Poring through a pile of requests for funding by homeless services providers under the new Pathways Home criteria for funding (more about that here), I came across this application (and associated budget proposal) from Safe and Affordable Seattle, a group headed up by Elizabeth Campbell (a Magnolia homeowner and pro-viaduct activist who opposes low-income housing near Discovery Park) and Gretchen Taylor (a Magnolia homeowner and neighborhood activist who co-founded the Neighborhood Safety Alliance, argues that homeless people just want to take advantage of the system, and went to this event.) In its previous incarnation, Safe and Affordable Seattle was a group, also headed up by Campbell, that filed papers with the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission to oppose a levy for homeless services that never happened. The group/Campbell now runs a website dedicated to banning homeless encampments and pursuing “s legal actions against the City and its elected officials who have failed in their very basic duties to keep all Seattlelites safe.”
SAS asked for $264,000 in city funding (including $175,000 for “consultant services”) to produce [sic throughout] a “book and video documentary about the past and present history of 1) homeless individuals and populations in Seattle, the society and culture of homeless-ness, and associated counter cultures or societies associated thereto, 2) solutions and providers organization and local personalitiies that work with homeless people or homeless related matters, 3) City of Seattle policies, programs, and activities related to homeless people or homeless related matters; all between the years 2007 to 2018.”
I’m stunned, of course, that this completely sincere and totally professional application for public funding did not receive the due consideration it deserved from the city. Perhaps Campbell and Taylor can dip into their own funds to produce a “book” on homeless “personalitiies” and “sub cultures” themselves.
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1. I’ve known Mike Fong, Mayor Ed Murray’s chief of staff, since he worked as an aide to city council member Heidi Wills. In fact, he started at the city right around the same time I started covering city hall, in the late spring of 2001.
Back then, he looked like this:
After 16 years working for the city—as a council staffer and, for the past two years, the mayor’s chief of staff—Fong is leaving city hall behind. (Other mayoral staffers surely won’t be far behind him, as the seventh floor of City Hall empties out in anticipation of current Mayor Ed Murray’s departure in December). He isn’t going far, though—just across the street to the office of King County Executive Dow Constantine, where he’ll be chief operating officer, overseeing Constantine’s cabinet.
Fong has been at city hall (and not just THIS city hall—the old one, too) through some of the biggest stories (and transformations) in the city’s history—from Strippergate to the ouster of former City Light director Gary Zarker to the council’s review of then-mayor Greg Nickels’ response to the 2009 snow storm, which ultimately contributed to Nickels’ loss (to Mike McGinn) that year. During that time, the old City Hall itself was razed, Seattle’spopulation grew from around half a million people to more than 700,000, and Amazon’s value rose from $3.6 billion to more than $500 billion. But as far as I can tell, Mike hasn’t changed all that much. He’s the kind of easygoing, no-bullshit staffer journalists love—he doesn’t spin or offer bland talking points, and his grasp on policy is peerless—and the kind of guy I’d want on my side if I was an elected official with aspirations for higher office. I know I don’t speak just for myself when I say he’ll be missed at city hall.
2. Constantine’s office has seen quite a few shakeups recently, including the departure of his longtime chief of staff (and onetime aide to former mayor Greg Nickels) Sung Yang last month. Yang, who also moved to Constantine’s office after a long career at the city, left to join Pacific Public Affairs, the consulting firm owned by Constantine’s former deputy chief of staff, Joe Woods. Rachel Smith, the county’s government relations director (and another former Nickels staffer), is Constantine’s new chief of staff. Constantine’s campaign manager, Mina Hashemi Mercer, is also reportedly leaving to become the next Director of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, where she previously worked for two and a half years.
Constantine is eternally rumored to be considering a run for governor.
3. The city council’s housing and human services committee discussed legislation that would protect some people living in their vehicles from ticketing or towing for certain parking violations and provide them with access to services; in exchange, vehicle residents would register with the city and agree to abide by certain rules. The recommendations are designed to get people into permanent housing faster while recognizing the reality that homeless people don’t have the money to pay fines or get their vehicle out of impoundment. Another reality: Homeless people who lose their vehicles don’t just disappear; usually, they become homeless people living on the street, destabilized and in even more desperate straits.
North end neighborhood activists, including members of the so-called Neighborhood Safety Alliance, made familiar arguments yesterday against people living in RVs, claiming that they were responsible for an E. coli spike in Thornton Creek, accusing them of leaving literal “tons of garbage and human waste” all over neighborhoods, and suggesting that they, the north Seattle homeowners, might just decide to buy an RV and live in it so they, too, could enjoy the good life, exempt from rules and “homeowner taxes.”
Neigh Safety Alliance's Gretchen Taylor: "What is proposed… is that we remove authority over public land."
One speaker, Phil Cochran, used his public comment time to demand that Mike O’Brien answer a “simple question.” Actually, he had two: “Do you believe that this ordinance will result in more RVs and more homeless junkies in the city of Seattle, yes or no?” and “What happens when some of these rolling meth labs—which we know they are—catch fire? Who should we sue?” Because public comment is not Adults Play High-School Debate time, O’Brien did not respond, except to say that he’d be happy to discuss the issue at literally any other time. And a member of the Interbay Neighborhood Association said the area around W Thorndyke Drive—at the base of Magnolia, near Dravus—was so totally taken over by RVs that that part of Magnolia is now “unlivable.”
Huh.
Maybe he meant “because no one who isn’t wealthy can afford to live there.”
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“I am considered, today, so dangerous that today I’m the second most dangerous man in America—after, of course, Daddy.”
“Daddy,” of course, is Donald Trump, and the person speaking was Milo Yiannopoulos—the professional outrage purveyor best known for promoting Gamergate, getting kicked off Twitter for his racist rants against actor Leslie Jones, and signing a $250,000 book deal. Yiannopoulos spoke Friday night at the University of Washington to a crowd of about 200—students and paying “VIPs” who made it inside Kane Hall before protesters outside blocked the entrance.
For those who made it inside the hall, Yiannopoulos’ talk was a rare opportunity to enjoy jokes about “hairy dykes,” “trannies,” and “Sasquatch lesbians” while police in riot gear protected them from the diverse community outside.
It was, in other words, a safe space.
While Yiannapoulos cracked jokes about delicate liberal “snowflakes” who can’t deal with the rough and tumble of the real world, protesters outside were getting pepper-sprayed and even shot. When word came down of the shooting, Yiannopoulos immediately pivoted to blame “the progressive left” for the violence, telling the crowd that it was under assault by “left-wing protesters with sharpened protest signs, with baseball bats, with flammable liquids, and, it sounds like, with firearms.”
That wild speculation turned out not to be true; the man who was shot was a medic for the protesters, not a Milo supporter. (Earlier today, the Seattle Times reported that the victim’s condition has been upgraded from critical to serious, and that the alleged shooter, who remained at large for several hours while the event continued, has been released .) Meanwhile, Yiannopoulos continued with his talk—because, he said, “if we don’t continue, they have won.”
For someone whose “Daddy” just won the White House, Yiannapoulos certainly loves to play the victim. Like many on the far right, he at least claims to long for a halcyon past where men were men and women were “happier in the kitchen,” neatly eliding the fact that men like him—pretty, vulgar, flamboyantly gay—were even more hated in that supposedly superior past than women who worked.
Yiannopoulos’ own sense of put-upon entitlement and victimization plays well with fans who feel their right to dictate the terms of the world has been stolen from underneath them. He flirts with the deep-seated homophobia of the right by joking about volunteering for electroshock conversion therapy now that Mike Pence is vice president, but he’s a cartoon character, both fundamentally unthreatening and, in the actions he provokes with his hate speech online, deeply dangerous.
In person, he comes off as an insecure narcissist. Onstage, he’s a kind of gay minstrel, applying lipstick and cracking jokes about sucking cock before crowds that would, likely as not, be more than happy to bash his head in if he wasn’t mouthing the words they wanted to hear. His flippant misogyny and racism come across as opportunistic and insincere. His thirst for the spotlight is palpable, and he seems like he might blink out of existence if people stopped paying attention to him.
So should we? It’s a classic question: Is it better to refuse to print noxious speech, on the grounds that reporting it only gives a platform to hate? Or better to expose it to sunlight, so that people outside the alt-right bubble can hear what its hero is saying and judge for themselves?
Well, I listened to the guy for an hour, and I think it’s worth knowing what he said—if only so readers can get some sense of how the alt-right thinks. (Yiannopoulos denies that he’s part of the alt-right, because, he says, he isn’t a “white nationalist”—his mother is Jewish—but the former Breitbart editor exists firmly within the alt-right milieu, and he is closely associated with white nationalists and their fans even if, as he claims, he is not one himself.)
The crowd—overwhelmingly young, male, and white—laughed uproariously at jokes that would have been right at home in an Andrew Dice Clay set circa 1988. (Google it, kids.) A woman protesting Trump: “Sexually ambiguous super retard turbo lez.” Rachel Maddow: “That nice young man.” The fake roses on his podium: “Lena Dunham’s seen more action. Well, actually, that’s not fair, because she did rape her sister.” Saturday’s Women’s March in DC: “Can you imagine 50,000 lesbians lost in Washington, D.C.? You’d be finding them in creases for weeks.” The women attending the Seattle Womxn’s March: “armpit-hair-braiding West Coast Femsquatches.” On the spelling “Womxn”: “The ‘X’ is silent, just like their own ex-boyfriends are silent. Because they ate them.”
You get the drift. Milo Yiannopoulos’s juvenile act, conducted with a heavy assist from PowerPoint and a script on his iPad, consists almost entirely of tired, faux-“outrageous” jokes about women, particularly lesbians and “trannies,” Muslims, and “cucks.” For someone who’s widely vilified as a white supremacist and neo-Nazi, Yiannopoulos has always targeted women with far more zest than racial or religious minorities.
“Fat retard who wants to rape herself.”
Interspersed with the fat jokes, though, were a few genuinely frightening statements about specific women Yiannopoulos believe have wronged him, including Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian, one of the main targets of Gamergate. (Yiannopoulos relentlessly promoted Gamergate, the online and real-life harassment campaign aimed at silencing women who spoke out against sexism in games and gaming culture). Of Sarkeesian, Yiannopoulos said last night, “People don’t hate you because you’re a woman. They hate you because you’re a cunt.”
So what about Yiannopoulos’s outrage performance art shtick appeals to College Republicans? It isn’t funny, it isn’t well-executed (a lot of the jokes failed to stick, in part, because Yiannopoulos drifted off on tangents, at one point literally getting distracted by a fly), and it isn’t, strictly speaking, new. What it is, I think, is what has always passed for rebellion among young conformists—speaking “truth” to “P.C. culture,” which is to say, parroting the racism and sexism of their fathers and grandfathers, even when they don’t really mean it.
But there are real-world consequences to Yiannapoulos’s seemingly harmless antics. Milo tells women to kill themselves, encourages his followers to harass women who cross him, and drives women off Twitter by inciting threats that make them fear for their lives. He loves to say that there is “no such thing as cyberbullying,” but his online bullying has led to real-life threats against people—like game developer Brianna Wu, who had to leave her home after a Twitter user sent her “a string of threats including a pledge to choke her to death with her husband’s penis,” according to Mother Jones. (Wu, according to Yiannopoulos: “Another straight white male.”)
The UW probably learned its lesson about interpreting “free speech” to mean “the right of anyone to use university facilities to say anything, at any time.” (Then again, maybe not: A student told me UW President Ana Mari Cauce responded to her letter asking the school to cancel or move the event by saying that, hopefully, Yiannopoulos would decide to cancel himself.) But there’s a lesson for progressives tempted to show up in numbers, too. Sometimes, even in the face of a loudmouth shouting insults, it’s more effective to ignore the bully.
Notes: If you’d like to see an archive of my tweets from the event, including more details about the protests outside, I’ve collected those tweets on Storify.
Also, readers who follow news related to neighborhoods and homelessness may be interested to know that the four primary members of the Neighborhood Safety Alliance—the ones who show up to council meetings, write letters to council members, and serve as the public faces of one of the most vocal groups opposed to the city’s proposals for addressing homelessness and the heroin epidemic—came to see Yiannopoulos together. The four were in the “VIP” line that made it into Kane Hall before protesters blocked entrances to the building, and they held Trump signs and stood up during standing ovations for Yiannopoulos. I note their presence not to castigate them for supporting Trump or attending this particular event (for which VIP tickets cost $250), but because it’s newsworthy that a group this active and influential at City Hall attended a talk by a man who is widely viewed as a purveyor of hate speech. Last year, Yiannopoulos was kicked off Twitter for leading sexist and racist harassment campaigns, and his online actions have led to real-world death and rape threats against many of the feminist women who are his favorite targets.
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Legislation to provide modest protections for unhoused people living in unsanctioned tent encampments continued moving forward on parallel tracks this week, as an 18-member task force appointed by Mayor Ed Murray scrambled to come up with “guiding principles” to send to the council’s human services committee, chaired by Sally Bagshaw, in time for a Thursday-morning hearing on a separate bill that would effectively end random encampment sweeps. Murray spokesman Benton Strong told me after Wednesday night’s meeting that the task force still hopes to come up with legislation for the mayor to propose in lieu of the bill the council is currently considering.
Meanwhile, the council is barreling forward with its own legislation that would make it harder to sweep homeless encampments. The legislation, which was originally drafted by the ACLU of Washington and Columbia Legal Services, would bar the city from removing tents and property at encampments in “suitable” locations without at least 30 days’ notice and referrals to “adequate and accessible housing,” which can be long-term overnight shelter, and “stable services that can lead to housing, rather than a return to homelessness.”
The legislation would also set up a shorter process for clearing out encampments that create an immediate health or safety risk to residents of the encampment or the surrounding area, and would specifically bar encampments in places where there is a “specific public use,” such as schools, playgrounds, and sidewalks. In those cases, the city would have to provide 48 hours’ notice, and provide an alternative spot that is “suitable” for the encampment to relocate. All of this would be backed up with the threat of a $250 for violating the ordinance.
As Josh Feit at PubliCola pointed out this morning, most of the council seems more or less on board with this basic framework, although some have balked at the $250 fine, saying it would be costly to implement and could open up the city to frivolous lawsuits. Only Tim Burgess, a former cop who occupies the “conservative” end of the generally left-leaning council dais, seems totally opposed to the proposal; he argued Thursday that if the city could no longer clear camps with relative impunity, police would be compelled not to respond to calls for service at encampments, a worst-case scenario that council staffer Ketil Freeman dispensed with quickly, saying police could respond to 911 calls “as long as the assistance was done in accordance with these principles.”
Some the “guiding principles” presented at Wednesday’s task force meeting.
Burgess had to leave early. But before he did, he threw down this warning: “If we follow the approach that the committee is discussing, we are essentially voting to allow permanent camping in the city on public property that the city defines as ‘suitable.’ That’s one of my core concerns about this ordinance: It suggests that our response to homelessness is to allow camping in the city.” His suggestion: Expand the number of sanctioned encampments, which have been a relatively stable housing solution for some unsheltered people. Bagshaw responded that she wasn’t opposed to that idea, but pointed out that “that is not going to solve the problem,” in part because sanctioned encampments impose rules that many people find intolerable, including a blanket proscription on drugs and alcohol.
With Burgess dispatched, the rest of the council appeared to reach a few points of consensus: First, that the current system, in which the city slaps a notice on campers’ tents giving them 72 hours to leave a location, then comes back in a few days to confiscate their belongings and tell them about existing shelter options, isn’t working. (The problem isn’t that people aren’t aware of shelters, it’s that most shelters are full, and that they have possessions, partners, and preferences that shelters don’t accommodate.) Second, that the definitions of terms like “accessible and available housing” and “unsuitable locations” need some massaging. Third, that easing the rules on encampments isn’t a long-term solution; instead, Bagshaw argued, it should be an interim step, to allow the mayor’s office time to “breathe” and come up with a systemic response to homelessness. (They’re working on that, for better or worse.) And fourth, that while the council debates solutions, the city should at least spend some money cleaning up trash around encampment sites, since homeless people don’t have easy access to Dumpsters and garbage bags. “We penalize business owners when someone sprays graffiti on their outdoors and we force them to repaint it,” council member Bruce Harrell said. “It seems to me that the city should have incredible liability when we see the amounts of trash in areas [where people are camping], and we are not being responsible enough to clean it up.”
The council also agreed to remove people living in RVs and cars from the legislation, since they present a different set of challenges than people sleeping outside in tents.
For those imagining that the federal government will come in and deliver enough housing dollars to make the problem go away, Bagshaw concluded with a warning. “This is a city problem. It’s also a county problem. But what I do believe, after spending time in Washington D.C. and the state of Washington, in the governor’s office is: The cavalry is not coming. We are going to have to solve this … in a very short time period. One of the things we can’t do is to wait another two years to have someone decide this. We’re going to have to do this right away.”
On this issue, the momentum all seems to be with the council. Although the mayor’s task force continues to meet, and is supposed come up with some sort of recommendations by the end of the month, it remains unclear what form those will take, and whether the 18 task force members can reach consensus. At the fourth task force meeting Wednesday, Neighborhood Safety Alliance leader Gretchen Taylor, one of the neighborhood activists Murray appointed to the task force, was still asking “why must we allow camping” at all, and discussing whether endorsing “low-barrier shelters” a good idea, given that some people will prefer not to worry that their bunkmate is high or that he has a pet. Given that Seattle doesn’t have any low-barrier shelters that would meet the standard of “adequate and accessible housing” yet, this seems like a highly rhetorical, and pointlessly theoretical, discussion.
Critics and advocates of the task force have reminded me that this is just how the mayor works: Set up a task force that includes people with opposing perspectives, “lock ’em in a room,” and don’t let them out until they come up with a consensus. Two problems with that theory. One is that the mayor’s office hasn’t been much of a presence at these meetings; only George Scarola, Murray’s homelessness coordinator (a high-profile appointment Murray made last month), has sat quietly through the meetings from beginning to end. This (along with some pretty loosey-goosey facilitation) has allowed the loudest advocates to use up a huge amount of time each week grandstanding, so that the last few minutes become a scramble to summarize everything and come up with “next steps.” (As Alliance for Pioneer Square director Leslie Smith put it at last week’s meeting, “I have completely lost track [of] what the charge of this group is.”)
The other is that there’s really no urgency to come up with legislation. The council already has legislation. The task force could be considering the council’s bill, and working to address any deficiencies they see in that proposal. But that would require the mayor to concede that the council has him in checkmate, and that his steadfast support for sweeps has put him in a weak political position. So instead, they’re sitting in service to a classic Murray temper tantrum.
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Nothing could have summed up last night’s meeting of the mayor’s 18-member Unsanctioned Encampments Cleanup Protocols Task Force better, for me, than the moment when task force co-chair Sally Clark, at that very moment presiding over the meeting, “liked” the following tweet:
Yet that’s basically what the task force is expected, by the end of the month, to do: Come up with recommendations that will help determine when, how, and under what circumstances the city can remove people and their possessions from an unsanctioned encampment.
The ACLU and Columbia Legal Services arguably circumvented the task force last month, when they proposed their own legislation that would make it much harder to sweep unsanctioned encampments, a move that some on the task force view as a sign of urgency, and others as a provocation. As task force member (and Alliance for Pioneer Square director) Leslie Smith put it, the new proposal “is hurrying along the path, and I think that has given us either a greater sense of urgency to this group or a greater sense of hopelessness.”
I’ve been to two of the three task force meetings so far (there will be at least three more before the end of the month, but only one is likely to be as long as or longer than tonight’s), and the overwhelming sense is that no one quite knows why they’re there. The format so far has been: Public comment (this week, Magnolia resident/Neighborhood Safety Alliance representative Cindy Pierce expressed confusion at why the task force was meeting at all, given that there are plenty of shelter and treatment beds available: “I see a lot of money being spent and a pretty simple answer, so why do we continue to have these conversations?”), followed by official presentations, followed by a rushed hour or so of discussion that can sound an awful lot like serial grandstanding. By the time most task force members have said their piece, it’s 8:00, and there’s no time left to talk about recommendations, or solutions, or finding common ground.
For example: Committee members spent a lot of time at last week’s meeting interrogating Chris Potter from the Department of Finance and Administrative Services (FAS) about exactly what kind of notice the city currently gives encampment residents whom it plans to sweep, whether it provides outreach services to people living on their own, and whether the city is sufficiently tracking and collecting data on the homeless. Near the end of that meeting, NSA member Gretchen Taylor, a member of the task force, asked rhetorically, “Why are we even entertaining the idea of allowing people to camp wherever they want in our city?”
Cindy Pierce
The discussion last night (which didn’t really get off the ground until about 7:15, after presentations by staffers from multiple city departments, the county, and the state department of transportation), initially seemed like it would be another re-litigation of whether the city’s encampment policy should be changed at all.
But the meeting quickly took a turn for the ontological, when committee members started asking whether the task force could accomplish anything, given its limited time frame and the fact that the council was already considering legislation that would drastically change the city’s policy on encampment sweeps regardless of what the task force comes up with. “My take on tonight is, I have completely lost track [of] what the charge of this group is, and I think this group may have lost track of that” too, Smith said. Eisinger, who initially declined the mayor’s invitation to serve on the task force, added, “I’m disappointed at how this task force is being used… [and] I find it deeply frustrating to be asked to participate in a process in which … this group of people, who have given their time to serve, do not have the opportunity to participate.”
Chloe Gale, co-director of Evergreen Treatment Services’ REACH outreach program, tried to refocus the conversation. “We’ve heard really great stories [in these meetings], but we do not have the resources here at this table to answer those [bigger] questions” about homelessness, Gale said. “To me, it boils down to, ‘When do we move somebody?’ That’s what we do have to deal with.” But will they? We’ll know by the end of the month.
While the mayor’s meetings are winding up, the council is moving forward with parallel proposals to deal with encampments: The ACLU legislation, which got assigned to council member Sally Bagshaw’s human services committee last Tuesday, and a set of protocols for clearing the last remaining residents of the Jungle, which moved out of committee by a 4-2 vote on Wednesday afternoon.
Tim Burgess voted “no” on the ACLU legislation, and Mike O’Brien and Kshama Sawant said no to the protocols for clearing the greenbelt, which will entail telling the 100 or so people remaining there that they have to leave. “Every effort will be made to achieve voluntary compliance with these police orders and every individual circumstance will be evaluated based on the input and experience of outreach workers,” the plan says bluntly. Many of the people who were living in the Jungle encampments have now relocated to another temporary site on Airport Way, which began as an unsanctioned encampment and is now a tacitly sanctioned one; many others remain unaccounted for.
Jeff Lilley, head of the Union Gospel Mission (the agency charged with conducting outreach during the Jungle clearout), implied strongly during the meeting that there are more than enough shelter and treatment beds for everyone who needs one; the problem is convincing people who “have to be told” that living outside isn’t their best option to take them. O’Brien and Sawant were skeptical of that claim, and O’Brien noted that, extrapolating from UGM’s own numbers, about 200 people simply moved on from the Jungle without being connected to any kind of housing or services whatsoever. But Lilley countered that some of those people were “transients”—people who drifted here from somewhere else, and may have gone back there—and that many were not really homeless to begin with. “You literally lost some of the population that was just there to sell and deal drugs,” he said.
Near the end of the meeting, Sawant posed a question I asked on Twitter: Will all the “42 available treatment beds” UGM says it has lying unused require participation in an explicitly Christian program? After all, a recovery program that requires participants to pray to Jesus isn’t really inclusive—nor can it be publicly funded under the separation of church and state. (UGM operates largely outside the city and county homeless service system for that very reason). Lilley said UGM’s shelter does not require church participation, but their year-long treatment program requires commitment to Christianity, including daily Bible study and lessons in “how to live with self-worth and self-respect through the power of Christ.”
The Jungle cleanup protocols go the full council next Monday, where they’ll almost certainly be approved.
population grew from around half a million people to more than 700,000, and Amazon’s value rose from $3.6 billion to more than $500 billion. But as far as I can tell, Mike hasn’t changed all that much. He’s the kind of easygoing, no-bullshit staffer journalists love—he doesn’t spin or offer bland talking points, and his grasp on policy is peerless—and the kind of guy I’d want on my side if I was an elected official with aspirations for higher office. I know I don’t speak just for myself when I say he’ll be missed at city hall.
