June 27, 1995: Operation Homestead Gets the SWAT Treatment

Operation Homestead activists occupying the Pacific Hotel, downtown Seattle, September 1992. Photo credit: Dana Schuerholz

The garishly über-megalithic commercial complex in the heart of downtown Seattle that currently houses NikeTown, along with other similar corporate chain stores, has long been a deceptively dazzling civic eyesore. You might not think so from looking at it now, but not long ago that spot was the site of an affordable housing complex–one of the last then remaining downtown. On the date in focus here, a pair of activists attempted to save it–symbolically, at least–from the impending wrecking ball.

Before there was NikeTown, etc., there was the Payne Apartments, a 43-unit low-income apartment building located at 1521 Seventh Avenue. The building was then scheduled to be torn down the following week to make way for the highly-publicized $25 million project that would house NikeTown, along with a Planet Hollywood outlet and other such upscale tenants. The project was one of many such pricey development deals resulting from the mid-1990s local economic boom then vastly transforming (or neutering, depending on whom you ask) the character of downtown Seattle.

Not everyone blindly welcomed that change. Operation Homestead, a grassroots organization founded in 1988 with the mission of saving low-income housing in Seattle, had already staged, as of the summer of 1995, a number of occupations of buildings threatened by development. These buildings were either abandoned or had been bought out by developers (and, in some cases, the developers had unlawfully evicted the buildings’ low-income tenants). In the early evening of June 26, 1995, Dana Schuerholz and Bob Kubiniec, representing Operation Homestead, scaled the side of the Payne by the fire escape all the way up to the roof, with the intention, full publicized in advance, of staging a non-violent protest against the loss of affordable housing.

The Seattle Police Department handled the protest with characteristic restraint–in other words, by sending a full Special Patrol Unit (Seattle’s equivalent of a SWAT team) into the building, with weapons drawn, shortly after midnight, to arrest Schuerholz and Kubiniec.

After bringing the two activists down to the street, the police then drenched them with water hoses, in order, according to the police, to prevent possible asbestos contamination (demolition of the building had already begun). The two were then left to sit in wet clothes for several hours in King County Jail, while under investigation for trespassing charges.

Meanwhile, supporters of the protest who had gathered across the street from the Payne explained the motivations for the action to the press. They lamented the city government’s failure to adequately address the ongoing loss of affordable housing in the midst of Seattle’s then-booming economy. They also lamented the city government’s eagerness to coddle the many real estate developers responsible for that loss.

Schuerholz and Kubiniec were later acquitted of trespassing charges. The gentrification of downtown Seattle would continue unchecked for several years after.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Real Change Newspaper archives; Jennifer Bjorhus and Dee Norton, “2 Housing Advocates Arrested For Sit-In,” The Seattle Times, June 27, 1995; Jennifer Bjorhus, “Peaceful Protesters Get Swat Treatment,” The Seattle Times, June 29, 1995.

January 21, 1997: In Search of the Golden Shower of Public-Private Partnerships

Downtown Seattle: A wonderful place to shop!

Gentrification, triangulation, and public urination, oh my!

Such were the underlying themes of civic life in Seattle during the allegedly halcyon days of the dot-com boom. And such was the backstory on the date in focus here, when roughly 75 local homeless citizens and advocates invaded the downtown Nordstrom store (then in its original Westlake Center location) and the brand-new NikeTown wearing bathrobes and shower caps and bearing rubber duckies and toothbrushes. These activists were ostensibly searching for a place to take a shower, but in fact they were engaging in a protest to draw attention to Seattle City Council plans to de-fund a proposed downtown public hygiene center that could have been used by the homeless.

The protest, which took place at noon, was strategically scheduled that day to coincide with a meeting of the council’s Health, Housing, Human Services, Education and Libraries Committee, in which the committee planned to vote on the disputed location of the hygiene center. The facility, as proposed by its advocates, would have been located in the basement of the Glen Hotel, a vacant remnant of Old Seattle at Third Avenue and Spring Street. However, certain city mothers and fathers, heavily influenced by the pro-business Downtown Seattle Association, fought both overtly and covertly for “dispersed” bathing and toilet facilities spread over the outskirts of downtown, safely concealed from the city’s financial and retail core.

Such moneyed maneuvering was of a piece with Seattle City Hall’s attitude towards the homeless during the late 1990s, best exemplified by a set of proposed “civility laws” banning economically unproductive loitering and public urination downtown. And such were the ways in which our city government so gleefully wizzed all over the city’s poor folks while rolling out the red carpet for the rich–best exemplified by the $73 million of public money then being given away behind closed doors to none other than Nordstrom, for construction of the private parking garage that now stands at Sixth Avenue and Pine Street.

The following day the council committee relented somewhat and informally agreed to install public toilets at the Glen Hotel site. Eventually the proposed hygiene center would surface elsewhere downtown as the Urban Rest Stop. Today, the Glen Hotel survives as a single-room occupancy apartment building for homeless individuals, with shared bathrooms. Meanwhile, now that Seattle’s economic straits are far, far more dire than those of 1997, our city’s homeless citizens are still waiting for a truly fair break–despite the apparent sympathies of our current mayor.

–Jeff Stevens. Sources: Joe Mooney, “Cleanliness proves next to impossible for some downtown,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 22, 1997, p. B 1; Linda Keene, “Restroom protest at Nordstrom–Homeless advocates seek downtown hygiene center,” The Seattle Times, January 22, 1997, p. B 1; Neil Modie, “Panel favors public toilets at hotel,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 23, 1997, p. B 2; Timothy A. Gibson, “Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle” (Lexington Books, 2003).