Tag: west seattle

“It Was Too Much”: Volunteer Shelter Operator Says City Policy Overwhelmed Tiny West Seattle Shelter

West Seattle American Legion Hall
West Seattle American Legion Hall

By Erica C. Barnett

As snow, ice, and freezing temperatures closed in on Seattle in late December, the city opened three shelters in the downtown Seattle area, with enough beds to serve several hundred people. The emphasis on the center city reflected an implicit assumption that most people living unsheltered in Seattle either live near the center city or could get there easily on public transit, using transit passes or the free bus tickets the city’s outreach teams distributed for this purpose.

At the same time, over in West Seattle, Keith Hughes was worried. Since 2019, the retired carpenter and electrician has run an occasional, informal shelter out of the American Legion hall on Southwest Alaska Street, providing a place to stay for a handful of local unhoused residents during the coldest winter nights. Initially, Hughes opened the building, which is owned by the West Seattle Veterans Center, as a place for unsheltered people “to get dry and warm up” after noticing that “four, five, six people” would often sit under an overhang in front of the building to get out of the rain. Later, when the temperature dipped into the 20s, “I couldn’t get myself to throw them back out of the building,” so he started keeping the building open on the coldest night of the  year.

“I started it because it needed to be,” Hughes, who is 74, said. “The hall is there, not getting used, 95 percent of the time, so I decided it needed to get used.”

Ordinarily, according to Hughes, the shelter, which is run by Hughes and a handful of volunteers, serves between 6 and 12 guests a night, although it often has fewer. Hughes said this year was shaping up to be much the same as previous winters—until the county, city, and Seattle Times included the shelter on their official, public lists of available shelters just after Christmas.

“I had a guy sent to me who had been hit by.a car, patched up by the crisis clinic, and released back onto the street with a bus ticket and my address. He couldn’t hardly walk. I’m not a medical facility.”—Keith Hughes, volunteer operator, West Seattle Veterans Center shelter

The result, Hughes said, was instantaneous. “I was trying to take care of people locally in West Seattle, and suddenly I was getting phone calls from Beacon Hill, and SoDo, and Capitol Hill, and a Sound Mental Health clinic, and Navos Mental Health [in Burien], asking if I had space in my shelter. I’m not a professional. I’m not a mental health counselor. I’m not a social worker. It was too much.”

Tomasz Biernacki, a West Seattle resident who volunteered at the shelter several nights, said the shelter was “being run by three people with no training, zero support, and our only hope was that Tracy [Record, the editor of the West Seattle Blog] would post updates on what’s going on with the shelter so that people would” volunteer for shifts, which she did. Biernacki described several instances when shelter volunteers were overwhelmed by situations they were underqualified to deal with, including “at least one person in mental distress that was sent from another shelter” and a man who was paralyzed from the waist down who involuntarily “crapped all over the place” and had to be transported by ambulance to a hospital.

“Somebody brought in a Somali woman who said she was running away from an abusive family—they found her in the snow wearing just a t-shirt and a pair of pants, so they brought her in,” Biernacki said. “I started calling every single phone number I could get my hands on for, like, a women’s shelter— I only have so much knowledge about this—and nobody ever called me back.”

Hughes said the influx of people needing a place to stay overwhelmed the shelter. “Basically, all the city did was add me to the list of shelters out there and made my address public, which doubled the number of people that showed up,” Hughes said. “On really cold nights this year, I had 18, 20, 22 people, some of which were being sent to me directly from mental health facilities. I had a guy sent to me who had been hit by.a car, patched up by the crisis clinic, and released back onto the street with a bus ticket and my address. He couldn’t hardly walk. I’m not a medical facility.”

It’s unclear who, exactly, made the decision to list the West Seattle site on both the city and King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s list of available shelters. Lisa Gustaveson, a former HSD staffer who now works as a senior advisor to the KCRHA, was apparently the first to identify the site as a viable shelter option for people outside downtown Seattle, and initially advocating against making the shelter location public.

“The facility didn’t report being above capacity, and was only at capacity on one night according to the census counts provided. Keeping open capacity hidden from the community seems counter to the point of opening emergency severe weather shelter.”—Seattle Human Services Department spokeswoman Jenna Franklin

Jenna Franklin, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Human Services Department, said the city listed the shelter after it became a “funder,” which it did by agreeing to pay Hughes’ higher-than-average utility bills during the official winter emergency—the only reimbursement the city has offered. In contrast, other winter shelter providers, which (unlike Hughes) have formal contracts to provide shelter services, will be compensated for additional staff, services, and supplies associated with the winter shelters they operated. Editor’s note: This paragraph initially said that the city “had to list” the shelter once it became a funder, which was inaccurate. PubliCola regrets the error.

Franklin said the city was not the first to publicly advertise that the shelter was open. “The shelter was listed in the broader news (West Seattle Blog and Seattle Times) prior to HSD listing it, and KCRHA published this location on their site and map on 12/25, prior to HSD sharing it as well.”

Still, it would be misleading to suggest that the city wasn’t primarily responsible for making Seattle residents aware of what shelters were available. Throughout the weather emergency, the city’s public information officers, including Franklin, directed the media to use and link to the HSD website in stories about available shelter; the KCRHA’s winter shelter blog post also directed visitors back to the city’s website. Continue reading ““It Was Too Much”: Volunteer Shelter Operator Says City Policy Overwhelmed Tiny West Seattle Shelter”

Spike In Cost Estimates Raises Questions About Future of West Seattle-Ballard Light Rail

By Erica C. Barnett

The estimated cost of extending Seattle’s light rail system to Ballard and West Seattle, as well as several other components of the Sound Transit 3 plan adopted by voters in 2015, has risen dramatically since last year, Sound Transit staffers told the agency’s executive committee Wednesday. The main factors driving the increase, according to the agency, are higher than anticipated property acquisition costs, higher costs for labor and materials, and unanticipated “soft costs,” including additional funding for contingencies.

Overall, according to the staff presentation, the estimated cost to build the West Seattle-Ballard line and other aspects of the planned expansion, including a planned Tacoma Dome extension and a new operations and maintenance facility in South King County has increased by $7.9 billion, with the bulk of that—around $4.4 billion at the midrange of Sound Transit’s new estimates—coming from increased costs to build light rail between West Seattle and Ballard.

Sound Transit provided PubliCola a more detailed breakdown of the West Seattle-to-Ballard cost increases. The chart below represents the best-case (lowest-cost) scenario from the range Sound Transit released yesterday. The most dramatic percentage increase is in the elevated West Seattle to downtown segment, which Sound Transit attributed to the higher cost of property in quickly densifying West Seattle.

The main reason for the cost increases in general, Sound Transit deputy CEO Kimberly Farley said, was the cost of buying up property along the line. Property values have continued to skyrocket in Seattle and across the region despite the recession. Exacerbating that problem, Sound Transit will have to buy back an undisclosed number of buildings that are either currently under development or that have been developed since the ballot measure passed in 2015.

One of these is the Legacy at Fauntleroy mixed-use building, which will include more than 300 apartments and ground-floor commercial space. That building, and likely others, is on land that was upzoned in 2019 under Seattle’s Mandatory Housing Affordability program. The upzone, to 95 feet, went into effect in April 2019, making the seven-story project possible, and construction began three months later. The building is still under construction. PubliCola has a call out to the owner of the property.

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During Wednesday’s meeting, board members and Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff hastened to emphasize that these huge unanticipated costs should be viewed as a challenge, not a disaster. “While these numbers are sobering, they’re not catastrophic,” Rogoff said. King County executive Dow Constantine added that the one certainty is that light rail will only get more, not less, expensive to build in the future. “This system would have been a lot easier to build 50 years ago,” he said—an allusion to the frequently referenced Forward Thrust plan that Puget Sound region voters rejected in 1968 and again in 1970.

Staffers noted Wednesday that it was possible to make some “protective acquisitions” of property to prevent huge spikes in property values along the line, but agency spokesman Geoff Patrick told PubliCola their power to do so is limited. “While public agencies can secure federal approval for protective acquisitions in some cases, most property acquisition must occur after environmental review processes are completed and the Board has adopted the final project to be built,” he said. “This occurs after completion of the draft and final environmental impact statements that are required for most major projects.” Continue reading “Spike In Cost Estimates Raises Questions About Future of West Seattle-Ballard Light Rail”

Durkan’s Pedestrian Bridge Idea Raises Feasibility Questions, SPOG President Debuts New Podcast, and Homeless Vaccinations Threatened

1. When Mayor Jenny Durkan announced last month that the city would repair, rather than replace, the damaged West Seattle Bridge, she made an offhand comment that could have major implications for Sound Transit’s light rail project if it turns into policy: The new light rail bridge connecting downtown to West Seattle, she said, should include crossings for pedestrians and cyclists as well as light rail itself. “It makes no sense to build a bridge that does only one thing,” Durkan said.

Sound Transit is facing a revenue shortfall of $8 billion to $12 billion over the life of the Sound Transit 3 program due to the COVID-fueled economic downturn. Rachelle Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the agency, said Durkan’s office and Seattle Department of Transportation Staff “informed us of the mayor’s idea prior to her announcement but there were not any substantive discussions” about how the bridge would need to be revamped to accommodate other, non-light rail modes and how much additional time and cost such changes would add to the project.

Sound Transit is scheduled to publish the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the project in mid-2021; that document will only include the light-rail-only options that the agency has considered so far, “consistent with the ST3 plan,” Cunningham said. During their conversations with the mayor’s office, “Sound Transit staff noted that the voter-approved ST3 plan only authorizes construction of a light rail bridge. Changing that plan to a multi-modal crossing would require additional funding from alternative sources as well as additional planning time” to accommodate things like supplementary design work and additional environmental review.

The steep grades required for an elevated rail line across the Duwamish River crossing could be an issue for people walking, biking, or rolling as well. Any changes to the current plan would likely require review and action by the Sound Transit board, Cunningham said.

2. In a promotional email sent on Tuesday, Police Officers’ Guild President Mike Solan wrote that his new podcast could become “an effective tool to push back against the progressive march to socialism.” The first episode of Hold the Line with Mike Solan (rhymes if you say it with a Southern accent!) appeared on YouTube the same day; the featured guest was Victoria Beach, the chair of the Seattle Police Department’s African American Community Advisory Council.

Solan opened his debut appearance with a call for unity, then pivoted to denounce a legislative proposal by city council member Lisa Herbold as a “preposterous” attempt to “legalize most crime.” (The legislation he was referring to would not “legalize most crime”; it would create new defenses against prosecution for crimes that result from poverty or an unmanaged mental health or addiction disorder). But, Solan added, he’s open to bringing Herbold on the podcast to “talk it out.”

After a jarring transition involving a clip from the 1996 sci-fi film Independence Day, Solan introduced Beach, a close ally of retired Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best who made periodic appearances at protests on Capitol Hill this summer.

Beach, a lifelong Seattleite, told Solan she “grew up hating police.” Her nephew was beaten bloody more than a decade ago; in 2000, two SPD officers pointed guns at her 5-year-old daughter while responding to an erroneous call from a white college student about a stolen car. Solan interrupted her as she told this story to explain why officers might point guns at children during “high risk felony stop[s],” but Beach forged ahead. “I’ve never had a positive experience,” she said. “Nothing positive?” he asked, sounding hurt.

Support PubliCola

If you’re reading this, we know you’re someone who appreciates deeply sourced breaking news, features, and analysis—along with guest columns from local opinion leaders, ongoing coverage of the kind of stories that get short shrift in mainstream media, and informed, incisive opinion writing about issues that matter. Earlier this month, we took a look back at just some of the work we’ve been able to do thanks to generous contributions from our readers, but those pieces represent just a handful of the hundreds of stories we’ve published this year.

We know there are a lot of publications competing for your dollars and attention, but PubliCola truly is different. We cover Seattle and King County on a budget that is funded entirely and exclusively by reader contributions—no ads, no paywalls, ever.

Being fully independent means that we cover the stories we consider most interesting and newsworthy, based on our own news judgment and feedback from readers about what matters to them, not what advertisers or corporate funders want us to write about. It also means that we need your support. So if you get something out of this site, consider giving something back by kicking in a few dollars a month, or making a one-time contribution, to help us keep doing this work. If you prefer to Venmo or write a check, our Support page includes information about those options. Thank you for your ongoing readership and support.

During an hour-long conversation, Solan occasionally ventured toward self-reflection, at one point noting that his hunger as a rookie patrol officer for “action” and car chases in  the Rainier Valley was immature. But he also repeatedly minimized the significance of race in policing: he expressed discomfort with the “social justice term ‘white privilege'” because of his hard-working two-parent upbringing; he dismissed racial profiling by police as the consequence of inexperienced cops with “bad intuition”; and he lamented the public’s tendency to focus on “about 30 cases a year” in which police kill unarmed Black people when “most people killed by police are white.” When Solan commented that “there are racist cops, but there are racist plumbers and racist teachers,” Beach intervened. “But plumbers and teachers don’t carry weapons,” she said.

3. King County Public Health Officer Dr. Jeff Duchin—whose press conferences often feature stark reminders about COVID morbidity and phrases like “unprecedented death and devastation”—said Friday that even if the health department gets access to a vaccine, it may have to lay off the workers who would administer it to low-income and homeless people around the county. Continue reading “Durkan’s Pedestrian Bridge Idea Raises Feasibility Questions, SPOG President Debuts New Podcast, and Homeless Vaccinations Threatened”

Six Weeks After City Announced Plans for 50-Bed Shelter, Southwest Teen Life Center Opens to Eight Homeless Youth

More than six weeks after the city publicly announced that it planned to convert the Southwest Teen Life Center in West Seattle into a temporary shelter for 50 people by early April, the new shelter finally opened on Friday—with just five young adults as guests. (According to the city, three more had moved in by Monday). The residents of the new expansion shelter had been staying at YouthCare’s overnight shelter in Southeast Seattle, which has a (cramped) capacity of 20 clients under ordinary, non-COVID conditions.

When COVID started forcing shelter operators to find more space for people to sleep, Youthcare development and communications officer Jody Waits said, it became clear that “our choices were: Cut services in half, or let’s see if we can find a bigger space.”

“What happens when certain [restrictions] are lifted and we start to engage in the community and the economy with social distancing, and your place of familiarity, your cousins, your tutor, your old neighborhood are really quite far away?”

The shelter’s clients are mostly from Southeast Seattle, which was one reason the agency scoured the area for a suitable temporary location before moving to a location seven miles, and an hour’s bus ride, away. Eventually, it came down to the Teen Life Center or a disused funeral home in South Seattle that would require extensive retrofits. Shelter clients and staff considered both options, and ultimately picked West Seattle.

“Our clients in that space [on Rainier] are so highly tethered on a community level to that neighborhood that moving out felt really impossible to consider,” but eventually, “we realized that despite all of the desire to stay in South Seattle, as opposed to Southwest Seattle, we just weren’t going to find an option that we could do fast enough” in the area, Waits said.

Before YouthCare moved the shelter, they tried to downsize, finding temporary housing for some residents and expediting permanent housing for others. That left just a handful of people—those who truly had nowhere else to go—to move into the Teen Life Center, which has been closed to the public since March 13.

The city has confirmed that the center will be staffed by employees from Seattle’s parks department and patrolled by guards from Phoenix Security, a private security firm that  charges the city $90 an hour to provide security at two temporary shelters in the Central District and on Capitol Hill.

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A spokesman for the city said the space would “shelter up to 30 young adults” once it gets up to full capacity. Separately, an HSD spokesman forwarded an email from the city staffer who is leading the Teen Life Center effort, who wrote that HSD had “set a deadline for full utilization of 20 participants by [the] week of May 18.” 

Waits says it’s unlikely the temporary shelter will ever have 30 clients, which is 50 percent more than the shelter had when it was located in a convenient, familiar location. “Our contract doesn’t support provision for 30 [young adults], we’re not compensated to take care of 30 young people and … we don’t have the staffing for 30,” she said.

As for the lower number:  “Everyone is hopeful that we will get back up to that 20-youth threshold.” But there’s no way to force young adults to come to the shelter, or stay there—a problem Waits expects to become more acute when the weather turns warm and the city starts to reopen.

“Good weather changes young people’s decisions,” she said. “What happens when certain [restrictions] are lifted and we start to engage in the community and the economy with social distancing, and your place of familiarity, your cousins, your tutor, your old neighborhood are really quite far away?”

Early on in the COVID crisis, Mayor Jenny Durkan and the Human Services Department frequently claimed that the city and county had jointly created “1,900 new temporary housing options.” These “options,” as I reported at the time, consisted mostly of hospital and isolation/recovery beds that were not exclusively reserved for people experiencing homelessness, plus shelter beds that had been temporarily moved to new locations so that people could sleep six feet apart. But they also included beds that never actually opened—including 50 at the Teen Life Center. The Loyal Heights Community Center, site of another 50 of the 1,900 beds announced in March, remains closed.

Utility Changes Still Don’t Answer Key Question: What If You Just Can’t Pay?

This story originally ran at the South Seattle Emerald.

spu-shutoffs

Earlier this year, the West Seattle Helpline, which provides financial assistance to people who need help paying their utility bills, learned about a troubling change the city’s two utilities, Seattle City Light (City Light) and Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), were making as part of their transition to a new joint billing and customer contact system.

The change, which past shutoff patterns indicate would disproportionately impact customers in the 98118 ZIP code (South Seattle), would have made it harder for many families with overdue bills to get up to date, and would have given them less time to do so. “These across-the-board shutoffs are doing more harm than good,” West Seattle Helpline Chris Langeler says. “It’s getting colder and we can’t have folks without water or heat as the weather gets rough.”

The new customer information system, memorably named the New Customer Information System (NCIS), consolidated the utilities’ previously separate billing systems and, among other changes, created a uniform policy for dealing with people who fail to pay their bills. If you’ve heard of the system at all, it’s probably because it was in the news earlier this year for launching months behind schedule and at least $34 million over budget.

Before the city consolidated their billing systems, SPU and City Light had slightly different policies for working with people who failed to pay their bills within a 51-day billing cycle, and, if necessary, shutting off their electricity or water. City Light gave customers just 30 days to pay their bills in full, but only required payment of 50 percent right away; SPU gave customers 60 days to pay, but required 75 percent up front to avoid shutoff. When the two agencies were consolidating their billing systems as part of the switch to NCIS, they essentially decided to adopt the worst parts of both policies, which would have required delinquent customers to repay 75 percent of their bills within 30 days, or risk shutoff and an additional shutoff fee of $164.

In response to the concerns raised by Langeler, council member Lisa Herbold brought the issue to both utilities’ attention, and after Herbold submitted a budget proposal that would have required both utilities to adopt the lower, 50 percent, threshold, the two utilities changed their joint policy to require customers to pay back half their bill within 60 days.

Last year, SPU shut off water to 3,044 customers; City Light cut off power to 4,624. Most of those customers were concentrated, officials from both utilities say, in Southeast Seattle, Delridge, and parts of far North Seattle. As a map illustrating shutoff patterns provided by SPU demonstrates, the greatest concentration of utility disconnections between 2013 and 2016 was in the 98118 ZIP code—an area that includes Columbia and Hillman Cities and parts of Rainier Beach and Beacon Hill.

“It’s not surprising where economic hardship exists,” Chris Courtney, head of credit and collections for SPU, acknowledges. Neither agency could provide specific demographic data for the households where utilities they disconnect, but Langeler notes that “people of color disproportionately bear the risk of having their water or electricity shut-off under the current policies.  That’s what we see in West Seattle and White Center, and if we had data city-wide, I’d bet we’d see the same thing: low-income families of color being hit hardest.”

Langeler says the impacts to individuals and families who lose access to power and water can be immediate and long lasting. “In addition to the very real effects for the folks who have been shut off—[difficulty] bathing, having to find water in other places, asking neighbors to fill up buckets so they can take water back home—[SPU is] not helping them get on stable footing” by shutting off their water, Langeler says. “The fear and stress that that adds can have its own detrimental health impacts. It adds in another layer of panic and it makes it harder to focus as these families are trying to get their stability back.”

The bottom line, Langeler says, is that “The folks we see who have their utilities shut off are the folks who don’t have the funds to pay.”

SPU spokesman Andy Ryan says one reason the utility cuts off people’s water—instead of, say, giving them additional time to pay their debts—is that SPU is asking questions like, “are we just going to get more people getting deeper in debt? … Our biggest concern all along has been that we not entice people to put things off. That is going to make it harder for them later.”

Danielle Purnell, a strategic advisor for SPU, says the policy change “really only impacts people who are having short-term financial hardships. [It’s meant] to help people make it through to the next bill and keep on service. It doesn’t necessarily help people who live on the ragged edge or who are having a hard time making ends meet over the long term. If you’re having a hard time paying your bills, you’re going to need to be connected to other social services; you’re going to need to look at conservation.”

One of the programs that is meant to help people on the “ragged edge” of poverty (as well as those well above that state) is the city’s utility discount program, which provides a 60 percent discount on utility bills for people making up to 250 percent of the federal poverty rate—about $30,000 for an individual or $61,000 for a family of four. (You can see the areas of high discount program enrollment, which in some cases correspond with lower disconnection rates, on the map SPU provided.)

In 2014, Mayor Ed Murray pledged to double enrollment in the program, and the utilities actually met that goal ahead of schedule, largely by auto-enrolling low-income people when they apply for other benefits.  However, many eligible ratepayers remain unenrolled (Real Change estimates that about 75,000 Seattle residents are eligible for the program), a gap City Light spokesman Scott Thomsen attributes in part to the stigma associated with accepting government benefits.

“For some of them, there’s a pride issue—they want to pay their bill just like everyone else,” Thomsen says. “For some of them, there are trust issues with the government.” And then, for some of them, “the process itself was challenging.”

Ah, yes. The process. During our meeting and phone conversations, representatives of both utilities pointed out repeatedly that the form to apply for the discount program is “now only one page.” It would be nitpicking to point out that that isn’t true, because the real issue is that applying for the program requires gathering extensive, time-consuming documentation of a customer’s income sources—from paychecks to federal welfare (TANF) benefits to social security to child support.

This process sounds basic, but it can be arduous and time-consuming to pull together, print, and submit proof of every source of income they’ve had in the past 30 days. (Previously, the city required proof of hardship for the past two months, but they’ve recently reduced that to one.). Utility officials say the process is somewhat challenging by design.

“We offer the largest discount of any utility in the country, and we also have one of the highest eligibility levels,” City Light’s Scott Thomsen says. “This is a very generous program, and with that comes the desire to make sure that the people who are getting the assistance qualify for that assistance.” Thomsen contrasts Seattle’s program to those in other cities, “where the application process is fairly simple and easy” but the dollar benefit is much lower. With better benefits, in other words, come more stringent requirements, “because you’re involving more money,” Thomsen says.

One of the things that might disqualify a person for the discount program is having too much income because of government benefits—things like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Social Security income (SSI). Even health care premium payments for Medicare and Medicaid, which are taken out of a person’s Social Security check before it ever hits their mailbox or bank account, count as gross income against the total amount that person can earn to qualify for the discount program.

Utility officials argue that anyone living on TANF or SSI checks is almost certainly poor enough to qualify for a discount—“I can’t imagine that someone who was subsisting on [assistance] would ever get close to the [cutoff] limit,” SPU’s Ryan says— but Herbold’s office and the spokesmen for both utilities say they’re exploring ways to address the issue anyway.

Why should assistance people get because they’re poor count against their ability to get other assistance they need because they’re poor? For that matter, what’s the point in cutting off utilities to a few thousand people a year, anyway? Real Change director Tim Harris argues that “if you are on TANF, you are desperately poor—if anybody needs the utility rate discount, it’s somebody on fucking TANF.” Harris believes that “what’s behind [the policy] is the understanding of utilities as a commodity like any other commodity, as opposed to being a human necessity.”

I brought this up in my meeting with officials for both utilities—if only a few thousand people fail to pay their bills every year, why not just forgive those folks’ debts and save the time and effort spent sending people out to their homes to manually disconnect their utilities? The money lost must be minuscule, so is it just … the principle of the thing?

The answer seems to be: Kind of. “Our biggest concern all along has been that we not entice people to put things off. That is going to make it harder for them,” Ryan says. “Our hesistancy has been, are we going to get more people even deeper in debt?” And, he adds: “How do you pay for it?”

Right now, that isn’t SPU’s or City Light’s problem. Instead, the burden of paying for people to keep the lights on, or the water running, falls largely on organizations like Langeler’s, which bridge the gaps when a customer can’t pay and the City of Seattle refuses to budge. Langeler praises SPU and City Light for being flexible enough to change their late-payment policies, but the city still acts harshly toward those who can’t scrape enough together to pay for basic services. That means thousands of people each year, including a huge concentration in South Seattle, will continue to find themselves in the dark.

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Parking Accessibility vs. People Accessibility

Screen shot 2015-04-09 at 9.21.05 PM

KING 5 TV’s news staff long ago established themselves as the whiniest whiners who ever whined about having to pay a few bucks to park their cars on publicly owned streets. But it’s hard not to notice the fever pitch that coverage has reached in the past few months, even as KING management confirmed rumors that it will move the station’s headquarters to SoDo—where on-street parking is more expensive than at KING’s current digs on Dexter, and much harder to come by during baseball season.

But it’s not just personal for the station whose employees will soon have to endure the indignity of driving around for parking, paying market rate at one of the many private lots near their new location, or taking the bus. (Just kidding about that last one.) Based on KING’s relentless coverage, you might reasonably conclude that the network sees parking almost as a moral issue—a human right that exists beyond the free market. If you believe the city has a duty to donate street space for you to store your car, it’s a short leap to  trashing those who want to use the streets for bike lanes, parks, or faster transit as greedy, out-of-touch, bike-hugging ivory tower types who don’t understand how Real Seattleites live.

See, for example, a few representative recent stories, all from this February and March: “Seattle Making More Money on Parking.” “For Seattle, Parking Revenue Adds Up“; “Seattle’s Building Boom Often Comes Without Parking.” “Growing Pains: Parking in Seattle Getting Harder, More Expensive.” And finally, “Seattle’s Disappearing Parking“; Seattle’s Disappearing Parking“; and, of course, “Seattle’s Disappearing Parking.”

The most recent example of KING’s breathless coverage of Seattle’s supposed “War on Parking” (stage left, ominous voice: “Some have called it… a war on parking”)  is a piece titled “Housing Boom Prompts Parking Shortage” about the “seismic shift” in Seattle’s parking burden. Reporter Chris Daniels’ target? City policies that give some developers the option—and it is only an option—to cater to car-free or car-lite residents by devoting less of their building budget to parking storage.

To hear Daniels tell it, on-street parking has “evaporate[d]” as new residents move in, zooming up and down the street like maniacs when they aren’t stealing the parking that rightly belongs to the people who got there first. No statistics are cited on how many new units have been built with reduced or no parking, nor are of those speed-demon new neighbors given a say in the piece (three white homeowners serve as a barometer of West Seattle sentiment). No information is provided that might demonstrate any “parking shortage” in West Seattle or elsewhere, nor any evidence that only “select developers” are given special dispensation to build without parking. And even the image KING uses of this supposed scourge of brand-new housing appears to be a somewhat older three-story building—with a parking garage.

There’s a whole debate over how to define the “frequent transit service” that allows developers to build housing with less or no parking (they don’t have to build without parking; the new standards merely allow developers to respond to market demand for parking spaces), but you won’t hear about it by watching KING 5.

Instead, you’ll hear reporters like Daniels handing the mic freely, and without any pretense of evenhandedness, to longtime homeowners who bemoan their lack of “parking accessibility.”

How chained are we to our cars that “parking accessibility”—subsidized car storage in our publicly owned rights-of-way—has become more valuable than accessibility for human beings?