Shawn Vestal: Housed people are increasingly in our faces. What to do?

If you’ve been downtown lately, you’ve noticed: The streets are shockingly, distressingly full of those people.

Over Memorial Day weekend, as the weather warmed, they were everywhere. Everywhere. In Riverfront Park. On the streets. In the coffee shops. On the corners. In the library – the library is an absolute mecca for those people, you know. They pour in and out. They sit and read. A truly treacherous place.

I saw them in the bookstore, too, and walking across the Monroe Street Bridge, and strolling aimlessly, as if they didn’t have a single productive purpose on earth. Carrying their big bags of stuff. Drinking from cups and bottles. Pushing strollers and carts. Walking dogs. Looking at smartphones.

Who gave those people smartphones? Obama?

Everywhere you looked, there they were. Clogging up sidewalks. Sitting on benches. Vaping. Talking. Living.

You know who I mean. Some might be too afraid to name them – too cowed by political correctness, too afraid of being called callous and mean-spirited by the bleeding hearts – but enough is enough. It’s time for straight talk about the downtown epidemic.

I’m talking about the homed. The housed.

Every day, it seems, there are more of them downtown – walking around on our sidewalks, going into our stores and buying things, eating food at our growing number of excellent restaurants. Even if all you do downtown is drive through, you can’t help but notice.

Remember the good old days? When there were hardly any housed people downtown? A couple decades back, when I first arrived here, and for many years thereafter, you could walk down Main Street after 5 p.m. on a weekday – or at noon on a Sunday – and see almost no housed people at all.

You could walk for blocks and blocks and feel as though you had the city to yourself. The housed existed, of course – they have always been with us, I suppose – but they didn’t force themselves into your line of vision. You might have completely forgotten that the housed were hidden out there, as you strolled around beautiful, pristine, empty downtown Spokane.

It was so great.

So it’s been an adjustment, this new era in Spokane with housed people everywhere you look downtown, carrying their bags full of retail goods and riding Lime scooters, strolling with their shaved ices and hot dogs through the park on the river around which millions and millions of dollars of public and private investments are flowing.

You even see those people across the river in Kendall Yards. Some housed people actually live right there, right on the ground where for years and years and years Spokane had no problems with the housed population whatsoever.

What in the world is going on? Surely there are economic factors at work, deep, long-term factors that have been accruing and cohering, drawing the housed out of their homes. And surely there are political factors as well, politicians who may have contributed to the kind of environment that entices these housed people downtown – that attracts them, like flies.

For the love of Mike, City Hall is engaged right now in a campaign to lure some of Seattle’s housed people to Spokane – and these are not your average housed people, but very, very well-housed people. Excessively housed, you might say.

We’re giving them too many reasons to come here, I’m afraid. We’re just too darn generous. And it’s changing our city.

However: It’s important to remember that housed people are individuals just like anyone else. We should avoid demonizing and stereotyping these people, who have found themselves living indoors for reasons that we might not understand. Some of them are carrying reasons that have left them housed from deep within their family histories; many of the housed are simply living out circumstances that were planted irrevocably in their childhoods.

We should not conflate the worst of them with all of them.

Yes, the housed commit crimes. In fact, it’s unquestionable that housed people commit the majority of all crimes, and this is no small matter. Housed people rob, steal, assault – all of it, on a regular basis. Some of them have committed murder. You could look it up. Some of those crimes, believe it or not, have been captured by security cameras.

If you saw any of that footage, you might think: That is NOT OK!

And yes, some of the housed use drugs or drink too much. To dangerous excess, even, creating drastic problems of public safety and health that are costly to us all. On weekends, some of our downtown bars are full of housed people causing problems that frequently bring the police. Stupid, drunken, anti-social behavior. Drunken driving alone, they say, causes thousands upon thousands of deaths each year. Not OK!

And yet we should not paint all car-owning housed people with the same brush.

That’s going to be hard, given that we’ve entered the silly season of a city election. Underinformed and overconfident candidates will rush to make shallow judgments about the plague of the housed downtown – stoking unfounded fear, manipulating isolated incidents to paint false pictures, appealing to simple bigotries, stirring up the populace against people based on their presumed housing status, turning the city’s downtown into a false emblem for empty slogans, behind which lurk no actual solutions.

Don’t believe the hype. Yes, the housed are everywhere these days – practically swarming the city. Yes, there are consequences for all. It is literally changing the nature of Spokane.

But if we try hard, using our brains and hearts more than our spleens, I feel confident that we can survive this epidemic.