No easy fix for homelessness | Q&A with Mr. Federal Way

Published 9:00 am Monday, March 28, 2016

Q: Mr. Federal Way, I saw the homeless encampment story last week and wanted to add my $0.02. Homelessness has totally increased in Federal Way – I’ve seen more panhandlers everywhere, especially on South 320th Street and around the Costco. You wrote a couple of things that makes it seem like Federal Way cleaning up homeless camps is a bad thing, but I’m happy they’re taking the hard line and doing something about it. Do you think the homeless problems just go away on their own?

A: Mr. Federal Way has no doubt that the population of homeless people in the city has increased – the few stats that are out there show an increase, and also Mr. Federal Way has eyes. It’s hard to miss.

Mr. Federal Way has also seen a huge increase in the number of letters and emails, day after day, from people complaining about homelessness. These, too, are an eyesore, since they always boil down to your point here – “Just drive ’em out! It’s simple, common-sense, sure-fire solution time!” These emails and letters, I want to point out, are also generally riddled with misspellings and have no breaks between sentences or thoughts except the mind-boggling amount of exclamation points thrown in with indiscriminate zeal.

This, fellow Federal Wayans, is something you should keep in mind next time you think Mr. Federal Way is being a mean-spirited grump. Trying spend your days deciphering the Zodiac Killer’s incoherent scribblings and see if you stay all nice-y and forgive-y when your mayor blows $100,000 of your tax money on a used – a USED – piano.

Homelessness is, as our city officials insist, a regional problem. They’re correct on that one, proving that even a broken clock can, twice a day, get it right. People without homes are called “transients” because they’re, you know, transient. With no fixed address or local support, moving homeless people out of one area just disperses collected populations into the surrounding areas or down the road to a different city. In this case, to Federal Way. Additionally, you may remember a period of time not too long ago that some folks are already calling The Great Recession, with a capital “the” for emphasis, which wiped out a bunch of people’s living situations, ruined the job market, and just generally made things unbearable.

So there are homeless people now. Probably more than there were before The Great The. So what do we do? Solving homelessness, or at least getting homeless folks to mosey their second-hand Jordaches on down the road, isn’t something that just happens. Not quickly, anyway. You can bust up all the encampments you want, but then all you’ve done is taken a single area with a lot of rusty syringes, stolen items, busted shopping carts and human waste and forced it to scatter, leaving you with a LOT of areas with slightly fewer syringes, contraband and poop per square inch. If your best-case scenario is that a mass moseyin’ is incited, you’ll notice a difference for about five minutes before more homeless folks move in from other cities who’ve done the same thing, and then you’ll remember that the garbage economy that kicked so many people into the gutter in the first place is still garbage.

And all of the tough-on-the-homeless, bulldoze-the-encampments, blame-the-suffering policymaking that got you those five minutes to begin with has to be done while you force yourself to forget that you’re doing this to, you know, people. Human beings. Folks who at some point were somebody’s son or daughter or dad or friend. A lot of people – politicians in particular, Mr. Federal Way has noticed – can manage that for quite a while. Actual people can only do it for so long before they spend the rest of their lives trying to reconcile how they treated another human being with the image of themselves they used to have.

It’s complicated, it’s vast, and it won’t be solved with a simple, short-sighted scheme. Naturally, then, the city recently put forth a plan to essentially bulldoze any homeless encampment they find, leave some Multi-Service Center brochures near the mounds of hazmat trash left behind, and assume that everything will work itself out. Proving a broken clock is still, twice daily notwithstanding, a broken freakin’ clock.

Mr. Federal Way’s tip of the week: If someone’s trying to sell you a simple solution to a complex problem, they’re trying to sell you a heap of beans on a Steinway bench.

Q: Mr. Federal Way, are you caucusing this weekend? Or did your party already do theirs?

A: None of your business.

Got a question for Mr. Federal Way? Email mrfederalway@federalwaymirror.com