Unexpected 'news' from Nickelsville
Tell a hopeful story! Worthy causes such as ending homelessness need positive messaging.
About 60 people attended a public meeting last week at Nickelsville, currently being hosted by New Hope Missionary Baptist Church on 21st Avenue near Yesler. Announcements of the meeting in early December billed it as a “press conference,” but in a crowd swelled by tent city residents the only reporter I saw was from Real Change, an event co-sponsor along with SHARE/WHEEL.
The announcement of the event may have extinguished media interest instead of sparking it. The mass email arrived at Crosscut and elsewhere in the form of a broadside that ridiculed Danny Westneat for a Seattle Times column noting a decline in the demand for shelter beds during the winter’s first cold spell and hazarding the possibility (among others) that the King County Committee to End Homelessness (CEH) might be making progress. Although I share the righteous indignation that must be felt by many individuals living in Seattle tents and by people concerned about those who do, the invective dampened my enthusiasm about the meeting. Still, I’m glad I went.
In the keynoter’s “Declaration of a State of Emergency in 2010,” some of the information was as chilling as the muddy ground under my shoes and stung like the smoke from the burn barrel. For example, according to a mid-November statistic cited from the King County Medical Examiner's office, the average age of homeless individuals in King County who have died so far this year is only 48. Such a waste of life. But the speeches and handouts that day also divided the people present into opposing camps (“We are unwelcome in your public spaces, and are harassed by your police…”), and they called CEH’s 10-year plan to end homelessness “a fraud.”
It made me recall what Saul Alinsky, who launched modern community organizing along with the Industrial Areas Foundation, said about the place of anger in confronting injustice. The emotion can provide some of the fuel people need to engage in long struggles for change, but the vehicles it powers shouldn't attack like tanks with guns ablaze. Alinsky taught his organizers to work with cold anger — with coolly strategic energy aimed at achieving well-defined goals.
Strategic, clear goals are what 10-year-plan leaders chose. CEH project director Bill Block emailed the following reply to my query after the meeting: “By the end of the year the number of units opened (new construction, rehab or dedicated vouchers) will be around 3,300, with another 700 in the pipeline. Every one of those has taken people from emergency shelter or the streets or time-limited transitional housing. It is the equivalent to creating that number of new emergency shelter beds, but with much better outcomes.” Block added, “There are many people in desperate need out there, but a staffed shelter bed costs almost as much as a housing voucher, so we have chosen to focus on long-term housing. I just wish we had more resources so we could house even more people. The advocates are correct when they say that everyone should have the opportunity to have safe, affordable housing.”
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof offers advice different from Alinsky’s to groups working for social justice. Citing current social psychology research Kristof writes that the general public responds to need “not because of stories of desperate circumstances but when we can be cheered up with positive stories of success and transformation.” He adds that the hopeful stories should each “focus on an individual, not a group.”
Just one individual. In an experiment Kristof cites, people were asked to donate to a hungry girl or boy. “In each case, research subjects were quite willing to help and donated generously either to Rokia or to Moussa. But when people were asked to donate to Rokia and Moussa together, with their photographs side by side, donations decreased.” According to a researcher Kristof consulted, “our empathy begins to fade when the number of victims reaches just two. As he puts it: ‘The more who die, the less we care.’" This hard truth, Kristof concludes, means it’s counterproductive to “make people feel guilty if they don't help, rather than good if they do. ... The challenge is to acknowledge both the desperate needs and also the very real progress …, the prospect of improvement in real people's lives if the help goes forward.”
As I said, I’m glad I went to the press conference. I got to see my old Nickelsville friends Richard and Damien, who told me that Bruce and Donna, a married couple I last talked with months ago at the tent city when it was located in South Seattle, now have an apartment in Shoreline. At the bus stop afterward I met Rob, a young man living in TC3 who is taking classes in dealing craps, virtually guaranteeing himself future casino employment at $26 per hour or more. “I used to drive Blue Star buses,” Rob told me, “but $11.50 an hour wasn’t enough for a Seattle-area apartment.” He became homeless when he and his ex split up, but now besides getting trained in a marketable skill he is taking a course in how to buy a foreclosed house when he saves up enough of his future wages.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 8:26 a.m. inappropriate
I think you're right that it is important to let people in Seattle know that the work being done in our community is having a tremendous impact to prevent people from becoming homeless and to help them stabilize their lives. This message needs to continue getting out, so that people understand the need for more investment in meeting the huge need that still exists for homeless families and individuals.
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 10:09 a.m. inappropriate
What an interesting and intelligent article, Judy.
Certainly homeless advocates can benefit from social psychological research the same way that advertisers and politicians have.
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 10:36 a.m. inappropriate
While we're quoting Alinsky, how about this:
"An organizer must stir up dissatisfaction and discontent... He must create a mechanism that can drain off the underlying guilt for having accepted the previous situation for so long a time. Out of this mechanism, a new community organization arises....
"The job then is getting the people to move, to act, to participate; in short, to develop and harness the necessary power to effectively conflict with the prevailing patterns and change them. When those prominent in the status quo turn and label you an 'agitator' they are completely correct, for that is, in one word, your function—to agitate to the point of conflict."
When Bill Block emailed me the Kristof piece last week, I thought, O-Boy, This is going to be the Ten Year Plan Crowd's answer to obvious failure. "The individual win trumps the systemic failure. Let's all be positive!"
Looks like I was right.
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 11:48 a.m. inappropriate
Reject all things Alinsky and realize that tent cities, 'homeless advocates', Real Change sales forces, overt panhandling, and 'happy stories' about individuals are all in-your-face examples of efforts to keep the issue alive. That issue being the solicitation of public tax and private money and keeping the 'Big Homeless Machine' greased.
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 2:01 p.m. inappropriate
Knowing who your friends are is critical to any successful organizing efforts. CEH is no more perfect that any other human endeavor but to imply people like Bill Hobson of DESC or Paul Lambros of Plymouth Housing Group, both of whom are active in CEH's Interagency Council, aren't doing their part to end homelessness is offensive on its face and ludicrous in its message.
Those guys and others like them (Rick Friedhoff at Compass, Sharon Lee at LIHI) are doers - they spend their energy on actually housing people; any shortcomings in the efforts of that group are due to lack of public and private resources not lack of caring or some imaginary conspiracy to divert funds away from those most in need.
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 4:53 p.m. inappropriate
This discussion of "good news" v. "bad news" has been going on for some years. It's useless because most people are already convinced that what they believe is the truth, and defensiveness set in long ago.
But the actual truth is that the units created are not NET units. A net unit figure would include the units lost since the Ten Year Plan started. That's never mentioned, except by those who are accused of seeing the glass as half-empty. That doesn't mean that anyone involved in the Plan or governmental entities or the religious community or the general public don't care about people who are homeless; they do. What it means is that people aren't being told ALL the truth because officials don't want to sound like pessimists.
Hobson and Lambros and Hallerman and Lee and Friedhoff and many other providers are doing everything they can to end homelessness by housing people. Two things hamper the effort to end homelessness, only one of which is in most providers' arena: a much larger reliable funding source to pay for construction/renovation of that housing -- i.e., public funding. The other thing is that people need to stay alive until they get housing, which means something more than a bed-bugged mat on the floor -- i.e., also public funding. Some housing providers have shelters also and they don't like having to beg for money to provide only those mats. I don't see providers indulging in self-pats on the back; I see them at CEH meetings looking pretty depressed. A wonderful wrap-around LIHI building opened in Lake City last month. We need many, many more of them. I look at the people who didn't get in every day in my neighborhood.
I can't figure out why telling the public that we are winning the game when we are behind will actually make it more likely that we can win. Despite the studies on messaging, that's simply a lie. It can only lead to more lies so that it doesn't seem as though the public was misled to begin with. That was the pattern of HUD during at least eight years. It shouldn't continue.
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 4:54 p.m. inappropriate
Judy, good article. I was at the Nickelsville ``press conference'' as well. I've written a lot for Real Change and if I can give myself a plug, I've just started a blog on local homeless issues, http://invisibleseattle.blogspot.com. Also, Andrea Bauer and Monica Hill from the Freedom Socialist Newspaper based in Seattle were at the event. Andrea particularly, is a big supporter of the homeless and was arrested at the first Nickelsville back in the fall of 2008. Also, it was good to hear that Bruce and Donna have their own place now. Just about all of the original Nickelodeons from fall 2008 have moved on, which belies the idea of the permantly homeless.
Posted Tue, Dec 29, 5:18 p.m. inappropriate
What Sarah points out in her final paragraph is the heart of the issue. What makes the Ten Year Plan more of an ideological paradigm than a "plan to end homelessness" is the blithe insistence that we are winning and, while understandable behind on the goal, making progress toward solving the problem.
The City also consistently uses the existence of the Plan to excuse activities that criminalize homelessness and hold the line against desperately needed additional emergency shelter. This is simply wrong on all levels, and is inevitable so long as we allow the focus on housing to act as a set of blinders that excludes all other factors. While plan leadership are certainly not villainous, they are, in their less politically courageous moments, complicit in evil.
Yes. Evil.
We all love a hopeful story arc, but we need to love the truth more. All this long-term thinking and efficiency doesn't meet the short-term and escalating emergency, or address the related trend toward criminalization of the very poor.
Posted Mon, Jan 4, 8:37 a.m. inappropriate
@Tim Harris: I think Alinsky would agree with us both that activists who "agitate to the point of conflict" about injustice are important change-agents - as you have been with Real Change News. But Alinsky would also ask whether Nickelsville activists and advocates are being strategic in the conflicts they seek to arouse. He'd ask whether ridiculing a sympathetic journalist, calling an effective public effort to house homeless people a fraud, and addressing sympathetic listeners as if they were opponents would more likely awaken opposition to an unjust system, or arouse irritation at the injustice of the accusations themselves. "Cold anger" also includes telling stories of progress, like the ones Alinsky also made part of his IAF work. He might think such stories even more essential now, strategically, than in his own pre-postmodern era, when "guilt" was a stronger force in the American conscience. In any case, he wouldn't reflexively dismiss respected research on how to engage public support.
@Sarah: Nowhere does Kristof suggest telling "lies," or "telling the public that we are winning the game when we are actually behind." (Incidentally, CEH doesn't, either - check out their progress report, linked to the end of my article.) And thank you for mentioning (and walking through with me last fall) the new LIHI building in Lake City - http://www.lihi.org/__prop_mcdermottplace0001.html. Beautiful!
Thanks to all for these thoughtful comments.
Posted Mon, Jan 4, 8:35 p.m. inappropriate
Hi Judy,
The ghost of Alinsky hovers indecisively. I doubt be would have put out a press release attacking Danny W. That was just kinda intemperate. But at the same time, it came from people who are better placed than he to know whether things are indeed improving, and that's something that ought to be considered.
As for the rest, even the IAF seems to have moved away from Saul's injunction to "rub raw the sores of discontent," and they now favor a pressure politics based much more on sheer numbers than provocation. The effectiveness of that shift can be argued both ways, and people do.
At the heart of this is the role of poor people themselves in defining and organizing to change their reality. I know that writers seldom craft their own headlines, but when homeless people declare a State of Emergency and define a 8-point set of organizing priorities, that, to my mind, is news, and not "news." If journalists really stayed away because they were miffed at the treatment of their friend Danny, I say grow up and grow some skin, and start afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted like journalists are supposed to.
Kristoff's piece is interesting, but it doesn't define reality, much less poor people's organizing strategies. At a time when the siruation on the ground for homeless people is at an all time low and everyone seems to be speaking for homeless people but homeless people themselves, my sense is that more, not less, conflict is called for. I'd like to think the Ghost of Alinsky is with me on that one.
Posted Mon, Jan 4, 10:42 p.m. inappropriate
Tim, I appreciate your writing in this conciliatory way about the press release and Kristof. And we agree about the creative potential of conflict, if not about the most strategic form conflict should take under current circumstances. May I clarify that I never suggested reporters would refuse to cover an event "because they were miffed at the treatment of their friend Danny"? I don't know Danny. I was merely talking about my own ambivalence (some of which other writers may have felt, though I'm in no position to judge): a sense of personal interest in Nickelsville and in solving the problem of homelessness, competing against the sense that there's never enough time to write about everything of significance. In advance of the event I worried about wasting half an afternoon listening to rants, but in the end decided to attend, hoping for better.