Miloscia said that was not his understanding. But Denny Eliason, a lobbyist for the Washington Bankers Association, explained that lenders would have few choices but to charge the extra fee to the home buyer on the front end, doubling or tripling the $62 the purchaser already has to pay.
Once loans are made, Eliason said, lenders bundle and sell them as securities to large financial institutions. It would be next to impossible, he said, to figure out a way to charge the institutions the $62, so lenders would have to raise interest rates to cover the cost or try to estimate how many times a loan might trade hands over the course of its life and charge that to the home buyer, possibly resulting in a front-end cost in the hundreds of dollars.
“This will be borne, we believe, very directly by the first-time home buyer,” Eliason said.
The Housing Trust Fund was reduced in 2009 Legislature from $200 million to $100 million. Housing advocates say that money is already committed to projects and that, in the coming 2010-11 fiscal year, there will be nothing in the way of state funding for affordable housing without more revenue.
Local jurisdictions such as Seattle depend on the funds, said Daniel Malone of the Washington State Coalition for the Homeless, to match dollars they have already allocated for affordable housing. By law, he said, the Seattle Housing Levy that voters renewed last fall can pay for no more than 40 percent of a given project, making Housing Trust Fund dollars critical to building any new affordable housing in the coming year.
Another affordable housing bill heard today by the committee—HB 2900, put forward by Rep. Roger Goodman (D-Kirkland)—seeks to replicate the model of Seattle’s 1811 Eastlake, a building developed and run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center that houses chronic inebriates and allows them to drink on the premises.
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, residents of the building have cost the state and city $4 million less in emergency room, jail and medical costs in just one year, DESC Executive Director Bill Hobson told the committee, the majority of it in Medicaid dollars that the state saved.
Goodman said the model should be rolled out to other counties, but that a substitute bill will be offered in place of his original legislation.
Marijuana still in play in Senate
Like it? Share it!
Last week, the House Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness Committee voted down HB 2401 and HB 1177, two bills aimed, respectively, at legalizing and decriminalizing the possession of marijuana.
But that doesn’t mean decriminalization has died this session. Doug Honig of the ACLU of Washington points out that a bill introduced in the Senate last year to decriminalize pot—SB 5615, introduced by Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle)—is still in play, though not scheduled at this time for a vote in any committee.
The bill would decriminalize adult possession of small amounts of marijuana by reclassifying it as a $100 civil infraction that can be paid like a traffic ticket, rather than as a misdemeanor with mandatory jail time.
The state’s Office of Financial Management estimates the bill would save state government and local jurisdictions $16 million per year—at the risk, opponents in law enforcement and drug treatment say, of sending a message to the young that drug use is OK.
Says Honig in an e-mail: “Though HB 1177 did not make it out of committee last week, the companion bill SB 5615 is alive and we are hopeful it will move forward ... The Washington State Bar Association’s Board of Governors has endorsed the bill, it has picked up substantial support among legislators, and last session SB 5615 passed out of committee in the Senate with a bipartisan ‘pass’ recommend.”
Governor’s aide questions “Disability Lifeline” bill
Like it? Share it!
Gov. Christine Gregoire and Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson both want to reform a state disability called General Assistance-Unemployable. But they don’t agree on how.
At a committee hearing Thursday on House Bill 2782, legislation introduced by Dickerson (D-Seattle) to reform GAU and change its name to Disability Lifeline, Gregoire aide Alexis Oliver raised objections that could indicate the governor does not support the bill.
“The bill is trying to achieve cost savings through better management,” Oliver, the governor’s executive policy adviser, told members of the House Human Services Committee. But, “It’s very hard to understand how the few policy changes (in the bill) would create any type of programmatic savings.”
The governor has proposed rescuing GAU program, which she put on the chopping block in her December budget, by reducing the monthly grant recipients get from $339 to $250 and putting a lifetime cap of six months on the benefits, which come with state-paid medical coverage. The Security Lifeline bill proposed by Dickerson, (D-Seattle), chair of the Human Services Committee, would maintain full benefits without a cap, but seeks to move people more quickly from GAU to federal SSI – Supplemental Security Income for the poor and disabled.
The legislation would do that by giving the Department of Social and Health Services a three-month deadline to put new recipients in a separate category called General Assistance-Expedited for people the state expects to get SSI. Once they get SSI, the feds reimburse the state for what it has paid out in GAX funds.
Dickerson said it currently takes DSHS up to 18 months to make the decision and, last year, $614 million in federal funds went unclaimed.
Oliver said it generally takes six to nine months to document a disability claim for SSI, however. “The timeline is a tad bit constrained,” Oliver said. And “we’re not understanding how that would capture significant cost savings.”
Dickerson said she would revise the timeline in the bill, but “millions of dollars are lost,” she said, “if we accept the timeline of 18 months.”
Oliver also questioned what she called “vague language” in the bill to give GAU recipients priority for substance abuse treatment and, for those leaving GAU, priority to get on the state’s Basic Health Plan. She also questioned how a housing pilot that Dickerson calls for in the bill would be paid for.
The two-county pilot would pay GAU recipients a lesser grant of $250 but provide housing, Dickserson said. It would be modeled on 1811 Eastlake, a project of the Downtown Emergency Services Center that does not require sobriety of residents. About 25 percent of GAU recipients statewide, and up to 40 percent in King County, are homeless, Dickerson said.
The Security Lifeline bill would also support a philanthropic effort already led by Seattle’s Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to create a “one-stop” Internet portal where people can sign up for benefits and expand the Food Stamp Employment Training program from 12 to 15 colleges.
The governor’s aide said a full proposal for the governor’s plan to reform GAU should be released next week.
UPDATE: Gregoire spokesperson Karina Shagren said Monday that the governor has taken no position on the Security Lifeline bill.
Health care reform on the rocks? Change the rules, McDermott says
Like it? Share it!
The pill is bitter, critics say of the final health care reform bill being hammered out right now between the U.S. House and Senate. But with Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts, where a Republican won the seat long held by Democrat Edward Kennedy, Americans better take the medicine quick or face losing health care reform altogether.
That was the message Sunday from Congressman Jim McDermott and two key state legislators on health care – Sen. Karen Keiser and Rep. Eileen Cody – at a union hall forum where they urged more than 250 health care activists and constituents to accept compromise and press for passage of some legislation, even if far from perfect, even if Democrat Martha Coakley lost the Massachusetts Senate race and the 60-vote majority needed to block the Republicans from filibustering reform to death.
“If we don’t get this passed now, we’re not going to see it in our lifetimes,” said state Rep. Eileen Cody (D-West Seattle), chair of the House Health Care & Wellness Committee. “We can’t lose this one. We’re too close.”
On Tuesday, Coakley, the state attorney general and heir apparent to Kennedy, lost to Republican Scott Brown, a political newcomer. That doesn’t mean health care reform is over, said McDermott (D-Seattle), but it could mean Democrats will have to change the rules to get it.
“My resolution to the Senate: Change the filibuster rule,” he said, by reducing the number of votes required from two-thirds to a simple majority of 55. “We’re not stuck on this 60 votes. That’s not democracy. Democracy is majority rule, not 60 percent rule.”
Senators won’t want to give up the filibuster, but the Democratic leadership “is going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting if they lose that seat in Massachusetts,” McDermott said.
Another plan, The New York Times reported Sunday, could be to call for a House vote on the Senate version of the bill, which the House could pass as is and send directly to President Obama for signature.
In both versions of the bill, insurance companies would reap millions in tax subsidies for health policies, detractors said at Sunday’s forum and, under the House bill, women would lose private health coverage for abortion. But, like Medicare before it, the bill can be fixed once it’s passed, McDermott said.
“Using this as back door to undo Roe v. Wade,” he said of the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in 1973, “is simply not going to stand.”
Day of Advocacy
Like it? Share it!
Yesterday I went to Olympia for an event sponsored by a number of not for profit organizations, too many to mention really. The focus was on five legislative priorities, to create, preserve and maintain quality affordable housing, income supports for working families, mortgage foreclosure protection, quality affordable health care, and a balanced approach to the budget.
Two of the speakers made a particular impression on me. A mother talked about her struggles raising twins one of whom is autistic. I cannot remember all of the details but DSHS told her she could go to school for nine months, limiting her to earning a vocational certificate, and to qualify for assistance for her autistic son using her home based business the business would have to earn 250 percent of the poverty level, thus disqualifying her for benefits.
Another woman, an immigrant spoke about her need to act as an interpreter for her very ill father, and how she was the one to inform him of two amputations, and finally she had to deliver the bad news of his imminent death. No child should be put in that position, and the proposed cuts in the state budget eliminated interpreter services.
My elected representative was not available today, but low and behold when the march ended at the Capitol steps and the speeches started, Larry Seaquist was introduced. When he was done speaking I made my way down to thank him for coming out today and handed him the issue of Real Change with the 2010 Declaration of a State of Emergency.
I enjoyed the workshops and being with so many people passionate about the welfare of others. When Martin Luther King was quoted “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” It made think of the King County budget which dedicates 70 percent of revenue to peace & justice while nothing is dedicated to social services. This is not to say King County spends nothing on social services but that nothing is dedicated or mandated.
Supreme Court to rule on release of R-71 petitions against gay marriage
Like it? Share it!
The final word on whether initiative petitions are public record in Washington state is going to come from the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Washington secretary of state’s office said Friday that the high court has agreed to hear a case brought by Protect Marriage Washington, the group that fought last year to defeat the state’s new domestic partnership law through Referendum 71. They argue that people who signed petitions to put Ref. 71 on the ballot could be harassed or hurt by gay activists if the names are revealed.
The court is expected to hear oral arguments in the case as early as April 19.
Yesler Terrace: Eye on the ball?
Like it? Share it!
So many committees, so few members: Less than half of the 25-member citizen committee that’s monitoring the Seattle Housing Authority’s plans for redeveloping Yesler Terrace showed up Thursday for the first meeting of 2010 – a year when the public will have a lot more to scrutinize as the agency moves forward on a potential $310 million project to replace the First Hill site’s 561 low-income apartments.
Adrienne Quinn, who resigned from her post this month as head of Seattle’s Office of Housing with the arrival of Mayor Mike McGinn, is no longer participating, said committee Chair Germaine Covington. Others were absent, she said, because the housing authority gave them little advance notice and they had made other plans.
That left 11 members, including Covington, who spent the evening deciding how to divide themselves among four subcommittees that will carry much of the discussion this year on various aspects of the project. The subcommittee topics came from a housing authority list of subjects the group voted on, with “streetscape” design drawing the most votes and “community services” and “office” drawing the least.
The three other subcommittees will focus on what types of housing and open space the development should have and how to create a “social infrastructure” of educational and economic opportunities for Yesler Terrace’s future public housing residents. The work will parallel an environmental impact study of the 30-acre site. The housing authority plans to release a first draft of the study for public comment in August, said Brian Sullivan, development manager for Yesler Terrace.
The project follows redevelopments of public housing at Holly Park, High Point and Rainier Vista and is the housing authority’s largest to date: The site’s World War II-era units, which overlook downtown, will be rebuilt in a largely privately owned community of office buildings and high-rises that will include up to 5,000 residences when finished. The agency expects to finance the project largely by selling much of the site’s publicly owned land to private developers.
“Hands off my doobie”
Like it? Share it!
It’s not just smokers who want to legalize marijuana: Lawyers, doctors and a law enforcement group endorsed the idea Wednesday at a House hearing on whether the state should decriminalize or legalize the herb.
“The way we handle the War on Drugs is clearly wrong and we can do better,” said James Anderson, president of the King County Bar Association.
“As doctors, we are concerned about the health consequences,” said Charles Heaney, executive director of the King County Medical Society, which supports decriminalization. “People who are incarcerated are at risk for physical violence, sexual assault and related communicable diseases and exposure to harder drugs a lot more harmful than marijuana.”
House Bill 1177, sponsored by Rep. Dave Upthegrove (D-Des Moines), would decriminalize marijuana by reducing the penalty for possessing 40 grams or less from a misdemeanor to a civil infraction. Instead of getting arrested, a user 18 or older would get a ticket of $100. Possession by those under 18 would remain a misdemeanor.
Another bill introduced by Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), House Bill 2401, would legalize marijuana altogether for those 21 and older. Sales would be regulated by the state through state liquor stores. Dickerson said the plan could generate more than $300 million for the state over a two-year period.
Both bills face questions about whether they would run afoul of federal prohibitions on marijuana, but Shankar Narayan, legislative director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, said 13 states had already decriminalized the drug. He added the state would save at least $10 million in criminal prosecution by doing so—$6 million less than identified in the fiscal note accompanying HB 1177.
Marijuana laws have not only served to drive up the price of the drug for traffickers, others said, but can give criminal records to young men and women that keep them from getting financial aid for college or jobs—for no clear reason, said Gil Mobley, a physician who said he has interviewed hundreds of marijuana users in his occupational medicine practice.
“Anyone saying that MJ is addicting is either misinformed or flat out lying with a hidden agenda,” Mobley said. “It’s no more addicting than your favorite TV show, sex with your spouse or playing with your dog. [And] it is certainly not a gateway drug, any more than caffeine or Coca-Cola is.”
Don Pierce, with the Washington Association of Sheriffs, disagreed. “If you believe that it is OK for kids in school to use marijuana and be high, then you should pass either one or both of these,” he said. Marijuana is used much less frequency by the young today than alcohol specifically because it is illegal, he said.
“We have substances now that are legal [and] we have issues with impairment,” said Bruce Bjork of the Sheriffs and Police Chiefs Association. “I, for one, would prefer not have another substance that’s going to allow an impaired individual in a legal fashion during the hunting season, for instance, using a firearm, operating a vessel on a very crowded lake, operating a motor vehicle [or] flying a plane.”
But, if legislators don’t pass one of the bills, “We’re going to take it out of your hands,” said Rick Smith with Sensible Washington, a group that has filed a statewide citizens initiative to legalize marijuana. “Penalties for cannabis, no, it’s no good.”
The committee is scheduled to vote on the bills Jan. 20.
What Gregoire plans to save with $779 million in taxes
Like it? Share it!
Gov. Christine Gregoire gave the Senate Ways & Means Committee a price tag Tuesday of $779 million for the programs she would save in her “Book 2” budget, which assumes the Legislature will agree on some new taxes in that amount.
She proposed raising about $70 million of the tab by imposing the state’s Business & Occupation tax on out-of-state companies that do more than $500,000 worth of business in Washington state, even if they have no offices here.
That’s a start, but she and lawmakers would need to raise another $700 million in taxes to “buy back” the programs, which would otherwise be cut as part of $1.7 billion in state reductions she proposed in December.
The second budget, human services advocates say, still leaves $1 billion in services cuts. Among the programs she would save:
K-12 Levy Equalization – $165 million
Provides state financial support to districts with a lower than average property tax base.
Basic Health Plan – $160 million
Saves 65,000 Washingtonians from losing state health coverage.
Higher Education State Need Grant − $146 million
Restores grants to 12,300 low-income college students.
Redesigned General Assistance-Unemployable Program − $84.5 million
Imposes six-month benefit maximum, reduces grants from $339 to $250 a month.
K-12 All-day Kindergarten, Gifted Program and Reading Corps − $42 million
Funds kindergarteners in school districts with the highest levels of poverty.
Working Connections Child Care Option − $39.5 million
Partially restores childcare payments to welfare recipients.
Maternity Support Services – $28 million
Provides services to more than 50,000 women with high-risk pregnancies.
Optional Medicaid Services – $21 million
Restores dental, vision and podiatry services for Medicaid recipients.
Housekeeping for Elderly, Developmentally Disabled—$18 million
Restores housekeeping and laundry services to help 42,000 people stay in their homes.
Early Childhood Education – $10.5 million
Restores funding for more than 1,500 low-income, 3-year-old children.
Senior Citizens Services Act – $6.9 million
Helps provide meal assistance, transportation, in-home services and counseling.
Adult Hospice Care – $6.1 million
Provides end-of-life services for more than 2,600 adults.
Outpatient Drug Treatment – $5.4 million
Provides chemical dependency and detoxification services for 12,800 clients.
HIV/AIDS Client Services and AIDSNET Grants – $4.8 million
Outpatient Community Mental Health Services – $4.1 million
Children’s Apple Health Insurance – $4.1 million
Homeless shelter, with a twist
Like it? Share it!
Sometimes, if you’re looking for some help in turning your life around, you can never be sure who your ally will be. The man in the three-piece suit might stand up for you long before the self-proclaimed progressive sporting the Patagonia fleece jacket.
Case in point: Dan de Vaul. A sharp-tongue codger with a penchant for guns, Mr. de Vaul has given homeless people in recovery a place to live in San Luis Obispo, CA. Of course, just because he’s supplying housing doesn’t mean that everyone loves, or even likes, what he does. Actually, authorities have come down pretty hard on him.
The NYTimes just published a feature about Dan de Vaul that’s pretty good. But if visuals are your thing, check out Dan de Vaul in a video profile. It spells out all the issues and puts a nice, little zoning spin on NIMBY— Not in My Backyard.
News from the Poorhouse
Like it? Share it!
In Michigan child poverty rates are some of the worst in the country. A new study reveals that 1 in 5 children in Michigan are living in poverty and more than 30,000 are victims of abuse or neglect.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has approved a grant request for six Springfield, Missouri programs attempting to combat homelessness. The grant totals $894,253 and will fund 5 programs – The Kitchen Inc., Salvation Army, The Housing Authority of Springfield, and the Missouri Department of Mental Health.
In a story by Sightline Daily it was reported that Seattle, while being a city of good life-expectancy and median income, has a poverty level of 12.5 percent and an unemployment rate of 9.1 percent.
While the economy may be on the rebound a new story in USA Today reveals that the effects of the recession will continue to reverberate for years to come. Today 15.4 million people are unemployed, twice as many as in December 2007. Beyond this a cited study in the article reveals that most countries affected by postwar financial crises, on average, have an 86 percent rise in public debt after three years.
In a run-up to the hosting of the Winter Games Vancouver is doing everything possible to confront its homelessness issue. The city adding more beds to its shelters to make a total of 1,250 available to the homeless and 480 permanent housing projects were been built in the last year, with 600 more to come. These projects are part of the city’s stated goal of eradicating homelessness by 2015.
20,000 “no cuts” signatures presented to governor
Like it? Share it!
House Speaker Frank Chopp is calling it the “smart recovery.” Human services workers, low-income housing developers and educators who have formed the Rebuilding Our Futures Coalition are calling it “no cuts.”
By either name, it’s a way of saving the $1.7 billion in social programs that Gov. Gregoire put on the chopping block in December to balance the state’s budget. Yesterday, during the 2010 Legislature’s opening day, the coalition presented Gregoire and Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown (D-Spokane) with petitions and postcards from more than 20,000 Washingtonians opposing what’s called the “all-cuts” budget.
The group, which says it gathered the signatures in just a few days and has grown to more than 100 organizations, says the cuts would leave hundreds of thousands without health care, education, housing, and environmental protection. In a presentation scheduled today at 3:30 p.m. before the state Senate’s Ways & Means Committee, Gregoire plans to outline how she would “buy back” about $700 million in services such as the Basic Health Plan and Apple Health for children, in part by closing a tax loophole that allows out-of-state companies doing business in Washington to pay no tax.
Tony Lee, advocacy director for Solid Ground, a Seattle nonprofit that provides services to low-income families, says that would still leave about $1 billion in cuts.
Dickerson looks to reform General Assistance for disabled
Like it? Share it!
If you don’t know what GAU is—a state disability program for those who can’t work—you’re not alone. For 18,000 people like Marvin Gnad, a 48-year-old who became homeless after medical problems threw him out of work a few years ago, the $339 a month and medical benefits they get from the state’s General Assistance-Unemployable is all they’ve got.
But they may not have it much longer if the state can’t find a way to save the program, which Gov. Christine Gregoire put on the chopping block in the supplemental budget she proposed in December to fill a shortfall of $2.6 billion.
After the governor makes her State of the State address tomorrow at noon, she’s scheduled to appear before the Senate Ways & Means Committee at 3:30 p.m. to discuss what the politicos call her “Book 2” budget—a second budget in which she’s expected to put a price tag on the social programs she would “buy back” if lawmakers approve any tax increases. In December, she said would like to see about $700 million in tax increases, but Gregoire is waiting to see what Congress does with a jobs bill and healthcare reform before putting any taxes on the table.
The governor’s proposal would only save $250 of Marvin Gnad’s monthly check and it’s not like he had a lot of spending money to begin with at $339. “I’d lose my place,” Gnad says of the room he rents from a nonprofit agency for $60 a month. “I’d be back on the streets.”
Enter Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson (D-Seattle), chair of the House’s Human Services Committee, with a new idea for saving the state disability program. For starters, she says, it’s time to change GAU’s name so people know what it is.
“One of the reasons GAU has had such a difficult time with proper funding is that neither policymakers nor the public understand who these adults are,” Dickerson says. “GAU means nothing to the public and often nothing to legislators, who have to be knowledgeable about 1,000 different things.”
Dickerson’s multifacted Security Lifeline bill would change the GAU program and its name to Disability Lifeline.
Lawmakers would still have to come up with funding to continue recipients’ $339 a month and state medical benefits. But if they are eligible for Supplemental Security Income—federal disability assistance for the poor—Dickerson would put them on a fast track to get it. That, in turn, would put the state on a fast track to get repaid: The feds reimburse the state for all disability funds paid out to individuals accepted by SSI.
“The more people we get to do that, the less it costs the state,” Dickerson says.
The bill would step things up by giving the Department of Social and Health Services a 90-day deadline to decide whether a new state disability recipient is eligible to apply for federal SSI and should be put in a category called General Assistance-Expedited, or GAX. The state currently takes up to 18 months to make this decision, Dickerson says.
The bill would also expand the state’s Food Stamp, Employment and Training program and create a one-stop website where people can apply for federal, state and local benefits, ranging from college financial aid to nutrition programs.
“A majority [of GAU recipients] are battling mental illness, many are homeless, and a large share are veterans who have served our country,” House Speaker Frank Chopp said Monday during his opening speech in the Legislature. “These reforms will save lives, save money, and make ‘general assistance’ more understandable to the general public.”
Office of Housing director leaves
Like it? Share it!
From the McGinn campaign:
SEATTLE – Today Mayor Mike McGinn announced that he had accepted the resignation of Office of Housing Director Adrienne Quinn, who is leaving Seattle to live closer to her elderly parents. Quinn served as housing director for five years, the longest serving housing director since the office was created in 1999. Her resignation is effective February 5.
Quinn is leaving for a job as VP of Public Policy and Government Relations for Enterprise Community Partners, an affordable housing tax credit provider. (She’ll also be back East, says the Mayor’s press release, closer to her aging parents.) Enterprise’s financing, and the Office of Housing’s, allows local non-profit developers to build and preserve below-market rate apartments.
I’m expecting a call from Quinn tomorrow for more on the move.
Something beautiful and amazing
Like it? Share it!
This woman in Seattle is doing something very cool she calls Freestyle volunteering. Basically she connects with homeless and mentally ill folks she meets on the street and takes them out for coffee. That’s it, one hour of coffee and companionship and seeing someone as a human being. Too bad that’s so rare. Good on her for being there and showing us the way . Here’s the link: http://freestylevolunteer.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/about-freestyle-volunteering/
This week in Olympia
Like it? Share it!
It’s the start of a brand new legislative session, with high stakes and lots on the agenda. Here is a preview of some items important to health care and human services this week.
House Bill 2484 sets a new 60-day notification standard for landlords to end a tenant’s month-to-month rental agreement, with some exceptions. It’s getting a public hearing in the Judiciary committee on Wednesday at 8 a.m.
A holdover from last year, when the House passed it 59-37 but the Senate failed to vote, Engrossed House Bill 2138 frees up surplus government land for construction of affordable housing. It’s getting a hearing at the same time, Wednesday at 8 a.m., before the House’s Local Government & Housing committee.
House Bill 2497, a bill that would increase the penalty for assaulting a homeless person — classifying it as a hate crime under the state’s malicious harassment law — gets a hearing before the House Public Safety & Emergency Preparedness committee on Tuesday at 10 a.m.
A day after she presents her budget “buy-back” of part of the state cuts she laid out in mid-December, Gov. Gregoire’s budget is explained in detail by the Office of Financial Management before the House Appropriations committee. That’s Wednesday at 6 p.m. in Room B of the capitol’s John L. O’Brien Building.; a public hearing will follow.
At the same time, in the next room over, human services spending gets its own overview and public hearing in front of the Health & Human Services Appropriations committee. Public feedback on the same subject continues before the same committee on Thursday at 1:30 p.m., and again, before the Ways and Means committee, at 3:30 p.m.
Committee work sessions are the legislators’ way of mulling over vital issues that aren’t captured within a given bill. They’re informal discussions in which no votes are cast, and this week they’ll address:
• Research into the child welfare system (8 a.m. Thursday before the House Early Learning & Children’s Services committee)
• The state’s use of funds from the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (10 a.m. Thursday in front of the House Community & Economic Development & Trade committee)
• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — welfare — and child care (1:30 p.m. Thursday in front of the Senate Ways & Means committee)
• Child welfare and housing (1:30 p.m. Friday with, again, the House Early Learning and Children’s Services committee).
Look for more Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, as we see which services the governor wants to buy back — and how. And look for more coverage over at the brand new Olympia Newswire, where we’ll be proudly cross-posting.
Super Stills from Surviving the Streets
Like it? Share it!
Real Change and our friends Michael Grabham and Patti Dunn of The Finish Company collected outdoor gear donations all over Seattle to help homeless folks survive the winter freeze. Coats, sleeping bags, socks, handwarmers . . .170 people served in 2 hours! Thank you for your donations.
Photography by Revel Smith
News from the Poorhouse
Like it? Share it!
In a recent article written by The Economic Times it was reported that in India 1 in 3 people are living below the poverty line. This new data reveals the poverty level of India to be far higher than once estimated – over 10 percent higher – with 37 percent of the total population living below the poverty line.
As the healthcare debate continues in the United States a recent article written by the New York Times reveals that people receiving medical benefits through Medicaid may be receiving questionable treatment. New federally funded prescription drug research reveals that children covered by Medicaid are prescribed powerful antipsychotic medications at a rate four times higher than children covered by private health insurance.
In New York City, as of December 8th, city shelters were at 99.6 percent capacity. Last week’s citywide census of homeless individuals showed that 6,975 adults were in shelters. However, this census does not include the 30,698 homeless individuals in short-term housing for homeless families or chronically homeless individuals who have entered the Safe Havens program.
In Marina, California, shelter workers are reporting a vast upswing in the number of homeless individuals who have college degrees. In the story, written by KSBW, it is reported that James Scott has recently become homeless despite degrees from UC-Berkley, MIT, and the University of Chicago.
A recent report released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors shows that requests for emergency food assistance increased by 26 percent in 2008. This is the largest average increase in demand in the last 18 years. Seattle also reported a 30 percent increase in people requesting food assistance for the first time in their lives.
Turning Points Is Here
Like it? Share it!
The Turning Points DVD has arrived and is for sale by Real Change Vendors.
If you need help finding a vendor near where you work or live check out Find a Vendor.
Description of Turning Points:
Our lives are constantly shaped by transitions - some positive, others negative, some life affirming, others crushing. All of us have stories to tell. In Turning Points we hear from eight homeless and formerly homeless Real Change vendors about the transitions in their lives. Whether its the strength of a relationship, the experience of war, or the salvation in finding community, each story illuminates the intense human ability to persevere against all odds.
Governor splits the difference
Like it? Share it!
Or nearly so. The draft budget Gov. Christine Gregoire put out today falls about a billion dollars short of balancing next year’s $2.6 billion shortfall, cutting a bunch of vital services.
Gregoire’s expected to release another document listing the tax increases that’ll fill the billion-dollar void. But by the sound of bipartisan reaction to today’s missive, she’s got an uphill battle.
Republican leaders won’t condone new taxes. Democrats will, but in ways that are very likely to continue a revenue system that leans hardest on those least able to pay: the poorest. It will be very hard to have a genuine conversation about tax reform in the midst of a crisis — especially when neither party was willing to do it in better times.
A little — and a big — story about food stamps
Like it? Share it!
Just a couple of blocks for Real Change stands one of those urban markets: full of over-priced foodstuffs, most of them of a rather poor quality. I found myself there a couple weeks ago to get some yogurt.
At the counter stood a young woman who was buying some chips and a big bottle of soda. She handed the cashier a card— an EBT card. Or, what used to be known, not so long ago as food stamps. Trouble was, she didn’t have enough on it to buy her food. She looked flustered; the cashier appeared tired. I offered to cover the difference — not even a dollar — which seemed to surprise everyone. The woman left with her food, barely able to acknowledge me, which was fine. If the situation had been reversed, I might have felt the same.
What the whole scene did was remind me of all the people I’ve known and seen who’ve used food stamps. When I was a kid in Maryland, elderly people used them at the grocery store; in Maine, where I went to college, locals shopped with them at mini-marts; on Cape Cod, where I spent my 20s, people who didn’t have winter jobs in the seasonal economy used $20 food stamps to buy an orange at A&P, then took the change and bought beer and cigarettes at the liquor store around the corner. So many people.
These days, there are even more people. A recent NY Times article, “Food Stamp Use Soars, and Stigma Fades,” spells it all out: “In more than 800 counties, [they] helps feed one in three children;” “places with soaring rolls include populous Riverside County, Calif., most of greater Phoenix and Las Vegas, [and] a ring of affluent Atlanta suburbs;” and “food stamps reach about two-thirds of those eligible.”
It’s a long article, by online standards, but it’s chock full of sad, yet important, information. And, if you can’t read it all now, then at least check out the multimedia map of the U.S., a third of the way down the page. It puts in all into color-coded context.
And makes me realize that woman I helped out, she’s not alone. Not by a long shot. And hopefully one day, her stigma will disappear.
“Women Behind Bars” not allowed behind bars
Like it? Share it!
Last year, on a journalistic visit to the Sex Offender Treatment Program at Twin Rivers Unit — part of the Monroe Correctional Complex — I visited the library. There weren’t a lot of tables and there weren’t a lot of prisoners there, but the near-dozen or so people sitting or walking around were leafing through books. Perhaps it was the writer in me, but I wondered why there weren’t more books around. But then I remembered: not every book requested by a prisoner makes into that prisoner’s hand.
Take, for example, “Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System.” Written by Silja J.A. Talvi — a Real Change board member — the non-fiction work has been banned by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, along with “Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits from Crime” by Joel Dyer. (Both books were ordered by prisoners.) Refusal to allow prisoners to have these books has led to books’ publisher, the Washington-based non-profit Prison Legal News, to file a federal lawsuit saying the prisoners were denied their constitutional rights.
Why were the books banned? According to the Criminal Justice page of change.org, the TDCJ claims they are too graphic, not because the books are critical of the prison system.
In the case of “Women Behind Bars,” the book does offer up frank language in regards to sex. But the language doesn’t aim to entice; it aims to educate, namely about sexual abuse. Even so, the Texas system i.d.’d Page 38 of Talji’s book, which contains the following passage:
“The dark secret of her life was that she had been forced to perform fellatio on her uncle when she was just four years old. … This unresolved trauma became ‘the template for a lifetime of distrust, fear uncertainty and a spirit of self-negation.’”
The 11-page lawsuit states, in part, that the “TDCJs censorship regime … is arbitrary, serves no legitimate penological purpose as applied to PLN publication[s], and violates the constitutional rights of publishers like PLN.”
In a 2007 Silja J. A. Talvi interview printed in Real Change, Talvi talked about “Women Behind Bars” and the work involved in the writing it. Among the great things she said was this:
“As a journalist, these women are my subjects. I am not supposed to be friends with them, but in truth I am. I am friends with women who are survivors. These are women who don’t trust anyone on the outside, they have been screwed their whole lives. And to get letters from them and their family members saying you gave us this ray of hope, that someone is actually listening to me, that’s a good feeling.”
One hopes, sometime soon, these women — survivors — will be able read both books. As for yourself, you can read the whole lawsuit to let Texas female prisoners receive “Women Behind Bars” and here.
Queen Anne vendor dies
Like it? Share it!
Real Change vendor Linda Spafford passed away on Wed., Nov. 4. Spafford, who sold the paper outside the Metropolitan Market in the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood, died of a heart attack.
Her maiden name was Linda J. Funston, and she moved with her family from Bismarck, North Dakota to Seattle’s Greenwood neighborhood when she was 14. Kicked out of her apartment with two kids in tow in the mid-1990s, she stayed in Belltown homeless shelters for about a year, then moved into public housing and in 1999 began selling Real Change to make ends meet.
A diabetic with high blood pressure, Spafford, 57, left behind her adult children, five grandchildren, and a small garden she kept outside her Queen Anne apartment building.
Her family is holding a memorial service Sat., Nov. 28 at 2 p.m. at the Renton Church of the Nazarene, 850 Union Ave. NE, Renton. Donations for a funeral are being accepted.
Best timeline ever
Like it? Share it!
Preparing for Wednesday’s issue, which marks 10 years since Seattle protesters ripped corporate globalization a new one, I finally spent some time at the WTO History Project, featuring an excellent trove of accounts of the protests by organizers and participants.
Their timeline of events, here, makes for gripping reading. Even having been there — I was involved with the infant Independent Media Center — I’m struck by the extraordinary success of the activists and the ham-fisted government response. Example, from the timeline:
7:15 am, Dec. 1, 1999: “Let me get this straight,” an officer says over the radio. “We’re just supposed to arrest all the protesters?” “That’s affirmative,” a supervisor answers.
For another pretty great blow-by-blow account, check out the November issue of Seattle Metropolitan, in which veteran local journo Eric Scigliano smartly reconstructs the proceedings from the wildly varying perspectives of organizers, protesters and local boosters.
Panhandling: What people are saying
Like it? Share it!
Speaking of people’s comments about begging:
Cydney Gillis has been digging through public documents from City Hall to nail down the details in the city’s new frontal attack on instances of “aggressive” panhandling. Her story this week provided some insight into Councilmember Tim Burgess’ ideas for increased policing. And it quotes just a few of the, uh, colorful comments by folks telling the government, with startling candor, to do something about these needy folk. As in, crack down on them.
Like Kevin Clark, president and CEO of Argosy Cruises. With Argosy’s waterfront presence and its perennial investments in the campaigns of local officials, you know Clark’s e-mail gets read:
I saw many more in a stack of correspondence to City Council last month. But the one that has stuck with me is from the man turning in a fiftysomething panhandler who pursued him in a slow-motion chase. The writer’s worried about what kind of harm a guy like that might do to people less imposing than himself. Money quote:
If panhandlers get beat up by hostile pedestrians, can they get workers comp?
Brother, can you spare… up to $13/hr?
Like it? Share it!
Ahh, the holidays. The season that keeps on giving. Though in this case, it may not be the season, so much as the issue: panhandling.
Perhaps you already know that City Councilmember — and former cop — Tim Burgess wants to institute new legislation to stop “aggressive panhandling.” And, from time to time, Real Change vendors get lumped in with panhandlers, making this issue — of people in need asking for financial assistance and whether they’re worthy of that assistance — all the murkier. But sometimes, a little story can say a lot more than a rant. So, here’s a story, as related by a P-I blogger.
It tells the tale of a young woman panhandling up on Capitol Hill. So much gets said about the (ulterior) motives of panhandlers, it’s hard to know what to believe. So hats off to blogger Justin Ames for at least talking to the person he was writing about. Whether or not you agree with the young woman’s motives, it may help you to realize that her actions carry no guarantees. Sitting out the rain, she can make, if she’s lucky, $13/hr. Or, if fortunes prove bad, $5/hr.
Ames’ post offers no answers, but it paints a picture of the panhandler as a human. A person. And that, all too often, gets lost in the discussion.
(Oh. And don’t forget to read the comments, too, especially the fourth one…)
Portland vs. Seattle, part billion and one
Like it? Share it!
Portland has a streetcar that actually goes somewhere. You can eat pizza, drink beer, and watch a movie in public there about as cheaply as you can in private in Seattle. And we’re one closed bookstore away from losing our reputation as a place literate folks like to live.
But as sister streetpaper Street Roots points out, we’ve got a housing levy.
Turning Points Premiere
Like it? Share it!
Premiere of Turning Points
Tuesday December 8th 7pm
Trinity United Methodist Church, Ballard
6512 23rd Ave NW
Seattle, WA, 98117
View Map
This premiere showing of Turning Points is free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception with refreshments.
Turning Points is a collaborative video-documentary created by Real Change vendors, staff, and volunteers.
Our lives are constantly shaped by transitions - some positive, others negative, some life affirming, others crushing. All of us have stories to tell. In Turning Points we hear from eight homeless and formerly homeless Real Change vendors about the transitions in their lives. Whether its the strength of a relationship, the experience of war, or the salvation in finding community, each story illuminates the intense human ability to persevere against all odds.
Turning Points will be for sale by Real Change vendors during the 2009 holiday season.
City Council eases budget cuts, restores some library hours and jobs
Like it? Share it!
Members of the Seattle City Council held a press conference today at the downtown library to congratulate themselves, in part, for rescuing some of the library hours and jobs that would have been cut next year under the mayor’s plan to fill the city’s $72 million budget hole.
The $860,000 in restored funding will keep 11 branches open seven days a week and cut fewer library jobs. But other branches will still close two days a week and lose staff. Among other differences with the mayor’s plan, the council fully restored $40,000 to food bank and meals programs and $186,000 that the mayor had sought to cut in human services advocacy money that funds groups like the Seattle Human Services Coalition.
The council also restored more than $1 million in funding for three programs that help the addicted or mentally ill get off the streets—Co-STAR, GOTS and CURB—that Mayor Nickels has tried to zero out before. On the down side, it looks like the Technology Assistance Center, which helps nonprofits, had its $176,000 budget slashed.
The council plans a final vote on the package at its regular weekly meeting on Monday, Nov. 23, starting at 2 p.m.
Unemployment: higher than you think?
Like it? Share it!
Hey, did you hear? The recession’s stalled and the unemployment rate just went down. No, wait, it went up. No, no, no: It’s holding steady, no change.
So which is it? Well, that depends on whom you ask.
On Nov. 9, the New York Times reported that the unemployment rate had risen to 10.2 percent, the highest in a quarter century. That’s not good news. But then on Nov. 10, another Times article, penned by the Times’ chief financial correspondent Floyd Norris, added a caveat: Things weren’t so bad for some (that would be those with college degrees), but pretty bad for others (those without). Or, in short:
...The number of jobs fell for those with less education. If [the Nov. 9] report does indicate that the job recession is ending, it is an end that is providing immediate benefits for the educated, not for many of the people who most need help.
Overlooking the use of the term “educated,” it seems like the recession’s impact is far from over for people who haven’t, for whatever reason, received that college degree. But, if that’s the case, just how bad is it? Michael Lind has an idea.
Lind, the Senior Research Fellow and Policy Director of New America’s Economic Growth Program, provides some startling numbers: the unemployment rate may be as high as 18.8 percent. How so? Well, it all comes down to those people who, after not finding a job for so long, have given up; their numbers usually go unreported. Factor them in and, well, the numbers go from bad to worse. Read all about it, if you will. It might make you more inclined to upscale unemployment numbers, the next time you see them reported.
Hunger in Washington up 24 percent
Like it? Share it!
The U.S. Department of Agriculture delivered a grim report today: 49.1 million Americans faced food insecurity at the end of 2008, a 35 percent increase from December 2007 and the highest jump since the department started tracking the data in 1995.
Food insecurity means that, on any given day, a household’s members may not have enough to eat—something that has driven more and more families to food banks and meal providers as the economic downturn has worsened.
In Washington state, the number of food-insecure households increased to 288,000 in 2008, an increase of 13 percent. The rise in households experiencing hunger—a more dire category of food insecurity—jumped to 112,000, or 24 percent. According to the Children’s Alliance of Seattle, that means as many as 373,000 children in the state live in households where food is in shortage.
“These numbers are even worse than we anticipated,” Linda Stone, the Children’s Alliance senior food policy coordinator, said in a statement. “Families will go to extraordinary lengths to make sure their children get something to eat, but this report shows that more and more families can’t put food on the table no matter how hard they try.”
Cheri Honkala: cool
Like it? Share it!
Preparing for the 10th anniversary of the WTO, I googled the leader of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and found this, Al Jazeera English’s profile on her, which is worth the 11 minutes because it knits together a story of Nashville’s crackdown on the visibly poor with Honkala’s life story:
Cheri was arrested during the WTO; during her return to Seattle for trial, contributing writer Joe Martin did an interview which, too bad, is no longer online.
Leave it to a Qatar news channel to tell U.S. audiences about a civil rights hero.
Poor headlines
Like it? Share it!
[Note: the following was written by Evergreen State Colege intern Nicholas Rapp, who doesn’t yet have his own blogging identity, but I’m working on that. —ed.]
Death at an early age: The average age of death for homeless individuals in the U.S. is 47, according to a report by the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, and it’s three to four times more likely that a man or woman on the streets will die young than one of their neighbors living inside.
New census data reveals that last year poverty climbed to 13.2 percent, its highest point since 1997. Latinos’ median income has dropped the most, by 5.6 percent, double the loss of non-Latinos.
These trends will be difficult to change without new employment on the horizon, and that prospect is looking bleak. Unemployment nationwide is at 10.2 percent. The news for young people and minorities is worse with a startling 11.4 percent of males 16 or older who are unemployed and 15.7 percent of blacks who are unemployed.
King County Council makes immigration status a non-issue
Like it? Share it!
“Don’t ask.” Unlike some jurisdictions around the state (namely, Lynnwood), sheriff’s deputies in King County aren’t in the habit of making immigrants prove they’re in the country legally. With a measure passed today, however, the King County Council has prohibited officers or public health workers from asking about immigration status—a move that the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, which pushed for the measure, says is good for the health and safety of all county residents.
That’s because immigrants shouldn’t be afraid to step forward to report crime or seek preventive medical care when they are sick. The legislation, originally sponsored by Councilmember Larry Gossett, makes county services available to all residents, regardless of citizenship or status, except where prohibited by federal law.
“If an epidemic starts in a population that doesn’t have access to care, it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to everyone,” said Councilmember Julia Patterson, chair of the King County Board of Health, in a statement. “Diseases like H1N1 flu don’t discriminate based on whether or not you’re a legal citizen, and therefore, restricting access to care for some hurts us all.”
In addition to ensuring equal access to services, the ordinance requires that:
· King County Sheriff’s deputies cannot request specific documents, such as passports, alien registration cards or work permits, for the sole purpose of determining whether the individual has violated federal civil immigration laws,
· Deputies cannot use stops for minor offenses, such as traffic stops, to determine an individual’s immigration status,
· Deputies shall not initiate any inquiry or enforcement action based solely on a person’s civil immigration status, race, inability to speak English or inability to understand the deputy,
· Public Health - Seattle & King County shall not condition the provision of health services on matters related to citizenship or immigration status.
Inspiring Women
Like it? Share it!
Thursday evening, November 5th, the clothing store Eileen Fisher hosted an event called “Inspiring Women,” in which four local, entrepreneurial women came to discuss how following their passions has led them to satisfying and life-giving careers. Christina Baldwin, author of the book Storycatcher; Susan Goodwin, a self-taught jeweler; Alissa Leinonen, founder of Gourmondo Catering; and Molly Woodruff, founder of Molly Baby Baking Company, gathered in the intimate setting to talk about their challenges, successes, and celebrity clients in front of the audience of women. All of these women fell in love with their craft, and were excited to share their stories to inspire other women.
What was exciting for Real Change was that Annie, a Real Change volunteer and employee of Eileen Fisher, talked up the “Women of Real Change” program at her work and convinced them to let “Vendor of the Year” Susan Ford and I go speak on behalf of Women of Real Change. The Women Of Real Change program was started in 2004 in an attempt to provide a safe space for female vendors to build relationships and support each other through fun and educational activities like going to the zoo and taking Home Alive self defense classes together. Female vendors often face greater challenges while selling because of intimidation or harassment by men and the safety issues involved. Susan was a great speaker and charmed the other women in the room talking about her love of Real Change and her customers: “I’ve just met so many wonderful people out there.”
Molly Woodruff provided mouthwatering “Molly Babies” cookies for the “Inspiring Women” event, Alissa Leinonen’s company Gourmondo catered it, Christina Baldwin was selling her numerous books on journaling and reflection, and Susan Goodwin had her beautiful jewelry on display and for sale. Susan Goodwin was especially kind in her decision to contribute 20 percent of all proceeds from the night’s event to the Women Of Real Change.
A big thank-you to Annie, and to everyone who came to “Inspiring Women” for supporting the Women of Real Change!
RC intern in the NY Times
Like it? Share it!
Usually, this blog reports news that makes you shake your head in shame for the plight of the poor. But how about some good news, born, only slightly, of our own office?
In the editorial department, we’ve been fortunate enough to have a steady flow of interns, though we hit somewhat of a dry spell in ‘07. But early that summer, I got an email from a young man named Patrick Reis. Fluent in Spanish, Patrick said he wanted to write for a publication dedicated to social justice. Unfortunately, with my in-box clogged, I lost track of that email. No matter: One day, Patrick showed up at the office. Giving him points for persistence, I met with him. His journalistic passion was true; his clips were sound. So I thought, Let’s give it a go. It was a good decision, because Patrick worked hard that summer, turning in some good articles, including a nice feature about the Penny Arcade Expo.
But. interns move on, and he left Real Change that fall. These days, he lives in D.C., where, along with spying the likes of Sen. John McCain, he works for an online mag devoted to energy and enviro policy, greenwire.com. His beat: mountaintop mining.
Well, one of his pieces, about the Endangered Species Act, was printed, with a co-byline, in the NY Times last month. And another, about biodiversity in Appalachia, found its way into Scientific American. Give ‘em a read.
And to Mr. Reis, we say: Nice work, Patrick. It was good to have had you here…
Eastern Wash. rep stumps against health care bill
Like it? Share it!
From a GOP email this morning:
Representative Cathy McMorris Rogers [sic] will discuss how Speaker Pelosi’s health care bill will pit government bureaucrats between [sic] patients and their doctors from 2:20 – 2:30 PM PST.
McMorris Rogers Rodgers is a GOP darling. She’ll be addressing the effect of the House health care bill on rural and low-income people during her time slot. Tune in here.
Want to know why health care reform is a really bad idea for low-income people? Or why rural Washington is better off as is? Call RNC Regional Press Secretary Jahan Wilcox at (202)863-5342 and pass on your question.
Big social services cuts in the works
Like it? Share it!
It’s a good thing Washington voters rejected Initiative 1033, Tim Eyman’s bid to retard government spending. With state revenues still lagging from the recession, the Washington State Budget & Policy Center reports that the Department of Social and Health Services is looking at “cuts on top of cuts” in 2010 to cover a nearly $2 billion deficit.
According to a recent memo from DSHS’s Health and Recovery Services Administration, that includes cutting nearly $70 million in medical assistance for the poor, $11.6 million in children’s health coverage, and $12.9 million in mental health care—along with costing the state an estimated $101.4 million in federal matching funds.
Election news: winning the war, losing a battle
Like it? Share it!
Opponents of Initiative 1033 and supporters of Referendum 71 — I’m in each camp, as are most King County voters — are happy this morning. Both are going down, according to the Secretary of State’s incredibly handy electoral map.
Those are the R. 71 results to date. A daunting sea of anti-gay voters — misleadingly so, of course, since most of these counties have very few people.
But the state legislature will be a little less blue come January. After this election, rural eastern Washington is sending only Republicans to Olympia. It ought to concern Dwight Pelz, Frank Chopp and Chris Gregoire that they have no rural voice from the state’s eastern two-thirds — not even from Walla Walla.
Health care and the undead
Like it? Share it!
Some people are willing to be arrested; others just want to replay Thriller. Real Change contributor Elliot Stoller tagged along with some Zombies for a Public Option down at Pike Place on Halloween.
Every year an estimated 20,000 Americans die because they can’t get needed medical care, according to those who know. These are just the ones who dance best.
Health care arrests in support of single-payer plan
Like it? Share it!
I didn’t see a single news item about seven protesters’ civil disobedience Wednesday in the Seattle offices of Regence Blue Shield. But here’s a photo by Real Change contributor Luke McGuff: former School Board member Sally Soriano is led out of the health insurance giant’s downtown lobby that afternoon.
Luke says the demonstrators were taken away, very gently, then released. No arrests were made.
Participant Jim Squires M.D. shared the following with Luke:
“The primary problem is the private health insurance industry being the means by which you access the health care system. This is a totally dysfunctional system that leads to many people not having health insurance, tens of millions underinsured, and medical bankruptcies. It’s also increasingly expensive, and more and more unaffordable for average people. The solution to the health care crisis is really very simple: medicare for all, with a single payer system.”
Seattle United for Single Payer Health Care isn’t getting exactly what it wants, but you can’t discount the power of the federal government effectively negotiating prices with providers.
Cracking down on Homelessness in the Land of the Midnight Sun
Like it? Share it!
Today’s high in Anchorage, Alaska: 38 degrees (though, according to weather.com, it feels like 27). Not the best of forecasts if you’re homeless in Anchorage.
But the 50th state’s homeless have to contend with more than weather. They’ve also got to be worried about how that state’s largest city has decided to deal with them.
Just check out this NY Times article and video from Sun., Oct. 25, “Homeless Deaths Rise, and Anchorage Copes,” which addresses the deaths of 13 homeless people since the spring. Republican mayor Dan Sullivan has set up a task force and staff position to deal with homelessness.
That sounds great. But the city has also authorized the police to dismantle encampments — “with just 12 hours’ notice.” And there’s more: A detox and alcohol abuse center, run by the Salvation Army, has also begun accepting chronic inebriates “who have been taken there essentially by force.” All someone — a cop, doctor, a family member — has to do is convince a judge that an individual’s alcohol abuse makes that person a threat to himself or others. The judge can order the person held for 30 days. Or longer. “The person does not need to have committed a crime.”
All of which might make some people go, Hmmmm, that seems a little tough. Or ask, Why are so many homeless people there dying? And what’s going on with public drunkenness?
The article never really delves into these concerns. But it does provide a really interesting comment toward the end of the piece:
“Experts say the problem of public drunkenness is part of a larger homeless problem that disproportionately affects Native Alaskans, particularly men who have moved in from rural parts of Alaska and lost their way in the city.”
Now, doesn’t that make you wish somebody, at some news organization — The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, hell, even the NYT — went out to those rural towns and saw what life was like there, to see why these Native men are leaving those small outposts to venture to Anchorage. Maybe then, a more effective way of cutting down on homelessness and alcoholism could be found long before people die on the streets of Anchorage.
Too bad Real Change doesn’t have a sister paper there. It might be worth the trip.
Comments
Search Our Archives
Recent Blog Posts
NASNA to lay off executive director
Saturday, July 31 at 1:15am
Midyear budget cuts spare human services—for now
Monday, June 14 at 12:46pm
Where the cops have gone
Friday, June 11 at 3:40pm
Real Change a partner in organizing Seattle Unity Forum
Friday, June 11 at 2:43pm
PSCA Drops Appeal On Real Change Use Permit
Friday, June 11 at 2:24pm
Real Change staff earn journalism awards
Tuesday, June 1 at 5:09pm
City Council upholds veto of panhandling ordinance
Monday, May 24 at 3:08pm
Home free? Not quite.
Monday, May 17 at 5:01pm
“Ding dong, the jail is dead”
Thursday, May 13 at 10:32am
Situation gets darker in Land of Midnight Sun
Monday, May 10 at 2:50pm
Real Change on Facebook
Real Change on Twitter
Subscribe to Real Change News