Breathless election night coverage before the polls close

KILL LIST

Breathless election night coverage before the polls close

CNN, on Election Day 2020, seemed intent on blowing out viewers’ synapses no matter how few votes had been counted. Wolf Blitzer and John King colored in states on their “magic wall” and threw out “Key Race Alerts” (sponsored by Calm, a sleep and meditation app). Into the early morning, the outcome remained unknown, yet the intensity stayed high. the city saw record-breaking home prices, displacement, and street homelessness. Yet Murray called Amazon’s hiring frenzy “a great problem to have.”

By the summer of 2018, journalists in Seattle were connecting the dots and had decided to cooperate on an official “day of homelessness.” Four outlets—Crosscut/KCTS 9, a nonprofit digital newsroom and public TV station; KUOW public radio; Seattlepi.com; and the Seattle Times—shared data and coordinated #SeaHomeless reporting; the Seattle Times subsequently created a Project Homeless team. “The idea was, ‘We need to elevate this issue—we’re going to do this to bring it to politicians’ attention,’ ” David Kroman, a reporter at Crosscut, told me. “Real Change had been doing it this whole time, so it felt like the larger media landscape was catching up to them.”

Ashley Archibald was the primary reporter for Real Change at the time. She broke several important stories, including one on a streetoutreach group that cut ties with Seattle police because of how officers carried out sweeps and pushed people into emergency shelters. She also wrote about how Amazon and other businesses were likely to use loopholes to circumvent a proposed progressive tax. “Any scoops I got were almost certainly due to the fact that Real Change is very close to the ground,” Archibald said.

But the implications of this proximity were understood differently throughout the office. As “the homelessness problem” became increasingly equated with sweeps, young employees clashed with Harris, who turns sixty-one at the end of September and viewed sweeps as a compromise in the trade-off for shelter. “The way I put this is, I’m not for people’s right to live in squalor,” he told me. His colleagues were vocal in their disagreement; Real Change published op-eds by local activists opposing street evictions without exception. “There were serious tensions between the old-guard homeless-advocacy community that was about expanding services and finding a middle path, and the harder socialist left that was represented by people like Kshama Sawant,” he said.

According to Harris, the debate over the Compassion Seattle amendment has been the latest proof of a polarized community. Business groups and social services agencies behind the proposal argued that it would bake a minimum level of homelessness funding into the city budget and create two thousand emergency housing units. Their opponents, rallied in large part by Real Change’s advocacy department, called the amendment an unfunded mandate to encourage sweeps and prioritize shelter beds over permanent, affordable housing. “I am absolutely in agreement with Real Change that we are opposing Compassion Seattle,” Sawant told me. “It is not compassionate at all.” (She made the same point in an op-ed in The Stranger, noting that the amendment was funded by real estate money.)

Harris, a supporter of Compassion Seattle, found himself awkwardly in league with Tim Burgess, a former city council member who, in heavily left Seattle, counts as a conservative. Back in 2010, Harris and Real Change went to war with Burgess over an ordinance that was widely perceived as criminalizing panhandling—and won a mayoral veto. (Real Change was “almost always pretty harsh on me, both the editorial and the news side,” Burgess said. Nevertheless, he added, “I read it, and people in my office read it, because it offered

a perspective that in some ways was closer to the ground.”) By last fall, Harris, feeling out of place at Real Change, decided to step down. (He told me that in November he plans to launch a new regional street paper called Dignity City.)

Real Change continued apace. In late May, as Compassion Seattle advocates were finalizing the language of the amendment, Tiffani McCoy and Jacob Schear, of Real Change’s advocacy department, helped organize a press conference in Victor Steinbrueck Park, next to a memorial for unhoused people. Speakers announced the formation of House Our Neighbors!, a coalition to fight Compassion Seattle and its “pro-sweeps agenda.” Burgess told me that McCoy “engaged in a significant disinformation campaign” about Compassion Seattle, but McCoy and House Our Neighbors! say that they merely pulled subtext to the surface. The amendment “deceptively co-opted the language of social justice and ‘compassion,’ ” McCoy, Schear, and a vendor named Paige Owens wrote in a Real Change op-ed, in June. In late August, after more aggressive campaigning, a state judge pulled Compassion Seattle from the fall ballot, ruling that it conflicted with state law. McCoy told me: “What I love about organizing with vendors the absolute most is they can see through bullshit.”

Where does Amazon end and the housing crisis begin? Seattle is growing faster than any other large city in the United States, thanks to the ever-expanding tech economy. Last year, the median home sale price in the surrounding county topped $820,000; twelve thousand people were counted as homeless. To clean up its reputation as gentrifier par excellence, Amazon has started funding programs to confront homelessness. In 2016, it pledged a year’s use of a former hotel to Mary’s Place, a women’s shelter in Seattle. Later, the company promised to give Mary’s Place $100 million over ten years and allowed it to open a shelter on Amazon’s downtown campus. When the new facility scheduled a ribboncutting ceremony, in the spring of 2020, Nacozy had to decide whether Real Change should cover the event. Though the paper had no intention of doing public relations for Jeff Bezos, she said, neither did it “want to become the bulldog against Amazon.” Ultimately, Real Change decided against a story— sometimes, they figured, no coverage is preferable to a dutiful report.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Real Change cannot endorse candidates in elections, but it can take positions on ballot measures and campaigns, as well as on the behavior of companies, and over the past few years the newspaper has devoted many column inches to the extended opera of the Seattle City Council’s attempt to tax Amazon and other big businesses. In 2020, covid-19 and Black Lives Matter consumed much of the staff’s energy; this year, Amazon returned as a major plotline. Real Change ran an article on local protests in solidarity with workers at a warehouse in Alabama, as well as op-eds decrying Amazon for “interfering with union organizing” and linking the company to the “rightwing recall campaign” against Council Member Sawant. In July, Real Change ran a special Amazon issue, pegged to Bezos’s journey into outer space. The cover illustration portrays him as a cyborg puppeteer steering the movements of faceless laborers.

Samira George told me that she hopes to report more on Big Tech in the future, since Amazon is implicitly part of most housing stories. “The biggest thing that comes up with my sources is the shortage of affordability and how prices are going up,” she said. “Obviously it’s connected to tech jobs.” Reporters at the Seattle Times could be trusted to get “the big Amazon stories or the big shelter stories,” she explained, but it was her responsibility to show how “the smaller ones interconnect, giving more of a voice to people experiencing homelessness.”

All journalism could benefit from taking the street-paper approach, which centers unhoused people rather than, say, Amazon executives. Given the rise in extreme inequality across the US, traditional political and business reporting are due for an overhaul; how else to give an honest accounting of our monopoly economy—and of the people deliberately left behind? Katherine Anne Long, the Amazon beat reporter for the Seattle Times, told me that she tries to focus on human stories that reveal “the social impact of business.” Still, she must keep her readership in mind. “I want to tell stories that feel

Given the rise in extreme inequality across the US, traditional political and business reporting are due for an overhaul.

important to Amazon’s headquarters employees who are in Seattle,” she said. “Those roughly sixty thousand folks constitute a core audience for us.”

Real Change vendors also sell to tech workers, but most customers are older, longer-term residents with a charitable bent. “We’re lucky, in that people come to us who are benevolent toward someone selling a street paper,” Nacozy told me. “So there’s an expectation that there’s an anti-poverty instinct.” The paper assumes “a different starting place,” she said: whereas a mainstream outlet might treat homelessness as a “dollar centric” business or real estate story to satisfy its audience, Real Change would always make it a “human rights issue.”

In certain neighborhoods of Seattle, outside upscale groceries, bookstores, and coffee shops, it used to be difficult not to run into a Real Change vendor. The most experienced, high-volume vendors enjoyed fixed locations and shifts; they would sit or stand with a stack of papers, yelling out their favorite page numbers and asking after the families of regular customers. During the pandemic, the number of vendors dropped by a third, to just under two hundred, and circulation shrank from more than ten thousand per week to fewer than six thousand. Customers were encouraged to read the paper online and send money by Venmo to individual vendors. But by the early summer of 2021, people were stepping out again; week by week, the printing load was increasing.

On a cool, breezy Friday on Seattle’s Third Avenue, men zipped in and out of their tents in a dance of avoidance and symbiosis with neonshirted garbagemen hired by the downtown business improvement district. James Smith stood outside a corner Starbucks, wearing a baseball cap, nylon jacket, and jeans, a Real Change badge hanging from his neck and several newspapers under his arm. He told me that he had come to Seattle thirteen years ago but just recently learned about Real Change. He kept running into a friend who sold the paper. “I decided, I said, ‘I’m gonna check it out.’ ” Smith went through a short orientation, agreed to follow a few basic rules, and received ten free newspapers to try his luck. No other job requires so little of its workers from the start. (“You don’t need to have an ID or even use your real name,” Camilla Walter, Real Change’s development director, told me. “You just have to be over the age of eighteen.”) Smith, who was staying at a Compass Housing Alliance shelter, had made a couple hundred dollars so far. “This has helped me immensely,” he said. “I’m on hard times, with the pandemic and what’s going on.”

Harris and Bayer speak of street papers’ equalizing plane of commerce, and there are plenty of touching stories from Real Change staff—of customers who invite their vendor to Thanksgiving dinner or bring them on family vacations, who pool funds to buy their

vendor a van or help them get into permanent housing. Many contacts are less pleasant, though. Some people cross the street to avoid Real Change vendors or pretend to have already bought an issue that just came off the printer’s van.

A 2007 study of Street Sheet vendors in San Francisco described sellers’ efforts to “construct an ‘authentic’ homeless identity that meets the expectations of passersby.” Other vendors may go in the opposite direction, assuming the mantle of entrepreneur: a respectable small-businessperson distanced from the life of the street. Real Change does not give vendors a script, and Rebecca Marriott, who leads the vendor program, told me that the roster ranges from people who are street homeless, living in vehicles or tents, to those living in apartments and working other jobs. Before coming to Real Change, she’d helped poor people in New York City find employment and become independent; she observed that homeless services were often unduly separated from advocacy around labor. “When programming is being developed, employment is never mentioned,” she said. “Traditional employment just doesn’t work for everybody, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t work.”

That day, from her covid-Plexiglas-ringed desk on the first floor of the Real Change office, Marriott buzzed people through a secure door and greeted nearly all of them by name. A vendor named Priscilla came in, carrying a large backpack and wearing a wool coat that drew compliments. “Rebecca got it for me!” she said. (Marriott had set the coat aside from the donations closet.) Another vendor entered, and yelled an off-season “Merry Christmas!” Before March of 2020, the storefront was usually crowded with vendors buying papers at Real Change’s cashier stall, taking coffee and bathroom breaks, charging their phones, and doing research on office computers. In pandemic mode, only a few visitors were allowed in at a time. Many asked Marriott or Ainsley Meyer, a case manager, for grocery bundles, dry socks, hygiene kits, sack lunches, or coats. Eventually, across the street, a mobile health unit started offering covid vaccines, which Real Change encouraged its vendors to get with the promise of twenty-five free newspapers per shot. Meyer also helped vendors apply for housing, food stamps, and pandemic stimulus checks.

Though vendors aren’t required to join the editorial or advocacy sides of Real Change, many choose to do so. Some have offered feedback at weekly editorial meetings with Nacozy; others tell Marriott and Meyer what they think about cover stories: that a given headline is too depressing (not so marketable) or that a color scheme repeats that of a previous issue (not novel enough to claim the attention of passersby). Vendors contribute story ideas, too. In April, Neal Lampi, a former organizer with Real Change who lives in an RV, supplied a tip: The city intended to reinstate a seventy-two-hour limit on parking, which had been suspended during the pandemic. People living in their cars or camper vans would have to resume their hunt for the next safe space and give up the community they’d formed with neighbors parked nearby. Based on Lampi’s lead, George wrote a profile of Dee Powers, a thirty-eight-yearold who’d begun living in an RV in 2015, when their rent shot up by 40 percent. The advocacy department took up the matter with city hall, and Sawant called on Mayor Durkan to lift the limit—but to no avail, even as the city and state effectively extended a pandemic ban on evictions.

Last summer, as covid deaths spiked and protests flared in response to the murder of George Floyd, Lampi reflected on vending and politics in an essay in Real Change. “You never really know what motivates people to buy a paper,” he wrote, but “even a $2 customer could be seen as a witness to those standing in solidarity with the poor, the homeless, LGBTQ rights activists, #BLACKLIVESMATTER, immigrants and all of the legions of villainized people paraded across the screen of Faux News.” Yet at the same time, he continued, the great thing about selling the paper “is that virtually anyone” can do it: “We don’t demand adherence to a creed or agreement with our editorial viewpoints. You can thrive simply by treating others like you would like to be treated, selling a boat load of papers, happily voting Republican.” cjr