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Please Join us TOMORROW to . . . Bear Witness To the Shame
of When Tacoma workers building luxury condos, making beds at Marriott Courtyard hotel, cleaning toilets at Columbia Bank building, washing floors at UW campus, or guarding the Maersk port need a place to stay because wages don't cover rent, the King Center was always that place of last resort. It's difficult to stretch a $10/hour paycheck with no healthcare to the end of the month. The King Center, the shelter at the Martin Luther King Housing Development Association, meets urgent needs of our community's working poor, the very wounded veterans and immigrant workers we stood with on May Day. Now upscale property developers have dictated to the Tacoma City Council that the shelter's working poor are not welcome next to Tacoma's market-rate condos. On May 6, the Tacoma City Council effectively votes to close the King Center July 1, by denying a funding process it has approved annually and changed little except for the growing pressure of developers (see below for background). The developers who have the most to gain from the King Center closing are a powerful business alliance of Tom O'Connor and Bill Riley. Both have tremendous influence over the Tacoma City Council. As the Immediate Past President and a National Director of MBA, Mr. O'Connor was the 2007 top officer of the 950 developer Pierce County Master Builders Association (MBA). Mr. Riley is a top lobbyist and VP for the Washington Association of Realtors and a prolific Pierce County developer within the MBA. Mr. O'Connor's MidTown Lofts development shares the alley with the King Center on Tacoma Avenue while Mr. Riley owns an under-developed parcel bordering the King Shelter. The King Center will close 125 emergency shelter beds while Mr. O'Connor's condo next door will create 50 upscale units expected to run $280k to $400k. Mr. Riley's company BRC Associates LLC is suing the King Center for nuisance. Mr. O'Connor has only anger for the residents of the MLK shelter but he's not confident that some of his company's poverty-wage employees may have spent some nights there. He has stated to JwJ that he "needs lots of big toys," and "having kids shuts doors," a "bad choice" when working for him because he does not provide family healthcare coverage. Not only do upscale developers apparently wish for corporate welfare from the City Council and a personal favor not to see and hear their poverty-wage employees, but they also have complained about church members singing at the Center on Sunday afternoon. They don't want the King Center threatening big profits by impacting property values, consuming view property with a homeless shelter, or driving away high-end condo buyers. These developers have no alternative plan but to dump and push the Downtown working poor they create onto the streets of nearby areas with the help of East Tacoma district Council member Rick Talbert, ironically. Growing Tacoma's local poverty and need for homeless shelters is unfortunately the result of this MBA and City Council partnership. This partnership is attacking shelters in their targeted profit centers and opposing the working poor forming unions at residential construction sites. The City Council needs to make a partnership that benefits all of us. Tell our City Council: MidTown Lofts is one of many upscale condo projects to which the City Council has donated our tax-dollars. As Downtown and Hilltop real estate has become more desirable, the pressure on the King Center has increased. This funding vote may prove to be the last straw, but recent history shows us this is part of a larger pattern. Seven years ago, the City forced both the Rescue Mission and Nativity House to move to make room for the Convention Center and the Marriot Hotel. Both organizations struggled to find new locations, while increasing their capacity to meet growing needs. Meanwhile promises that the Marriott would bring good, living wage jobs are broken. Two years ago, just as a non-profit developer was completing their plans to renovate the Winthrop Apartments and maintain them as worker-affordable housing, the City Manager Eric Anderson threatened a Christmas Eve eviction on the grounds that the building did not pass an inspection. Somehow, though, when the outcry from Winthrop residents, Tacoma Catholic Worker, JwJ and community allies became powerful enough, repairs were made with residents still inside. In the following months, City Council and officials blocked the renovation of needed housing and paved the way instead for a luxury condo-hotel developer Prium to buy the building. The fate of the Winthrop residents and their future housing is still in doubt although our community alliance forced Prium and the City to promise a fair relocation plan. JwJ activists are now familiar with how we all pay the costs of tax-dollar subsidies to high-end developers: budget cuts to schools, fire, police, emergency medical, parks, and road repair while this development model denies us local jobs, living wages, job training, and affordable housing. And we must spend more for this development model when including the cost of food banks, shelters, and free clinics that developer's employees must use to make ends meet. |
