Snow and Homelessness

The Emerald City has weathered more than a week of snow; the most February snow on record. Seattle doesn't do snow well because we don't get it that often, and when we do it's usually a modest one- or two-day event. Seattle is not like Chicago or Minneapolis. I emailed a guy I know in Chicago about Seattle's snow closures and he responded:

It literally took the -40 degree polar vortex for us to start shutting down! It usually takes really significant snow fall or cold temperatures for businesses to close up. Other than a couple weeks ago, the last time I remember there being a “snow day” for work was around 2009 or 2010.

The only truly decent politician I know is my city council representative Kshama Sawant. She is up for reelection this year, and a scrum of challengers have already declared. Sawant's campaign sent out a "What's at stake in this election" message last night:

As climate change makes previously “once-in-a-lifetime” extreme weather commonplace, Seattle’s 2019 snowstorms have battered working-class people with longer, more dangerous commutes, missed hours, and rising childcare costs from school closures. But no group is hit harder than Seattle’s homeless population, who face a literal life-or-death situation and are eight times more likely to die of hypothermia in King County. Tragically, an unsheltered man in Seattle, Derek Johnson, was found dead Thursday morning due to exposure — because without shelter, people die.

Inequality is stark in Seattle. Our city has been the national leader in the number of construction cranes three years running and nearly one in 10 apartments sit vacant, while at the same time, Seattle’s homeless population is one of the highest per capita in the nation. The crisis gets worse every year. Between 2012 and 2018, homeless deaths more than doubled, disproportionately people of color. Seattle now has more unsheltered people than New York City, a city 12 times our size.

The crisis of affordable housing in Seattle, along with weak tenant rights laws, has helped lead to an epidemic of evictions, which often lead to homelessness. On average, one District 3 resident is evicted from their home every other day, and our neighborhoods of First Hill, Capitol Hill, and the Central District see some of the highest rates of eviction in the city. This crisis is entirely preventable: three of four people evicted reported that they could pay all or some portion of the rent owed if a reasonable payment plan was offered. At the same time the total amount of back rent owed by everyone facing eviction in 2017 was a little under $1 million, less than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos makes in a single day.

New York City -- Queens, in fact -- is going through the same convulsions Seattle did last year when it passed and then rescinded a tax on large corporate employers to pay for affordable housing and homeless services. Sawant and one other city councilor, Teresa Mosqueda, were the only legislators who originally backed the tax not to flip. To San Francisco's credit, city voters passed a ballot initiative in November similar to Seattle's city-council rescinded "head tax."

The baseline profound failure of neoliberalism is homelessness; nowhere is the misanthropy of market orthodoxy more visible. If a society cannot provide affordable housing it's not worth one's allegiance. Personal shelter, I would argue, is synonymous with personhood, individual identity.

Neoliberalism is producing more and more unpersons. Not a good sign for the stability of the paradigm.