About a half-dozen years ago, during Mayor Mike McGinn’s administration, I saw how even the most well-intentioned bureaucrats will screw up when it comes to homelessness.
One of the first things McGinn did was to form a task force on unsheltered homelessness. Mayor Ed Murray’s administration, four years later, followed suit. I was on each of these.
In both cases, there was this moment, after the reports were published, where it seemed like a more or less adequate response to the misery might be around the corner. It felt like power was actually listening to the people. In both instances, we were disappointed.
At the time, the Seattle City Council was divided on the idea of extending the right to camp from faith-based hosts — a First Amendment-protected form of religious land use — to use of privately or city-owned land.
The McGinn administration decided that the way to pass legislation was to make those proposed camps look as much like existing shelter as possible.
This meant mandatory case management, unrealistic timelines for moving people into housing and undermining the peer-support model that made cheap survival encampments possible.
It also meant a price tag of about $3 million.
I recall being blunt in my response.
“This will fail,” I said. “Most advocates won’t support this, because if you’re going to spend $3 million on homelessness, this isn’t the place. And homeless people won’t support it, because it undermines their self-management model.”
The deputy mayor said that’s where I was wrong and pulled out a wall-sized chart that laid out in great detail how this legislation would pass.
It did not.
You know that old joke about how to make God laugh? The punch line is usually “Tell him you have a plan,” but I’d also accept “Form a mayoral task force.”
You know that old joke about how to make God laugh? The punch line is usually “Tell him you have a plan,” but I’d also accept “Form a mayoral task force.”
Seattle’s approach to car camping has suffered from the same well-intentioned, process-heavy incompetence.
Over the past seven years, the numbers of people living in vehicles has roughly tripled, with the 2017 point-in-time count finding 1,550 people living in cars in Seattle.
Over that time, we’ve seen various efforts come and go. Road to Housing was an outreach and referral program to move vehicle residents to church lots and then to housing. Turns out, there wasn’t housing. That program is gone.
Then, along with Murray’s Homeless State of Emergency, we got three safe parking zones and one safe parking lot. The safe lot was closed because security to meet neighborhood concerns became cost prohibitive. And still there was no housing.
The one safe parking zone left in the city is slated to close this year.
RELATED ARTICLE: The city of Seattle spent nearly $225,000 to tow and destroy people's homes
Jesse Rawlins, a legislative aide to Councilmember Mike O’Brien, explains that this failure is rooted in “assuming that the problem is broken people rather than a broken system.”
Here’s a joke I remember from third grade. How can you tell an elephant’s been in the refrigerator? His footprints are in the butter.
What makes this funny at all is the idea that anyone could miss something so obvious.
Here’s another bad joke: Seattle’s response to car camping.
We’ve missed the elephant in the refrigerator. A broken system produces broken people, not the other way around.
When we simply stop chasing and ticketing and towing people who live in their cars, we stop adding to the problems they already have.
When we simply stop chasing and ticketing and towing people who live in their cars, we stop adding to the problems they already have.
And, when you combine trusting in people with building community, you get things that start looking like solutions.
Lake Washington United Methodist Church in Kirkland has a safe parking lot that served 200 people last year on a budget of about $15,000.
They have a dog run. There is free Wi-Fi. They have three portable toilets, and people can also use church facilities for cooking, eating and hygiene.
After seven years of operating this program, this church feels “blessed by the people we have met and the people we have become.” They have made a real difference in people’s lives.
After seven years of city efforts to “help” car campers, all we have to show is a record of failure. It’s time to out that elephant.
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.
Wait, there's more. Check out the full April 18 - April 24 issue.