Blinkie and Havik are married, originally from California, and have been living on Seattle streets for two years.
  • Kelly O
  • Blinkie and Havik are married, originally from California, and have been living on Seattle streets for two years.

Kevin is originally from Iowa and has been living on Seattle streets for two weeks.
  • Kelly O
  • Kevin is originally from Iowa and has been living on Seattle streets for two weeks.

Don't miss Dom's mightily reported and beautifully argued piece this week against the civility bill that the city council is expected to vote on next week.

That a majority of the city council, a group of overwhelmingly white people who get paid over $100,000 a year, is taking this legislation seriously—and plans to pass it—despite the avalanche of evidence and opposition, is a reminder of this psychic chasm between wealth and disadvantage. They take misguided anecdotal complaints seriously, then offer a bill that ratifies the wealthy interests of downtown, makes no sense, doesn't solve the problem it pretends to address, doesn't fund things that would solve the problem, and gives Burgess a legislative "accomplishment" he can run on later...

This is the new city council. This bill—built on misrepresentation of facts, kowtowing to conservative money, and targeting the poorest people for political gain—is a glimpse into this conservative council's priorities.

In the course of reporting the story, The Stranger obtained a spreadsheet that an elite downtown business group paid to develop and maintain—detailing the personal lives of the homeless, their habits, their appearance and physical impairments, their financial situation, whether they have pets, what days of the week they've been seen, speculation about mental health status, and other obsessive information. Along with Dom's reporting, we ran an excerpt of that spreadsheet. Then we created a matching spreadsheet on Tim Burgess and two of the downtown business leaders muscling through this legislation, complete with information about their daily habits, their appearance and physical impairments, their financial situation, etc.