A Pandemic of Homelessness

It's that time of year. The big dark has descended upon the Pacific Northwest. Sunrise is after 7:00 AM. Sunset is 4:30 PM. 

Each year around mid-November, due to the dark mornings and dropping temperatures, I'll start replacing my weekend road runs with laps on the community center soccer pitch. 

Due to a lengthy recovery from COVID, I've been leery about recommitting to running. Last December I posted my best 5K time in years. It seemed as if I were on my way back. I followed that performance with close to a personal worst a couple months later at a leap year 5K; a performance that augured my falling ill with the coronavirus.

Slowly but surely my strength is returning. Demands at work are off the charts. So all restored vitality is being sucked up by the job. Nonetheless, with the chores of grocery shopping and laundry already expedited, and with Thanksgiving approaching, my holiday ritual for which is a long early morning run, I decided to head out to the playfield at 5 AM this morning.

I walked the steep hill up to the community center rather than run it, as I usually do. When I got to the artificial turf soccer field it was pitch black. No moonlight nor any streetlamp glow. I noticed big tarped piles dotting the perimeter. I figured it was machinery for turf maintenance. 

When I started running my square laps I could see that tarped piles were actually homeless bivouacs. Underneath the blue tarps were igloo-style camping tents. They lined the four sides of the pitch.

I've been coming to this community center soccer field for two decades, and I've never seen anything like this before. Clearly it is something that the city's parks department must have signed off on. I know from being on that field early in the morning that city workers service it regularly.

Homelessness was a huge problem prior to the pandemic, a glaring indictment of "as good as it gets" American neoliberalism and Trumpian "the greatest economy of all time" hokum. Now that problem is being mainlined. Cities are transferring homeless from barracks-style shelters to hotels in order to reduce the number of coronavirus infections. Seattle is considering buying a hotel for the homeless. 

Hopefully some sort of socialized housing safety net comes out of this pandemic, a basic right to something like a home in a tiny house village. 

After I finished jogging I walked to a nearby Safeway for some Emergen-C. On the south side of an east-west street opposite the Safeway is a little pocket city park, a patch of green grass and shade trees. It too was filled with tents of the homeless. On the sidewalk leading to the Safeway entrance homeless slept.

The longer the pandemic persists the more homelessness is going to be forced from the margins of our neoliberal society to its center.