homeless in seattle as a photo journal project to build community awareness for those living without shelter in other basic needs the site currently has nearly eleven thousand followers representing forty five countries and it is a project under the with the issue of homelessness well about five years ago i moved my architecture office to the fremont neighborhood in seattle and shortly after i started to go down to the bench on the canal my office is along the trail along the ship canal and at the bench there are a lot of folks that are homeless some are there just visiting for the day others are actually spending the night on the bench it has a small roof cover there and  would go down for lunches and maybe early morning coffee and and hang out and i just started to get to know some of the folks about three years ago about a year and a half of doing that about three years ago i was coming in on bicycle to my office and i noticed there was a there were two carts parked out in front of my office and they were stuffed full of art supplies and paintings and the bottom shelf there was a man sleeping and i got off my bike and i tapped him on the shoulder he was under a blanket i said hey when you get up and if you like you can come to my office for a cup of tea and to make a long story short he came in you know an hour or so later introduced himself  and we sat had a cup of tea and he he asked me if i wanted to hear a children's book story that he was writing and i said sure and and you know he pulled out about twenty five pages of crumpled news of notebook paper and and i thought to myself oh my god i'm going to be here for i'm going to be here for an hour listening to this and but as he as he started in he was he was less reading it more performing it he was singing parts of it at one point he got up and danced a portion of it and about three quarters of the way through i started to tear up and then he started crying and i started to cry and you know there was this beautiful moment where two strangers were having this intimate connection and when he finished i just blurted out to him you know do you want to keep your art supplies and your your art work in my shed outside and you know he was all excited about that and i and then i said where i really want to say which was and you want to sleep there and so he went out to the shed cleaned it all up and when i left that at the end of the day you know he had his whole little home made so in the morning he showed up with some artwork and i realized that point that he was really this brilliant artist and he shared to me how he had been so frustrated over the last ten years of doing art and being homeless on the streets of seattle that he couldn't sell things really and he was giving them away for ten fifteen dollars for food for art supplies and in that moment i just said why don't i started a facebook page for you we'll call it chaka we can try to get some commissions some sales for you just get a following and so that's what we did for about three and a half months until one morning when i came into the office turned on the computer looked on the chaka site and there was a comment by a young woman from pittsburgh an eighteen year old woman who said oh my god i think we've just found our father and then a seventeen year old woman her sister writes it is our dad and then chalk his mom and all his sisters all on the site pleading for him to come home telling them that they love him and i'm reading this i'm just struck by it all and at that moment chaka walks in the door and i say to him you know you've got to read this and so i read it out loud actually to him and i turn around and he streaming tears and he just says to me i have to go home so he takes me to fred meyer gives me his royal dinner with all these food stamps and he spends the night it at our house and four thirty in the morning i drive him to sea tac and say goodbye to somebody that four months ago i just met  someone that was homeless and had become this dear dear friend and i'm driving home from sea tac back to my office and i'm just bawling you know i'm just really profoundly touched by what had happened over that time and what i realized is that this man had blown apart for me the negative stereotype against homelessness you know his his kindness his his genuine kind of genius artistic talent and also his struggles  he left his children when they were seven and eight because of all his mental health issues he's bipolar he has anger management issues sit sincere deep depression and he was afraid that he was going to negatively impact his children he just left  but i got to see him navigate through that in a beautiful way and it really opened his humanity to me and it was in that moment that i realized that the negative stereotype not only was inaccurate it also it was debilitating you know as debilitating to people that are live on the street it's debilitating to our compassion our collective compassion his community and and it's debilitating to bring us together as a community and it was in that at that point that i decided  three years ago that i would start another facebook site called homeless in seattle and that has you know moved from early simple photographs and a few comments to  community that has rallied around people that are living on the street there are nearly eleven thousand as you mentioned people following it and over the three years every single request that i've made for anybody that has come into the office living on the street has been met by this community it's been it's been quite quite remarkable to me so one of the things that i've actually learned about this which i didn't understand starting off is that there are these two worlds  co existing side by side but unaware of each other really one world is a group of people that are living homeless and they have these needs they have needs for tents and they sleeping bags and basic needs shelter and food and clothing and such but what they really need is friendship and the other world right next to it is the world of people living in homes who can provide these things can provide sleeping core still want connection and friendship and that's one of the things that has been most beautiful about the homeless and seattle community is that there is this meeting up and these these friendships that are being made between people living outside and people living inside that honestly one one by one is dismantling the negative stereotype and so you have opened up your office space your architectural office space for this i have and you know it's a little bit like if you open the door to a tidal wave it's coming in and and if you tell somebody on the street that they can use your bathroom for instance something that simple word spreads very quickly and pretty soon you have everybody that's living outside that wants to use your bathroom and then when they find out that there's also coffee and tea and in the winter a place to get out of the rain and then maybe just a place to sit and read books you know during the day there's a there's a gentleman that i met that lived about he's in housing now he's in d s e housing in columbia city his name's darwin but he was chronically homeless and he lived about two blocks from my office in a little tiny doorway cut out about three feet deep and six feet wide and  he came to my office one morning about seven thirty the rain was just coming down and he was sopping wet had been raining all night and he was just drenched and he asked me if he could just sit by the heater and by the window and so he stayed there all day basically and about oh i don't know four o'clock he stood up and he said to me hey i want to just thank you for letting me be inside today and as i stood up and i'm seeing the rain coming down i'm thinking you know right of course it's nasty as can be out there and he it's like he reads my mind he says you know it's not because it's so wet outside all day it's it's actually because today i got to be a part of something normal and  d he went on to explain that you know he he got to listen to me have these normal conversations all day long on the phone that a client came in and talked architecture with me had this normal kind of back and forth  even the small things he said like the u p s delivery man coming in and having me sign for a package and then him genuinely saying have a nice day this was this was all stuff that he got to be part of any and then he shared that even though people that are living outside homeless it may appear that they are mingling with all of everybody else with with walking down the sidewalk or or on the bus on a bench somewhere that in fact they are not mingling they are separated out by this giant plexiglas divider and the only people that they really get to talk to are people also living non normal lives on this other side of the plexiglass divider and this was really an important insight for me because it made me realize that unintentionally when we walk past somebody that is on the street homeless and we do this i think to no fault of our own you know the issue of homelessness is a is a an amazing giant complex issue that overwhelms us and in that moment of walking past somebody when you have ten minutes to get your meeting there or your your head is full of all the other worries and thoughts that you have it's very difficult to stop your life and say wow can i what can i do for you we're going to help with and but unintentionally in that moment we're making our own little twelve inch by twelve inch tile plexiglas and we're putting it in that giant wall and so whether we know it or not you know we're all part of this issue we we're partisan issue by our actions or our inaction and and  there is there is in my opinion a something we can do about that and that is that we can take our one little piece of plexiglas down we don't have to save anybody we don't have to fix anybody but we can we can just reach out and say hello we can give a smile we can make eye contact we can see their humanity we can give them dignity by saying i see you suffering and i feel i really feel for you you know my heart goes out to you i can't do anything for you right now but i want you to know that i see you you know you're visible and if you if you do that perhaps to somebody that is sitting on the sidewalk on your way to work and you do that each day i can guarantee you after ten times of saying hello you know your own human spirit's going to ask what's your name you know and pretty soon you'll be going by saying hey john and maybe you'll be running by one morning to catch the bus but you'll still be screaming hey hope you have a good day right so it starts and maybe that's all it'll ever be but also maybe you'll find your best friend  so i was initially pulled into your your facebook site homeless in seattle i think probably somebody else clicked on it and you have these amazing photos which lead me to believe  clearly the guy behind the camera is a professional photojournalist so what's what is your your focus on that and do you have a background in photography i actually don't my dad was an amateur photographer he was an attorney here in seattle and so i grew up working the darkroom and maybe there i gain an appreciation for photography i certainly all the photographs are black and white and i'm sure that that influences from my father as an architect i love black and white photography color is very distracting to me it takes you away from composition you know and i  also think that black and white allows you to see the person the portrait the color you might be drawn to the red sweater you know or the yellow hat but black and white i think it allows you to look at the person more deeply  for me but for me this if you want to call it a photo journal project homeless in seattle for me one of the profound things that has happened with it as a as you know being the person that's taking the photograph is that it has been this magical connector for me to other people the camera camera is this is a tool and it's a connector tool and i don't know that i would have had the ability to to come to so many people with you know with my interest to connect with him without the camera and that's just me personally but the reason it has worked is it goes back to this idea that people that are on the street feel invisible and anything that you can do to make them feel seen whether that is a just say hello or taking a picture and i don't mean taking a picture as a tourist you know taking a picture for me means the person that i'm taking the picture of wanting the photo as much as i want the photo that there is this mutual can action is mutual exchange that is going on and that that journey of new friendship is what's important as opposed to the end result which is the photo the photo is just a piece of paper with their image what what is really lasting is this connection that you get with a person if you take the time to do that for the person that's homeless the amazing thing to me that i didn't understand when i started was that the photograph is is documenting that they're there that they actually were here on this planet earth they exist and that other people are seeing them i in my office i have a giant wall of four by six images that are all put tight to each other and the wall is actually a place now that people that come into the office they bring friends that are also living on the street to show their own picture on the wall and then when the new person comes in they'll you know you can just watch them they'll be amazed by all the people that they already know and they'll you'll hear them say oh i know so and so i know there's there's johnny and mike i didn't know mike is still around and and invariably they'll turn to me and ask for their photo to be taken and that they want to be they want to be seen you know it's the that's the issue of this and that's actually what's compelled me with the this is actually i'm currently working with washing state university i'm i'm teaching a grad school class for their architecture design department it started last semester actually the previous semester with  another professor there who we discussed this idea of involving students with design and the issue of homelessness and i brought up to him that seattle had a recent zoning change  detached accessory dwelling units in the backyards of folks properties in residential areas allowing for increased density and we discussed this idea about homelessness and housing and one of the issues with with housing of course is where do you house people and there's a lot of issues with that there is the nimby response you know you know literally not in my backyard we were actually wanting to challenge that direct on but actually for me more importantly is that while tent cities and large buildings that house transitional housing and permanent housing for people that are low income and and housing  that while those are beautiful and necessary they are still segregating they're still saying let's take all the people that are homeless and put them in a tent city or let's put them in a building and again this is a better solution than a much better solution than allowing people to live on the street which is you know which is in a word shameful right i mean that's another conversation but we as a culture need to really own up to the fact that we're walking past people that are not this is not the issue of homelessness these are actually about individuals who are suffering but but in my mind a much healthier response would be integration right and because not only for the person that's pulling themselves out of homelessness but also for for all of us right this this awareness that the negative stereotype again is punishing to people when when it's inaccurate it shouldn't be in place and and if we can house people in our communities actually in our communities and we get to know each other you instantly you expose the negative stereotype for being inaccurate and you begin this path of healing and bring us together as a community we know that we know that diversity makes us stronger and richer and healthier in our life experiences and you know we have to reach out past that because we also at the same time we seek safety and we can create fear and birds of a feather flock together type thing that we we are a little bit of fraid of things that are different and we need to push past that so back to your was with my wife and i our property sunan and rebecca are in shoreline and we live in seattle and so we had this beautiful you know set of designs for backyard shelters and one of the things that just absolutely blew me away was the transition that the students went through they they spent a day in my office we also went meeting people that are homeless we also went out and met three stars who has lived for three years in his rowboat in the arboretum under the five twenty bridge is this abbott environmentalist and he shared all this knowledge and beauty about the environment the students they were all just i know why dad and mouth open listening and then we spent two nights at tent city three and both this time we just did this when with a new group of students and that time previously we had meetings afterwards and truly both times  you know it made me tear up to see the transition that these young people were going through thinking when they came into it that they had an idea about what homelessness was and leaving making statements such as i'll never walk past anybody on the street again in the same way that i will say hello that i will reach out that you know that i understand now that this is an issue of people coming to homelessness because of a reason you know not because they choose to be homeless but because of a reason that there is some life trauma some life event that actually created this and it's real and that anybody could be in that place and that when you suddenly are in that place how your perspective has shifted you know and and the beautiful thing about all that is that these young students are you know i believe firmly that they're going to spend the rest their life engaged with this issue one way or the other you know they're going to be involved in it and that's that's pretty compelling to me and did they come up with any designs that one can apply to this unique situation they did part of the discussion really is what what is transitional housing one of the things that happens for people that move from outdoors to indoors especially people that are have been chronically homeless is  it's not just as simple as moving indoors i mean it is a it's a cultural shift and and the questions were for instance for the first class you know how much what kind of shelter is is needed what's too much what's viable what's what's the correct response and and some students came up with designs that the kitchen and the actual gathering spot would be out side under a cover and that their sleeping place and maybe a small sitting place would be indoors and that again being transitional moving to someone's backyard for a small period of time while they wait to get into permanent housing  and you know the the idea of beauty you know that architects are obsessed with you know as space being beautiful and how'd it and can enrich someone's life not just if you're a wealthy client but actually for someone who is going through transitional housing how to make that beautiful and simple simple and beautiful the same time and the responses that the students came up with i thought were you know they came from their heart which is a good place to come from and leads to good design so this this semester the students here we've opened it up a little bit we've moved it away from transitional housing and asked the students to find during their their we can in their first week and a half what what was needed in in and again this is it's different for every person they met so the list was pretty long so right now they're in the process of calling it down but what would what would be needed that could make their life better and what design process could the students go through that would they could in richer or better the life of someone that's on the street so each of them come up with these ideas  of design for a small project like a better backpack a mobile care unit that would be sponsored by maybe a business and somebody would would travel around the city who would have hygiene products wou ld have an ability to plug in your or your devices you know one project is turning benches into shelter this is one of the one of my pet peeves as you know that we do in this city is that we put bars on benches so that people can't lay down right as if to say you know we don't want you to have any place to lay down even when you don't have a house and we purposely don't put cover over benches because that would you know give somebody a place to lay down and sleep if they were outside so all these ideas you know the students are engaging in and i think they're exciting and and will become part of our conversation so just a few minutes left so how can people who are listening get more involved with your projects well one is they can go to the home the facebook site almost in seattle i would i would encourage everybody to just just get on the site like it and start commenting become part of the conversation i would also encourage you to find your own answer to this issue of homelessness the answer actually isn't important what's important is that you're finding your answer that you're involved that you have an opinion bring it up at a dinner table conversation bring it up at the coffee shop what do you think about homelessness what you're feeling you know in gauging the conversation i would  say simple things when you come off the freeway ramp roll your window down and say hi to the person i do it every time i've never been asked for money and i have my i don't have a problem with giving money i know some people do and that's ok but just say hi you will see a transformation that person's face it's a beautiful thing here's another thing by the real change newspaper real change is one of the best things going in the city with regards to homelessness it is empowering for people that are trying to find a way to re insert and do something about making a living i can't say enough good things about real change in tim harris and all the people down there working hard to make a difference for homelessness come by and ask how you can volunteer one of the things that we're doing is we're not giving people projects we're asking people what they want to deal and trying to find create nurture within every person their own little tiny project it could be tiny  big and i could give you i don't know how much time we have but we we we have tons of examples of people that are doing beautiful things from high end salon stylist creating free hair cut days on the canal you know that are bringing lots of people together in this beautiful day of giving care foot massages back massages haircuts washing hair all that happening by people that are just stepping forward and volunteer and making this  connection well with that we are pretty much out of time i want to thank very much for coming and spending time with us this morning i want to thank you so much i really appreciate it time once again for community form and we are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning just spear just spear is the socialist alternative candidate for the washington state legislator legislature forty third district position to jess thank you very much for coming and spending time  having me so start out tell us a little bit about yourself and why you are running for the state legislature yeah so i'm a member of social saul turnitin and i've been involved in campaigns two thousand and twelve against my current opponent speaker frank shop and then also in two thousand and thirteen i was her volunteer coordinator where you know we organized over four hundred volunteers to get out there and built support to election with so watch which as you know successful we went on to land to launch fifteen now of which i was the organizing director so for the past six months or so i've been out there building support for fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage in the community which of course was also successful so now i'm running for the washington state house of representatives as you mentioned in the forty third district and i'm doing that because it's obvious just like in the seattle city council before she was elected we don't have a voice for working people and olympia and you know that just by looking at what gets passed and what gets thwarted so right now the priorities are very much skewed toward the interests of big business boeing gets a special session and an eight point seven billion dollar handout while our education is criminally underfunded we're looking at drastic cuts to transit hearing king county and you know we have a whole slew of social services that are not funded at the level they should be so it's obvious that the priorities are backwards in olympia and we know one of the biggest reasons is because there is no unambiguous voice for working people down there most of the politicians w lot of them have good values and good intentions i have no doubt about that they're very much conflicted by the fact that they take corporate money i mean my opponent frank shop takes money from you  know a list of corporations that most people would be quite familiar with including boeing alaska airlines the washington restaurant association which i want to flag because that was one of the biggest opponents of the fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage and that's one of his top donors he also takes lots of money from vulcan you know paul allen's developer company that's building all over the city and really causing their rent to skyrocket so i think we're looking at what's necessary what's needed the funding for social services and the fact that we don't have somebody that's really arguing for that really boldly putting forward what's necessary and then also going out there in the community and building support for these issues  think we really needed somebody to go down there and do that and i was very happy to step up and run in this race and i think that a lot of people are excited about the campaign because they've seen schama get elected and then go on to win the highest minimum wage in the country and of course she didn't do that alone and fifty now did not do that alone we did that with the help of labor unions that organized down and sea tac to win the fifteen down there and then of course working washington and other community organizations in seattle it was a collective effort but i don't think anybody doubts that if she had not been elected that there would have been the the same momentum to pass a fifteen hour minimum wage that quickly so i think that type of fighting spirit people also want to see down and olympia and that's you know that's why i'm running so specifically what would you change or proposed to change in terms of the corporate control of what happens in olympia we have to in the corporate welfare that the state engages in so there's always this talk of a revenue crisis or we don't have enough money for this or that and you know during the recession that was mostly because we have the most regressive tax system in the entire country and so when you have a recession and people are thrown out of their jobs and they're no longer paying that sales tax that's incredibly high in seattle but also statewide then they you know the state doesn't have the revenue necessary to fund social services and rather than taxing the very wealthy and the big corporations washington state legislature cut social services by ten billion dollars so we are talking about ending that corporate welfare there are something like five hundred corporate loopholes that exist on the books today that starve our state treasury of over six billion it's not just the most recent handout to boeing of eight point seven billion there's a bunch of corporate loopholes that are they are just you know to help certain sectors of the economy and some of them just make no sense when you look at like golf club membership fees sales tax exemptions or cosmetic surgeries you know sales tax exemptions and the like a bunch of those could be close so that we can fund social services in a progressive manner right now what we have is a very regressive tax system where the tax burden falls heavily on the shoulders of working people instead of on the very wealthy and the big corporations that are in this state there are sixty eight thousand millionaires that live in king county alone just a small tax on that wealth could provide a lot of funding for the social services instead of constantly looking at ways to increase the sales tax increase the gas tax add an entertainment tax add a bag tax you know they're constantly looking at increasing revenue by taxing working people we've got to shift that and i think what's lacking is somebody that's you know taking no corporate money as our campaign does it takes no corporate money and so is uncompromised and will go down an olympian very much argue for a tax on the wealthy and a tax on the big corporations we're also talking about lifting the ban on rent control there's a statewide ban which prevents cities like seattle which had the fastest rising rent in the entire country last year and you know recently we've seen that's continuing that trend they don't have the ability to enact policies to create rent stabilization where if you're living in a home the landlord is not allowed to raise the rent more than maybe the you know consumer price index tying it to inflation a couple percentage points when your lease is up rather than what we see now where it can go up however much the landlord wants it can go up one hundred percent we see there's a building in ravenna theodora which houses disabled and elderly people and the person that owns a building wants to sell it to a private owner and so essentially those residents are going to be kicked out and they are fighting back and we are definitely in solidarity with them but we need to be able to have the ability in seattle to enact policies to provide relief right now for residents so we're calling for rent control and also for more affordable housing there's a lot of affordable housing out there but it's not meeting the demand a lot of the housing that's being built right now by big developers like paul allen's vulcan are these posh apartments you know where the rent is fifteen hundred one thousand nine hundred for a one bedroom most working people cannot afford that much for a one bedroom so but maybe they make a little too much for affordable housing and then they're sort of stuck in the middle where they can't afford to live in them you know the expensive new units but they also make a little too much for affordable housing and so they're pushed to the outskirts of the city and i myself have that went up fifteen percent and i had to leave i think you know we need more affordable housing we need below market rate high quality housing we're also calling for taxing the wealthy that's part of ending the corporate welfare but also taxing the very wealthy and the big corporations so that we can fully fund transit we can fully fund education and then also so that we can start to massively invest in clean renewable energy we get most of our energy from hydro powered seventy percent and we also get a few percentage points of energy from wind but we need to be expanding wind and solar we know that climate change is going to cause the snowpack to decline even more and it's going to make hydro power less reliable so if we want to continue to be powering seattle and the rest of the state with clean renewable energy we need to really invest in solar and wind and we also need to go one hundred percent renewable there's no reason why we can't do that what's lacking is somebody to really boldly advocate for it so you know a massively expanding transit which is one of the best ways seattle itself can you know reduce our carbon emissions and also investing in clean renewable energy both of those things are necessary so that we can start to tackle global warming transit was an issue that was tried to be brought before the legislature multiple times and and failed and there are there are those out there that are worried about also you running being a spoiler to a degree that saying it's so critical that the democrats you know  retake olympia what is your response to those two issues the first is the transportation package that they passed in the house that died in the senate and even the senate version of it again was calling for taxing on working people it was calling for increasing the gas tax something like ten to twelve cents which is ridiculous we already pay high taxes when it comes to gas and you know it's causing this problem where you know people driving are pitted against people that want to use transit and we're not really providing reliable funding that's necessary so that we don't have to face the cuts that we're facing right now in king county the proposal coming out of the city council to deal with the cuts in the city again from the mayor and then a lot of the city council supports this is you know a license fee which is incredibly regressive it doesn't matter what kind of car you drive you're going to pay the same flat fee i think it's sixty dollars and then also they're talking about increasing the sales tax which of course is highly regressive and working people pay a larger share of their income towards you know usable goods so to us that's that's that's very shortsighted and it's going to guarantee future cuts in two thousand one when we had the dot com bubble burst we had drastic cuts to metro that was necessary because the funding fell the same thing happened with the global economic recession in two thousand and eight the funding fell they had to cut transit or they had to look for progressive ways of have put forward a progressive funding option for transit in seattle that hopefully other localities can look at and maybe the state legislature could take a take a lesson from they're talking about in acting what's called a head tacked head tax or an employee hours tax and this basically you know puts a tax on medium and large businesses small businesses are exempt from this and when you break down how much it's going to cost these businesses it's essentially something like a penny an hour that you would add to you know how much you have to pay for employees but it provides enough funding so that we can get rid of one of those regressive options and that's what's necessary we need people that are going to look for progressive tax options so that we can fund our social services and not put the burden on working people but also so those social services are reliably funded we know that the funding is going to be there we don't have to worry about the next economic downturn really you know doing away with that funding when it comes to what's going to happen with the speaker of the house and if i'm elected that'll throw it up in chaos and and  whether or not people should worry about that and maybe worry that i'm going to be a spoiler i think we have to really question the logic there that somehow reelecting frank chop will send a signal that people are fed up with the regressive taxes and the failure of the democratic party to really lead on going towards more progressive taxation fully funding our social services and really ending that corporate welfare that starving our state treasury he has not done that in his entire twenty year career and i think we have to question whether or not re electing him would actually send any type of signal in fact i think it would send the signal that you know politics as usual is working and that the right word drift and the democratic caucus is just fine with working people instead i think we want to send the signal that no people are fed up they're tired of the excuses that they're hearing that there's a republican you know obstacle that they have to overcome or there's some right wing democrats that don't agree and so we have to work to get the votes i don't accept that logic at all to me that's the logic of lesser evil isn't where you know we have to continue to vote for the lesser of the two evils because we're really worried about the republicans coming in if i'm elected and we take out the speaker of the house that will be a political earthquake it will affect the entire state legislature and the senate will make the most progressive democrats in the caucus recognize that there's room for them to go out there really argue for the policies that they have maybe has a tape it to because the speaker of the house stopped that and then also i think for more centrist democrats they would recognize that they're completely out of touch it's not just in seattle that people want to see more progressive taxation and want to see the social services funded by taxing the wealthy and taxing the big corporations you know people in eastern washington want that as well and when it comes to something like increasing the minimum wage there was over sixty percent support so republicans support this as well when you don't have leadership in the house pushing these issues forward so i think the whole idea that you know we have to worry about who's going to become the speaker and and you know maybe if i'm elected that will upset things i think we have to get out of that logic and start to think about what would happen if i got elected the signal that would send to the entire representative body down in the limpia and consider what i would do instead in similarity to what sherman has done in the seattle city council i recognize that there's you know technical differences between you know a body of nine on the seattle city council that's entirely you know democratic and one socialist versus down in you know olympia where you actually have republicans down there you have right wing democrats down there and there's a lot more people you have to work with so i can i understand the technical difficulties but the method that we would you know employ to really advance working class interests is the same we would go out there and build a campaign for taxing millionaires for ending corporate welfare just as we did with launching fifteen now and going out there and building support for a fifteen hour minimum wage in the communities we will go out there and campaign on lifting the ban on rent control the whole point of this isn't just to get somebody elected this isn't just about me it's about registering the anger and the frustration at the status quo of politics as usual not working for working people and also to go out there and get regular people involved in the political process that's missing right now there isn't that pressure from working people on elected officials that they're feeling that they you know that they feel like they really need to take up the issues that we care about most instead the pressure on them is from their corporate donors and the business lobbyists that are swarming the limpia telling them that you know we want this bill passed or we want you to not pass th bill we need to really rally people behind issues so that we can get them passed much like we did with the fifteen an hour minimum wage that would not have passed in its current form if we had not had people out there marching rallying you know tabling every week and and going out and talking with their neighbors if that pressure from ordinary working people had not been on the seattle city council had not been on the mayor's advisory task force then we would not have had a strong fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage ordinance passed even though it had those corporate loopholes which of course were not happy about to us that shows that we need to build an even even more powerful movement not that the movement that we did build wasn't what got it done i think we need to take that lesson and what's possible down in olympia too and sort of reject this lesser evil ism logic or this worry about you know how it'll shift the democratic caucus and who might come in i think we need to think a little bit bigger and understand it's not just swapping out frank chops vote for mine it would change the whole political conversation so specifically how would you get us to one hundred percent and how would you propose to get us to one hundred percent renewables and what would be the time on that we have a whole swath of land in eastern washington that i know that different departments have looked at to sort of see how much wind power could be generated and it's it's a lot there's a lot of land out there we could be putting solar panels on all the buildings in seattle and in you know buildings all across washington state the technology exists what's lacking is an investment in it to go out there in really expand the production of solar and wind turbines and then install them everywhere we also need a new electric grid to deal with the different types of energy that would be produced all of that would massively create jobs there are workers right now that are trained and ready to go to work on these projects but there's nobody advocating for actually expanding the investment here and also expanding it in a way that's progressive that it's reliably funded and not asking working people to pay more in gas taxes or you know pitting road projects against transit projects i think really what's required is somebody saying that what we're doing is not enough we're not doing enough to deal with global warming and the problem that we're dealing with with unemployment there's still unemployment and underemployment even though we're in a so called recovery and the fact that we're facing global warming you know with the new climate assessment coming out this year the i p c c report coming out this year and really laying it out bare that climate change isn't the future it's right now we're dealing with it right now we need to take it seriously and plan for the future both of those things can be met by massively investing in clean renewable energy shifting away from fossil fuels and making sure we have the energy that's necessary so that we can have our high living standards but we power that in a clean renewable way really what's required is ending the corporate welfare so that we can fund these projects so that we don't have to take funding from education we don't have to take funding from you know human and health services we can create the funding pool necessary to invest in clean renewable energy i'm not trying to you know make it seem like it's super simple but to me it's just obvious you create the revenue that's necessary you say what it's necessary for and you go out there and you build on a campaign for it there are a lot of people in this state that are environmentally conscious and want to see bold action on this and they rightfully applaud the steps that are taken in the right direction by the new governor by obama coming out with the new e p a regulations but these steps that are being taken are to me baby steps i mean i'm a climate scientist what we're facing requires bold action it requires a giant leaps forward because the politicians have been dragging their feet for decades we don't have time for another cut you know task force that aside a cap and trade mechanism that may or may not work we need to tax the wealthy and the big corporations fund transit fun clean renewable energy and really put us on a pathway to our sustainable future so sticking with the concept of wind was a wind farms eastern washington would this then be a public utility that the state would be paying making a downpayment on be a public utility i don't think should be privately owned or run in any way for profit much like seattle city light which has its problems  we need to be making sure that this is a not for profit that this is publicly publicly run and the end costs can be lowered this way you know really it's just the cost of the upkeep in investment that's necessary it's different you know from a coal fired plant or from fossil fuels in general where you have to constantly extract ship and burn fossil fuels which lead to higher costs people talk all the time about how coal and natural gas cost less than solar and wind but the cost of solar and wind have gone down dramatically and there's lots of new technology that we can be employing to drive those costs down as well but really the initial costs are really what's in front of us after that the cost of the upkeep isn't very much and it creates a lot more jobs than the fossil fuel industry and it can employ some of the same workers from one industry to another so i think that you know that's one big reason why we need to move to clean renewable so that we can provide much cheaper if not free energy to everybody that lives in washington state and actually be a leader in the united states for what's possible to you know put people back to work and put us on a sustainable pathway so that other states can follow suit i read earlier this week that in the u s there are now more people employed in the solar power industry than are in coal industry yeah i mean co has been slashing jobs for decades as they've gone to more disruptive ways to unearth the reserves i mean they've gone to mountaintop blasting which is a mountain top or new removal which is incredibly disheartening  and also destructive to the families that live nearby yeah i mean in new reports show all the time that clean renewable energy infrastructure projects hire a lot more people and these are also career jobs these are jobs where dangerous so that's another argument for why we should be moving to clean renewable and specifically with the taxing the corporate the large corporations and  extremely wealthy do you have numbers proposed for that at this point i mean do you to spend it be for instance with the wealthy if you make over x amount you would be taxed x amount no i mean i think i would look at what ch pushing for last year which was a millionaire tax write off so if you make a million or more in income then we would tax that by how much i don't know we'd have to look at the numbers it doesn't have to be a really large tax but we would talk about you know making sure that it's known to people that this is a millionaire tax that it's a tax on income above a certain amount i think if you look at ten ninety eight when they tried to pass that a few years ago it was labeled as an income tax and a lot of working people rightfully feared that it was a slippery slope and if you start to introduce an income tax on two hundred two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year would that start to slide down to fifty thousand dollars a year you know and people dealing with the most regressive taxes in the country rightfully worried about that they didn't trust the democratic party not to enact an income tax on top of their sales taxes their entertainment taxes so i think we need to look at that type of thing but make sure that it's on in big us that it's really to tax those who have the most wealth and ease the burden of taxes on working people you know there's ways that we can close corporate loopholes  you can tax more wealthy people and then lower the sales taxes ease the tax burden on working people the actual number we'd have to look more in detail of what's necessary to create the revenue pools that we need to fund transit to fund education to fund social services but again there's so much wealth in washington state you would need really high taxes to provide this revenue there's you know you a small tax would provide enough you mentioned earlier i think it was for king county is did you say sixty eight thousand no you know yes and my understanding is it's like one of the most densely populated by millionaires counties in the country that's right it is and i think in the world to we have multimillionaires that are living here i mean we have no income tax so they can live here without seeing their income tax in any way we also don't have a capital gains tax a lot of the ways that really wealthy people make money is they make money through capital gains not necessarily through their salary so that's why you know they pay a much lower tax rate than working people and we need to change that we need to make sure that you know those that have the most are paying their fair  share and we have you know as you said a lot of people that live in seattle lot of people who live in king county in washington state that have a lot of wealth and if you talk to some of them they're very happy to say yes the tax burden needs to be lifted off of working people and put on the people that can afford it otherwise they're also affected by the cuts to transit they're also affected by the underfunding of education so you know we need to we need to shift that burden on to the those that can afford it the mo all right just a couple minutes left can you touch on very quickly proposed what you would propose for workers at the state level what i would propose for workers i think what propose is that we all start to get politically involved and being gauged and if we want higher wages if we want to increase the minimum wage statewide which is necessary one thirty two it's the highest in the country although a few states have passed up to ten ten and i think massachusetts just passed to eleven which will happen incrementally so we're being passed by other states but even one thirty two an hour is not enough not just in seattle but in other you know municipalities around the state we need to increase the minimum wage there's been talk about twelve dollars an hour but i would be bold and say we need fifteen and we should be out there campaigning for it and do everything we can to force the other elected officials to side with workers against the corporate you know the corporations that fund their campaigns and i think we need to recognize that what happened with the fight for fifteen in seattle has lessons for all the other issues that working people care about whether you you know you need a raise for teachers or state employees or just if you're working at a job that's non unionized the lesson is is that there is power by uniting together with other people and going out there and demanding your rights i mean it may look odd to people that that's what wins the day that going out there and marching in the street and carrying signs and chanting and all of that seems odd to people that haven't seen mass movements and we haven't seen them in this country in generations that that's actually what when's the date but you know just a look at history will show you everybody's aware of the civil rights movement the women's movement cue movement the environmental movement those things all have movement at the end of them for a reason because we know that it took you know thousand and millions of people coming together demanding rights that's how we won you know civil rights women's rights environmental protections and if we want to you know have more rights on the job higher wages and benefits actual jobs that are careers and that are safe then we need to go out there unite together in our community and demand those rights well that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming to spend time with us this morning thank you so much