On the morning of Oct. 24, I’ll be at City Hall to stand with Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s call for city investment in housing now. But not because I think anyone is listening.
There will be no massive bond issue this budget to build housing. There will be no eleventh-hour spending reprioritization. There will be no sudden burst of political will to tax the wealthy.
I’ll go anyway, because standing in the gap between what is and what should be is the most important thing we can do. When we accept that there is nothing to be done, that justice is for radicals and dreamers, we begin to give up.
We pretend that things are OK. We pretend that a few more cops on the Navigation Team is a meaningful investment during a State of Emergency.
We pretend that spending another $800,000 on Rapid Rehousing is going to move the needle.
We pretend to care about harm reduction while we stall some more on safe consumption sites.
We pretend to be about the business of solving homelessness, and we tinker around the edges and call that progress. We even call it an emergency.
In the first six months of this year, 7,373 people stayed in a Seattle shelter; 987 of these exited shelter to permanent housing.
In the first six months of this year, 7,373 people stayed in a Seattle shelter; 987 of these exited shelter to permanent housing.
According to the mayor’s budget document, “shelter is successful when people leave a shelter program and move into permanent housing.
So, that would be a nearly 87 percent failure rate, because we lack the housing for people to move into.
So, we’re reluctant to fund shelters, because shelter doesn’t lead to housing, and we don’t fund housing because we lack the political will to make that choice. And so people stay outside, chased around and left to sicken and die, year after appalling year.
People stay outside, chased around and left to sicken and die, year after appalling year.
If we could see the misery this creates — the human toll of accepting that housing is just for those who can afford it — our hearts would break. We would seek solutions like our own lives depended on it. We would stop pretending and start to truly care.
My friend Darcie Day died homeless this weekend. She was 51.
Her heart stopped, and then she was gone, leaving those who loved her to grieve the loss.
I’ve known Darcie since she was a member of the StreetLife Homeless Art Gallery in 1994. She was a poet, an artist, a personality, an advocate and a survivor.
And she was left on the streets for far too long. You’d think that in 25-some years of being homeless, someone like Darcie would eventually get the help she needs. But you’d be wrong.
When we did her vendor profile back in 2009, she’d recently spoken at a rally to stop the sweeps.
“Just because we’re homeless doesn’t mean we’re not human beings,” she said. “The police think we’re scum, we’re animals, that we don’t belong here ... but we bleed the same blood, we breathe the same air. They just see us as a job.”
People are left on the streets to eventually die everyday. Maybe, to those who don’t know them, that doesn’t seem quite real.
Darcie was real. Now she’s gone. And we fight for the living in her memory.
Tim Harris is the Founding Director Real Change and has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, Harris founded street newspaper Spare Change in Boston while working as Executive Director of Boston Jobs with Peace.
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