This is not the post I wanted to write next. That one is about meat. It is in progress. This post is about housing. In particular, it is about the place where I have been staying, and the organization that controls it.
I have been homeless, on and off, for most of my life now. I have couch-surfed, lived in vans, camped in the woods. I applied about five years ago to the Seattle Housing Authority, because I liked Seattle and I wanted to live there. I thought I had friends in Seattle.
I was staying with some other people I thought were friends, in central Washington, when I received the letter about two years ago offering me this apartment at one of SHA’s buildings in Seattle. I packed up the van and drove to town. After about another two weeks I had moved in to the building. The next day someone stole the van.
Since that time I have done my best to set up a household here. I have made some efforts to integrate with some community here, but my efforts to date have been rebuffed, so I have stopped trying. I still seek community but I must range further afield to find it. I am very tired. In the interest of this pursuit I attended a meeting at the building. At this meeting the current buiding manager announced the arrival of a new building manager.
The new and old managers worked together at the building for a time, and then the old one went away and the new building manager was just the building manager. This person immediately started making some big changes. Positive changes included having the exterior windows washed and the outside of the building cleaned. Less-positive ones included mass evictions, additional cameras in the lobby, installation of security guards in the lobby, and the removal of all the furniture therefrom. A small table and chair were provided for the guards’ use, but we rent-paying tenants are no longer allowed to use our own public entry area. Old and sick people have to wait outside for medical transport in the cold. The guards also wander the halls and grounds, harassing the tenants and their guests; they have threatened me personally. The new manager and her guards do not obey the rules of the building: they smoke on the grounds, they litter, they drink alcohol in the parking lot. We have a lot of rules here, a minor violation can get one of us evicted. Apparently the rules do not apply to the guards.
Having looked into the state of “tenants’ rights” in the city and state, it appears that I have no recourse in the case of harassment-by-proxy, or even direct harassment, unless I can prove it is retaliatory for trying to organize the building or whatever. I have not been trying to do that. I have just been trying to live here.
Now I no longer want to live here. I don’t even want to be in Seattle any more. I have no reason to stay here. I have no where else to go and no realistic way to get there.
It doesn’t matter to me any more where I live. All I need is a place to be with a little computer to keep doing this: writing this useless blog, working on my stupid book, playing my dumb music. A little trailer or something to mount solar panels on, some way to shunt it around. I might even be able to manage it if I wasn’t trapped inside and paralyzed by anxiety- but probably not. My income is too low and my savings are depleted from living here.
Until yesterday I did not have a working phone, so I was unable to make any calls to the multiple overlapping useless agencies that exist to paper over the utter lack of tenants’ rights in the city and… everywhere I guess. Landlords are in charge everywhere, which is part of the reason why everything is so bad.
The shape of this housing machine is less complex than many with which the agency is involved. SHA owns and operates the building. The building is served by a collection of services also owned by SHA, according to the logos on vehicles that come here: garbage pickup, painting, electricians, and pest control have all shown up here in SHA livery. Some of these services, like garbage / recycle pickup, are also done by other outfits according to the livery of the relevant machine.
There have been no SHA-branded security guards. I think this is odd. If there is a need for security guards, surely SHA can find and employ them itself. Certainly there are more than a few guards living in this building. It seems to me it would make sense to hire them instead of some un-vetted random strangers. I say they are not vetted because I have heard several Loud Cellphone Talkers among the guards bragging about how the company that employs them will “hire literally anybody bro”. Presumably this includes gangsters and criminals: on Saturday night I saw that night’s guard out in the parking lot, taking pictures of peoples’ apartment windows.
Obviously it is a Bad Idea from a physical-security standpoint to invite a bunch of strangers into your apartment building, let them take over the lobby, give them access to security cameras and keys, and invite them to non-consensually photograph and harass the tenants. For the management of such a building to take such a decision smacks of incompetence, malice or grift. These actions make it impossible for me to trust these people, who are the face of the organization which is my landlord. How, then, am I to trust the landlord?
In general it is hard for me, now, to trust the Housing Machine at all. The entire set of mechanisms around land ownership, rent, tenancy and occupation are all ancient, terrible, larded with cruft and hopelessly corrupt. It is feudal nonsense that’s been perpetuated into supposedly more “modern” or “enlightened” political regimes.
You can’t trust a lord, even a “land lord”. They can renege on whatever agreement they make, with effectively no recourse on your part. Meanwhile the landlord can act against tenants in all sorts of legal and not-so-legal ways.
I feel like the analysis here is pretty easy: you cannot trust a machine made of Lords. Lords do not obey Law, even as their status comes from Law.
It might be that Law is also untrustworthy. Maybe that will be another blog post.