In a Friday night post on the Seattle Police Department Blotter blog, interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz confirmed that two officers were in Washington, D.C. during the riots at the US Capitol on Wednesday, though he could not confirm whether the officers took part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. Diaz wrote that SPD referred the two officers to the Office of Police Accountability (OPA) for further investigation; the OPA will review whether the officers violated SPD policy and whether their actions could merit criminal charges.
“If any SPD officers were directly involved in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol,” he added, “I will immediately terminate them.” For the time being, the two officers are on administrative leave.
OPA Director Andrew Myerberg confirmed the news on Friday, adding that the department learned the officers had been in D.C. through posts on a social media account. The two officers already under investigation were not on duty on Wednesday; Myerberg told PubliCola that they were either furloughed or used vacation days; both are patrol officers. He also noted that the OPA is “looking into the identities of other SPD employees who may have attended,” though he did not confirm that more than two officers were present in D.C.
Despite claims from MSNBC contributor and former Seattle city council candidate Naveed Jamali that the officers were a couple, SPD has not confirmed any relationship between the two officers.
The announcement comes only hours after retired SPD Chief Carmen Best, Mayor Jenny Durkan and regular SPD ally Scott Lindsay joined calls for Seattle Police Officers’ Guild president Mike Solan to apologize or resign in response to tweets in which Solan appeared to blame Black Lives Matter activists for the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “As someone who has fought for police reform and defended Seattle Police against defunding,” Lindsay wrote in a tweet on Friday afternoon, “I have a duty to call out when the head of their union spreads misinformation about the Capitol attack.” A subsequent statement from Durkan called Solan’s claims “wrong [and] immoral,” adding that they expect the OPA to investigate Solan for the tweets; the OPA will now treat the mayor’s statement as a complaint to be reviewed.
Both officers under investigation by the OPA are SPOG members.
1. Yesterday afternoon, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff revealed some bad news that could spell trouble up and down the planned Link light rail corridor: The Federal Way station and light rail extension, which was approved as part of the Sound Transit 2 ballot measure in 2008, is now projected to cost $460 million more than anticipated. That increase—the result, Sound Transit staff said yesterday, of escalating land, materials, and labor costs—pushes the price tag for the Federal Way extension up to $2.5 billion. Of that total, $500 million is supposed to come from the federal government—and President Trump has proposed no longer awarding capital investment grants for transit projects, including those that have already been approved. In briefing materials for yesterday’s meeting, Sound Transit expressed optimism at the fact that “In response to the Administration’s proposal to no longer award new [Capital Investment Grants], Congress is demonstrating its strong, bicameral and bipartisan commitment to keep the CIG program funded.” However, the fate of the Federal Way grant, as well as a $1.2 billion grant for a northern light rail extension to Lynnwood, which is also $500 million over budget, is ultimately in the hands of the administration, which has been dragging its feet even on grants that the Federal Transportation Administration has already approved.
On Thursday, Rogoff said Sound Transit had “the financial strength to withstand increased project costs, lower than anticipated federal funding,” or a recession, but if two or more of those problems occur simultaneously, it would “put stress on our ability to deliver.” Rogoff said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the likelihood that Sound Transit would win both grants. However, he added that “In the coming months, the staff and board will have to look closely at how some of these same pressures will impact the rest of the system,” and how market forces in particular (like high construction costs) “could have impacts across the more than two decades of projects of delivery ahead of us.”
In addition to those two financial question marks, Federal Way faces a separate challenge: Revenues have been falling short in the Board members and Rogoff hinted yesterday at another possible way of saving money, if the federal grants don’t come through: By shifting federal dollars from one of the five Sound Transit subareas (say, the North King County subarea, which includes Seattle) into the South King subarea, Sound Transit could fund the Federal Way extension. Sound Transit has a policy called subarea equity that requires funds raised in each of five geographic subareas to be spent in that area, but that policy does not apply to federal funding. As Rogoff said Thursday, “The Sound Transit 3 plan gives the Sound Transit board broad discretion over how to allocate federal assistance between subareas as necessary to complete the system plan, and as necessary to focus federal funding on the subareas facing the greatest challenges.”
Of course, if the Trump Administration decides to starve transit agencies of funding, the question of where to spend federal funds will be the least of Sound Transit’s problems.
2.The Sound Transit board also approved a new policy that will allow drivers of single-occupancy vehicles (SOVs) to buy monthly parking permits at park-and-rides that are currently over 90 percent of capacity on weekdays, which will provide certainty for solo commuters, who often have to show up well before 7am or drive around looking for scarce free parking in the lots. The new permits would cost drivers, on average, $90 a month (the exact price for reserved parking at each lot is still TBD), but low-income drivers (those who are eligible for the low-income ORCA Lift pass) would pay around $30 a month. Meanwhile, carpool permits, which currently cost $5 a month, would become free. Half the space in park-and-ride lots subject to the new rules will be reserved, but the rest will still be available free of charge to carpool as well as solo drivers.
The idea behind the SOV permits is to raise revenue for Sound Transit (about $2 million a year) while giving people a financial incentive to carpool to transit instead of driving alone. (The permits will also, incidentally, make driving alone more convenient for people who choose to pay for new SOV permits). Editorializing here: Given that commute-trip reduction (reducing the number of commuters who drive alone) has been official state policy since 1991 , why not encourage carpooling (and increase revenues) by not only making HOV permits free, but charging a parking fee to everyone who chooses to drive alone?
3. One Table, the long-dormant task force charged with coming up with solutions to the root causes of homelessness, will meet again this coming Friday for the first time since April. In advance of that meeting, five mayors of King County cities (Renton, Bellevue, Kent, Auburn, and Kirkland) wrote a letter to the chairs of the task force urging action in several areas, including behavioral health. Specifically, they suggested that One Table look at ways that people who “refuse treatment … could be helped by new legislation allowing for involuntary treatment for those presenting an imminent likelihood of serious harm to self or others, or who are gravely disabled as a result of substance use disorder.”
The legislation, known as Ricky’s Law, allows specially designated mental health professionals to detain people who “present at risk of harm to self or others, or are gravely disabled as a result of a substance use disorder” in a secure detox facility, where people can be physically restrained, secluded, and forced to stay, for up to 17 days.
The immediate problem, as is always the case when the conversation around homelessness turns to no-cost detox or “treatment on demand” for people experiencing homelessness, is that there simply aren’t enough treatment beds for even a fraction of the people who need them. Actually, in King County, there aren’t any secure detox facilities.
So why not just ship people with incapacitating addiction outside the county? Statewide, there are only about 46 secure beds, total—22 in Chehalis and another 24 in Spokane. Because Ricky’s Law does not allow cities to detain people with addiction if there are no beds available, suggesting it as a solution for homeless people struggling with addiction in King County smacks of grandstanding.
If you’re addicted to alcohol, the most likely scenario is that you end up right back where you were—drunk on the street, creating a “nuisance” for the same people who reported you to authorities in the first place. If you’re addicted to heroin, relapsing can mean death. In fact, the period immediately after treatment is the most dangerous point for opiate addicts, who often relapse with the dose they’re accustomed to using, and overdose because their body has lost its tolerance to the drug.
Now you’ve got an increase in overdoses and a new round of treatment “failures,” which anti-homeless activists can use as a justification to say, “See? We told you so! They just want to sit around and use drugs and drink, they don’t want to get better!” From a policy, medical, and human perspective, 17-day detox, even if it includes the kind of vague “referrals to services” that we like to provide instead of actually, you know, funding services that actually work and providing housing to help them stick, is almost worse than nothing.
1. The Seattle Department of Transportation and the Durkan administration will soon propose what is being called a “reset” for Move Seattle, the $930 million levy that passed in 2015, to reflect the reality that the federal funding that the city assumed would be available for many of the projects has not come through from the Trump Administration, as well as increased cost estimates for some projects on the levy list.
The “reset” will likely mean significant cuts to some of the projects that were promised in the levy, particularly those that assumed high levels of federal funding, such as seven proposed new RapidRide lines, which were supposed to get more than half their funding ($218 million) from the feds. “They’re calling it a ‘reset,’ but I don’t know what that means,” says city council transportation committee chairman Mike O’Brien. “It’s not terribly encouraging.” Additionally, O’Brien says, “costs have gone up significantly in the last few years because of the pace of the economy,” making capital projects, in particular, more expensive than the city bargained for.
The City Budget Office and the Seattle Department of Transportation are still having conversations about what the cuts might look like, but according to multiple current and former city staffers familiar with the situation, one possibility is that some of the planned new RapidRide lines might no longer happen on schedule or at all; another is that some projects could be dramatically scaled back, but not eliminated entirely. A third possibility is that some projects could be delayed until a future levy (or Presidential administration) or paid for with other funding sources .Move Seattle taxes will be collected through 2024. The mayor and SDOT are expected to release details of the “reset” in the several weeks.
One possibility is that some of the planned new RapidRide lines might no longer happen on schedule or at all; another is that some projects could be scaled back, but not eliminated entirely.
The city was counting on about $564 million in federal funds to leverage the $930 million in local tax dollars in the voter-approved levy, but since the 2016 election, all bets are off. (Seattle’s sanctuary city status has prompted several threats from the Trump Administration to withhold federal grant funding from the city.) SDOT has not released a 2017 financial report for Move Seattle, so it’s difficult to say how much federal money came in during the first full year under the new federal regime, but in 2016, the city received and spent just $16.3 million in federal funds on Move Seattle projects—a tiny fraction of that $564 million total. I have requested the 2017 spending report for Move Seattle from SDOT and will update this post if I receive it.
The projects on this list that could be particularly at risk for cuts include those that rely heavily on federal funding, including not just the seven RapidRide lines but bridge safety improvements, pedestrian safety projects, and sidewalks in neighborhoods that don’t currently have them. The percentage of federal funds assumed for each category of projects ranges from none to 86.7 percent.
“We’re still giving between 70 and 75 percent of our lane miles [downtown] over to folks that are only 25 percent of the [commuter] population. To me, that seems like a really inequitable use of public space.” – Council member Rob Johnson
It’s a particularly inopportune time for more bad news from SDOT. Last week, Mayor Jenny Durkan announced she was putting the Center City Streetcar on “pause” because of dramatic cost overruns, and earlier this week, Durkan announced that the city would delay a long-planned protected bike lane on Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle until 2021, when the Northgate light rail station opens, ostensibly to avoid eliminating motorized traffic lanes on Fourth during the upcoming “period of maximum constraint” downtown. Interim SDOT director Goran Sparrman got an earful about the delayed bike safety improvements from both O’Brien and council member (and former Transportation Choices Coalition director) Rob Johnson during his presentation on the One Center City plan earlier this week; Johnson said that one of his “frustrations” was that although the city says it prioritizes pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders over cars, its actions downtown have done exactly the opposite. “It’s not just that we aren’t dedicating enough of the center city to bicycle facilities, but ditto on the transit side of things, Goran,” Johnson said. “We’re still giving between 70 and 75 percent of our lane miles [downtown] over to folks that are only 25 percent of the [commuter] population. To me, that seems like a really inequitable use of public space.”
2. On Wednesday, with little fanfare, One Table—the 91-member work group tasked with coming up with recommendations to address the regional homelessness crisis—released its recommendations, in a nine-page document that includes no cost estimates, no funding proposals, and no timeline for implementing any of the ideas on the list. The city of Seattle’s progressive revenue task force, which recommended a tax on employers that could raise up to $75 million annually, has said that it would wait until One Table to release its recommendations before recommending additional taxes, with the ultimate goal of raising a total of $150 million a year.
The recommendations, which were released jointly by King County and the cities of Seattle and Auburn, are mostly familiar: Providing 5,000 units of affordable housing across the county over three years, by building new housing and by “increasing access to existing housing choices”; treatment on demand; financial assistance for housing, including short-term help for people in crisis; and increased investment in job programs for people at risk of homelessness. Since the list of “actions” doesn’t include any dollar amounts, it’s hard to assess how ambitious the proposal truly is, but 5,000 units in three years throughout King County (to say nothing of the three-county Puget Sound region) will house fewer than half of the 12,000 people living outdoors or in sanctioned encampments or shelters in King County alone. Job programs and homelessness prevention efforts will undoubtedly prevent some people from falling into homelessness and making that number even larger, but until it’s clear how the recommendations would cost and where the money would come from, it’s hard to say what impact the proposals will have, and whether One Table will live up to its promise to “best tackle this problem to ensure expansive and lasting solutions,” as Mayor Jenny Durkan put it when the work group held its first meeting in January.
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As the Trump Administration cracks down on undocumented immigrants and threatens to overturn the Affordable Care Act, pushing more than 20 million people off their health care plans, some Seattle leaders are looking for ways to ensure that people living in the city can access health care regardless of their income or immigration status.
To figure out how to accomplish this, they’re looking to the south—specifically, to San Francisco, another high-cost West Coast “sanctuary city” that just happens to have the only truly universal health care coverage system in the country.
The plan, known as Healthy San Francisco, isn’t technically health insurance—only San Francisco residents are covered, and only inside San Francisco’s borders. But it does provide comprehensive health care—everything from annual exams to mental health care to lab tests to addiction treatment—to people making up to 500 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $60,000 for an individual. This group includes independent contractors, lower-middle-class people without employer-provided insurance, and, increasingly, undocumented immigrants, who do not qualify for benefits under the Affordable Care Act.
The idea, according to San Francisco Health Department spokeswoman Rachel Kagan, is to “reduce the dependence of uninsured people on emergency rooms health care,” by getting them “plugged into the health care system earlier, where they can get preventative care.” At its peak, Healthy San Francisco had about 65,000 members; once Obamacare was up and running, enrollment declined to about 14,000.
People who qualify for Medicaid are ineligible for Healthy San Francisco, as are people who already have insurance. (Uninsured people who qualify for the Affordable Care Act can decide to pay the federal penalty and join Healthy San Francisco instead). “It’s supposed to be a program of last resort,” says Alice Kurniadi, a senior program planner at SFDPH, which oversees the program. Healthy San Francisco is funded by the city’s general fund, fees from participants, which max out at $1,800 a year, and a payroll tax on businesses—$2.64 per employee, per hour for businesses with more than 100 employees, and $1.76 an hour for businesses with 20 to 100 workers.
Seattle had a similar tax—derisively referred to as the “head tax” by opponents—for a brief period in the mid-2000s, when the city council passed a $25-per-employee tax to pay for transportation projects. That tax was repealed in 2009, and efforts to reinstate it for other purposes (most recently, to fund the city’s Office of Labor Standards) have failed. (Restaurants challenged the law in San Francisco, but lost; a subsequent court case concluded that the “Healthy San Francisco fees” many had instituted in protested went straight into restaurant owners’ pockets.)
City council Position 8 candidate Teresa Mosqueda, who says she will propose a “Healthy Seattle” plan here if she’s elected in November, acknowledges that there are significant differences between the fiscal and political climates in San Francisco and Seattle that will need to be addressed for the plan to have a shot here.
“The biggest difference is that [San Francisco] already has so much more revenue that they’re able to play with,” including a statewide income tax, Mosqueda says. “Because we have a different revenue system here, we need to have a larger conversation with businesses and employees” about the best way to fund a citywide health-care plan.
One thing Seattle does have in common with San Francisco, Mosqueda notes, is a large system of community health-care providers that could form the backbone of a public provider network. San Francisco’s “medical homes” are mostly community clinics, along with a few private providers. “They had three dozen health care centers and hospitals in their city,” Mosqueda says. “I’ve counted—we have almost four dozen community health centers in our city, and even more hospitals and a VA.”
No one I spoke to in either city was placing bets on whether Trump will manage to overturn the Affordable Care Act this year, but both San Francisco health officials and Mosqueda said it’s a good idea for cities to prepare for the worst.
“If we can actually create a pool that will allow people to get the comprehensive services that they need, then we should,” Mosqueda says. “I think it’s definitely possible in a post-ACA world” to deliver health-care services at the city level. “And also in a post-whatever-Trump-does world,” she adds.
That was Mayor Ed Murray’s latest volley in his own war against the Trump Administration, launched yesterday along with a lawsuit charging that Trump has no legal right to pull federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that refuse to enforce federal immigration statutes according to the new Administration’s harsh interpretation of those laws.
Yesterday, the mayor and City Attorney Pete Holmes announced they were filing suit against the US Justice Department, whose director, KKK apologist Jeff Sessions, announced this week that he would pull Department of Justice grants to cities that refuse to assist federal agents in tracking down and detaining undocumented immigrants. Seattle’s 2017 budget assumes $2.6 million in DOJ grants for domestic violence prevention, officer body cams, human trafficking prosecution, and more.
The lawsuit contends that Sessions’ order violates the 10th Amendment, by dictating the way the city enforces federal laws, and the Spending Clause from Article 1 of the Constitution, by attempting to coerce the city into aiding immigration agents by threatening to withhold federal funding if it doesn’t.
“We have the law on our side: the federal government cannot compel our police department to enforce federal immigration law and cannot use our federal dollars to coerce Seattle into turning our backs on our immigrant and refugee communities,” Murray said.
Trump’s war on immigrants is a war on cities because cities are made stronger, politically, culturally, and economically, by the presences of immigrants, and he’s waging that war because city values—diversity, inclusion, resistance, queerness, intellectualism, and unconformity—are anathema to his backward-looking vision of a nation united by fear and mutual distrust. Seattle is the first city to formally resist Sessions’ and Trump’s unconstitutional bullying by filing a lawsuit. If cities’ response to the last unconstitutional order targeting immigrants was any indication, we won’t be the last.
2. A Queen Anne homeowner’s dogged, well-financed effort to kill backyard cottages in Seattle won a victory that will further delay a proposal to make it easier for homeowners to build accessory units and cost taxpayers thousands of dollars in the process.
This week, city council member Mike O’Brien announced that thanks to activist Marty Kaplan‘s successful effort to delay new rules that would loosen the regulations that currently make it prohibitively expensive for many homeowners to build accessory units, the city will do a full environmental impact statement to determine the impact accessory units will have on the city’s environment. The intuitively obvious conclusion would be that backyard cottages improve the environment, because they add density, which helps prevent suburban sprawl and reduce auto dependence. In addition, they allow homeowners to age in place, promoting multigenerational households and preventing the development of lot-line-to-lot-line McMansions that often sprout in neighborhoods when single-family properties change hands.
O’Brien proposed his backyard cottage legislation in May 2016. With any luck, he will be able to introduce new legislation sometime in the summer of 2018.
3. Bikesharing advocates will say goodbye to Pronto with a group ride tomorrow afternoon. Pronto riders will gather at 3rd Ave. and Broad Street at 5pm (there are two Pronto stations within two blocks, but the clunky green bikes are available all over downtown) and ride slowly up Capitol Hill, ending at a bar TBA. “Ed Murray’s house for bell ringing party optional.” Murray announced he was killing the money-losing bikeshare system in January.
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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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Just three months after the joint Seattle-King County Opiate Addiction Task Force issued its recommendations for addressing the opiate addiction epidemic in the region, the federal government appears poised to slam the door on many of those proposals, county officials, state legislators, and experts on addiction and mental illness said Wednesday. Speaking at the county’s annual legislative forum on behavioral health at Town Hall, King County Executive Dow Constantine described a grim future if Congressional Republicans repeal the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, a move Constantine said “would reduce or roll back access to treatment, particularly for people with substance use disorders. And even if there is treatment, it is more likely to be involuntary”–in places like lockdown mental hospitals and jails, Constantine said.
CARA, which President Obama signed into law this year, funds local programs to address heroin and opiate addiction, including traditional inpatient and outpatient treatment, medication disposal, distribution of the overdose-reversal drug naloxone, and medication-assisted treatment for opiate addiction with drugs like buprenorphine.
National Council on Behavioral Health president Linda Rosenberg noted that president-elect Trump and Congressional Republicans want not only to repeal the Affordable Care Act—eliminating mental health coverage for millions of newly insured Americans—but to turn Medicaid, the program that provides health care for the very poorest Americans, into a block grant to states, which would effectively end health care as an entitlement. Without ongoing funding for Medicaid expansion, King County Behavioral Health and Recovery Division Director Jim Vollendroff added, the county could find itself unable to fund drug treatment and other recommendations of the opiate task force recommendations. At the same time, “the county’s overall financial crisis threatens its ability to keep us all safe and healthy,” Vollendroff said.
One of the task force’s recommendations, supervised drug-consumption sites—where drug users could consume heroin, crack, meth, and other illegal substances under medical supervision—could be threatened from another corner of the new administration. Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has made no secret of his opposition to drug legalization, speaking out strongly against legal weed. (“Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” Sessions once said.) It’s hard to imagine this drug warrior will sit idly by while a liberal city creates a space for people to use illegal drugs with impunity, and county officials say they are waiting on tenterhooks to see whether the new administration will crack down on innovative experiments like safe-consumption spaces.
So although the county distributed a short but ambitious list of federal legislative priorities—including full funding of CARA, preservation of Medicaid expansion, and federal funding for 30-day treatment stays, rather than the current 15-day limit—it’s pretty clear that any real progress on improving the state’s treatment capacity will have to come from the state. The legislators gathered on stage at Town Hall last night promised to introduce a full slate of bills promoting addiction prevention and education, drug takeback programs, and programs to encourage people to enter the mental health-care field and keep them there. “The need is outstripping the number of workers in the field who can serve this community,” said freshman state Sen. Lisa Wellman, D-41. “We need to work, we need to educate, and we need to make sure this is a good paying job that people want to serve in.”
However, few legislators described how they would actually fund all these programs—Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-36, talked about directing taxes from recreational marijuana toward treatment instead of the state’s general fund, a perennial Democratic goal—and none talked about safe consumption, the most controversial element of the task force’s recommendations. Sen. Mark Miloscia (R-30), the only Republican on the stage, has been vocal about his opposition to safe consumption sites—yesterday on Twitter, he characterized “decriminalization/legalization of heroin, rather than elimination” as “Death!”—and has proposed legislation that would prevent any local jurisdiction, such as the city or the county, from opening a safe consumption site.
Check out King County’s full list of state and federal legislative priorities here.
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A scary thing happened to me on the half-block walk between my bus stop and my house the other night. As I walked along the sidewalk, a man in a silver BMW tore out of the quiet, one-lane alley behind my house and pulled into the street, nearly hitting me. Seeing me (and possibly hearing my standard response when this happens, a resigned “No need to stop”), he slammed on the brakes, leaped out of the car, at charged at me, and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Why don’t you wear something I can SEE next time, you stupid fucking cunt? Get out of my fucking way, you stupid ugly bitch!” The guy, about 50, was tall, white, bald, and much taller and larger than me. I was pretty sure he was going to attack me, but he didn’t, and I managed to stumble home physically unscathed.
Later that night, I posted a quick note on my Facebook page, describing what had happened and concluding, “This man is probably my neighbor. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.” (Shorthand for: Electing a man who cheerfully brags about sexual assault and has been accused many times of harassment, assault, and even rape, has emboldened some misogynists to act out in more extreme ways than before the election, as part of a documented increase in crimes based on a person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, or perceived religion.) The next day, I found the car, which was parked at one of the new townhouses about 50 yards down the alley, and posted an update, which read in part:
I know there’s no point in repeating this to people who just won’t believe my experience, but this kind of explicitly violent threat, and this level of aggression, has been escalating in my experience, and the experience of many women I know, since Trump was elected. Misogynists like this guy may have WANTED to lunge at and threaten women physically before Trump, but now they are empowered and validated when they actually do so. This is new. It is different. It is terrifying. So don’t tell me that if I had just dressed differently (wearing lights and reflectors to walk the half-block from my bus stop to my house) or been meeker, smaller, or more passive in some way, this wouldn’t have happened. I didn’t bring this attack on myself. Neither did the many women who have experienced similar incidents since November 9. I will not accept any excuses for this kind of violent misogynistic behavior, and neither should you.
You’ll never believe this, but some people–all strangers or relative strangers, almost exclusively men*–didn’t listen. So I decided to compile some of their helpful suggestions here, in case any other woman ever finds herself confronted with a large, screaming man who lunges at her and won’t take “I was just trying to walk down the sidewalk” for an answer. (I should note here, of course, that most of the responses to my post came from a place of genuine concern and desire to express support or offer help; that said, the responses below are typical of the comments from men who never learned that lesson about opinions and assholes.) Notice how many times I’m told that it’s my responsibility not to get myself hit by a speeding car or physically threatened by a man (“Just move to another part of the city/country!”), and how many people turn out to be mind-readers who just know that this man didn’t mean anything malicious when he threatened me and called me a “stupid fucking cunt.”
Time to move if this is your neighbor!
She should have been packing and she could have “feared for her life”.
In no way trying to excuse or support his behavior but I do a lot of running. I have been hit (daylight) wearing bright colors, hit at night with a light and reflective clothes. The point to be made is that even when supposedly obvious drivers (both genders) can’t/don’t see me. If you are out at night in dark/non-reflective clothes drivers can’t see you. Be seen.
stop and think about his point of view for a minute! Assuming it was dark, he barely missed you due to not seeing you because of the dark clothing you were wearing. [Note: I did not say what color or shade of clothing I was wearing.]
As a driver, IT IS very difficult to see pedestrians in the dark. Unfortunately, he handled the situation with immaturity, blame and anger, but I doubt he meant any danger to you. It was just a poor way to express himself and try to make his point, as he was caught off guard when he suddenly noticed someone walking in the alley that he didn’t see before.
Try to consider it from his angle, please….and what does Trump have to do with this? Nothing.
You marginalize the incident by trying to illogically link it to a politician you dislike. It stands on it’s own the guy who verbally accosted you is an ass.
You have to remember that even though you think that you might be able to be seen at night, dusk, that actually it is a scientific fact that drivers cannot see people on the street as well as you might think they can.
So yeah wasn’t right that he was mad at you but I think he was scared that he almost hit you. You might think about how close you came to being hit and how you can contribute in the future to your own safety.*
I would suggest moving to some place like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit or Philadelphia.
If you want to see real hatred [nope, didn’t say I did], try that coming from Clinton supporters. Here are some examples: [irrelevant links to right-wing sites]
sometimes in the dark or bad weather if you can move your arms or make a quick movement make yourself as visible as possible to a driver, a small flashlight could save you and others life. Also with people on cell phones both walking and driving it is tougher these days were all at risk even under ideal conditions.
Empower yourself with MACE and a taser….and/or carry a lil .380. Take self-defense classes and kick his ass
Go and get you some bear mase. Next time this asshole approaches spray his ass then kick him on the balls and beat the shit out of him. Real Talk a lesson should be taught to this son of a bitch!
Stop casting blame. Some people are just jerks. And others are judgemental.*
There HAS been a rise in violence since the election, mostly from HRC supporters: [irrelevant link to right-wing site]
stop demonizing people who have a different opinion and perhaps consider listening to the reasons and facts behind that opinion.
Car drivers did this well before Trump was elected
I hear muzzle flash is visible for a split second from quite far away.
Women go through our lives not being believed, particularly by men. We go through our lives being told how we should have behaved differently, that we were probably just misinterpreting the situation, that we were probably at fault, that we should bend as far as we can to make sure things don’t happen to us, as if making ourselves as small as possible, or taking a self-defense class, or covering ourselves with lights and reflectors will protect us from men who want to harm us. (The idea that we might expect men to be better is never on the table.) We are constantly told to question our own experience.
So when I explain something that happened to me, something that was, by any interpretation, a crime, what I don’t need is a bunch of men telling me what I did wrong or why what happened to me didn’t actually happen or that I should really try to see things from the perspective of my attacker. I can explain until I am blue in the face all the ways in which misogynists have been emboldened since the election of the pussy-grabber-in-chief, using not just my own experience (which is so easily invalidated by a simple, “Are you sure it really happened that way”?) but the experiences of many, many women I know as well as statistics on sexual harassment and other gender-motivated crimes. But the truth is that people who won’t believe my experience won’t believe the experience of millions of other women, either. Because the bottom line is we’re all just women. And until people start believing women, I’m afraid these incidents are going to continue to be ignored, and dismissed, and rendered silent by the chorus of voices, mostly men’s, but some women’s, too. saying “Yeah, but…” We have to start saying “I believe you” instead.
* And some women! Whose comments are marked with asterisks!
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Over the last few days, I’ve seen a number of urbanists claiming that even if Donald Trump does deport millions of undocumented immigrants, ban abortion, eliminate health care coverage for 20 million Americans, and devalue the lives of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and religious minorities, at least he’ll be “good for cities.”
After all (the argument goes), Trump is a developer, and a New Yorker—which makes him fundamentally urbanist, right? I mean, check it out: Not only did he help build the biggest, most urban city in the nation, he made a promise to “rebuild America’s inner cities,” which could definitely use some sidewalks and pothole fixes. And he vowed to spend $1 trillion on “rebuilding America’s infrastructure”—which can only be good news for mass transit, sidewalks, and crumbling city streets. (Finally, a Pothole President!) And just think: By clearing away local and state regulations that hamper housing production—like environmental laws that keep housing away from freeways, and zoning restrictions that draw borders around developable areas–President Trump will clear the way for a new urbanist renaissance.
Bullshit. Trump would be a disaster for cities, and not just because his ascension represents a total rejection of the diversity of thoughts, ideas, opinions, and people that makes cities great. He would be a disaster for cities because every policy he has espoused is (like his largely rural support base) profoundly anti-urban—and if you believe, as I do, that Trump means what he says, then it’s time to take a gimlet-eyed look at what Trump has said he will do in, and to, cities. Urbanists must stop indulging in the fantasy that there is a “real” Donald Trump who supports investments in public transit, urban housing, and programs that will give poor people in cities opportunities to succeed. There is only one Donald Trump. Here is what that Donald Trump seems likely, based on his own words and actions, to do.
• Cut federal funding for mass transit.
When Republicans talk about transportation “infrastructure,” they mean, first, big highway projects, and second, roads and bridges in rural areas. The GOP platform adopted this year says this quite explicitly. “One fifth of (trust) funds are spent on mass transit, an inherently local affair that serves only a small portion of the population, concentrated in six big cities,” it says. “We propose to phase out the federal transit program.” Sound Transit 3, which voters overwhelmingly adopted Tuesday, relies heavily on that transit program–it includes $5 billion in matching funds from the federal government—as do most of the transit funding measures passed by urban voters across the nation last week.
• Privatize roads, highways and bridges–and leave those that can’t turn a profit to crumble.
If you think a President Trump will not only renege on his party’s promise but reject it wholeheartedly then you haven’t looked at his infrastructure plan. In effect, Trump’s proposal would privatize the nation’s roads, bridges, and highways by providing tax credits to subsidize $1 trillion in private investment in infrastructure. Companies would make their money back for charging people to drive on those roads, bridges, and highways, and any project that doesn’t pencil out—that is, that doesn’t turn a profit for investors—won’t get built. (On Friday, Trump announced his pick to head up his “transportation and infrastructure” team—literal asphalt lobbyist Martin Whitmer.)
This will lead not only to a widening gap between poor counties and cities and wealthy ones, but a disinvestment in inner-city transit infrastructure. (picture wealthy exurban homeowners driving on pristinely maintained toll roads while overcrowded buses ferry carless city dwellers through traffic-jammed, pothole-riddled streets. Rail and express-bus lines that serve the suburbs will be able to pay for themselves through higher user fees, but public transit, which relies heavily on federal funding as well as local subsidies, won’t. (Think about it: Even if King County Metro raised bus fare to, say, $10 a ride—about what it would cost absent other funding sources—the vast majority of riders would be forced to stop riding, making the system unprofitable. Oh, and there’s that whole equity and social justice thing.)
Privatization also creates a perverse incentive for builders to cut corners and endanger public safety, by saving costs on bridge reinforcement, for example, or using less-reliable or less-durable materials. It also means that cities whose citizens can’t afford to pay for improvements themselves—say, struggling citizens of Flint, Michigan poisoned by lead in their water pipes, or parents in low-income school districts with school buildings that are unsafe and out-of-date—will be left behind. Inner cities aren’t the crumbling, post-apocalyptic hellscapes Trump made them out to be on the campaign trail—far from it—but his privatization plans would send them spiraling in that direction.
• Eliminate some federal housing subsidies, and abandon commitments to fair housing made by President Obama.
Trump hasn’t yet said who he’ll appoint to head up the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in fact, the issue of housing—particularly housing for the homeless, a population that has boomed in cities even as the economy has recovered—didn’t really come up during the campaign. That’s a shame, because it would be instructive to know how Trump plans to address the growing crisis, which has led three West Coast cities (including Seattle) and Hawaii to declare an official state of emergency.
Seattle, in response to HUD policies under Obama that direct federal funds into “rapid rehousing” vouchers, recently released a plan called “Pathways Home” that reflects this approach, but if HUD dramatically changes direction, reducing the federal subsidies on which cities like Seattle rely or relying on privatization schemes like the one Trump has proposed to pay for other kinds of infrastructure, cities could find themselves trying to dig out of an ever-deeper funding hole. (That’s assuming that those cities that have declared themselves “sanctuary cities” for immigrants, including Seattle, still receive any federal funding at all).
Trump’s family, famously, was accused of discriminating against African American tenants in New York City in the 1970s, when Trump was president of Trump Industries. (A New York Times investigation uncovered “a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.”) On the campaign trail this year, Trump vowed to overturn a rule adopted by the Obama administration called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which requires local jurisdictions that receive federal housing funds to address housing segregation and other disparities in housing access, in part by encouraging affordable housing development in more affluent, whiter neighborhoods. Right-wing outlets and pundits, from the Daily Caller to the Daily Sturmer, effusively praised Trump for his promise to reject Obama’s efforts to, as one alt-right site put it, “force ‘diversity’ on white neighborhoods.”
One day after the election, Mayor Ed Murray said he would consider floating another levy (in addition to the $290 million housing levy voters adopted earlier this year) to address the city’s homelessness crisis. As the impact of Trump’s presidency sets in, we’ll see how serious he is about that idea.
• Adopt policies that make the homelessness and addiction crises worse.
Last year, the One Night Count of the homeless counted about 10,000 homeless people living in King County, about half of them sleeping unsheltered. (Service providers suggest doubling that amount to get an accurate figure). Reducing that number will require funding not just for housing but for drug and alcohol treatment, mental health care, and job assistance.
Trump hasn’t said anything specific about dealing with those root causes of homelessness, but his health care plan consists of repealing the Affordable Care Act, which will leave some 20 million Americans, most of them lower-income, without health care. That includes mental health care, including treatment for addiction. Meanwhile, Trump’s only public statements about drug addiction have consisted of wonderment that an opiate epidemic could exist in America’s beautiful rural areas (“How does heroin work with these beautiful lakes and trees?”), and a promise to build a wall with Mexico to cut off the flow of drugs, War on Drugs-style. Neither of these statements bodes well for reducing the addiction epidemic, or for helping people who are homeless because of addiction get housing and health care.
This is far from a comprehensive list of reasons urbanists, and those who love cities, should be alarmed about the next four years—there’s also the promised crackdown on religious and sexual minorities, the prospect of mass deportations, the rejection of climate science, and the imposition of a 1950s good-ol-boy culture that is fundamentally provincial, anti-intellectual, and conformist. The next four years will reveal how much of this vision Trump manages to inflict on America, and how much cities react by pulling up the drawbridges and becoming not so much urban archipelagos as urban islands.
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1. Yesterday afternoon, Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff revealed some bad news that could spell trouble up and down the planned Link light rail corridor: The Federal Way station and light rail extension, which was approved as part of the Sound Transit 2 ballot measure in 2008, is now projected to cost $460 million more than anticipated. That increase—the result, Sound Transit staff said yesterday, of escalating land, materials, and labor costs—pushes the price tag for the Federal Way extension up to $2.5 billion. Of that total, $500 million is supposed to come from the federal government—and President Trump has proposed no longer awarding capital investment grants for transit projects, including those that have already been approved. In briefing materials for yesterday’s meeting, Sound Transit expressed optimism at the fact that “In response to the Administration’s proposal to no longer award new [Capital Investment Grants], Congress is demonstrating its strong, bicameral and bipartisan commitment to keep the CIG program funded.” However, the fate of the Federal Way grant, as well as a $1.2 billion grant for a northern light rail extension to Lynnwood, which is also 
