Our columnist knows a little sump'in about Ron Sims, the Black former executive of King County, Seattle, Washington, who's been nominated to become President Obama's Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. "Sims has long had the consistency of weak oatmeal... a perfect complement to the Oba." Ron Sims and the citizens are in for a rough ride. "Like it or not, Hurricane Katrina was the test forum for a widespread application of a ‘new' Housing and Urban Development policy, which, as that troublesome spirit Russell Means pointed out a few days ago, is nothing more than the treatment that has been dumped on the Indigenous American for centuries."
"Sims has long had the consistency of weak oatmeal."
Mark Twain used to tell a story about a hack politician from Hannibal, Missouri who got appointed to some high-ranking post in a presidential administration. The poor clown felt compelled to poll his fellow townsmen about his good fortune, and, upon coming back home to Hannibal one day, grabbed an old acquaintance and asked him what people said when they heard he had been appointed special counsel to the president. "They didn't say anything", replied his cohort, "they only laughed."
It didn't seem funny to me when I heard our King County [state of Washington] Executive Ron Sims got appointed to the post of Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in Obama's cabinet. Sims has long had the consistency of weak oatmeal, but he's the sort of northwest politico "democratic" party administrations have liked to have close to them for awhile now. Lyndon Johnson had cold war liberals Henry Jackson and Warren Magnusen, Jimmy Carter had Seattle's Congressman Brock Adams as Transportation Secretary, and later replaced him with Portland Oregon Mayor Neil Goldschmidt during a cabinet purge in the last year of his term. Bill Clinton had those shameless corporate liberals Patty Murray and Norm Dicks to shill his programs in the Senate and the House, and now Obama has Ron Sims. Happy days are here again, as the old party anthem brays.
Ron Sims is a "famous first." He is the first black to serve as King County Executive, and has been viewed by local "democratic" party hustlers as a serious man. Sims is a perfect complement to the Oba, as his attitude towards black or any working class struggle manifests in the housing and urban development policies he and his local business partners ( I won't call them community leaders) have helped maintain in Seattle.
"Gentrification has driven housing prices so high that many black and Latino families can no longer afford to live in the city."
All throughout historically black areas of the city, parts of town like Columbia City and the Central District, gentrification has driven housing prices so high that many black and Latino families can no longer afford to live in the city. "Mixed income residency" housing has managed to hold firm with new housing projects in the High Point area on the west side, and recently down in the southeast area of town where the former Rainier Vista housing complex once was located. But the actual number of units built is nowhere near large enough to accommodate the numbers of economically displaced and de-skilled working people.
Working class families have had to relocate to the outskirts of town in numbers so large that it has actually affected the enrollment numbers in the city schools, which of course necessitates the closure of schools, public health clinics, you know the drill. In effect, then, Seattle is no different then any other urban center, in that it attempts in low-key manner to emulate the urban renewal programs that are built to accommodate the best and the beautiful entrepreneurial elite all over this country. The sun is shining, the Holy Joe gods of the Buck-o-Rama are smiling, and the great unwashed are relocated so they can re-orient their lives to meet the whims of the market cult auction block like they're supposed to. Ron Sims and his advisors, throughout their tenure of King County leadership, have demonstrated that they are just one more contingent in Jello Biafra's "suede denim secret police." Who needs a tyrant like Joey Stalin when people can be economically pushed to an emotional space where they begin to purge each other? Ah, the genius of the invisible hand. And available exits, wherever they might be found, are randomly shuffled by the Wizards of the Sacred Crapshoot Exchange.
My wife and I believed we might have found one of those exits when we became "home owners" upon buying our house in White Center. We placed a small down payment on a Cape Cod bungalow style home that was built in 1942 and has had some minor additions tacked onto it in the decades since. We agreed to a thirty year mortgage, arduous though it has been, because we could no longer endure a King County and Greater Seattle housing market under which rent gouging was claiming half of our income. Neither of us saw the purchase as some huge real estate investment, but rather, a practical concession in which we saw paying a mortgage as a way of paying ourselves some of the money we'd usually have been putting into a landlord's pocket. We came back out here from New York City in 2001, and over the first two years we lived here, poured a little under forty grand in rent and deposits into the pockets of landlords. That's how ridiculous rental housing costs in Seattle were between 2001 and 2003. We ended up buying a house because we got tired of paying someone else's mortgage.
"We saw paying a mortgage as a way of paying ourselves some of the money we'd usually have been putting into a landlord's pocket."
I'm not going to go into the various money hustles that we've found ourselves confronting in the tenuous balancing act of keeping the house solid and livable and staying out of even higher levels of debt. Suffice it to say we've been caught up in an arrangement we can barely afford to maintain, but we've avoided some of the more obvious pitfalls in home financing that have derailed tens of thousands of "home owners" in this country in the last couple of years. But it is a thirty year mortgage, and by the time we've paid this house off, we will have paid twice the "market value" the house had the year we purchased it. There are outs, of course. Should one of us die suddenly, or be unable to work, there are escape clauses for the remaining partner to get out from under the obligation, which is good, because I wouldn't want to leave Kathleen with all this and vice versa. But my point in bringing this up is to illustrate the absurdity of a lifestyle that is actually forced onto many people who aren't particularly interested in the speculative spiral that drives the everyday lives of everyone in this country, and we can expect even more sophisticated layers of this kind of lunatic housing policy with a weak oatmeal man like Ron Sims in the Obama cabinet.
If you can't survive in the Grand Nickel-Counter's game of economic grab-ass, if you can't afford to bring storm preparedness to your "property"; if what homeowners insurance you're able to purchase is helpful solely at the arbitrary whim of some seven figure insurance executive somewhere; if you're so tapped financially by the bare essentials as most people are bound to be by the crisis in the economy, you can expect that the owners of the good old U.S. will simply play the eminent domain hustle or the Katrina card.
"My point in bringing this up is to illustrate the absurdity of a lifestyle that is actually forced onto many people who aren't particularly interested in the speculative spiral."
The eminent domain hustle is one which catches up neighborhoods like the one in New London, Connecticut a couple of years back. Residents of Fort Trumbull found out that if the legal team of a big business interest decide a corporate park is better for the common good then the eyesore a piece of property might become when its owners are unable for one reason or another to care for it, that the laws of eminent domain will allow authorities to take personal property away from its owners. The Supreme Court decided in favor of the corporate entity in question, and thus, urban blight plays right back into the hands of the real estate sharks and banks who allow it to happen to begin with. Any decision made by the higher courts is open to appeal, of course, and many in New London did appeal, but the process is one which takes such time as the invisible hand of the marketplace decides to remove its thumb from its invisible ass.
In raising this point, I am fully aware that there are drug dealers and gangstas and ‘ho's who thrive on urban blight, and that urban blight is a problem. But urban blight is a problem that springs from the machinations of major league drug dealers and gangstas and ‘ho's, most of whom never have to answer to any law or standard of human decency. Some of them actually get nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize or get named to State Department offices upon occasion, proving, I suppose, that the work of satire is on its last legs when reality becomes a larger farce than Mad Magazine.
And of course, everyone knows about the Katrina card, and how the right wing, righteous defenders of individual liberty in this country, were so vigilant in their defense of the property rights, nay, basic housing rights, of the people of the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans. Wasn't the essential decency of market ideologues in full blossom at that moment? Like it or not, Hurricane Katrina was the test forum for a widespread application of a "new" Housing and Urban Development policy, which, as that troublesome spirit Russell Means pointed out a few days ago, is nothing more than the treatment that has been dumped on the Indigenous American for centuries. Only now, everybody who gets in the way is going to get a turn, because the foreclosure market (in case you haven't noticed all the hoopla in televised media and on the Internet) is going to be the next big bonanza for the jerks who landed the economy in this hole to begin with. And they'll be underwritten by the largesse of the public sector, which, by the way, you and I pay for. Magic of the marketplace indeed, huh? Talk about the serpent devouring its tail.
"The foreclosure market is going to be the next big bonanza for the jerks who landed the economy in this hole to begin with."
Yes, indeed. Already the ruling class media mouth pieces are telling us "we're all socialists now." check out Newsweek magazine these days. Yes, openly "planned economy," with all the economic "specialists" as beneficiaries. Only what's theirs is theirs, and what's yours is theirs also. Just ask Secretary of the Treasury "Save the Hedge Fund Thieves" Timothy Geithner. Necessity is the mother of retention.
Many of us who didn't understand the looming reality of 2005 when Katrina hit have since come to understand it. Overpasses collapsed in Minneapolis that very same winter, ah well, fortunes of war. Energy grids died in Queens, New York, for ten days during the baked apple summer of 2006, people just had to adjust. Tons of coal sludge poured into the Mississippi River last year, well, who needs frogs, fish and waterfowl anyway? Floodwaters rose and destroyed homes along miles of the Chehalis River here in Washington State a few weeks ago, jeez, man, quit your whining and "man up, bitch." Caveat emptor, ya know? Times are tough, don't you know, the National Guard has nations to build overseas, just focus on the change in which we can believe.
So. Here comes the Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former King County Executive Ron Sims, fellow residents of the Great Nuthouse (we have to be crazy to be putting up with this crap). May you all love him as dearly as many of we out here have come to love him. On a certain level, he's a nice guy, just so long as you don't cross him and his buddies.
All the same, the rest of us better learn how to read the fine print. This is, after all, the age of the paid "extended warranty," and even though you've paid for a solid product, the owners of society don't have to stand by their commitments or what they "produce." Nope, that's your gig, baby. And the show must go on.
BAR columnist michael hureaux perez is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in southwest Seattle, Washington. He is a longtime contributor to small and alternative presses around the country and performs his work frequently. Email to: [email protected]