for those of you visiting let me go back on what the common good caf is it's an attempt to establish an environment so that we can have a civil civic discussion and this first part is a seven week kind of  of tweaking it and getting the figure out what we're doing what works well what doesn't work well the format if this is your first night here is there is a presenter the presenter speaks for about twenty twenty five minutes the presenter is supposed to have something to say that you can't say for yourself and that's what makes the presenter a presenter is they've got something to bring now we will all evaluate and judge him harris if he is if he is in fact that person and the magic of the night is after that after that presentation you're all broken up into yourself organize into little pods of three or five folks and and you have a discussion about what you've just heard and then we gather back together and the q and a comes back out of the groups out of what you've discussed again with our presenter who's bringing us something that we can bring here ourself and so that's kind of the format it's an experiment in democracy i think that's actually how democracy works  or at least that's one facet of how democracy works there's a couple of of additions that we hope will evolve and eventually we get to a point where the culture here is is civil so that we can actually bring in opposing viewpoints and so people can begin to really truly dialogue with the cultural and political and economic problems of our times that seems to just be increasing so one of the things that we've already learned it is the power of music and the goodness of music and the soul of music and so tonight we just have a wealth of stanislav came and played for us a bit and puget sound i used to call it c atl now we call it paul allen for the money and the flag and the mountain made in nature became a mountain made a cash and a little baby billionaires broke out of their padded cells and the little town got a real big and everything went to college se come to the right place you like highrise go get get get some calm there with a happy face with a starbucks on every corner and your own cash machine now i know what they mean when they call it the green thank you yeah it's wonderful to see some many people here this is a good idea rich i remember talking with red chip about this idea and usually when we talk about things we have these like huge wild grand ideas that  come to anything but thanks to rich this one dead tonight i am going to talk about occupy c h k c which is the organizing work that we're doing and that's you know occupy c e h k c probably doesn't make a lot of sense to you right off the bat but i'm hoping that by the time i step talking it will and i want to draw some connections that might not already be totally obvious to you and i want to talk about cities and sort of how cities have changed and how that's happened relationship to homelessness and i want to conclude by asking you all to consider the radical proposition that  of our public policy making around homelessness as is is pretty much just as corporate dominated as our public policy decision making and any other area and why that might be a problem so to begin with they want to start with westlake was like plaza we had some recent experience with westlake plaza we did our first sort of occupy c e h k c demonstration which was a twenty four hour occupation of westlake sounder that common a day about  hundred to one hundred fifty marching to the c e h k c that's the committee to end homelessness in king county governing board meeting which happens quarterly and asking them to develop an economic justice agenda and part of being cat man at westlake plaza was that we had been told that we couldn't camp at westlake plaza and we went to a federal judge and got a temporary restraining order that overturned the parks department decision to not allow us to camp overnight and the judge agreed that he overturned their decision and we were allowed to camp overnight and the reason that he overturn the decision was that he agreed with us that westlake plaza westlake center was a symbolic site and i'll just read you a little bit from our motion and usually you know a legal motion isn't the sort doesn't contain the sort of language that makes your heart pitter patter but  and the defendants will hear the word defendants and hear defendants for city of seattle and seattle parks and recreation defendants have engaged in a concerted effort over the past fifteen years to sanitize the downtown business core around westlake park for the comfort of shoppers and tourists by pushing homeless populations to south downtown through a number of tactics including the now infamous panhandling ordinance passed by the city council and backed by seattle downtown association the seattle convention and visitors this is actually a mistake our lawyer wrote this in a hurry that the panhandling ordinance didn't pass we defeated that but they did pass the so same death passed by the city council and backed by the downtown seattle association seattle convention and visitors bureau the monorail starbucks the mariners and a host of other downtown interests the proposed panhandling ordinance was only defeated by the mayor's meeting after a significant public backlash at the same time the city has cut back on funding for emergency services including closing homeless shelters second plaintiffs intend to protest major downtown corporations  retailers in the immediate vicinity of westlake park lyon through purported community groups such as the downtown seattle association these corporations have participated in and profited from the defendant's efforts the defendants of course you remember as the city of seattle to sanitize the business core near westlake park and this like spectacularly gratifying moment the federal judge agreed with us and said that camping in westlake park was a political was political free speech because of the symbolic nature of westlake park and i want to talk more about that because west lake is sort of ground of the remaking of seattle and as has been remade over the past several decades there has been a consistent relationship to the oppression and repression and homeless people and there's there's a reason for that so just to sort of walk through that history you know the development of westlake park was part of the road project and the road project started and two thousand on that two thousand and three in one thousand nine hundred three jeff rhodes developer had this great idea for how he could make the revitalization of the downtown work and you know this was it was at a time when the downtown entrance where very nervous about the sort of state of things and they wanted to rebuild the downtown and and bring commerce to the downtown they weren't clear on how they were going to do that you had to empty frederick and nails and building that was a kind of an anchor store that people were were freaked out about and the roads project you know it included buying the fredricka nails and building trading it off to the nordstrom's in a sort of an even trade the city agreeing to build a seven story parking garage all in all it was about one hundred million dollars and public subsidies including a section line away hud low income housing a loan that went to build this parking garage about one hundred million dollars in public subsidies to attract what was what was you know estimated to be about three hundred fifty million and downtown development and the westlake stander and the closure of that center to traffic as sort of like you know public space and the making of that into commercial space was was the heart of that project what a lot of people might not have put together is concurrently with the revitalization of westlake and this huge sort of public subsidization of private development to remake the downtown the citron ordinances were passed at the same time and those were the sit lie ordinances that said you can't crap up our public sidewalks by sitting down or laying down or meeting your human needs in public which you have to do because you're homeless and by definition you can't meet your human needs in private so that was made illegal at that time and you know we fought against that a lot of people thought against it but those fights there are nearly always losing fights where for reasons i'll go into into later but that was sort of the opening gun the downtown sort of the downtown interests on going war on the poor so we had t past we had the downtown revitalization quickly after that we had the decision to build her royal hall and the there was a low income housing and stick to it had been approved to put an urban hygiene center a downtown hygiene center and the glen hotel right around the corner from benaroya hall downtown interest completely freaked out there like what you're to have smelly homeless people lining up half a block away from our new shiny symphony center no way and they went nuclear they just they went nuclear and they fought it with everything they had and a result of that you know that service is is not in the downtown core where it would really make sense for that to be it's kind of off to the side it's up around nine stuart and you know it's sort of a significant extra leg the trips that people need to make to get clean and that's becoming more problematic now because of the demise of the ride free zone which is you know another and how when we decide that we can't afford things it's nearly always the dirt poor that we can't afford so after that that fight went on for like two years and we we ultimately lost that so then continuing to link the history of downtown development and how we treat homeless people we had a condo gold rush that really peaked you know i mean you know the developers here where about a year late out of the gate because the  subprime mortgage industry and the credit and history pretty much collapsed right in the middle of their kind of them and that that put a bit of a crimp in their plans but but nonetheless this was another opportunity to oppress homeless people there was a you know the starting gun was that there than a six hundred foot limit on high rise condos in the downtown area and legislation was passed that said you could build over six hundred feet and you have to pay this sort of bonus that goes into open space in the development of low income housing but six hundred foot cap on downtown residential is is off you can do this now so you know we fought this fight around which you know was a pyrrhic victory and hindsight where working with p sound stage we were able to raise the amount that developers paid into that amount from the proposed ten dollars a square foot to twenty dollars a square foot and the developers during this fight you know lined up to say are you going to impossible for us to do business you know you make us do this we're going to have to take our precious development capital and go to bellevue where they appreciate it your year your beautiful skyline is going to be wasted and this city council call them out call them on their bluff it was actually impressive they don't usually do that and they doubled the t d r bonus and it didn't prevent a single developer from rushing down to city hall to try to be first to get their permits filed in there was this period where  construction crane well oddly during this period it was when the mayor's office greg nickels decided to secret lee engage in a policy shift from tolerance of homeless encampments and a sort of the complaints driven system for monitoring and sometimes clearing homeless encampment to a proactive zero tolerance stance towards homeless encampment and that matt systematically identifying where people were camping and sending crews out on a monthly basis to proactively sinnott first they did it without any protocols whatsoever and without notifying anybody they were going to do it they just sent out teams they would like take machetes to people's tents throw all their crap in a dumpster and they would threaten to arrest them if they like came back to say anything about it it was just brutal and it took us it took us weeks to get them to even admit that they were doing it and we finally threw a freedom of information request found an e mail that gave  that there's actually been a policy shift to a zero tolerance policy and we spent the next two years fighting over the encampment clearance protocol and nichols administration just sort of stonewalled us through that entire period refused to meet with us and you know engaged and negotiations in extremely bad faith it was the most one sided public hearing i have ever attended when they had their public carrying on  encampment protocols where we turned out like seventy six people to testify and there was one person who sort of half heartedly testified in favor of the protocols that they had proposed and after that herring they really did not change their their proposed protocols at all they just you know it was a unusually farcical public process in a city known for its farcical public processes so you again you know you had that relationship between downtown development boom repression of homeless people so then you've got  the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry and you've got the collapse of the credit market with that and suddenly they all of these developers who have buildings have built are in big trouble because nobody is buying  and people are trying to bail on on the contracts that they'd signed to move into units that were going to be built because the prices there like really inflated the market just crashed and people have been paying these like you know pre crash prices for luxury condos everybody's backing out and developers are going bankrupt literally going bankrupt and you've got twenty to twenty five percent downtown vacancy rates  and an office space and retail is there is a recession that's the kind of thing that just you know reaches deep into the end test in downtown seattle association and closes with an icy grip and starts to squeeze in there like god i feel i feel bad what do i do i know i'm going to blame homeless people and that is when they tried to get the anti panhandling legislation across because obviously the problems of the downtown have not been caused by the collapse of the credit industry and the subsequent decimation of small businesses and that sort of thing it is the homeless people that are scaring people away from from shopping downtown and you know amazingly we were able to stop that legislation from passing and frankly we just got lucky we got really really lucky seattle the seattle human rights commission came out with their a poor that totally panned this legislation and said that it was creating a type of discretion at the beat cop love all that was going to lead to that criminalization and a very poor people and lead to increased incarceration in a sort of a kind of what's the word them after a kind of profiling kind of an economic profiling that targets poor people people of color gives the cops a lot of discretion and who they can arrest for like bullshit reasons that don't really stand up and that is we're going to create barriers to people people who are already very hard pressed for survival it was going to make it even harder for them by creating a whole raft of new problems well the city council was fully prepared to ignore that is you know that report landed with just you know i mean nobody even noticed it sally clarke was doing her thing where she always kind of pretends to very carefully consider the various ethical implications of the legislation before she votes with the downtown interests you know one hundred percent of the time and she was she was wearing her sincere face and going through through that thing and we decided that the seattle human rights commission i mean a sort of a quasi governmental body they couldn't politicize their own report but we could do that who kind of like come on and this this sort of wave of populist backlash to owed absolutely nothing to the downtown interest because they backed the other guy he decided that you know the time was right for him to step up and veto and we did this pressure campaign on o'brien and you know as sort of you know the body snatchers had gotten to a brian you know and it was sort of like his come to jesus moment and you know he thankfully for his soul he rejoined us and we won on that which was which was freaky in the downtown establishment completely flipped out they went they went nuts the press and the aftermath of that was just toxic and rab they could not believe that the city was capable of such an act of compassion it really freaked him out so that is a pretty astonishing history when you think about it and it's kind of going on under our noses there is this direct relationship between downtown development and rip and the needs of sort of downtown corporations and when when the pan handling legislation was up before the city council and people were testifying i mean it was like a who's who of corporate seattle you know it was like the mariners really the monorail it was seattle center seattle convention and visitors bureau master builders association all of the chambers of commerce is now in and of course the downtown seattle association and they were just they were frantic to get this thing passed so what's going on is that there is this cities are changed cities are not what they were thirty or forty years ago in modern homelessness and i think of modern homelessness as the homelessness that we've had from the seventy's forward because we had pretty much eliminated homelessness and this country homelessness i talked to a kid who was like nineteen the other the other day and as often happens when i have these conversations with people of that age you know now he was like what really homelessness hasn't always been been here you now i mean that's news to people who've grown up with it but you know there was a period of homelessness that dated from sort of post civil war civil war demobilisation in the imposition of the factory labor system major economic disruption  sort of flipped the relationship between urban and and and the countryside and suddenly you had this huge economic disruption and you had lots of migrant labor and you know what we think of his as hobos and that lasted up until world war two but world war two created full employment and there was a decision that was made a series of decisions that with the war demobilisation we were going to do the same thing that we did with civil war demobilisation we weren't going to like release people to go to hobo camps you know and my theory is that you know it's because you just like trained all of these people in the use of explosives and small arms so that's that's a bad idea so instead they did the g i bill which is probably the greatest and you know class mobility this country's ever seen f h a guaranteed loans programs that put people to work building bridges infrastructure that kind of thing and you had this economic growth in this continuous decline in inequality up until about seventy three and then you had the whole thing come undone because really globalization globalization the invention of of of  shipping container and and the internet making it possible to be able to ship goods and and not incur big losses and be able to locate pretty much pretty much anywhere and that was kind of you know opening on the attack on the arraignment that we had in the beginning a four decades of increasing inequality well part of that was the last of the manufacturing base which was devastating for cities you know because they had to remake themselves you know nobody wanted to be detroit nobody wanted to be that boarded up city that's lost twenty to twenty five percent of their population as an economic basket case so you know how does cities reinvent themselves  cities reinvent themselves as centers of urban living the centers of upscale consumption for those who can afford it you know and there's a kind of a formula that goes along with that you have the sort of like shiny shopping centers you've got the kind of you know you've got you've got the starbucks you've got the cultural the manatees you know it helps if you're surrounded by a beautiful landscape you want to put up you know numerous stadia and seattle followed that's crept you know and we pursued a very very aggressive way but there's an issue with that because while cities are you know an awesome place for people to experience the joys of urban living and density when they when they can afford it they're also the centers that have the tax base to be able to provide services for poor people and you've got forty years of whitening inequality now that is a lot of poor people just here in seattle between two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten the poverty rate went from ten percent the numbers of people living below the poverty line went from ten to fourteen percent that's an a single yeah yeah now that's astonishing so you've got all these poor people and they are living in the urban centers to cheat by jowl with the bees so what do you do you now well what you do is what cities everywhere have done they adopt a ten year plan and a committee to manage the contradiction which is i think essentially what the committee to end homelessness in king county is the ten year plan to and homelessness is not a particularly unique then it came out of the bush administration i mean here's a question everybody ought to consider you know it's kind of like  know it's like the sound of one hand clapping and if you get the answer to this you'll have this kind of ha moment and breakthrough to enlightment you know why would the bush administration and probably the most hostile and ministration to the interests of poor people and in recent history be the administration to commit themselves to ending homelessness within ten years  and the ideology is that homelessness is not a matter of system failure it's not about system failure it's about individual failure it's not about a screwed up system it's about screwed people not about how we can fix the system it's how about how we can fix joe homeless guy and make things ok for him it's very very n word looking and it's really about it narrows homelessness to really at housing and service provision housing and service provision and of course there's the lip service un out that says well of course we all know jobs housing blah blah blah but there's no program around that there's no advocacy there's no action there's no grassroots mobilization government is the wrong actor to take on the task of ending homelessness because government is like fatally compromised and now the government is on sort of the horns of dilemma because you can't ignore homelessness because to ignore homelessness would be to be you know considered unjust and callous but you can't really do anything about homelessness either because to do something about homelessness would be to engage in fixing all of those sort of that saying wage labor relationships that are out there that you would stop getting campaign contributions if you did that so what does government do government makes a big show of pretending to end homelessness of working really really hard on ending homelessness and setting goals and having these data points you know and making a sort of a big you know i think of it as like a fat guy running there's a lot of huffing and puffing and sweat but there isn't a lot of forward motion and the thing is that when the ten year plan was adopted that was and while the first year was two thousand and five the first full year of the plan was two thousand year from two thousand and six to two thousand and twelve well and from two thousand and six to two thousand and twelve there is down a thirty three percent increase in the number of people counted after the shelters are filled countywide  and in seattle and going can say you know they've added new county areas county wide that's apples to oranges you know it's not really a thirty percent thirty thirty three percent increase and that would be true but if you look at seattle alone you now and maybe there's been some improvements in how they conduct the count in seattle alone but seattle alone is a seventeen percent increase since the ten year plan started to people who are outside and there's been a seven percent increase between two thousand and six and two thousand and eleven which is the last year we have numbers for of people actually in shelter that night so by any measure we're losing but you know what the official line of the c h k c is that committee to end homelessness we're name we're winning and there's roughly a four percent reduction in homelessness every year due to the efforts of the ten year plan to end homelessness which is just not true it's just not true so  k c has been a wall on all of the civil rights issues that have conflicted with downtown development zero tolerance policy on urban camping a while not there the panhandling stuff not there don't have a thing to say about it and the reason that we've initiated this case organizing project is that you know just like we know that our financial regulation is written by the corporations you know we know that our insurance regulations are written by the corporations we know that our health care regulations are written by  such a radical idea to consider corporations and business interests that own government i writing our policy on how we're going to homelessness as well so this is why we have gone to the committee to end homelessness and came down and we've asked them three things we have said that a you have to stop using data as a weapon you can't use that as an excuse to def grassroots homeless organizations that are providing emergency shelter cost effectively and empowering way which is exactly what they're about to do to share we'll because share we'll doesn't have the capacity to participate in their safe harbors data collection system so they're about to lay defund them which is you know quite convenient for them we're also saying that you have to listen to what homeless people say they need and what homeless people are saying that they need is we have a crisis out here you know there where living out on the streets where there's not enough shelter for us the shelters are packed it's got bed bugs lice the conditions suck please do something about that what's the official response we're going to withdraw money from a cup and a couple of years from the emergency shelter system to put it into housing because in our magical world where if you put money into housing you will be able to commensurately withdraw money from shelter that's how we think it's going to work and we're also saying that you have to develop an economic justice agenda too and homelessness and actively pursue it because all of the stuff that you're doing is completely getting trumped by broader social forces and you can't continue to approach homelessness as though it's caused by this sort of you know a political set of circumstances and has nothing to do with the broader economic picture or not when you are claiming the mantle of being the organization that speaks for homeless people and homeless advocates and sets the agenda for homeless advocacy in this city so that's how we're going to him project and i've gone at least ten minutes over so i'm going to set up but but even spoke longer than anyone else yeah i mean i'm not going to be able to manage manage detail because it's a very detailed document and i could spend the next fifteen minutes  about it but the basic logic of the ten year plan is based on the idea of housing first and it's the idea that it is both cheaper and more humane to put somebody and housing with supportive service as dan to have cycling through jails emergency rooms and that sort of thing not having their needs manton that when you have people who are chronically homeless who there's a you know a definition of chronic homelessness is quite detailed but but the basic idea is a long term homeless person who has you know multiple issues  keeping them on the street it's going to be better to get them into housing immediately with services and the logic is is that if you focus on doing that you know that there is a  of chronically homeless people who need a finite amount of housing so if you identified is going to pull numbers out of my butt like they do if you identify three hundred thousand people all that are chronically homeless across the country that if you build thirty thousand units of affordable housing with services a year across the country you're going to get all of those people and you're going to take a lot of pressure off of the emergency shelter system because the sort of like the frequent flyers are removed from the system which allows you to focus your resources on the people that you can help with less energy and therefore by this process of narrowing people narrowing it down you know helping the chronic homeless first and then as you gain capacity shrinking down the shelter system and and you know after ten years everybody who needs it's and housing system you know you have this fixed number of homeless people the fixed number of economically devastated people you've got i mean look at what just happened in d c for the budget deal super committee you know where the house republicans written egged on their deal to cut military spending because they couldn't reach an agreement and they said hey let's gut food stamps and programs for abused kids and meals on wheels and basic health care for poor people instead so you got that kind of crap going on in this ten year plan paradigm isn't going to be able to keep up and the other thing is is that they track the affordable housing that they build to meet the ten year plan goals but they don't track the affordable housing that it trips off the market through just gentrification and and and you know market pressures which is significant you know it's at least twice as much housing as they're able to build that we're losing and that's kind of the flaw in the paradigm is it's not a closed system you know  it's this artificial logic sorry that was a long winded answer but i did my best to be pithy right there well the question as is is it a good strategy to you know do things like run the ten ninety eight and there should be actually you know have past it have something resembling a fair tax system and i would say yeah that's a great idea now i mean to my mind the core issues that need to be fixed have to do with you know corporate personhood and what that means in terms of outsized political influence in the democratic process and corporate rights trumping community rights over and over again campaign finance reform you know getting the money out of politics because again we have a really broken system and tax reform yeah now i mean without those things those are sort of you know the fundamental things that we have to do before we can reasonably fix things because that's why the political system is broken and and you can't just reform a fundamentally broken system you've got to deal with why it's broken right back there so you're talking about thick kang down the proposal to have a small hike and sales tax to fund human services you know my position at the time and it really hasn't changed is yes that's a regressive tax and we need him in services and if you can't pass a regressive tax and you know people are going to need to pay their fraction paralyzed by the perfect solution is worse than not doing anything yeah the most fundamental thing that i would do differently if i were running the committee to end homelessness is i would have a grassroots strategy i would be talking of economic justice as the solution to homelessness and about how we're not going to and homelessness unless we approach it  that level i would be tapping into the moral outrage that people rightly feel about homelessness instead of trying to neutralize it with these sort of blandest situations that we're dealing fine everything's ok don't worry about it we've got our committee there doing our work you know we're going to a limpia we're making our case they're giving us everything they possibly can up to the point where it actually challenges anything fundamental or war or a fan's anybody who actually has any power i think that if you don't do grassroots mobilization if you're not building power if you're not  building to be able to challenge the folks who want to keep things the way you way they are what you get is you know maybe this year they're not going to cut the housing trust fund  that a big victory because because you haven't lost more ground so i think you now focus on the big picture and list allies build a movement use the moral outrage instead of going out of your way to neutralize it and put people back to sleep so statement is that this system will respond when we start disrupting it and forcing it to respond and you know i agree with   literature that deals with globalization as the kind of precipitating event that created modern homelessness sites as published in one nine hundred eighty three and socialist review as kind of the academic source of the beginning of that kind of analysis and one of the things that he talks about his sort of borrowing from pivoting clowe word care is that there are two times two circumstances when the system will take care of poor people one is when when when poor people's labor will again be needed when their labor power is essentially in a bad there's a cyclo call downturn bunch of people who are unemployed they're going to be needed again so you know in those circumstances you have a relatively generous welfare state you know that that maintains people until they're back in the labor force that's not a situation where a situation where as we've got a whole bunch of people that have been written off and are suppressed less to the economy and you know unless things change pretty radically they're not they're not working a  and they've been they've been they've been thrown to the wolves you know so the other circumstance is when there is a system threat when people are out in the streets protesting you know when when people are raising hell and  look at the history of twentieth century poor people's movements you know the labor movement the civil rights movement welfare rights movement you know it's it's have been clobbered wrote about this and poor people's movements it's  know pretty clear what gets results is when people are out in the streets raising how and there has to be a system response mobutu will be with us and will her her her talk isn't a spirituality of economy it's a spirituality of resistance and i think what she wants to do is take us into the moral question of well what can we do and what kind of people are we becoming so ey tell me that there's light at the end of the tunnel and sometimes i think i see like the dissident glint in a i have a needle oh that glitter