(This article was originally published on The C is for Crank and has been reprinted with permission)
The Durkan Administration, which has been reluctant to spend city resources putting homeless people in hotels, has signed off on the expansion of the Public Defender Association’s new Co-LEAD program, which provides hotel rooms, case management, food, cell phones, and other necessities to people experiencing homelessness in King County, to include the city of Seattle. Co-LEAD is an expansion of the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, a pre-arrest diversion program for people involved in low-level criminal activity, and is aimed at reducing criminal activity, at a time when legal options for making money are scarce, and setting clients up for success once the immediate threat of COVID-19 has passed.
The rate of novel coronavirus infections in Washington State has risen once again, Gov. Jay Inslee said in a press conference on May 8.
Pointing to models from the Institute for Disease Modeling that show data collected up to April 19, Inslee said that though the rate of infection has dropped significantly since the initial outbreak, the rate of infection has risen from below one in both Eastern and Western Washington to about one in Western Washington and just above one in Eastern Washington. This means that one person is infecting one other person in Western Washington, and more than one other person in Eastern Washington. This is a notable increase for Western Washington, which had previously dropped to an infection rate of just over 0.5 in early April.
The May 7 appointment of Louis Dejoy, a major Trump donor, to be the 75th Postmaster General of the United States, should raise alarm bells for anyone concerned with the future of the U.S. Postal Service. He is a Trustee for the Fund for American Studies, a right-wing think tank whose vision is “to win over new generations to the ideas of liberty, limited government, and free markets.”
It wasn’t so long ago — just 2018 — that Seattle could be proud of its status as the only city in the nation where transit ridership was actually going up, and the number of people commuting to the center city by car was going down. COVID-19 didn’t just reverse this trend; it obliterated it. Ridership on King County Metro buses is down about 73%, while ridership on Sound Transit’s light rail line has shrunk an estimated 70%. In an attempt to protect drivers from riders who might be COVID-positive, both agencies eliminated fares, and Metro implemented back-door-only boarding, in March. Both agencies also cut service, which has led to overcrowding on popular routes, such as the Route 7, that serve essential workers getting to and from the center city.
Onda Origins Cafe & Roastery has turned their flagship cafe into a general store for local farmers, whose revenues have been hit hard by the closure of Seattle’s farmers markets. Although COVID-19 has shut down all but essential businesses, Onda remains open for take-out beverages and wholesale coffee, initiating partnerships with other local producers to sell their products. The company’s mission of connecting consumers to coffee producers has broadened to include connecting local farmers with the Hillman City community.
I’m sitting at home, safe and sound. Is it possible to still feel shitty despite how good I have it? Does it matter?
When I participate in comparative suffering, I lose every time. While the homeless in Las Vegas are being “quarantined” by laying in marked-off squares in a parking lot, while my mom-friends are telling me that they now juggle full-time work-from-home with arduous attempts at homeschooling their children, while essential workers risk daily exposure to disease to sustain their (and our collective) livelihood, how much weight can I possibly put on my own suffering?
(This article was originally published on realchangenews.org and has been reprinted with permission)
One mid-April afternoon, three masked men made their way through the Chinatown-International District, their faces fully covered with cloth and dark glasses. They left stickers plastered to buildings and telephone poles in their wake. “Better dead than red,” one said. Others read “America First.” All of the stickers listed a group called Patriot Front, a white nationalist hate group identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Later that same weekend, someone took the time to remove the stickers, but the incident is still under investigation by the Seattle Police Department.
Editor’s Note: We want to acknowledge that there remains disagreement in the martial arts community over who is properly credited as Bruce Lee’s senior-most student. In light of that fact, we’ve chosen to refer to Taky Kimura as Bruce Lee’s senior-most instructor.
Taky Kimura, Bruce Lee’s best friend and senior-most instructor, has been lovingly safeguarding Lee’s memory and legacy in Seattle for almost five decades. Many people know and admire legendary martial artist Bruce Lee, but few know about the close friend who helped Lee start his first martial arts school in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (CID) and carried on Lee’s legacy after he tragically passed. Kimura turned 96 last month and Thursday, May 7, a new short film about his life and relationship to Lee, “Taky Kimura: The Heart of the Dragon,” will premiere online for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.
As a resident of Forks, WA, I am encouraged to see that our community has been proactive in taking steps to minimize the impact of COVID-19 when it comes to our town. We closed parks, are staying at home, and made changes to our hospital and pharmacy protocols to limit contact.
But I am worried that we are not taking into account a large population that is within our community and currently incarcerated. As of May 5, 24 incarcerated people in Washington have tested positive for COVID-19, along with 36 prison staff members. Only twenty incarcerated people at Clallam Bay Corrections Center (CBCC), one of the local prisons on the West End of the Olympic Peninsula, have been tested.
Last Wednesday, April 29, tenants at Bellwether Housing Kingway Apartments & Juneau Townhomes submitted a petition signed by 100 residents across the two adjacent affordable housing complexes, making several demands of their landlord, Bellwether Housing. The demands included rent reduction or forgiveness and a fair and transparent payment plan in light of COVID-19 shutdowns. Bellwether responded on Friday, May 1, stating they were unable to decrease or forgive rent and they reiterated previous policies outlined in a letter issued to residents on March 19. The March 19 letter, from Director of Property Management Michelle Hawley and Resident Services Manager Elliot Swanson, said that back rent accrued during the government shutdowns could be paid on a payment plan that wouldn’t go into effect until normal operations resumed and that residents would have at least nine months to pay any back rent that might have accrued due to coronavirus-related unemployment.
