You would think, given that the numbers of homeless people in America quadrupled over the '80s and have been generally rising since, that this would be viewed as evidence of massive system failure. That when human misery exists on this scale -- with nearly 9,000 homeless people documented in King County on a single January night last year that people would understand that this is indicative of a fundamental need for system change.
But you would be wrong about that. We've done something else.
I think we were barely in the '90s the first time I heard the term "compassion fatigue." This was the idea that, having created a homeless shelter industry, we were all a little pissed off that there were still all these homeless people. Hadn't they gone away yet?
We decided the system that devalues and dehumanizes surplus people and tosses them to the wolves is not the problem. Homeless people are the problem, and all we need to do is figure out what's wrong with them and fix them, one person at a time.
So we got 10-Year Plans and 800-pound gorillas like the Gates Foundation and United Way funding "advocacy" that challenges nothing fundamental and, in the most helpful way imaginable, identifies the problem at the individual level.
Inequality has increased in America since 1973 as has homelessness. We've seen the globalization of capital, the erosion of worker power, the dismantling of the welfare state and, in its place, the rise of the incarcerate state, where one in 99 Americans are now behind bars.
This has been an enormous misdirect. The 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness really isn't a plan at all. It's an ideology that shifts responsibility for homelessness from a failed economic system to poor people themselves.
It's no accident that the development of Westlake Center as the revitalized downtown core of a global city came at the same time as the passage of ordinances pushed through city council by former City Attorney Mark Sidran. These Sidran Ordinances, among other things, made it illegal for people to sit or lie on sidewalks. The visible poor are not welcome in our shiny caffeinated cathedrals of consumption.
It was no accident that the zero-tolerance policies on urban camping that were trotted out four years ago came at the same time as our downtown condo boom. This brought the city's brutal crackdown on homeless encampments that led to the creation of Nickelsville.
It was no accident that news coverage of the homeless sweeps was typified by talk of hypodermic needles, feces, bottles of urine and tons of trash. This all came from city framing and press releases and was consistent with how these kinds of sweeps were justified all over the nation.
It was no accident when the last attempt to pass a law against aggressive panhandling came in the context of a crippling recession and 25 percent downtown office and retail vacancy rates.
Don't blame the subprime lenders or the collapse of the credit market: Blame the homeless!
Massive homelessness is an obvious indictment of an economic system that isn't working. The system response has been to co-opt those who might speak to this with moral authority and whatever nonthreatening scraps of funding that haven't yet been eliminated. The Occupy movement has been able to accomplish in a few months what homeless advocates have not in three decades: Finally, we're talking about class and inequality. Let's keep that conversation going.