Editor’s note: These letters to the editor are over 250 words, so they are only published online, not in print.
625 project should prioritize kids
To the editor:
There is considerable discussion of 625 being dedicated to affordable housing for families. As a social worker, I am passionate about affordable housing …done right. If the proposed 625 apartments will be housing families in some units , it will be affordable housing … done wrong. 625 is not a family-friendly site.
When a child living there, perhaps a latchkey kid, ends up severely injured or worse lying beside his ball in the busiest intersection on the island—-then please reflect on your Yes vote. Or when a youngster goes missing having been befriended by one of the many pedestrian strangers leaving the boat, please reflect on your Yes vote. Please put a human face on this project.
I regret to say this is not alarmist talk. These tragedies happen far too often and in many kinds of communities, but placing family housing at this site is a setup for them. These issues should have been the very first to be considered—perhaps they were—good if yes. Nothing is more important. It costs nothing to take a deep dive into them—no expensive consultants, no drawings, just sober, practical thinking.
Rather than becoming a showcase for our island’s support of affordable housing, 625 could become a statement of how little we thought of protecting children. What solutions were explored: full-time cops? Fencing the kids in? Providing tax-paid daycare? Not allowing them at all? This site is not good enough for them.
So members, (or all of us islanders for that matter), here’s the litmus test: If you would imagine your own child or grandchild living and playing at 625—and if you would have misgivings about that, then your vote must be No. These kids, these families are just as important and just as vulnerable as your own.
Janice Harris
Bainbridge Island
Gaza article reaction
To the editor:
Thank you for publishing the various local opinions on the “One Family in Gaza” movie.
I was surprised to read that the Bainbridge museum director cited “public safety concerns” for cancelling this movie, and that a Bainbridge Jewish organization considered such presentation “amplifying and legitimizing anti-Semitic rhetoric”.
While I understand that Jewish organizations support Israel, Kol Shalom’s tenet Gemilut chasadim (deeds of loving kindness), seems to be in direct opposition to what a former member of Kol Shalom calls “genocide” a “human rights crisis” in Gaza. She told the Review that “attempts to discuss the issue were repeatedly shut down”.
Shouldn’t the gruesome devastation of Gaza, the inexcusable death of some 70,000 innocent Palestinians, the skeletal Palestinian children searching for food in the ruins of Gaza, and Hamas’ role in starting this war, encourage discussions?
The tragedy of Gaza is personal to me. 80 years ago, I dug through the ruins of destroyed homes in search for food, just like the Gaza kids do today. These horrific images revived all of my WWII nightmares.
To defeat Hamas, Netanyahu (Israel Prime Minister) has imposed collective punishment on all of Gaza’s citizens. However, huge crowds of Israelis have demonstrated against Netanyahu’s war, and Thomas Friedman writes that “Israel is making itself a pariah state”, committing “suicide, homicide and fratricide”.
Yotam Vilk, an Israeli army platoon commander, wrote in the NY Times that the “reckless, nationalist-populist government” of Israel has “lost its way.” Is that “anti-Semitic rhetoric”?
These demonstrations in Israel raise hope that the country itself has not lost its soul.
James U. Behrend
Bainbridge Island
LIHI misleading
To the editor:
LIHI proposes to put a large workforce apartment building in downtown Bainbridge. While workforce housing is a great concept, that’s not really what LIHI does. What LIHI does is low-income housing (hence the name “Low Income Housing Institute.”) What that means is that they house people who don’t work, have no means of supporting themselves, and are on government assistance. If LIHI’s clients were otherwise stable and the only help they needed was paying the rent, LIHI would be a good neighbor, but in fact, most LIHI clients have other needs as well: behavioral issues, drug addiction, mental health problems.
Unfortunately, LIHI doesn’t provide those other important services its clients need; they just throw up buildings, pack impoverished people into them, and walk away. I know this because, as a Seattle resident who’s been following LIHI for years, I’ve visited several of their buildings, and the surrounding areas look like dumping grounds, as residents with nothing to do and plenty of unsavory habits and friends spill out into the neighborhoods around the buildings.
LIHI doesn’t just do big-box warehouses for poor people either; they also operate a network of shack villages around Seattle, at a cost of $1 million per year, per village. What does LIHI provide the shack village residents for that $1 million fee? Garbage service, rudimentary utilities, and the occasional social worker visit. But no job training or rehab. Occasionally, LIHI will move someone from a shack into one of their apartments so they can claim they’re getting people into permanent housing, but most of the residents who leave go back to the street or to another shack village.
In the past, LIHI has partnered SHARE. SHARE (the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort) runs several tent cities around King County and has been the subject of numerous scandals. LIHI was cofounded in the early 1990s by Scott Morrow, who ran SHARE until his death three years ago. SHARE decided to specialize in running tent camps and doing protest tent camps at city hall, while LIHI morphed into a multi-billion-dollar real estate venture, but the two organizations maintained an informal partnership.
The SHARE-LIHI outfit was essentially a land-grabbing operation, where SHARE would stake a claim to some public property by erecting an illegal tent city there, and then SHARE’s partner LIHI would cajole sympathetic city councilmembers into deeding over the land or giving them a long-term free lease on the property in exchange for SHARE dismantling the tent camp and going elsewhere. LIHI would then raise money through state and federal grants, and when they got enough money, they’d erect an apartment building on the site and run it on the slumlord model, maximizing their income while minimizing expenses.
Along with a handful of other taxpayer-supported housing providers, LIHI has built a “non-profit” real estate empire in Washington, and unless something is done to stop them, the Bainbridge site is going to be the next publicly gifted property in their portfolio. The only difference between Bainbridge and LIHI’s earlier acquisitions is that in Bainbridge, they’re jumping over the tent city/shack village phase and going straight to brick-and-mortar.
LIHI works with sympathetic city officials and activists to pressure cities into gifting them real estate on the theory that communities have a moral obligation to provide housing for their low-income residents. Again, that would be a reasonable concept, except that LIHI either can’t or won’t set aside units for poor people who are actually from those communities. In any case, for LIHI, the important thing is filling up all their units with people so they can keep billing the taxpayers for their operation.
It doesn’t matter to them where their residents come from or how long they’ve been in the community. Thus, even if this latest proposed project is built, there will probably be no net decrease in the number of Bainbridge residents living on the margins. Indeed, in Seattle, there’s been a visible increase in unsheltered people since LIHI and the other low-income housing tycoons came in, and that increase is nowhere more visible than right around LIHI’s properties. Check out their properties on North Aurora if you don’t believe me.
Think about all this as you’re deciding whether LIHI is a good fit for your town.
Davis Preston
Seattle
