Homelessness in Space

[from 10/7/11]

The Port finally evicted Nickelsville from Terminal 107 a few days ago. As usual I was asleep at home about the time it was all happening, because I needed my beauty sleep as you'd know if you'd seen me. I got up and got on the computer to play a few rounds of Orbit Your Unsuspecting Rabbit, when a friend's chat window popped up asking me if it was true that Anitra "Not Yet Ready To Be Arrested Again So Soon After Last Conviction" Freeman was arrested. I then spent five minutes learning what chat, twitter, and mobile phones are really good for.

The good news: Anitra did NOT get herself arrested, so with the clock on her conviction from last year ticking away she should be good for being arrested again in a month or two, when they'll really want another warm body in the police van. The bad news: 12 other people got arrested. Preliminary reports are that the people arrested were occupying space in such ways that it took more than 4 Port cops per to safely nab and extricate them, and that perhaps 30 more cops of some sort hung about just in case the Jaws of Life were needed. Then, more good news, all the arrestees were released the same day, pending charges.

I'm thrilled that space was involved. As a mathematician who specialized in the field inaccurately called geometry, which should have been called space-ology, I am ecstatic whenever space, or more generally space-time, or space-time related thingies, crop up in the news. I am proud to be a space-time cadet; I have the decoder ring, metaphorically speaking.

The situation is all about space. Nickelsville needs surface area to exist. This is part of a larger issue, that homeless people in general need surface space to exist. There's not enough space where they are allowed to be. For example, there are bed spaces in shelters, but not enough of them. Various estimates assess how much space is needed. In the city I would estimate an absolute minimum of 40,000 square feet is needed, here and there, to enable all the homeless people in Seattle, not just those involved with Nickelsville, to have enough to exist. That would be just less than one acre American, less than 4 decihectares for you foreigners.

The average block in the downtown business core is two acres. On top of that two acres are various office buildings, which serve to multiply, by the number of stories they have, those two acres over and over again. About 18% of it is going vacant these days. When all the calculations are done it turns out there are over 200 acres of unused surface space just downtown in commercial buildings. That's 200 times as much space as is needed to shelter all the homeless people in Seattle. There is, similarly, hundreds of times as much vacant space as is needed in Bellevue to shelter all the Bellevue homeless people, and likewise for Renton, Kirkland, and every other community in the entire country.

I can understand why homeless people aren't going to get one half of one percent of the vacant commercial space downtown. They don't have any money to pay for it. I'm just pointing out that there is no shortage of space in the world for human beings to exist. The prices for it are out of reach of a few thousand people, that's all.

All we're talking about here is bare minimum shelter, not adequate housing. To end homelessness would take more than the equivalent of .5% of the available space downtown. It would take closer to 5% of it. But if Nickelsville can't find even what would amount to .05%, the numbers tell you that the goal of ending homelessness will not be achieved, until the system that says no to human needs is overturned.

Meanwhile, is there anyone at all in this city besides Greg Nickels who just can't live without a 1st Avenue streetcar?