In recent months, the police have launched crackdowns on homeless encampments that have popped up with increasing frequency in our city's greenbelts. On the west side of Beacon Hill and more notably on Queen Anne Hill, police, aided by parks department personnel have raided make-shift little cities, summarily removing residents' belongings with not so much as a notice or attempt to assist affected individuals.
Housing and homeless advocates have tracked the cause of these recent crackdowns to the mayor's office. The assumption prevailing there seems to be that you've got to clean up these problems as soon as they appear, cite the people involved, arrest them if necessary, or just order them out of the area.
Around the region, other cities are taking steps to move the homeless along. Tacoma, Issaquah, and Olympia recently approved "anti-panhandling laws" which some Seattle officials have hinted they may want to emulate.
This is the "social control" school of public policy used to justify a host of measures implemented in Seattle over the last 15-20 years. There's the pedestrian interference law which gives police power to cite people who are "causing someone to take evasive action," criminalizing the simple act of sitting on a sidewalk.
And the no-camping law which allows police to fine a homeless person up to $500 for the act of laying out belongings or rolling up in a sleeping bag during the day in a public park.
Then there's the parks exclusion law giving parks personnel the power to ban a homeless person from that park and surrounding parks from seven days to a year - for example, someone who might be sleeping after park hours.
Increasingly, police make use of "trespass admonishments" whereby the police are authorized by a property owner to ban someone from a mall, parking lot, or places like the Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square at that officer's discretion. If that homeless person returns within a set period of time, he or she is subject to immediate arrest.
The whole point of this carceral net is to give police broad power over the street and park environment. It is impossible for homeless people not to, at one point or another, run afoul of one or more of these laws. They can't pay fines and then over time they have a warrant hanging over their heads. Voila, the police have total control and can move along the homeless at will anywhere and any time.
In police parlance, this system is called "community policing" or "order maintenance." It's a philosophy that pays no heed to anyone's basic civil rights or the Constitution.
It's all about typecasting the homeless so it's easier to get rid of them or move them along. And it could just as easily be about moving along young people or people of color congregating on a street corner - or any other population that doesn't fit in, especially if they are not there to "consume."
More to the point, by promulgating this philosophy of order-maintenance and social control, it becomes a convenient way for city officials to conceal their role in our city's failure to provide adequate funding for community-based treatment coupled with housing.
Worse, the land use policies and funding choices our leaders have made to promote redevelopment of our downtown and surrounding neighborhoods have caused the loss of thousands of units of low-income housing - some 15,000 units since the early '70s in downtown alone.
It's all about typecasting the homeless so it's easier to get rid of them or move them along. And it could just as easily be about moving along young people or people of color congregating on a street corner - or any other population that doesn't fit in, especially if they are not there to "consume.
For every new unit of subsidized housing built with our levy and other dollars, we lose three to four units to demolition, conversion, increased rents and gentrification. The rise of homelessness in Seattle is a direct result of this dramatic and accelerating loss of low-income housing. All other factors are incidental. Today there are over 8,000 homeless in a town with no more than 3,000-4,000 shelter beds.
Ten years ago, when City Attorney Mark Sidran and a former city councilmember succeeded in ramming through many of Seattle's current anti-homeless laws, it was not without an enormous outcry from housing and homeless advocates and the church community.
There were sit-ins, building occupations, lawsuits, and acrimonious name-calling from all sides. Public hearings were packed to the gills. Sidran and other city officials were called fascist or worse. These laws divided our city into the well-off who wanted the homeless gone and the rest of us who saw these laws for what they were - a crass social control measure aimed at sweeping the poor out of sight, out of mind.
With talk among city elites and chamber types of new, more onerous laws against the poor, and the current attempts by the mayor to "clean up" encampments, homeless advocates are once again taking up the banner for tolerance, for more housing, services, and jobs - not abuse or jail for the homeless.
Our elected officials boast routinely about how liberal and compassionate they are. Only a repeal of the "Sidran laws" and a move to more tolerant approach to encampments will give meaning to these claims. Policies designed to guarantee better access to affordable housing, jobs or job training, community-based treatment, and to protect an individual's right to free association would be seen as compassionate.
Should city officials persist in their efforts to pass even more draconian measures, we will, without a doubt, see a return to acrimonious city politics that will polarize our city along class and racial lines because a disproportionate share of those caught in this carceral net of anti-homeless laws are people of color.
The well being of our community and ourselves is irrevocably bound up in the well being of all of us, especially those less fortunate than us.
When poverty and inequality grow, that's when cities fundamentally break down. It certainly is not our place to tolerate inappropriate or criminal behavior, but it's immoral to address these problems by passing unconstitutional laws that essentially criminalize the poor - that cast a net over all who are homeless in our streets and parks.
John V. Fox and Carolee Colter may be reached via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.
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