No New Homeless, Please

Consider these three recent headlines chosen "at random": "Report: Quake leaves 5M Chinese homeless", "Summertime is Nickelsville Time!", and "[Chicago's] plan to end homelessness by 2012 threatened by subprime meltdown". Watch me pull a column out of them, Rocky!

For some time, a certain fellow editorial committee person for this rag (not me -- the one with musical talent) has been drumming on and on about how totally unprepared Seattle is for a big earthquake and how we here at Real Change should write about all the people who'd become homeless if we were hit by, say, a 7.9 quake centered at, say, Occidental South and South Weller. And what folks should do to prepare properly. Now that a disaster of that magnitude has happened in Sichuan, he keeps saying, "See? Do you see now? What was I saying? Will you listen to me now?"

In fact, when we had the little 6.8 earthquake on Ash Wednesday, 2001, radiating from Nisqually, Anitra "Now, I'm Not Speaking For SHARE/WHEEL Here" Freeman and I were homeless for 8 hours while the authorities made up their minds whether we could safely be permitted to enter our own building. If there had been more damage than there was, like if it had been a 7.2 quake, or if it had struck closer, we would probably still be homeless. I base that guess on the astonishing non-rapidity with which Katrina's victims got relief.

Now, I've been homeless before. So has Anitra. But if we had a really big earthquake like the one that hit in China the other day ALMOST EVERYBODY in Greater Seattle would be homeless, including a couple of million people who have never been homeless before, and including many of the pinheads in the Nickels administration who came up with the extremely flawed protocols for sweeps of homeless encampments in this city, inspiring some to plan a "Nickelsville" in response.

But we don't have to wait for an earthquake to see a lot of newly homeless people in Seattle. The subprime meltdown that's threatening Chicago's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness isn't just happening to Chicago. Not that Seattle's Ten Year Plan to Plan Planfullness is threatened by it. You can't exactly threaten a thing that's already in the process of imploding from its own stupidity. But it can be made to implode faster.

"Where are you going with this, Wes?" -- you might well ask. Well, what I'm concerned about is, I don't want all these damn Nouveau Sans-Abri messing up the street scene.

I don't want to be homeless side-by-side with Nickels administration pinheads. I don't want to share emergency disaster shelter with ex-Belltown-condominium-owning, BMW-driving, laptop-toting, cappuccino-addicts. I don't want to find myself in a Food Not Bombs line behind the person who last month insisted that Magnolia is no place for people who can't afford pheasant-and-rosemary pâté.

If we have a 7.9 earthquake centered in the Seattle city limits, the streets are going to be OVERRUN with people who wouldn't know a P-38 can opener from a teacup!



Seattle is full of people who think homelessness only happens to drug addicts and alcoholics, and who consider themselves superior human beings. When they're homeless what do you think will happen?

What will happen is, they won't change. They'll STILL consider themselves superior human beings. They'll make a virtue out of being homeless by earthquake, or homeless by foreclosure. They'll turn their own ignorance into a virtue. "Of course I don't know where to find shelter, I wasn't raised like that!" At community meals, if they fall into one by accident, they'll ask for Grey Poupon.

When they find themselves outside at 3 AM needing to use a bathroom and discover the lack of 24-hour public toilets, they will pee in their pants and congratulate themselves that at least they didn't use an alley like "those people."

The streets are no place for people who can't eat cold raviolis out of a can.