Alarm Bells
With permission from our friends at West Seattle Mutual Aid Party, we’re sharing their latest supporter email in full as it provides a useful and thoughtful perspective on the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding how unhoused people can be treated by cities in our country.
Hi from West Seattle Mutual Aid Party!
Our teams once again connected with 70 people this weekend with the nicer weather bringing out entire families to our distro which helps create a festive energy on the corner while we're out there. Despite this pleasant setting, the backdrop of this weekend's distro of the Grants Pass ruling by SCOTUS that came down last Friday weighed heavily on all of us so we wanted to take some time to continue discussing what we believe this will mean for our area.
For Seattle proper, the truth of the matter is that the city has not been concerning itself with Martin v. Boise/Grants Pass compliance for at least the last two years. As Real Change has reported, 2023 saw a record-breaking average of around 7 sweeps per day and 99% of those sweeps were conducted as "obstruction sweeps" where the city does not have to post advance notice or offer any resources at all. In early 2020, prior to COVID, the city had only 12 available shelter beds on average every night. We have actually **lost** total shelter beds since then as the system has (rightfully so, mind you) begun moving away from congregate shelter beds to enhanced shelter rooms which are far more private and thus more likely to be accepted as an offered resource but consequently are more expensive and thus less desirable to continue expanding. The numbers here alone demonstrate that we have not functionally been operating under a "resource must be offered before sweeping" paradigm that our city attorney argued Martin v. Boise/Grants Pass had unfairly burdened our system with. We anticipate that for at least the time being, things will continue in their current format here in Seattle specifically but that could change in a heartbeat and there is political energy that could make that happen.
Outside of Seattle city limits, the situation has immediately become more dire however, and this will have immediate impacts on Seattle itself as well. While Seattle, for now, may not want to overtly criminalize homelessness as they are now legally empowered to do by what can now be qualified as the worst SCOTUS in history, neighboring jurisdictions such as Burien now immediately can and already have. This immediate and enforceable criminalization of survival activities will once more push people out of the areas they know best and have the most developed support networks and into Seattle itself. With the Regional Homelessness Authority continuing to flounder and facing an increasingly uncertain political future and with little meaningful leadership at the federal level on these issues, it seems that individual jurisdictions and neighborhoods are on their own, now more than ever before.
We cannot sugarcoat this and pretend the current state of affairs is anything other than what it is: a crisis that appears to be entering a new and ever more frightening stage than we have previously witnessed. We also cannot pretend that what we do with West Seattle Mutual Aid Party is alone enough to make any actual headway toward changing the structural and political issues that have brought us here. But it is within the space that these kinds of projects create, and the relationships that are forged within and across the community, that the potential for collective survival begins to be meaningfully generated. And it is for this reason that we believe that everybody should be mobilizing to find ways to create and launch their own kind of collective efforts such as ours with a focus and in such a manner that speaks to your own conditions and collective desires for a positive shared future. It is only through a truly massive increase of micro-level activity like this that we can begin to move the needle on ensuring anything other than the most grim of futures.
Please reach out to us if you would like to chat more about how to do so!
Thanks as always for your support,