"When you take away their means to survive, you're going to kill a percentage of them - guaranteed"

[Indigo Blue]

Advocates for the homeless arrested at City Hall protest
Pastor among 15 picked up while criticizing sweeps of encampments
By JOHN IWASAKI
P-I REPORTER

Given that he was in a wheelchair, Mike Smith said Seattle police officers treated him "magnificently" Monday morning when they arrested him and 14 other homeless advocates who blocked Cherry Street near City Hall.

But the cordial treatment contrasted with the city's sweeps of homeless encampments, he said after his release from custody, likening the sweeps to a death sentence.

A downward economic spiral will keep "people dropping to the bottom," said Smith, who has cerebral palsy and lives in low-income housing near Pike Place Market.

"They're lucky to have a tent and a place to put it to survive. When you take away their means to survive, you're going to kill a percentage of them -- guaranteed. So as far as I'm concerned, the sweeps policy is about killing people."

The demonstration followed the third overnight campout at City Hall held by the Real Change Organizing Project, as well as a memorial service for hundreds of homeless people who have died on the streets.

After the service, demonstrators put a tent on Cherry Street at Fourth Avenue and stood on the street. About 20 police officers, aware of the demonstrators' plan to be arrested, lined the crosswalk and asked the crowd to disperse or risk arrest.

Among those picked up was the Rev. Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist Church, wearing his white pastoral robe over jeans and sneakers.


You can read the rest @ http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/366326_homeless10.html


If you've read this post, you might want to read this one, too:

"No matter what other factors may come into play in any individual’s experience of homelessness...: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Sapphire%20Blue/587



And also this report: WITHOUT HOUSING: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness, and Policy Failures: http://wraphome.org/documents/Without_Housing_20061114.pdf



"No matter what other factors may come into play in any individual’s experience of homelessness – without housing, that person will remain homeless."



"No matter what other factors may come into play in any individual’s experience of homelessness – without housing, that person will remain homeless."



"No matter what other factors may come into play in any individual’s experience of homelessness – without housing, that person will remain homeless."



"No matter what other factors may come into play in any individual’s experience of homelessness – without housing, that person will remain homeless."



"No matter what other factors may come into play in any individual’s experience of homelessness – without housing, that person will remain homeless."

[truedelphi]

1. Ya know, as far as I am concerned, what is happening is the

Tip of the holocaust.

The first stage of a holocaust in not at all the lines of people facing the gas chambers - it is the unempoloyment, and then the slow grind downwards, with starvation, anxiety and other accompanying mental disorders that spring up when one is thus accosted, or other illness taking many down.

It is only when those at the top get tired of how slowly the grinding down takes, and when they realize it could or should be speeded up, that it becomes a Final solution.

[Indigo Blue]

5. If this is what you think is happening, why do you think so many people are standing by...

... quietly watching, quietly accepting what is happening?

We have a severe lack of affordable (I mean REALLY affordable) housing in this country. HUD's low-income housing budget has been consistently slashed for decades. Homelessness has increased drastically over those same decades. Yet who speaks out? Who really cares about the people living on the streets, living in their cars, living in condemned & abandoned buildings? How can so many people close their eyes to what's going on right in front of them? Or ARE they speaking out and demanding that these people be driven out of their neighborhoods, their cities, their business districts? Have so many people lost their souls?

[Gormy Cuss]

2. The sweeps never work.

All they do is uproot people temporarily and set some of them back even more.

[Indigo Blue]

6. The sweeps should be outlawed.

[Hannah Bell]

3. Where are all the "homeless activists" who were telling me about

all the new housing seattle was creating for the homeless?

In fact, low income units are being lost. They're moving the poor folks off prime real estate & pushing them out of the city.

The report, authored by John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition and signed by Kristin O’Donnell of the Yesler Terrace Community Council, calls for one-for-one on-site replacement and says that the citizens committee did not receive adequate information about the housing authority’s redevelopment plans in the areas around Yesler Terrace.

“The policies,” Fox says, “aren’t strong enough to send the signal we need to send, that there shall be no net loss on site, that the site won’t be turned into some planner’s dream of high-density, high-income housing.”

In an age of declining federal funding for housing, SHA says it must redevelop to add density and make more money from its properties. But in previous rebuilds of garden communities at Roxbury Village, Holly Park, High Point, and Rainier Vista, where SHA sold land for private homes and condos and replaced duplexes with apartment buildings, Fox says the agency spent half a billion in federal HOPE VI grants and tore down half of the 2,000 low-income units without physically replacing them — a statistic that SHA says is wrong.

http://www.realchangenews.org/2007/2007_11_07/main_v14n46.html

[Indigo Blue]

7. I think this is happening everywhere.

And again, I want to know why so many people are quietly standing by, quietly accepting it.

[Hannah Bell]

9. The answer's pretty obvious:most people won't do much until it hits close to home.

They may "sympathize," go to a fundraiser, donate a few bucks - but get organized, make a stink?

The middle classes don't do that kind of thing.

The bedrock belief of most is that people are poor because of individual weaknesses, & that high degrees of inequality are acceptable.

[whistle]

4. How much has homelessness grown since July 2007 when the foreclosure crisis began?

[Indigo Blue]

8. I don't know if or how much foreclosures have increased the homeless population.

I wonder why the "foreclosure crisis" gets so much attention, though. Why no headlines about the homelessness crisis?

I'll answer that myself... this is the 'ownership society'. If you have, you count. If you don't have, you don't count. You're not even seen.

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. You'd be surprised, as tent cities

are now appearing all over the place because of the foreclosure crisis

Bushervilles, instead of Hoovervilles

And given the nature of our news media, even if half of us took to the streets to help the invisible (the way the homeless are treated), you'd NEVER read it in the paper

Search the LA Times for stories on this, as these tent cities were a major story last weekend

Oh and during the Great Depression things got really bad until there were so many homeless that police simply gave up... I highly suspect we are well on our way to that bleak future

[varelse]

11. "the city spends nearly $40 million a year to prevent and end homelessness,

Fryer said. The funding helps provide shelter, housing and hygiene programs for the homeless."

Maybe if they were spending that much money to actually build and maintain true low income housing, they might eventually eliminate homelessness? Just a thought...

[Indigo Blue]

12. "shelter, housing and hygiene programs". That ends homelessness?

What a condescending ass.

You're right, varelse; that money should be spent on permanent low-income housing. That and millions more.

[bananas]

13. k&r nt

[Dammit Ann]

14. Jesus Christ.

And it is probably only going to get worse. I'm appalled.