Extinguish your bad habits
Your photo caption on page 8 of the Jan. 15 issue, "Mufasa enjoys a cigarette outside a sex toy shop on Broadway in Capitol Hill" raises the question of how you would caption a photo of a homeless teen or adult if seen shooting up heroin or speed.
Make no mistake: there is nothing enviable nor admirable about smoking cigarettes. For the homeless, it's worse: It results in higher incidences of severe respiratory illnesses and debilitating diseases, including chronic asthma, bronchial pneumonia and tuberculosis.
Lastly, money spent on tobacco by the homeless is not money well spent, however "enjoyable" the quick fix. Faced with having several dollars for food versus tobacco, nicotine addicts will go for the cigs. This contributes to ill health and a severely decreased ability to fight off diseases common among those who live on the streets and in shelters.
That decreases the likelihood of finding employment of any kind, and the ripple effect continues to housing and an entrenched and permanent displacement from functional society.
The brutality and gross imperialism of the tobacco industry aside, kudos to photographer Ted Mase for a very fine photo!
Akiva Kenny Segan
Seattle
Safe Harbors endangers rights of homeless
Thank you for raising some of the issues about the Safe Harbors Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). We believe [this system] poses huge risks to homeless people, programs and perspectives, and starting in July 2012, funders (the City of Seattle, County and United Way) will withhold all contract funding if social service providers don't hit their 90 percent data collection mark. In real terms, this means that in six months, longstanding self-managed and grassroots community organizations like SHARE will be completely defunded by the City of Seattle and King County.
Is this what the wider King County community wants? Is this really going to solve homelessness?
The rising demand to feed the HMIS data machine will force more programs to pressure participants, and will create more risk for error. Over and over again we hear that when they're asked personal questions by providers, homeless people aren't even told they have the right to opt out of the HMIS system. How will their right to consent be preserved? How, in this atmosphere of pressure, will special needs be protected, especially, say, for domestic violence victims?
There is and will be great funding incentive to pressure participants for information and to withhold shelter/services to those who refuse to give it. Despite the "no conditioning of services" clause in HMIS partner agreements, we've heard from several homeless people that they've not been given shelter when they refused to give personal information.
In order to eradicate poverty, we, some of the 99 percent, need justice, not 90 percent of demographic data.
Members of the SHARE HMIS
Work Group
Jarvis Capucion, Michele Marchand, Lantz Rowland, Alice Quaintance