“This is a scourge in our state,” Inslee said. “There is no excuse. … The people of the state of Washington do not accept this level of squalor.”
Well … we should talk about that.
Do we really not accept this squalor, as the governor said? The record suggests that in Seattle at least, we do.
I’m not saying people are happy about it, or don’t care. Plenty of groups are working overtime to try to help.
But along the way, our city seems to have adapted. Whether it’s out of an abundance of tolerance, or concern about demonizing poverty, or simply feelings of powerlessness, we’ve become numb bit by bit to people living under bridges. Haven’t we?
Now you who are reading this may rightly say, “Well I don’t accept it, and I’ve wanted the city to do something about it for years.” I’m talking about the collective we, as carried out through the democratic actions and policies of the city. The city some years ago stopped acting as if people living in the most deplorable conditions imaginable was any urgent crisis.
Seven years ago, in fact, it started seeming like this might become Seattle’s Achilles’ heel.
Another politician, former King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, had just given a fiery call-to-action speech like Inslee’s. Satterberg pronounced the Jungle, an encampment on a greenbelt next to Beacon Hill, to be a humanitarian disaster. “Worse than Third World conditions,” he said.
At City Hall though, council members and nonprofit officials equivocated. They said it would be gentler to leave the 400 people in the Jungle than to push them into emergency shelter. They suggested equipping the Jungle like a campground, with lockers in the woods for storing belongings and bins under Interstate 5 for used hypodermic needles.
This was after five people had been shot, with two killed, in a dispute.
“They need to get people out of there,” I quoted one appalled, formerly homeless woman back then. “I can’t believe they were talking about leaving them there.”
I couldn’t either. They did leave them there, for nine more months, before finally clearing the encampment, over protests, in fall 2016. (...)
Inslee said there’s no excuse for it, but there are plenty. The main one is legit and well-intended: The city wanted to build real housing to solve this crisis, not more temporary shelter. This one thing, though, also effectively sanctioned these encampments. Housing takes years to build, so in the meantime, people under bridges it is.
Inslee, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and others now are pushing to shift that. Encampments are being shut down after social outreach teams offer temporary shelter, which is what we should have been doing all along. Often the camps don’t get priority, though, until somebody gets shot or killed — more perverse fallout from our abundance of compassion, along with an inability to stand up shelter faster.
The police chief told me in January that if Seattle could get a handle on just the unauthorized encampments, crime would fall significantly. Not because most homeless people are committing crimes. But because crime-focused individuals have been using homeless camps as human shields.
“They’ll set up tents or RVs in the middle of an encampment and run drugs or other operations out of there,” Chief Adrian Diaz said. “It makes it very difficult for our officers to intervene. The other homeless persons who are there often end up as victims.”
I think a lot about the old phrase “defining deviancy down.” It’s when a society is beset by aberrant behaviors to the point that it responds by lowering its own standards.
I’m not saying people are happy about it, or don’t care. Plenty of groups are working overtime to try to help.
But along the way, our city seems to have adapted. Whether it’s out of an abundance of tolerance, or concern about demonizing poverty, or simply feelings of powerlessness, we’ve become numb bit by bit to people living under bridges. Haven’t we?
Now you who are reading this may rightly say, “Well I don’t accept it, and I’ve wanted the city to do something about it for years.” I’m talking about the collective we, as carried out through the democratic actions and policies of the city. The city some years ago stopped acting as if people living in the most deplorable conditions imaginable was any urgent crisis.
Seven years ago, in fact, it started seeming like this might become Seattle’s Achilles’ heel.
Another politician, former King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, had just given a fiery call-to-action speech like Inslee’s. Satterberg pronounced the Jungle, an encampment on a greenbelt next to Beacon Hill, to be a humanitarian disaster. “Worse than Third World conditions,” he said.
At City Hall though, council members and nonprofit officials equivocated. They said it would be gentler to leave the 400 people in the Jungle than to push them into emergency shelter. They suggested equipping the Jungle like a campground, with lockers in the woods for storing belongings and bins under Interstate 5 for used hypodermic needles.
This was after five people had been shot, with two killed, in a dispute.
“They need to get people out of there,” I quoted one appalled, formerly homeless woman back then. “I can’t believe they were talking about leaving them there.”
I couldn’t either. They did leave them there, for nine more months, before finally clearing the encampment, over protests, in fall 2016. (...)
Inslee said there’s no excuse for it, but there are plenty. The main one is legit and well-intended: The city wanted to build real housing to solve this crisis, not more temporary shelter. This one thing, though, also effectively sanctioned these encampments. Housing takes years to build, so in the meantime, people under bridges it is.
Inslee, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and others now are pushing to shift that. Encampments are being shut down after social outreach teams offer temporary shelter, which is what we should have been doing all along. Often the camps don’t get priority, though, until somebody gets shot or killed — more perverse fallout from our abundance of compassion, along with an inability to stand up shelter faster.
The police chief told me in January that if Seattle could get a handle on just the unauthorized encampments, crime would fall significantly. Not because most homeless people are committing crimes. But because crime-focused individuals have been using homeless camps as human shields.
“They’ll set up tents or RVs in the middle of an encampment and run drugs or other operations out of there,” Chief Adrian Diaz said. “It makes it very difficult for our officers to intervene. The other homeless persons who are there often end up as victims.”
I think a lot about the old phrase “defining deviancy down.” It’s when a society is beset by aberrant behaviors to the point that it responds by lowering its own standards.
by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times
