Dog Loans

Banks report that there is little investment interest shown in the commercial area of Empire Way and Othello Street. There is a surplus of commercially zoned land indicated by vacancies and non-retail use of land in prime retail locations.

This was written thirty-four years ago in a study of the same area where the Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, a public institution whose business is to stimulate local investment, now operates. A couple of weeks ago, Martina Guilfoil, the executive director of the RVCDF made a spectacle of that organization with her rather less diplomatic gloss on the same theme in a letter to a loan applicant: "We recognize a dog loan when we see it," she wrote. "We are very interested in how our programs are working to help Rainier Valley businesses who actually operate a business and not a hobby."

In the Rainier Valley the distinction between retail and non-retail use, vacancy and occupancy, hobby and business, has long been a fine one. This clearly vexed Guilfoil, who, on behalf of the RVCDF’s board of directors, also informed the business owner that she is “one crazy ass bitch.” Taking the long view, store fronts here, it seems, are always in the process of becoming something else and the commerce inside exists somewhere in the twilight between hobby, social club, side business, and going concern.

The lettering on the corner awning reads “import-export” next to an Asian name, but the sign above the door a few paces down says the shop is a halal grocery. A cut rate brothel becomes a social service agency which in turn becomes nail shop. The tavern next door to the brothel back in the day is now a church and, who knows, may yet be a tavern someday.

Down by the Rose Petal with its “RESTAU ANT” sign, which to workaday world looks abandoned, roars to life on Saturday night. One afternoon this spring, the proprietor of a gyro restaurant was shaken by my request for a gyro -- whatever people came there for, it wasn’t the only product advertised on the sign outside. A tavern is a social club whose exclusivity is maintained by its dilapidated exterior, plywood-covered windows, the lack of a sign that clearly establishes the nature of the business.

A single family home beside Martin Luther King Jr Way S. is the beach head that builds a steady clientele as a Vietnamese bridal shop. From its side has grown a three story apartment complex whose slow-motion construction moves forward in fits and starts as more funds from the paying business become available. Cottage industry grinds modestly onward inside Craftsman bungalows without the pressure of overhead.

Southeast Seattle, with it’s low, haphazardly collected rents is an incubator for business that could not exist in a higher profile location. Down here, businesses that fulfill different purposes than growth and expansion find safety at the periphery of the city, for a moment at least.

As executive director of the Rainier Valley Community Development Fund, Guilfoil knew all this far better than most. I sat down with her almost two years ago to learn more about what the CDF was up to and found her to be engaged with the neighborhood and sensitive to the local business landscape.

In particular, we talked about two Somali immigrants who were extended one of the first business loans the organization made. In a culturally savvy move that a conventional lender wouldn’t even consider, the CDF worked with the imam of the borrowers’ mosque to set terms that were considered compliant with Islam’s prohibition on interest. The loan allowed the borrowers to successfully branch out from their auto sales business into transportation. Evidently they are still making it happen -- I see Universal Translation & Transportation cars all around the south end.

So what happened? How could a local institution that has proved itself in so many ways an asset to the Rainier Valley and particularly to the MLK business corridor sink to the ugliest kind of condescension?

Here, among the strivers and the poor there exists privilege - it’s one of the things that keeps this place interesting. Though content to dip in and out of the Rainier Valley at will, privilege comes to identify with the “vibrancy” of the place. It considers itself hep enough to bring off a brassy lines like “crazy ass bitch” and street-wise enough to know who it should be applied to.

In this spirit a haughty distinction was made in the name of the board of the RVDCF between “real” business and some other kind run by “broke ass crazies” that is beneath consideration. No doubt the loan applicants who come before the board consider their businesses legitimate and “real,” but how can they be sure now that the staff and the board of the RVCDF feel the same way?

More with Less Policing

Stop me if you've hear this one before:

Higher unemployment will drive more people to seek an illegitimate income, and budget shortfalls will force cities and counties to cut back on police officers, or at least fail to hire enough new ones to cope with their growing populations.

This prediction, from The Economist's "World in 2009" review, suggests that a new policing strategy will necessarily surmount the resource-intensive "zero tolerance" model pioneered in NYC in the early Nineties and adopted in most big city police departments since. The article continues:

The approach that will come to prominence in 2009 is almost the exact opposite of zero tolerance. Rather than cracking down on petty offenders such as turnstile-jumpers and squeegee men, the authorities will focus on those who are most likely to kill or be killed. Some may be drug dealers recently released from prison. Others may be the associates of people recently wounded by gunfire. What makes the approach particularly novel is that it depends on local people. Rather than insisting on zero tolerance from the police, it tries to change what the residents of crime-infested areas will tolerate.

This approach, pioneered in Boston and refined in Chicago, aptly describes Seattle's own Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (YVPI). Seattle's plan focuses government resources on the 800 or so youth identified as likely to commit future acts of violence. The YVPI uses a "case management" model to capture the target population, offer them various kinds of support, and allow opportunities for their behavior to be monitored and measured.

The notion that it "depends on local people" is a debatable feature of Seattle's YVPI. Using community resources and guiding a community's expectations by involving them in crime fighting is supposed to be what makes this strategy cheap compared with "broken windows."

One aspect of the program, the use of "violence interrupters" ties it to Chicago's CeaseFire program and provides at least an shred of community involvement -- the community in this case being ex-con or former gang member (the interrupter) with enough street credibility to diffuse potential violence before it erupts.

The YVPI conspicuously lacks another of piece Chicago's CeaseFire program -- community "responses" at the scenes of all shootings. These aren't built into the Seattle program precisely because the City has not developed the capacity to mobilize the community.

Seattle City Councilman Burgess affirms the need for community involvement in a recent Op Ed without pointing to any institutional framework for community involvement:

Most important, the initiative recognizes that one of the most effective ways to prevent violence is for community members to engage directly with at-risk youth, to challenge norms tolerating violence, and to encourage young people to speak out when violence strikes.

Two points to make here:

1) City officials have gone out of their way to champion their Youth Violence Prevention Initiative as "community-led" and "community-driven," which it is not. It is a smart "technocratic" strategy that leverages existing bureaucracy and expertise. It is led by government administrators, and driven by law enforcement, education, juvenile justice, and social welfare professionals.

2) I doubt the CeaseFire-like aspects of the YVPI signal a titanic shift in Seattle from one model of policing to another, but they do highlight a police force stretched dangerously thin and, owing to a tight budget, apt to see hiring levels reduced sometime in the next year. I have high hopes that case management for 800 kids will result in fewer shootings in our neighborhoods, but I'm skeptical that it will effect residential burglaries in Seward Park or other parts of the city. Budget woes or no, Seattle can't skimp on police hiring.

Thoughts on the Youth Violence Prevention Initiative

Last Tuesday, I attended the meeting of the City Council's Public Safety Committee (available here in its entirety), and what follows are a few observations about the briefing on the City's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative (YVPI).

Council members attending were: Tim Burgess, Bruce Harrell, Nick Lacata, and Sally Clark. Other key attendees: Holly Miller (Office for Education), Sid Sidorowicz (Office for Education), Doug Carey (Department of Finance), Jim Diaz (Interim Police Chief), James Kelly (Urban League), Jamila Taylor (Urban League's YVPI administrator), Mark Worsham (County Juvenile Court), Pegi McEvoy (Seattle Public Schools)

The plan as it was initially announced to the public had a 9.2 million dollar budget. According to Doug Carey of the Mayor's office, "because of budget balancing needs and one select program reduction, the Council action resulted in an 8 million dollar initiative over two years."

The intended outcomes of the YVPI are:

• A 50% reduction in court referrals for juvenile crimes against persons commited by youth residing in the Central Area, Southeast Area, and Southwest Area Networks
• A 50% reduction in the number of suspensions/expulsions due to violence-related incidents at Denny, Aki Kurose, Madrona K-8, Madison, and Washington Middle Schools

Councilman Burgess pointed out that for similar programs across the nation, success often means reductions of 2.5% to 20%, which is far less ambitious than the YVPI's.

The Mayor's office announced that, in addition to the middle school "emphasis officers" the YVPI includes, they intend to apply for Recovery Act (stimulus) funds to provide emphasis officers for high schools as well.

Holly Miller, interim YVPI director, said that the plan is a "community-led and community-driven process." She said that "this is not going to be resolved by the government." Her example of how the YVPI is "leveraging community resources," was that somebody from the Seattle Vocational Institute called her the other day and said they have training slots and pre-apprenticeship programs available for youth in the program.

Pegi McEvoy of Seattle Public Schools affirmed that "it is the mobilization at the community level that we're doing with the Urban League that will allow us to be successful."

A potential weakness of the program is that, where "community involvement" is concerned, the government administrators have a bias toward engaging established institutions like nonprofits and educational institutions. The YVPI administrators are overstating the level of community involvement when they think of "the community" only in terms of citizens who have connections with groups like the Urban League.

Under the plan, payment of 10% of the contracts with providers are contingent on meeting performance targets.

Interim Police Chief John Diaz confirmed that the new 6 person Gang Unit day squad will start work on April 15th. They will patrol "the high schools and corridors."

* * *

Last Tuesday afternoon in Council chambers, there was a reassuring air of confidence and optimism among the assembled notables. They lauded their "tremendous group work" so far and expressed "delight" with the "magnificent effort on the City's part and the Police Department's part." There was laughter and thanks for everybody's contributions and a sense of accomplishment that suggests something powerful is in the offing.

I caution humility to all those involved in this promising initiative: across town at Rainier and Othello, not an hour earlier, in broad daylight, there was an execution-style shooting. Until further notice, further congratulations are not in order.

Choice Words from the City Council Prez on Police Staffing

Rumor has it that at the last City Neighborhood Council meeting, city council president Richard Conlin volunteered that, due to a tough budget climate, future hiring for the Seattle Police Department may be on the chopping block.

Here is a good place to say that SPD South Precinct staffing is the number one, slam-dunk priority shared by our community and our local patrol officers. There is a lot we can do and have failed to do as a community, and there is room for debate about what the best approach to solving our youth violence problem in the medium to long term, but there is no question that more police resources are immediately needed on our streets -- a beefed up gang unit, foot patrols in select neighborhoods, more total hours for 911 responders.

By way of reassuring a community member that he wasn't proposing a hiring freeze for the SPD, Mr. Conlin wrote the following:

...we may need to consider slowing down filling the new positions that were added in the 2009-2010 budgets. Since new recruits train for almost a year that would have no impact in the near term on crime issues. It would simply be stretching out the five year expansion plan. Might be better to be cautious now than to hire people spend money training them and then have to do layoffs if the budget picture worsens.

In the rarefied world of city politics, there may be some distinction to draw between a hiring freeze and "slowing down filling the new positions," but for us in the Southeast, where crime and violence are an undeniable commonplace, we take the withdrawal of police resources, however temporary, as an insult.

The South Precinct does not have the personnel it needs to do its job. I hear the complaints and the excuses officers feel compelled to make for not providing the level of service the community needs. I wonder why Mr. Conlin hasn't.

I wonder why, when there's not enough police to start with, he thinks it's a consolation that the "slowing down" will only affect us after a year or so when new police don't start work in the South Precinct?

New Information on the Mayor's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative

For anybody who might care to wade through 38 pages of the mesmerizing prose government bureaucracies churn out, here is the most fleshed out info I've seen yet about the goals, methodology, and implementation of the Mayor's Youth Violence Prevention Initiative. Nothing on specific partners the City will be working with though.

Crime & Crime Prevention in the East Precinct

The Central District News reports that, according to the SPD, crime was down last month in the East Precinct. This is great news, as long as it's true. Past "errors" concerning crime statistics for the South Precinct make it clear that great news about crime in high crime neighborhoods should be met with some skepticism.

In other ambiguously good news, though the City cut the East Precinct's Crime Prevention Coordinator position at exactly the worst time, given the gang wars in the Southeast and Central Districts, the Central District News reports that, between the Mayor's office and the SPD, there is some will to restore it.

SEDC Approves Statement on Youth Violence

Last night at the Southeast District Council meeting, the group voted to approve the following statement on youth violence:

The youth violence problem in the Southeast Seattle is severe and getting worse. Our South Precinct is understaffed and should quickly be staffed up to the levels promised. The mayor and city council should give the youth violence issue the attention it deserves and sustain that attention until the issues are addressed. The member organizations of the Southeast District Council endorsing this statement pledge to involve themselves directly in whatever way they are able to support SE's youth, schools, and families, and recommend that the city takes neighborhood and business groups into account as the city formulates its youth violence initiative.

All attending groups voted yes except the Othello Neighborhood Association, which abstains on all votes, and the Rainier Othello Safety Association, which considered the statement too weakly worded.

I hope ROSA will make its alternative "statement with teeth" widely available, follow through on whatever action they propose, and lobby other groups in the Southeast and Central Districts to join them. I'm sure other SEDC members will be interested in taking as active a role in confronting our youth violence problem as ROSA clearly intends to.