A Heavy Cross to SHARE

I hate talking about SHARE. There are many good reasons for this. Their name is Anitra “Legion” Freeman, on whose kitchen floor I have sometimes slept.

If it weren’t for Ms. Freeman I probably wouldn’t know that SHARE was an acronym, or where to look up what the letters stand for. It’s the Seattle Housing And Resource Effort, according to one of Anitra’s 35 or so websites.

If I talk about SHARE I will surely get some detail about it wrong and Anitra will tell me about it, and then she will never stop telling me about it, because once she starts doing anything she can’t stop. She has no brakes.

Unfortunately the city of Seattle has given me no choice. It has denied funding to SHARE because SHARE would not agree to comply with “Safe Harbors,” AKA Tag n’ Trak, AKA Seattle’s version of HMIS (Homeless Management Information Strategies.)

You know a plan is a bad idea the minute someone calls it a strategy. “Strategy” is related to the word “stratosphere.” Both come to us from the ancient Greek for “cloud.” In the case of “strategy,” the idea is that the use of one can cloud people’s minds so they can’t see how stupid you’re being, so you can get away with being stupider than usual.

In this instance the city of Seattle is being so stupid, it might as well be shooting itself in the groinal area. This can be demonstrated mathematically, as follows.

Seattle currently funds 1275 shelter beds. About a quarter of those are administered by SHARE. The total funding costs a total of about 5 million dollars annually. SHARE’s share of the city’s funding, which is the money they will be losing as of next March when the funding year ends, is around a quarter of a million dollars.

That means that 75% of the city’s shelter beds (the non-SHARE portion) suck up 95% of the city’s funding, while 25% of the shelter beds (the SHARE portion) only suck up 5% of the funding.

If the city has to replace the 300 beds now provided by self-managed SHARE shelters with conventional shelters the cost will be more than six times what SHARE has needed.

You can be sure that much money is never going to materialize. Last month Mayor Nickels said he’d work with the City Council to increase shelter funding by as much as $500,000 in order to maintain the same number of shelter beds in the city. That’s not counting the $500,000 per year it’s expected to cost us for the extra paper, paper clips, and the super-duper unhackable computer system Safe Harbors is going to require. But the facts show that without SHARE the city will need $1,500,000 to have the same number of shelter beds it has had with SHARE.

Since that money won’t happen, we can expect to lose at least 200 shelter beds after March. SHARE proposes to make those up by setting up new tent cities. Those would violate SHARE’s agreement with the city regarding tent cities. But I don’t care, since by demanding that SHARE accept Safe Harbors I feel that the city has already in effect reneged on its agreements with SHARE on its own side, big time. I want everyone, and especially Anitra Freeman, to note my careful use of “I” statements here.

Oh wait, who says the city can’t provide beds as cheaply as SHARE? Why, they would just have to imitate the SHARE model without the help of SHARE! Why didn’t I think of that before?

Here’s how it will work. They’ll set up 13 or 14 self-managed shelters all around the city. Only, because they’ll be city shelters instead of SHARE shelters, they’ll be able to make sure that the people who run these self-managed shelters comply with Safe Harbors. The city will be able to do that by managing its own self-managed shelters!

There’s a perfect strategy!

Safe Harbors For All

This is one promise from me to you, my reader: I won’t ever claim to understand politics better than you do. I will never claim to understand politics at all. OK, I might, but when I do it, I’ll be lying. You have my word.

Take the Safe Harbors idea. It makes absolutely no sense to me. Since I don’t understand Safe Harbors, or Tag-n-Trak as we call it here at Real Change, it would be absurd of me to discuss it here.

Therefore I will, because that’s what I do.

Let me start by saying that the fundamental premise, that we don’t know enough about the homeless, their movements, what they do with their time, where they eat, and where they sleep, is an awesome, thought-provoking premise. A premise that just makes me wonder what planet our City Council weekends on.

But then I think, yes, there are clear advantages to our government in knowing where each individual homeless person reports two or more times per day. And instead of resisting this improvement in the way we govern our citizens, I should welcome it. I should see it for what it is: the beginning of a fabulous new future.

Therefore I have decided to go beyond embracing Tag-n-Trak for the homeless. I am ready to embrace this concept for all of Seattle, and promote the adoption of Safe Harbors style programs for all Americans.

Lets say you are an American and you need to use services that our government currently provides. Freeways, for example. Let’s say you want to use a freeway.

The way it is now, people use freeways without any accounting. Oh sure, we are able to know how many cars are on the freeways at any given time. But who are in those cars? Do they really need the freeways they’re using? What entrances and exits are they using? The fact is, we don’t know that information. Information like that is vital when our government allocates funds to improve our freeways, or determines when and where new freeways should be built.

My proposal would make that information available. Each time you entered a freeway you would be required to stop at the beginning of the ramp and supply your name and ID and the names and IDs of all your passengers, and state all of your destinations. When you left the freeway at an exit you would provide your names and IDs again. Any passengers lacking ID would be required to leave your vehicle and obtain the necessary ID before continuing on their trip.

The information so obtained would be kept strictly confidential. It would be used, anonymously, to create a file of your complete travels on the interstate freeways, which would never be used by unscrupulous individuals, corporations, bad renegade politicians, or Tim Eyman. The only way the information would be used is in the aggregate. That’s the “Safe” in Safe Harbors: if you can’t trust your government, who can you trust?

But that’s just the beginning. We need to clear up the Mercer Street mess. There are traffic jams on Rainier Avenue, 45th Street, gosh, even 3rd Avenue. So we’ll have to know when and how each individual motorist and their passengers access every major thoroughfare in the city.

Eventually, I see a day when you won’t be able to pull out of your driveway with Aunt Zelda in the back seat, your Irish Red Setter Big Stupid at your side, and your two sons in the trunk, without all five of you being registered and tracked electronically. You won’t even being aware of it. Won’t that be great? Think of the boost to the surveillance industry! Seattle could be number one in yet another high tech field, and we will have more billionaires!

But it doesn’t end with roads. When you’ve walked down the sidewalks downtown have you ever tossed trash into a public waste receptacle? Of course you have, because tossing it anywhere else is illegal. Well now, with my proposal to expand Tag-n-Trak, you will have to give your name and ID every time you use a public garbage can, and your waste will be weighed. That way, our city will be able to determine just how many public waste receptacles are really needed, and where.

I am looking forward to the day when we apply the Safe Harbors idea to everyone, including City Council members and the computer geeks who are eagerly awaiting their employment. I’m sure we can all agree, that will be a brave new world.

All this talk by our city council people about giving the homeless identification numbers to keep track of them has me experiencing roaring mathematical flashbacks of the third kind. Assigning numbers to entities -- how functional! We may soon be able to establish a one-to-one correspondence between Seattle's homeless and an American ton of rubber chickens!

By further applying Pascal's triangle (in reverse!), we can stack both the homeless and the rubber chickens in two dimensional piles (provided we neglect their thicknesses), then stand back and watch them keel over! More fun than blowing up the King Dome! (Remember kids, don't try this at home.)

Speaking of dead French gamblers: when all the homeless in Seattle have their own personal numbers, just think how much easier it will be for them to play the lotto!

I'm hoping that the numbers passed out will include fractions. I don't think fractions get enough attention in our post-modernistic fast-paced internetted digital world. A lonely, neglected fraction is a vindictive fraction. You've all been warned.

But I know that won't happen, because everyone is so keen on the idea of using these numbers to count the homeless, and everyone knows you don't use fractions to count anything, right? You have to use counting numbers, right? That'd be 1, 2, 3, 4, and numbers like those, right?

Wrong. You don't need numbers at all. You need identifiers, and the means to know when to introduce new identifiers (when there is a new homeless person in the city) and the means to know when to retire old identifiers (when someone becomes formerly homeless).

The city of Seattle doesn't know that much. Our city officials can't tell when someone has become homeless, nor can they tell when someone has stopped being homeless. They don't have a clue.

So the "number" of homeless the city arrives at by passing numerical identifiers out is certain to be meaningless.

In our last issue our esteemed editor god, Timothy Harris, pointed out some immediate objections to what he refers to as Tag n' Trak. For example the fact that many will not want to cooperate with the system for fear that the police or the INS will be allowed access to the data.

So at the beginning it is certain that the city won't count everyone.

But then, after a year or two have passed, the count will become too large, as the city is unable to know when to retire numbers, because there will be no sure way of spotting those exiting the system.

As the false count piles up it will become blatantly bloated, & the city will have no choice but to resort to the obvious fix: anyone who doesn't try to use the city's services within a certain time period gets their number retired.

So people who have given up on the city will again go uncounted, and we will be back to where we started.

(Actually there are those in the city government, Tom Byers, Peter Steinbrueck, etc., who say that the purpose of all this is only to count the resources available to the homeless, rather than the homeless themselves. Why then they are not proposing just assigning the numbers to the resources, they don't say.)

At least the proposal only involves passing out finite numbers to the homeless. Because if they were going to pass out infinite numbers I would be really peeved, as the following recycled poem is meant to indicate.

A Finite Rant Against Infinity, in 23 Lines to Be Exact

1. Don't need no body telling me

2. 'bout the 'lleged beauties of infinity.

3. A concept invented for divinity

4. by people with neurotic affinity

5. for passive-aggressive duplicity.

6. Paradox pawned-off as lucidity

7. meeting challenges with contrived absurdity

8. exploiting riddles to extract complicity.

9. THEN there's mathematical infinity.

10. Borrowed tongue-in-cheek from theology

11. and harnessed to Fourier Anal-why-ticity.

12. Hey I got a goddamn math degree

13. so don't even think to try to impress me

14. with your grasp of Cantorian Mystery.

15. Mystery my ass! It's deliberate reductivity.

16. and the fact that infinity squared is infinity

17. has nothing to do with eternity.

18. It is a dodge, a sham, an escape from the complexity

19. engendered by the finite's quirky specificity -

20. a specificity that makes the finite number 23

21. an enigma all too often mistaken for simplicity

22. (and if you really want to make points with me,

23. let's hear you explain the number three).