Rantz: Activists angry with Seattle plan to clean city, help homeless

Progressive activists are hopping mad that the City of Seattle appears to be committed to more homeless encampment sweeps via the Navigation team.

RELATED: Seattle council struggles to decipher their own homelessness spending

Their anger doesn’t come from wanting to help the homeless. Indeed, many progressive activists want to keep the homeless living on the streets, surrounded by human waste, in dangerous conditions, all under the guise that it’s compassion. “They have nowhere else to go,” they often claim, while ignoring there are shelter beds available. Activists’ anger comes from a simple place: they’re mad they’re not influencing or dictating policy, as they have for so long. It makes sense to ignore their policies: they haven’t worked.

The Associated Press reports that Seattle, in the first seven months of 2018, has swept more camps (220) than they have in all of 2017 (191). Why the urgency? Under Mayor Jenny Durkan, the city is opening more permissive shelter beds and Tiny Home Villages so there’s no excuse to sleep in the streets, under bridges, or in alleyways if you’re serious about getting help. While I’m not in love with aspects of Durkan’s plan, which doesn’t account for the appropriateness of some of their low-barrier (but they refuse to call it that) Tiny Home Villages, it is better than letting people sleep wherever they want, hurting themselves and our neighborhoods in the process.

And, activists are, of course, mad. It’s what they do: get mad on Twitter, Facebook and blogs, while doing nothing to actually help the people they claim to have compassion for.

Councilmember Kshama Sawant has been helping activists coordinate their protests, so they can stop these sweeps. Sawant benefits from homelessness. She likes the chaos because then she can blame it on evil capitalism. That’s her brand.

Activists Dae Shik Kim Hawkins Jr.  and Guy Oron seem more upset that cops get paychecks for working on the Navigation Team than they are over homeless people living on the streets. Hate for cops trumps compassion for the homeless.

Andres Salomon, a Mayoral candidate for 17 minutes and prolific Twitter troll, claims the sweeps makes homelessness worse. It doesn’t, of course, because one thing that won’t help get you a job is living alone, under a bridge, without access to running water and electricity.

“It’s moving people around to create the illusion that homelessness has been fixed when it hasn’t,” Sara Rankin told The Seattle Times. Rankin is with the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project at Seattle University School of Law.

This comment betrays her bias. Does anyone think homelessness has been “fixed” because of sweeps? No. We’re just happy people are getting help and our communities are being cleaned up. That’s a start, even if Rankin isn’t a fan of the process. But frankly, we shouldn’t care if she’s a fan. We shouldn’t care if any of these activists like the policy.

While activists fight for homeless “rights” to sleep on the streets and in abandoned cars, shoot up in non-threatening, safe spaces, how about we allow the people serious about the problem to get together and do something a bit different? Because what these activists support have shown to, well, not work. At all. How do we know that? Look at the results in the last decade that they’ve had influence over the conversation.

It’s certainly possible that Mayor Durkan’s plan won’t work. I’m not particularly hopeful, but that’s mostly because of the city’s track record. But we’re getting people off the streets, offering them resources, and we’re starting to clean up the pigsty parts of this city have become. That’s a start. And if this plan is going to fail, let’s fail quickly and move on to another idea. Activists want the status quo. I want innovative solutions. Durkan, for now, is at least trying.

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