Nickels Makes History Repeat

I have a column due by 9 AM this morning, and I've also promised Anitra "Not Acting On Behalf Of Anybody In Particular" Freeman that by the same time I'd read a book-length manifesto on Nickelsville that she wrote with a committee. Not being inclined to do needless work, I shall now attempt to combine the two efforts into one glorious slack-off.

[Above Left: Anitra with acquaintance.]

I've talked about Nickelsville here before but I've never spent an entire column on it. This is mainly due to the fact that it hasn't existed yet. I generally find that when I talk about that which is not, the results are even more obtuse than what you usually get when I talk about that which is.

But Nickelsville is poised to be, probably before the next column is out, so it has achieved a degree of concreteness analogous to that of The Melting of the Polar Icecaps and The Rise of the Oceans Due to Global Warming, or The Great Stock Market Crash of 2008 (both expected later today).

So what will Nickelsville be? It will be a Hooverville that is named after Greg Nickels, Seattle's mayor, rather than after Herbert Hoover, a former US President. In the Great Depression Seattle had a Hooverville, a shantytown built by homeless people. A lot of people then thought that Herbert Hoover was responsible for a lot of the Greatness of the Great Depression. So they named the shantytowns after him, the need for them being perceived to be partly his fault.

Today, we don't just think Greg Nickels has a lot to do with how hard it is to survive homeless in Seattle, we know he does. We have listened to him talk a good talk about ending homelessness, while at the same time chasing homeless encampments all around the city and destroying survival gear wherever found. The message from Nickels is, we, the City of Seattle, will end homelessness in the abstract by 2014 (only: not really because the plan isn't to actually end homeless, but hah, hah, that's what we say about it, even though the plan itself says something entirely different, read the fine print), but concretely we will strip all the homeless that are forced outdoors for lack of adequate shelter of all their property, and leave them to the elements.

So as those homeless people who wish to live band together into a shantytown, there is no question whose fault it all is. Nickelsville will be Nickels' fault. Without Greg Nickels and the homeless encampment sweeps he instigated, Nickelsville wouldn't be about to happen. As bad as George Bush is, there would not be a Bushville at this time. Until maybe next week, depending on how many multi-billion dollar financial greed factories file Chapter 11 this week.

As Anitra and Friends' manifesto ably and concisely points out, Nickelsville will cost the City of Seattle nothing. To be less concise: it will not take money out of the general fund. It will not be built by city workers paid by taxpayers. The residents will build and maintain it with assistance from private donors. The city will not be billed for the labor.

People are always saying, "Why don't homeless people ever do anything to help themselves?" Well, they do, everyday. They help themselves by barely surviving in spite of all the obstacles and all the persecution. It's understandable that people can't see that work of surviving, because it's scattered among thousands of personal stories.

Nickelsville should make matters clearer. "What are homeless people doing to help themselves?" Nickelsville, for one thing.

And if, as feared, the city tears Nickelsville down, that would help answer the follow-up question, "Why, if they are helping themselves, are they still homeless?"

The first step in getting out of homelessness is finding a way to maintain and survive every day. If that first step is continually tripped up by the police power of a mayor, then there can never be a second step.

Fannie Seized

Ooh, the Bush government just seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and I'm all a-twitter!

Quick partial telegraphic history of US Government involvement in the housing, rental, and mortgage business since the New Deal: Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) '33, Housing Acts '34, '37, Pinko Commy Federal National Mortgage Association '38 (Fannie Mae), Servicemen's Readjustment Act '44 (the GI "Bill of Rights"), Housing Acts '49, '54, '64, Housing and Urban Development Act '65, Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act '66, Housing and Urban Development Act '68 (created Ginny Mae), Emergency Home Finance Act '70, (created Freddie Mac), Housing and Urban Development Act '70, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) '75, Community Reinvestment Act '77, Homesteading and Neighborhood Restoration Act '95, Pinko Commy Republicans Seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac '08.

Really, it's a hoot when small government conservatives say one day that you have to let the market correct itself, and the next day send in the Marines.

General rule: If poor people are the only ones hurt by a market downturn, a government correction of the market is invariably "liberal", but if wealthy investors are feeling the crunch, it's a threat to our national security. Bolsheviks arise!

The truth is, deep down inside, George Bush is jealous of Hugo Chavez. Hugo Chavez gets to wear the cool red beret and the khakis all the time and blah-blah all day and no one can stop him. He gets to seize corporations any time he wants. Now, George is probably thinking, "Heh, heh, Daddy never seized a multi-billion-dollar secondary mortgage guarantor! And I just seized two of them suckers in one day! Next week maybe I'll seize BP and ExxonMobil, heh, heh, that'd show'm."

I just wish it went down like in the movies. Hundreds of guys dressed all in black with wicked guns rappel from hovering black helicopters into windows, race down corridors, shoot their way into board rooms, and march corporate executive weasels at gunpoint to waiting buses, which speed them to their new suites at the Concertina Hotel. Why is it never like that? Reality hates me. I'm sure George feels the same way. It's something I sense we have in common. That, and a sweet love of women's beach volleyball.



All of this wouldn't have been necessary if the government had never privatized these corporations to begin with. You don't have to seize what you already own. I blame Nixon.

At the outset the idea was to back up the mortgage industry with public funds, and nobody seriously believed it could happen without them. Then, as Republicans took control in the late 60s (Nixon!) during a relatively minor housing crisis (minor compared to now) they enforced the idea that what Fannie Mae needed was to be cut loose from the government and begin to get her money the Old Fashioned Way. To help her along she was introduced to her brand new wily half brother Freddie Mac, who would teach her how it's done through the magic of competition. (The same administration later brought us wage and price controls).

By seizing both of them, the Bush administration has restored the Fannie Mae piece of the New Deal: Your irony of the week.

Toward Further Confusion

1. How is it that conservatives and liberals so often resort to the same solutions to the same problems? Could it be that conservatives and liberals differ mainly on the nature of their excuses? Could it be Darwin was right, and it's all about whatever works, works? Or is there a God, Who wrote unto Moses (tablet missing, presumed broken) Thou Shalt Lend Private Funds Only?

2. In 1950, to prevent a national railroad strike from interfering with the Korean War effort, Truman ordered the Army to seize the country's railroads. The Army did so successfully with 46 officers, one enlisted man (a sergeant), and eight civilian clerks. Explain, drawing from your own experiences, or experiences of others you've read about, how so few men with weapons can do so much.

Lackawanna Wonderfulness

Here at Adventures in Irony, we aim to put everything that matters into perspective and distort beyond recognition everything that doesn't matter. Let's talk about the US presidential election!

We now know who's running. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama is running as the I Spy Bill Cosby (not to be confused with the stand-up or Jello-Pudding Cosbys), so has picked Robert Culp as his running mate. I discovered this watching Obama and Biden being interviewed together on 60 Minutes. The objective is for Obama to be the first African-American president without ever actually mentioning African-American-ness. Instead the focus will be on Wonderfulness and Joe Biden's ability to write his own speeches and direct himself. Obama's election will pave the way, in less than 40 years, for a Democratic Ticket that looks like Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson.

McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for Vice Presidential nominee gives us no choice but to speak of a Get Smart Ticket -- Sarah Palin being basically Barbara Feldon, Agent 99, with glasses, a bigger gun, and higher cheekbones. This means John McCain is Maxwell Smart. If anyone is bothered by this I'm sorry, but I don't make these things up. The McCain/Palin sequel, if it's allowed to happen, will be played by Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway.

Counting Greens, Libertarians, Socialists, and the others, there are at least an additional 11 tickets to choose from that I know of (not all offers valid at all election outlets). When one of those 11 tickets starts resembling a 60s TV spy show team I will let you all know within the week. Ralph Nader had a shot at being The Man From U.N.C.L.E but he blew it when he decided to run with Matt Gonzales. Matt Gonzales may have Illya Kuryakin's hair, his eyes, and maybe even his fashion sense, but he is no Illya Kuryakin.

A lot has been made of Barack Hussein Obama's name, especially the Hussein part. It's often suggested that Barack's parents went way out of their way to dream up the weirdest, scariest, name they could. The notion credits them with far more imagination than they actually showed: Barack's father's name was Barack Hussein Obama. They went with something already tried!

John McCain has been revealed as the least homeless man in America. Many in the homeless advocacy business are investigating what impact McCain's possession of all the vacant housing has already had on US homelessness. What we know for certain is that he's the candidate most capable of ending homelessness in a term at the White House, by inviting all the homeless people into his other digs.

Sarah Palin might not know how to end homelessness, but she could help homeless people get relief from their day-to-day struggles by teaching them to shoot and live off wild game. She knows how to make hats out of pigeons and gloves out of stray cats. I'm sure she'll have no problem with homeless people shooting stray cats. Realize it's not about the cats, it's about self-reliance. It's not about the elk, it's about oil. And so forth.

Joe Biden has been a senator from Delaware for 35 freaking years. He's not known for that, of course, since most Americans have never heard of Delaware ("lowest highest elevation of all fifty states") or knew that it was permitted votes in the Senate. Instead, he is best known for having lived as the son of a working-class car salesman in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, absorbing the honest straight-shooting ethics of all good salt-of-the-earth car salesmen. I didn't really mean to say that, I just wanted to say "Lackawanna."

For Extra Credit

Figure out how John McCain can be said to have had far more foreign policy experience than Barack Obama, but he still can't tell when a war is wrong and an insane waste of people and resources. Should we value experience in and of itself, or should we look at what’s been learned from it?

Epidemic of More Hair

Here's a quote I find fascinating. It was in an opinion piece for Indymedia in San Francisco, attributed to an unnamed reader of Mortgage News Daily. "If we don't do something [about the foreclosure crisis] we are going to have an epidemic of homeless people who are fed up and commit crimes this winter begging to be housed in Jail."

First of all, it's good to see that we are now capitalizing Jail, just like we have learned to capitalize Mother, God, and the Right Honorable So-and-So. If you incarcerate a higher percentage of your population than any other country in the world, it's time to start paying Jail some respect, in the sort of way Germans respect Himmel and Heimat. We capitalize White House and only one family lives there, and all it means is "white house." More than one in a hundred of our adults live in Jail; that counts for something. I'm also in favor of capitalizing Toilet, for the same reason.

The thing that really fascinates me about the quote is the notion that as soon as good law-abiding citizen homeowners become homeless they will immediately give up on all that and start breaking laws, loving Jail and the lawlessness that gets them there. This view does not describe my own bouts with homelessness.

I was homeless for an accumulated total of three and a half years before I started to think breaking laws would be a fun change of pace. For the whole time up until that I was actually, amazingly, the same fastidious, conscientious, law-abiding person I had been in all my previous (by that time) 45 years.

When I finally did consider breaking a law, it wasn't me that had changed; it was the law. It had become against the law to sit down on a sidewalk no matter how tired you were.

But maybe today's homeless people are different. Today's homeless people were born into a different world than we were. They haven't had Eisenhower to ground them and give their lives meaning. They smoke better weed. They have more hair and faster reflexes.

I was thinking about all this when I found a story in an online Florida newspaper titled "Homeless man charged with exposure of sexual organs." Actually the man, "Jimmy," was drunk and had an extremely full bladder, and therefore it wasn't his sexual organs, per se, that he exposed, it was his bladder-relieving organs, properly speaking.

Jimmy's real crime, it turns out, was not sexual in nature, but being so drunk he thought the New England Cafe in Jensen Beach was the Toilet.

So, how drunk were the owners of the New England Cafe of Jensen Beach, Florida, when they decided they were in New England?

Next, how drunk was the reader of Mortgage News Daily, to think that having your house foreclosed will make you want to live in Jail and do all the things it takes to get there?

Whenever people use terms like "epidemic" or "chronic" in connection with homelessness they reinforce the idea that it's a disease you catch. It's no wonder, with the government using such language all the time, that housed drunks, like that reader, would think that if you catch homeless cooties your personality will change and all your principles will atrophy and fall off after one cold night in a doorway.

It never occurs to housed drunks that the Jimmies out there who are now homeless drunks pissing on cafe tables in Florida were once housed drunks just like themselves, pissing on the coffee table in their living rooms just before passing out on the living room floor, and just hours after writing a stupid letter about homelessness to a newspaper.

Exercises For Advance Credit

How drunk was the writer when he wrote this column?

Which of the following comes closest to the writers point? a) "We're all just people, everywhere," b) "We're all drunks, under the skin," or c) "I need to lie down."

No Market Cookie

Let's talk about the failure of the housing market! Housing statistics are about the most boring things I can think of, after corn futures! So let's go for it!

Seriously, my heart raced a little last week when I read the following 2 successive Harper's Index entries: "Chance that a U.S. home is currently vacant: 1 in 35," and "Rank of this among the highest recorded vacancy rates in U.S. history: 1." That's sounds informative, I thought! What does it mean?

I had no clue, so I did what Harper's must have done, namely consult the US Census Bureau data. The picture that emerged from that excursion into surveys, tabulations, and estimates was surprisingly interesting, as I will now attempt to convey.

The 1 in 35 bit refers to homes that would ordinarily be occupied by the owners, rather than rentals. Just that much vacant housing of that type alone accounts for something on the order of 2 million vacant homes, nationally. Given that there are only about 700,000 Americans homeless at any moment, says HUD, that means the entire homeless population could fit in said housing, one each to a vacant home, and still have enough left over to house the homeless of Canada, England, Australia, and probably Western Europe in the same plush way. Since the average home is meant to accommodate somewhere between 2 and 6 residents, you could probably house 10 times the US homeless population in the vacant homes we are talking about, even if HUD's counts are way off.

Now, that's not fair, because every market has to have unused stocks of goods to keep it fluid. But when you look at rental vacancies it's a whole different situation.

A full 1 in 10 of all rental units are going vacant in this country. That means that even though less than half of all housing is rental housing (now we're counting apartments, but NOT motel or hotel rooms and NOT summer cabins and NOT rooms at shelters) we're talking about a terrific mondo quantity of vacant units. Altogether, counting all such vacant units and adding in the vacant homes, 18.6 million units of housing are going unused in this country, as of the 2nd quarter of 2008, while the aforementioned homeless people try to find nice bridges to sleep under.

That means there are more than twenty empty housing units for every person in the country who desperately needs housing.

That's way too much unused stock.

What's a market failure?

A market failure is an American-style supermarket opened up in the middle of a Third World slum offering tomatoes at $3 a pound to people who make $3 a month.

A market failure is a Chad street vendor trying to sell jalapeños to drought victims.

What we have here is a failure of the US housing market to deliver affordable housing. To paraphrase someone I wish I never heard of, you don't house the people you want, you house the people you have.

Fun Exercises -- Learn Through Play!

1. Henry Ford had the idea to pay workers high wages to make cars so cheap the workers themselves could afford them. It worked. Why is that idea called liberal now? Why don't conservatives want to own the ideas that have been proved to work in the past? Isn't that what "conservative" means? Keeping what works?

2. This writer has offered no explanation for the failure of the US housing market. Try to think of your own. Here are a few suggestions: a) Aliens did it. b) We've been too chummy with the People's Republic of China, blame Nixon. c) We've been too chummy with the Saudis, blame the Bushes. c) Government housing regulations have something to do with it. d) Al Qa'eda.

3. An exercise in perspective. List twenty successful markets in America. Here are a few to get you started: The Japanese appliance retail market. The banana market. The energy drink market. The potato market. The politician market.

Exploit Me, Please

I'm a big fan of exploitation. I think exploitation is great. So long as it's rational exploitation, of course. The main model of irrational exploitation would be the killing of the goose that lays the golden egg; the main model of rational exploitation would be the not-killing of said goose. I think more rational exploitation all around would be hunky-dory.

A cool example of rational exploitation is the REX Agreement. This is something you learn about if you watch too much late night TV. Say someone, I'll call him Mark (first name: The), has equity in his own home. REX & Co. will give him an "interest free" cash loan, in return for a percentage share in the future appreciation of the house added to the loan value. If the house goes up in value REX & Co. exploits Mark. On the other hand, if the house goes down in value, REX & Co. shares that loss, the percentage of the loss is subtracted from the lump sum owed, and Mark exploits REX & Co. If housing prices plummet throughout the country REX & Co. will hurt badly. They're betting that won't happen.

Note Mark can only exploit/be exploited this way by NOT being homeless. Homeless people are rarely exploited in any decent rational way, and that's one of the reasons being homeless sucks.

Last week a rare exploitation of homeless people was reported, involving some Los Angeles area hospitals. The hospital CEOs allegedly schemed to present homeless patients with mild health problems as sick enough to need a hospital bed for two or three days, in order to collect government payments (from Medicare and Medi-Cal, for examples.) The homeless patients would agree to it, for the deluxe temporary shelter. By the goose-model-analysis this was a rational exploitation. No geese died. Even the governments that were tapped are still alive. The only problem: the goose-model-analysis leaves out the issue of illegality.

Son of a bitch! It's against the law to defraud federal, state, and local governments!

What's a hospital for? Hospitality. Who needs hospitality the most? The hospice-deficient. Homelessness is actually a debilitating condition, as demonstrated by statistics that show that the average age of people who die on the streets is under 50. If I have a disease that can take 20 to 25 years off my life-span, and the only known cure for the disease is housing, why can't doctors prescribe the cure, and Medicare pay for it?

The real tragedy here is that the patients only got to stay up to 3 days in a hospital bed. That's like treating starvation with a single Holy Wafer. "Take this, eat it !-- It's the Body of Christ! -- Now, beat it!" -- was that Al Yankovic or Michael Jackson? I have confused my own self.

So let's get this antiquated law off our books and make it legal to defraud the government in this way. Better yet, let's be even more rational and put most of the homeless people into regular housing, and save the expensive hospital beds for those who need the full 24-hour nurse and needle treatment.

Questions for Further Exploitation

1. If We, the United States of America, made a REX Agreement for our whole country, how much money would we get? Then, assuming we finish selling our country to China and the United Arab Emirates in 2020, what would we owe REX & Co.? I'm guessing nothing (because we won't be worth anything in 2020, because we won't have invested in our own people), so let's do it! Daddy needs a big-screen TV and an iPhone!

2. Last week we talked about the Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. Communities that cooperate with HUD by collecting data on homeless people get HUD funds. The homeless people, whose data is worth so much, get ripped off. They're lucky if 10% of the HUD money eventually reaches them in the form of actual housing. But, hey, it doesn't kill them, right?

The Joy-Full

Consider how many chronically cheerful people you know.

I mean really, how many? Three? Eight? Sixty-two? I want a number.

I'm not talking about the temporarily cheerful. A chronically cheerful person is one who has been cheerful continuously for a period of one year, or who has had at least four episodes of cheerfulness in the past 3 years. A person has an episode of cheerfulness if the following holds for at least 30 consecutive days: 1) they are able to get up each morning, AND 2) they smile outwardly at least once each day (inward smiles do not count) without simultaneously expressing contempt or Schadenfreude. (Chronic amused contempt and chronic Schadenfreude are separate categories.)

Of course, you can't always be there to see the smile. So we need to adopt a "methodology" to assess the definition's satisfaction, absent direct evidence.

[Right: Schadenfreude is excluded.]

You could ask each person you know, "Are you chronically cheerful?" If they say yes, add one to your count. If they say no, add zero, and continue to the next candidate. Of course this should ideally be done with all your friends on the same day.

The problem with that approach is, you don't know if the persons you ask understand the question. A better methodology would be to read the definition of chronic cheerfulness first, and then ask.

In a still more accurate methodology, candidates would report smiling behavior daily and you would keep a record and make your determinations accordingly, rather than relying on the subjects' memories and limited self-awareness. You could computerize the process and call it a CIMS (Cheerful Information Management System.)

Can you see how the different methodologies could give different totals? The Bush Administration could and has seen that. That's how they lied to you last week.

Here's the scam that just went down.

February of just last year, 2007, HUD instituted an Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to the Congress. The AHAR presents, among other things, an assessment of the number of chronically homeless people in the country at a given time, namely one day in January of two years previous (for the first report, Jan. 2005). Since HUD doesn't have the manpower to do its own counting, the actual counting is done by many service agencies that have signed on to this enterprise.

The methodology used to determine who was chronically homeless, in 2005-2006, for the 2007 AHAR, was generally speaking, nonexistent. Some communities didn't do a count in January 2005 because national one-day counts weren't established yet, so they reported previous numbers and estimates. The 2005 numbers were in turn not based on a consistent national methodology. Every agency did it their own way.

No problem, thinks HUD. That was just the first AHAR. Each year they should get better.

The second AHAR came out just one month late, in March 2008, based on the count in January 2006. The numbers of chronically homeless were down. Hooray!

That report did say that the lower numbers could be entirely due to changing methodologies of counting. Specifically the HMIS, the Homeless Management Information Systems promoted by HUD, were just beginning to be used in some areas. Other areas continued to use the method of reading the definition to people of chronic homelessness and asking people if they were such. The report admitted that just those changes in methodology could account for the entire drop in numbers.

Evidently, when the Bush Administration saw the numbers dropping because of changes in methods, they saw a chance to lie big.

I know that because the third "Annual" Homeless Assessment Report came out last month! Seven months ahead of schedule!

Look at the even bigger drop, they said! It's because we're ending homelessness, not because the methods of counting are changing, trust us on that, they said!

They couldn't wait to take advantage of the confusion. If they'd waited until the report was due out, Bush wouldn't even be president any more.

That will have to be our consolation.