No One Challenges Boring

[from 6/30/10]

Let's talk about something incredibly boring!

Even the title of "Open Doors/ Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness", which I'll abbreviate as "OD" (because OD/FSPP&EH is stupid) is stunningly boring. It reminds me of my 1979 PhD mathematics thesis, which I titled something like "On the Classification of Some Types of 2-Dimensional Dealies of Some Certain Description or Other." Cleverly, it said it was ON the classification of dealies, it was not THE classification of dealies, that being something I couldn't do. Also, the title made sure no one would ever read it, so I wouldn't have to be bothered by their bound-to-be boring questions about it.

I'm sure no one at the department of the federal government in charge of putting out this snoozer wants to hear your bound-to-be boring questions, either. Remember when the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness came out? Remember how excited everybody was to hear that we were actually going to end homelessness in ten years? Remember all the questions that were raised in the course of the excitement, and how it emerged that the title was a fraud? Well, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness doesn't want that to happen again.

Now they're being up front in emphasizing the Plan part of the Plan. We're planning it, we're not doing it. It's a plan of action, not an action. For example, when the OD document gets down to stating the goals of the Plan, on page 11, bullet number 4 is NOT "to end homelessness before the End Times end it for us," but instead merely "Set a path to ending all types of homelessness."

You'd think after 6 years of the Ten Year Plan to Plan Planning to End Homelessness, these people would be past the trail blazing stage. But, no. Apparently no one had thought of setting a path before. So we've spent the last 6 years tangled in brambles up to our nostrils? Whoops!

Following the stifling bit about setting the path, OD goes on to set forth 5 themes of the strategic plan, of which 3 consist of two objectives each, one consists of 3 objectives, and one other consists of one objective. That's ten objectives altogether, so the number ten still looms large in the homelessness end-planning business, speaking sarcastically.

None of these objectives goes quite so far as to call for the creation of new housing. The closest we get to that is under the Theme "Increase Access to Stable and Affordable Housing", where we have 2 objectives calling for providing 1) affordable housing for those needing it, and 2) permanent housing for those really, really, really needing it (the "chronically" homeless, an arbitrary manipulable category lacking natural definition). In other words, those only needing housing would get provided housing, but not necessarily permanent housing. And no one gets housing created for them, only provided. You can easily provide everyone in the country housing, if most of it's not permanent. And you can provide some housing permanently, without creating new housing, by simply making the same housing temporary for other people.

Even the Vision of the OD plan is boring. Visions are supposed to be inspiring and forward-looking. The best they could come up with was that there shouldn't be homelessness. That's about it. Homelessness bad. No, I said it wrong, their vision is that no one should experience homelessness. It's alright if people ARE homeless, it's only a shame they have to be conscious for it. They could realize their crappy boring vision by passing out bottles of Jack Daniels on the streets.

"Objective 10: Transform homeless services to crisis response systems that prevent homelessness and rapidly return people who experience homelessness to stable housing."

When someone tells me they'd transform a thing to a thing, they're saying they don't need to create anything new. They're just going to turn lead into, ah, metal.

If only it all were interesting enough to induce people to ask, "What?"

Homelessness to End in 2024

I'm writing nine days before this will appear. I can't possibly know what's going on there in the time where you're at. The problem isn't that I can't predict the future. The problem is, like everyone else, I can't predict it correctly.

Therefore, when I get the urge to predict the future, I prefer to predict it far enough out that when it will have come about my actual predictions will have been forgotten, and I can say that what happened is what I said would. No one is going to go to the archives to check. That's one reason I will buck the trend and make predictions now for 2010 instead of 2009.

The other is, I have this theory about why 2001 was such a bad year: 2001 A Space Odyssey was too good. The movie jinxed the year. So, ipso reverso, 2010 should be a great year, because the movie 2010 The Year We Make Contact blew. Since I've never seen any of the movies set in 2009, I can't begin to guess what that year will be like.

So I will now predict the wonderful world of 2010.

I'll start with the easy stuff. There will be no aerial highways for flying cars, once again, in 2010. 2010 will be the first year in US history that no one wonders for even a minute what having a Black president in the White House would be like. Some very bad weather will happen somewhere. In spite of all efforts to prevent it, terrorists somewhere will blow something up, so it will take even longer to get a ride on a ferry.

During the latter half of February 2010, Canada will be in the news constantly, and then be forgotten again by the end of March. Around the same time, clipboard sales will increase, and complete strangers will visit millions of Americans asking too many prying questions. Lisa Simpson, a cartoon character, will be married. (These items are courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Every US business will have received at least one bailout by the end of 2010. Some of them will have been bailed out two or three times. All the world's trees will finally be cut down in order to print all the money for the bailouts. In the summer, your kid's lawn mowing service will get a federal bailout.

In predicting local news, I'm trying to see the 2010 Mayor of Seattle. I'm getting an image -- it's fading in and out -- it's someone I don't know yet. But I can definitely predict everyone I know hopes I'm right.

Due to the economic downturn, Real Change will have more vendors than ever. As the number of vendors approaches the number of customers, we will have to make up for it by going daily. There will be not one, but two crossword puzzles in every issue.

There will be so many homeless people that area shelters will adopt an alphabetical admissions system. Everyone will get two days of shelter each month. The days you get shelter will depend on the first letter of your last name. The city will point to this system as proof that everyone is getting the shelter they need, so no new shelters will be funded.

As King County's Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness enters its sixth year, its Governing Council finally says, "Whoa, we're not getting anywhere at this," so they cross out "Ten" on all their literature and write "Twenty" above it, and put out a press release announcing that they're way ahead of schedule. Critics suggest they set the end date of the Plan to End Homelessness in the past. The Committee to End Homelessness is as likely to invent a time machine to return us to 1964 as they are to actually end homelessness by continuing to sit on their hands and wait for the magic federal pixies to solve the problem with federal pixie gold dust, as they have been doing.

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.

Anthropologists!

I'll admit it, sometimes here at Adventures in Irony we don't want to write one more word about our mandated subject, Homelessness. We, meaning me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning, have/has a long list of subjects I think are vastly more fun and entertaining. One of those subjects is Anthropology.

I probably like Anthropology because I am an anthropon myself. In fact, when I first learned that Anthropology meant the study, by human beings, of human beings, I pictured an Anthropology professor standing at a mirror, checking herself out. Or maybe I already had that picture in my head. I should get that studied.

It turns out that United Way has just discovered that people who are homeless are human beings, so they have hired an anthropologist to study them. I learned about it in the P-I last Thursday. So I get to talk about Anthropology after all!

Her name is Debra Boyer and the picture accompanying the story shows her standing in a Seattle alley "that is commonly populated by drunken homeless people" with a proud Vince Matulionis standing well behind her, clearly thrilled to have her there and ready to anthropologize away.

Vince Matulionis directs the United Way of King County's Ending Homelessness group. I met Mr. Matulionis a few years ago when the King County Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness was just getting started. He talked about the Ten Year Plan, such as it was, and the need to deal with chronic homelessness first, and gave every impression of knowing about whom he and his Ten Year Planning people were planning for. After all, he had different names for different kinds.

It wouldn't make sense, would it, to go off and plan to end a bunch of people's homelessness in ten years, if you didn't know anything about the people whose homelessness you were ending? It would be sort of like going to war in a foreign country when you didn't know anything about the people who lived there, or whether they would greet your troops with flowers or guns. Only a moron would do that.

So it's a bit of a shock to me now that Mr. Matulionis is so proud of United Way's implied belated admission (what's it been, four years?) that they have been planning to end the homelessness of people they didn't know.

Let me explain what a field anthropologist does. The P-I article isn't real clear on this point, so I think it's worth spending a few words on it. An anthropologist gets to know people by going and meeting them and talking to them. Then, she goes and thinks about what they said to her, and writes up what that tells her about them.

So, in other words, you hire an anthropologist to get to know people you don't have the time or the interest to get to know. Your anthropologist sums up her findings, and you work from there.

I feel compelled to make an admission of my own. Obviously, I did not get to know Vince Matulionis as well as I should have, those four or five years ago. Perhaps I was too interested in ordering lunch. Perhaps I just didn't care enough about Vince Matulionis and his planning group people.

And it's not just Mr. Matulionis. It's the whole bunch of them. I'm talking about all the Ten Year Planning to End Homelessness Planners. I'm talking about their Governing Board. I'm talking about the Interagency Council.

Who are these suits? Why am I always finding out they know less each day than they claimed to know the day before? Is it part of their culture? Is it passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter? Or, are there no fathers and mothers? Are their families structured some weird way I never heard of, and everybody is raised by pigs?

What I'm saying is, I need a field anthropologist to get to know Mr. Matulionis & Friends, and report back to me.

While Men Walked On The Moon

Personal confession: For 2 years, over 35 years ago, I was a flack for a slum landlord. I got a job as a clerk at a motel on Aurora. For $50 per week I worked weeknights, got Saturdays off, then pulled a straight 22-hour Sunday shift .

If the job were just about the motel I wouldn't mention it here. But besides the motel, there was also slum housing. It was a bunch of dilapidated wooden structures behind the motel all painted lead-pink with anywhere from two to five or six small apartments per building. I don't recall the total number of units but it was somewhere in the 50-100 range.

The walls housed rats and occasionally cats who sometimes got lost in them, died, and reeked. In some of the rooms floorboards were broken and you had to avoid walk around them. Some buildings were built in the way of drainage and were constantly at risk of flooding, so there had to be sump pumps in crawl spaces under them. The pumps regularly failed, but were never replaced. All repairs were done by an old part-time worker who was never given the funds to do them right. The central steam heater was on a timer, so there was no heat from midnight to dawn every night.

The landlord was one of the cheapest, meanest people I have ever met. Apart from that she was a nice old Norwegian lady. She had a charming Norwegian accent and was somebody's beloved great-grandmother. I'll call her Mrs. Skyldig. After a childhood of abject poverty in Norway she came to the United States with her Norwegian husband. Her husband had built the apartments and motel back in the 20s and 30s and made a good enough living from them to buy a nice house in Ballard. Then he died in the 60s, leaving it all to her. Rather than sell the business she decided to continue it. She needed to develop managerial skills, but they never came. Because, however good a wife she had been, she was basically a mean, rotten, petty, selfish human being.

Now, as a general rule the sort of people who live in slums are the poorer people. Although Mrs. Skyldig grew up poor, she was convinced that the reason she was not poor by then was because of her superior character, and could not be persuaded that it was because she exploited people for profit. So she despised her own tenants and would evict people for the slightest infractions.

One tenant though was her example for all the others. "Why can't you be like Mr. Jones?" she would say, "He's such a good man." Jones had lived there trouble-free for a decade.

Then, Mrs. Skyldig found out Mr. Jones had long ago served time for a felony. She said, "I can't believe it! He has been all this time a criminal! People always betray me! There's no one I can trust!" She padlocked him out. Then she went home for the weekend.

That Sunday the remaining tenants came demanding that I join them in revolt. They presented me with a letter to sign that was addressed to Mrs. Skyldig and told her how wrong she was.

None of the tenants had signed the letter. I was willing to quit my job for them, but not if all that could come of it was my unemployment. I urged them to all sign it, and I promised I'd be the second signer. But no one stepped forward to be the first. They were all afraid to be the next one evicted, and wanted me to take all the heat. I said, "Well then, you don't really care as much as you say you do."

About 4 in 5 of them moved out within a month. They proved me wrong.

Now, I'm saying the supporters of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness don't care whether it really ends homelessness or not. Let's see them risk speaking out about the plan's failings, and prove me wrong.

It's About Affordability

I love analogies of all kinds. Analogies've been very good to me. For example, thanks to my ability to ace SAT multiple choice analogy questions, I was able to attend college. That was in spite of the countless Ds in Language Arts I earned by not doing any of my stupid moron teachers' stupid homework for morons and stupid losers, on account of my being socially maladjusted.

But, more important than getting into college so you can study hard, excel, party, and get laid, analogies can be instructive. By means of analogies you can learn to better live in this complicated world of ours, and so better party, and get laid.

Here's an instructive analogy: Living on the street out of a cardboard box even though you are able-bodied, is to being homeless, as being unable to drive to work even though you have a functioning car is to being gasolineless.

In ten years, as the price of gasoline continues to rise, I expect there will be thousands of the gasolineless walking 5, 10, or 15 miles to work every day. People who can still afford gasoline will look down upon the gasolineless. They'll say, if only the gasolineless applied themselves and worked extra jobs in other cities, they could afford gasoline like decent people. Boneheaded compassionate conservatives will lament the downward spiral that results from gasolinelessness. Because many of the gasolineless won't be able to get to work at all, their rents and mortgages will go unpaid, causing them to become homeless, too, after which it will be minutes before they start begging and using their change to buy Thunderbird. Boneheaded compassionate Liberals will speak of the ennobling effects of gasolinelessness.

High School kids will go gasolineless for a weekend to learn how hard it is, then write term papers on how it felt. The ones who weren't disposed to be sympathetic from the start will write about how it wasn't so bad having to walk to the neighborhood McDonald's for a change, and how the gasolineless are all whiners and losers.

After another ten or fifteen years, the gasolineless will be visible everywhere, bringing down property values and bumming decent people out. People will bitch and moan about how they can't drive two blocks without having to ignore a dozen or more dirty aggressive hitchhikers. So a Ten Year Plan to End Gasolinelessness will be developed by a Committee to End Gasolinelessness in King County. The committee will have numerous subcommittees, because the gasolineless come in so many different kinds. There's the Single Adult Gasolineless, the Families With Children Gasolineless, and the Senior Citizen & Physically Disabled Gasolineless.


[Above: As gasolinelessness increases, we'll be subjected to scenes like this everywhere. Our young men and women will all become indistinguishable from Europeans.]

They will come up with something called Gasoline-First. The idea originally will be to supply gasoline to all the gasolineless first, and only when they are in a stable gasoline-adequate living situation to begin work on the problems that made them gasolineless, so they can gradually improve themselves, develop work skills, and find productive work appropriate to their needs and abilities. Advocates of the Gasoline-First approach will tell the skeptics that it is easier and cheaper to give people gasoline than to have them cluttering our streets and highways thumbing rides, leaving us no choice but to jail them all.

Unfortunately there won't be funding for all the gasoline needed to do Gasoline-First for everybody right away, mainly because not enough people involved in the Ten Year Planning would raise hell and demand full funding. So in all the subcommittees the talk will focus on the Chronically Gasolineless -- people who are gasolineless for either long periods of time or repeatedly, who are the costliest burden on society. With the money we save Gasoline-Firsting the Chronically Gasolineless they believe we will eventually be able to Gasoline-First others.

Also our success in helping the Chronically Gasolineless out of Gasolinelessness will show what's possible and create the political will needed to end all Gasolinelessness, just in the nick of time, before the ten years are up.

Don't You Dare Duck, Either

Family dysfunction. You don't see me discussing it much because I'm a little bit raw from it. On the one hand, reliving pain is the best source of humor. On the other hand, reliving pain is the best source of relapse, which is the best source of a med-adjustment, which is on the road to Zombie Town and/or a new room at Harborview with built in straps, and new friends bearing needles for those all-important around-the-clock blood tests.

But I think I can avoid all that by not actually making family dysfunction the subject of my talk, but rather the day's primary source of analogies. Therefore I will not be talking directly about such situations as occur such as where Mommy "lovingly" corrects you too hard and breaks your brain permanently. Instead I'll talk about other stuff that happens and only refer to those situations by way of illustration.

So my goal today is to piss away the rest of my column space talking about things that resemble family dysfunctioning that I've known.

How 'bout that Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness?

We're all one big happy family at the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness! Why wouldn't we be? We're ending homelessness! In ten years! We've said so!

Turns out that's a bit like promising to honor and obey until death do us part. After about two or three years a promise like that has a way of morphing into, "You expect me to do what? You want to die?" Which if you think about it is the same thing.

Some of you might recall that back in January I had fun laughing about a thing, in the planning of the ten year's planning, called the Ten Year Plan dashboard. That was a document, or maybe it was a 'device', which was not finished, which WHEN finished would tell the big shots at the top of the planning process when the planning car was in need of oil or gas or a tune-up, so they could order their underlings to take care of that.

It turns out that it was totally dysfunctional of me to -- using the day's primary analogy source -- "snicker at Daddy that way." You're not supposed to snicker at Daddy when Daddy is busy telling you how things are going to happen around here in the future. You're supposed to hold your tongue until Daddy has made a new rule, and then, when you are spoken to, you may say what you think of the new rule, provided you speak respectfully.

It was especially dysfunctional of me because such things as governing dashboards are common in organizations. Even Real Change has been working on one. So I had snickered at Daddy for doing something all Daddies do. Next thing you know I'll be laughing at Daddy for breaking wind.

In a slightly different vein, last week our director Timothy "My Cage Is Too Dirty" Harris smelled something bad coming our way from the Seattle weekly named so. A writer at that weekly was asking questions of Real Change folks that made it seem like either a bogus 'expose' was being manufactured, or that someone had a bean and cheese burrito for breakfast.

We've seen these things elsewhere. A local 'investigation' reveals that some vendors at a street paper make so much money they can afford apartments, and they aren't fired for it! Some vendors meet the conditions of incentive programs to get guaranteed turf and other vendors don't! Vendors are caught drinking alcohol in their time off, as if they were ordinary people, and the director does nothing to stop them!

So Tim did a dysfunctional thing. He had the audacity to use his blog, Apesma's Lament, to object in advance of anything actually happening. The writer hasn't even written a story yet!*

What have we learned today? 1) Never giggle at your Betters. 2) You're not supposed to scream before your Betters hit you.

* That was when I wrote this. The article under discussion, by Huan Hsu, is out now.

The Rich Trickle On Us

Everyone has their own way of relating how rich Bill Gates is. Bill Gates is so rich, he has half the money in Seattle. Bill Gates is so rich, he sleeps in a different room of his house every night of every decade. Bill Gates is so rich, when he wants something from the grocery store, he has it delivered. I mean, the store. Bill Gates is so rich he could buy most countries.

Bill Gates is so rich he won't buy a used country, preferring a new custom country built from scratch, somewhere between Lake Washington and Lanai. And, finally, Bill Gates is so rich that just his money alone would be all you'd need to end homelessness in America for what's left of the ten years before the great Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is finished and solves everything.

What would it look like if Bill Gates actually did use his wealth to relieve some homelessness around here, just in Seattle? We have fewer than 10,000 homeless people. Gates could get 10,000 cheap prefab homes. At wholesale prices they'd all put together cost him less than a billion. Another billion to buy the land to put them on, and Bill's ranking among the world's billionaires wouldn't slip by more than 1.

But all that assumes Bill would go about relieving homelessness the way ordinary humans would. It doesn't take into account the fact that, like all billionaires, Bill Gates is an alien from Horsehead Nebula.

To understand how Bill would try to relieve Seattle's homelessness, consider another billionaire, Genshiro Kawamoto, who is trying to relieve homelessness in Oahu.

Kawamoto, like Gates, likes to spend a lot of time in the Hawaiian Islands. In the 80s Kawamoto mixed business with pleasure and bought up a lot of property in Hawaii as investments, including a lot of mansions. Recently he got bit by the altruism bug and announced he was going to rent 8 of his pricey Kahala Avenue luxury homes to poor struggling Hawaiian native families, preferably homeless families, for $150 to $200 per month, utilities paid, for up to ten years.

Now that he's moving people in, he's saying he won't charge some of them rent at all. He's partially furnishing the places. To help you visualize the deal, we're talking about homes in the $2,000,000 to $10,000,000 range that either sit directly on a gorgeous tropical ocean beach or are at most a couple of hundred feet removed.

One of the recipients is a woman with five children who has been staying in a homeless shelter for the last four or five months. Her new home for the next ten years is worth $5,000,000. We can expect that altogether approximately 50 homeless or on-the-edge-of-homeless people will get luxury digs from Kawamoto, most of them children of single mothers. That's the bright side. Thank you, Genshiro K!

The dark side is that the sort of real estate speculation that made Genshiro Kawamoto rich enough to do all this is lies precisely at the root of nearly all the homelessness Hawaii and the rest of America has to bear. Kawamoto is infamous in Hawaii for evicting renters at short notice to make a quick profit, as well as buying properties and neglecting to rent them at all. In short, he's a slumlord to the rich. He may not create homelessness in the demographic he serves, but his practices reduce their housing options, which reduces the options of the next lower class, and the next. It's the real trickle-down. The end result is homelessness for a lot more than fifty people.

So, thank you also, Genshiro K, for being a prime example of how the rich and powerful screw us all and then do some token rescues to make up for it. Just like the government and the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, which is really only a plan to reduce a fraction of it.