Billy Bob Needs an Education

[from 4/7/10]

I want you to all know how I felt when I heard the Pioneer Square Community Association, which is a freaking BIA, of all things (I'll get to that later), doesn't want Real Change moving to Pioneer Square. They say they don't want us there because, although they've never met us, don't know who any of us are, have never bothered to learn how we operate or visited us, or spent a microsecond thinking about what we do, they heard we're a nonprofit that provides work for homeless people, so therefore, to them, we're a social service agency. Read: "low-lifes."

I'd like to appeal to all the fathers out there, for a moment. Say your beautiful daughter is fifteen, going on sixteen, and she's ready to date. OK, let's get real, she's been dating for years, of course, but you think this is new, because you're Dad, and you've had your eyes closed and your ears stopped up by advanced age and denial. Anyway, you're paying attention now, finally, and you learn your daughter has a blind date with some Billy Bob that lives a mile and a half down the street, and you happen to know the guy through his parents and all your thoughts are, "Why that loser?" and "He'd better keep his hands to himself" and "He should thank his lucky stars he's dating my daughter."

And then you get a call from Mr. and Mrs. Bob telling you Billy won't be there because he heard your daughter, whom HE'S NEVER EVEN MET, is a low-class skank? How soon are you at the Bob household, explaining to Billy his number one mistake through an intense one-on-one tutorial in rigid-body physics?

OK. Let's have us a rant. When we arranged to move to Pioneer Square we knew that the BIA had a deal with the city that no new city-funded social service agency could set up in that neighborhood. But guess what? We're not the Seattle Channel! We're an independent news source that gets no funding from any government entity! And we DON'T recruit panhandlers and give them our papers for free to use as props for panhandling, contrary to the uninformed notions of those who haven't been paying attention to anything we've done FOR FIFTEEN YEARS. We recruit people who don't WANT to be panhandlers and set them up to sell the papers on commission.

Our vendors don't even have to be homeless. If Bill Gates ever decides he wants to be a Real Change vendor, we'll let him.

And who told the Pioneer Square Community Association they could pass themselves off as a community association? They're a "Business Improvement Area" association. That means it's an association of businesses, not a community organization.

I'm on the board of directors of this skank organization, I'm a former vendor, and I've been personally living in Pioneer Square for 13 years (4 years longer than the PSCA has been in existence!) and they've never asked me what I thought of their negotiations with the city for a moratorium on social service agencies in my neighborhood.

Do you live anywhere besides B-way, the UD, the ID, Downtown, West Seattle Junction, or Pioneer Square? You could start your own BIA! The city has an on-line handbook that says how!

It comes down to this: You go around and try and get the other businesses in your neighborhood to sign on to your proposed BIA. When you've got enough to represent 60% of the revenues of the neighborhood, the city lets you found a BIA. So a freaking BIA is NOT a community organization, and has no right to call itself one. It does not represent the community of its neighborhood democratically, it only represents businesses dollarwise. Which is fine, if it sticks to its own freaking business, which is improving the business of the neighborhood. Hence the name, Business Improvement thing.

Real Change isn't the social service agency PSCA thinks it is, and PSCA doesn't represent any community.