These Revolutionary Times is a project of The Political Revolution. Each Sunday, we focus on a small selection of papers, articles, and essays published in various publicly available sources that reflect political change already happening or that we think ought to happen or ought not to happen in 21st Century America. Our goal is to spur people to read these pieces with an open-minded but critical focus and engage here in an interchange of ideas about the issues raised in them.
What are street newspapers…
I’ll let Wikipedia answer this for me:
Most street newspapers have three main purposes:
- To provide income and job skills to the homeless and other marginalized individuals, who act as vendors of and often contributors to the newspapers
- To provide coverage of, and to educate the general public about, issues pertaining to homelessness and poverty
- To establish social networks within homeless communities and between homeless individuals and service providers
The defining characteristic of a street newspaper is that it is sold by homeless or marginalized vendors.
...and why should you read them?
Our media situation in Seattle is instructive: Once Upon a Time, we had two daily papers, the somewhat conservative Seattle Times, and the (oddly) somewhat more liberal Seattle Post-Intelligencer (oddly, because it was a Hearst paper). The P-I no longer has a print edition — it survives online, but with a much reduced local staff. We have two free weekly papers, of which one, The Stranger, is reliably progressive, if not radical. (It is also often NSFW, so you’ve been warned...) Some stories that are covered nowhere else appear in the University of Washington’s student paper, The Daily, but those mainly have to do with the UW. And there are stories and viewpoints missing from all of those…
Seattle has a housing problem. We have a large homeless population. We have tension due to tech workers moving in and displacing long-time residents. We have people griping about the homeless on neighborhood chat boards. We have politicians who acknowledge there is a need for housing, and we have politicians who are gonna get primaried if they don't start acknowledging it. We have some homeless advocacy organizations.
The Times and Stranger do write about homelessness and housing on occasion, each with their distinctive viewpoints. But most (perhaps all) of the writing is done by people who are not part of the affected populations that they’re writing about.
Enter Real Change News , our local street newspaper, founded in 1993. (Past tag lines have included “Bread and roses for the poor” and “Real change, not spare change”, but you won’t see those, as they made a recent format change, and a switch to weekly publication, to indicate status as a legitimate news source.) Real Change has professional writers, but many have been homeless. They aren’t advocating from the outside. And their point of view isn’t “what do we do about the homeless” but rather “news the homeless can use”, showing the rest of Seattle what it means to be homeless in Seattle, and advocating based on experience.
This week…
...we’re featuring recent articles from street newspapers. This is by necessity a tiny sampling — not all street newspapers publish their articles online, and there are hundreds of street newspapers, all over the world. Articles will start just below, but first…
To find out more, and find your local street newspaper
Many street newspapers belong to the International Network of Street Papers (INSP). (Their website has some issues — if the map or lists don’t seem to be displaying properly, try a different browser, refresh the page, or temporarily disable your cookie blocker.)
The Wikipedia article on street newspapers has a good history. Wikipedia also has a short list of street newspapers. Another list appears in their article on the INSP.
But nothing substitutes for local knowledge… Does your community have a street newspaper? Are there articles you’d like us to know about? Post in the comments…
And now…
A selection of articles from street newspapers
(Also have a look at their Twitter feed — but please come back here before reading all the articles they link to.)
Who helps the helpers? Service providers often live below the poverty line themselves (Ashley Archibald, 22-Aug-2018)
Ouch. Here’s a nasty little Seattle problem that’s not getting talked about…except by Real Change. One roadblock to helping the homeless get housed appears to be that the folks tasked with doing the helping are teetering on the brink of homelessness themselves. There’s no consistent nor simple funding source — funding for non-profits and agencies is cobbled together from sources ranging from local government, charities, companies, federal government. It surely doesn’t help that some 80% of the workers are women...
The low pay means many individuals who would like to do this kind of work simply can’t afford to stay. This creates a constant turnover, which is expensive and saps nonprofits of their already-depleted resources.
A socialist perspective might say: We’re trying to fund a social good from scraps. We’re effectively having to panhandle to solve the need to panhandle. This is also a telling indication of our priorities — we’re spending more on amenities for the already comfortable. A personal note: I see a fair amount of griping on Nextdoor about homeless encampments, with hints that they, or drug addicts, are responsible for local burglaries. And a fair amount of pushback to the gripers. But it’s rare to see people say, well, if you don’t like the burglaries that you attribute to the homeless or drug addicted, how about supporting funding to fix those issues, hmm? Maybe the problem will go away…
(Twitter)
Oregon Legislature to revisit mortgage subsidy reform: Rep. Keny-Guyer is considering a proposal to limit the mortgage interest deduction, whose dollars disproportionately benefit wealthy Oregonians (Joanne Zuhl, 17-Aug-2018)
Who’da thought? We sell this deduction as a way for first-time home buyers to get into housing. But really...who benefits most? Folks spending more on their mortgage.
Oregon has its own mortgage interest deduction. And…
“I think people were shocked when they found out the statistics of what federally and statewide we put into homeowner tax benefits, primarily the mortgage interest deduction, and conversely how little we put into non-homeowners – renters and the homeless,” Keny-Guyer said. …
Each biennium, the state’s mortgage interest deduction sends $1 billion to Oregon homeowners – more than half of it going to the top 20 percent of income earners, according to statistics compiled by the Oregon Center for Public Policy, which opposes the deduction.
The majority of homeowners, those in the lower income levels, receive less than 15 percent of those dollars.
“We have, over the years, been spending $1 billion per biennium on our mortgage interest deduction, and only $10 million on our emergency housing assistance for distressed renters and the State Homelessness Assistance Program. That’s 1 percent of a billion,” she said. “We’re so out of whack on how we allocate our housing dollars.”
As with most state taxes, Oregon relies on what people report on their federal tax returns to make it easier for folks to file state taxes. So, about those federal mortgage interest deductions…
In Oregon, the mortgage interest deduction, like most state tax laws, directly reflects federal laws. Until recent changes, homeowners were allowed to deduct the interest on mortgages up to $1 million. Last year, homeowners received nearly $70 billion in federal deductions.
However, this year, the Trump administration changed the tax policy to allow for interest deductions on mortgages up to $750,000. Homeowners are also allowed to use the deduction when purchasing a second home. The cap on the mortgage applies only to new homebuyers.
Wait, what?? The cap applies to new homebuyers? You mean, the ones that are claimed as the reason for the deduction? So folks who are already in a house, most often more established and earning more...there’s no cap on their deduction when they buy their next house?
Yo, readers — how many of you knew about that? Good on Street Roots for letting us know…
(Twitter account for their parent organization, The Coalition on Homelessness)
Facts about Business Improvement Districts (Street Sheet Staff, 20-Aug-2018)
Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are areas of cities where property owners have voted to take over the roles of security, marketing, and management usually performed by local governments. Once created the city itself is responsible for collecting property assessments from the business in the district, and then turning that money back over to a BID board composed of property/business owners voted in by other property owners in the district.
I suspect you can guess what happens next…
Many BIDs spend hundreds of thousands each year to pay for private security or hired “Ambassadors”, who represent constant surveillance and control of previously public space.
The goal of the BIDs is to make more money for the property owners, by marketing the districts to potential consumers, higher-paying tenants, and large businesses. This means clearing out poor tenants, small businesses, and especially homeless people, according to the “Broken Windows” policing theory.
When a city agrees to a BID, it is offloading its responsibility to a private group with an agenda that doesn’t include the well-being of everyone in the area.
Counter-protests reject white supremacist rally but disrupt homeless community (Christian Zapata, 23-Aug-2018)
Ok, folks, this one is a little uncomfortable. But it points out that we need to be aware that our actions, especially if they involve large gatherings or protests in public areas, can negatively impact vulnerable people.
Most of the article is interviews with counter-protest attendees — the parts about the effect on homeless are scattered throughout. Here are the main points:
The counter-protest took over a park where homeless were staying. The homeless folks were either pushed out, or inadvertently caught up in the protest, unable to get out, or assumed by police to be part of the protest.
The counter-protest also happened to have a confrontation with police directly in front of a church where Street Sense has a temporary office, and where homeless people normally would wait for a shuttle to shelters. Homeless folks were caught up in the confrontation, and the shuttles couldn’t operate.