Why does one of the wealthiest countries in the world have such a huge homelessness problem? Hear Tim Harris, the Executive Director of Real Change News, discuss the challenges faced by the poor, and the homeless and the systematic changes we face as a country.
Most Influential: Real Change’s Tim Harris
Tim Harris is a people person. “I think that people are sacred,” he says. “When I see people being dehumanized, it pisses me off and makes me want to do something about it.” He founded Seattle’s Real Change newspaper in 1994 to advocate for low-income individuals and provide job opportunities by recruiting them to sell the weekly publication on city streets and keep the profits. In February, when Seattle City Council member Tim Burgess proposed aggressive, anti-panhandling legislation, Harris saw it as a civil rights issue—and a legal threat to Real Change vendors. “Something that struck me about the debate was that the legislation couldn’t be justified based on actual crime rates,” says Harris. An opposition coalition formed, including the ACLU, NAACP, Real Change and others. While the Seattle City Council passed the new measure in April, the 5-4 vote was not sufficient to overturn Mayor Mike McGinn’s veto. Harris predicts that similar legislation will be proposed again, but he is grateful for what he views as a victory in protecting the rights of every person walking the streets. “It’s an extraordinary win,” he says.
Published November 2010
Honorary Political Genius: Tim Harris and Real Change
For Turning Seattle’s Scapegoats into an Unassailable Political Powerhouse (While Growing a Newspaper as Other Newspapers Are Dying)
The room was far too small. Twenty thousand copies of Real Changenewspaper would arrive every Wednesday at the office in Belltown, where writers and staff were already cramped. Dozens of homeless men and women would then try to enter a waiting area that only seated about four people to get those papers and sell them. So Tim Harris, who had a background in journalism and founded the newspaper in 1994, decided earlier this year that it was time to move.
But the Pioneer Square Community Association (PSCA) balked when Harris signed a lease two miles south. The group lobbied Mayor Mike McGinn to intervene against the presence of another social service organization, and it lobbied the Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board to ban the business, claiming that the offices weren’t “retail use.” PSCA director Leslie Smith even teared up as she pleaded at one of the public meetings. Then, when all that failed, Smith filed a legal appeal with the city.
Harris chided the group in the local press, but then in a calculated turnabout, he volunteered for a neighborhood cleanup. “We had an eight-person crew weeding and planting and putting down mulch in the median on First Avenue—right by our new offices,” he said this spring. Shortly after, both groups issued a joint press release to say the legal challenge had been dropped (and PSCA changed its name to The Alliance for Pioneer Square). “We look forward to Real Change‘s contributions to the vitality of the Pioneer Square neighborhood,” said a newly tuned Smith. Real Change hadn’t offered any concessions. It had won yet another political fight—this time against a well-heeled group anchored by real estate money in the city’s oldest neighborhood.
“The beautiful thing about Real Change,” says Harris, “is that it isn’t a politically smart thing to do to hate on Real Change.”
The Pioneer Square story (fighting, winning, and leaving the arena with a stronger relationship with his opponent) is only one facet of Harris’s genius.
The paper does a staggering number of things at the same time: providing social services during a human-services funding drought, running a media outlet—a newspaper that is growing steadily—while most newspapers are shrinking and closing, and parlaying all of that into a political body that converts the most down-and-out scapegoats in society into a virtually unassailable constituency.
For example, Harris was behind a city initiative in 2002 to build more homeless shelters. In a deal with the city council, Harris agreed to withhold it from the ballot if the city council funded half of the project (“We were bluffing that we had money for a campaign,” Harris says). Harris and Real Change transformed the debate around building a new jail by filing another initiative in 2008. Although former mayor Greg Nickels and former city attorney Tom Carr supported the jail initially, the discussion pushed politicians to the third rail of racial and social justice by last year’s election (when Carr and Nickels lost). Now elected leaders almost universally oppose another jail. And this spring, in defeating an aggressive panhandling bill, Harris’s opposition “was critical to the outcome,” says city council member Nick Licata.
The organization runs on an annual budget of around $850,000—about 40 percent from newspaper sales and the rest from donors—which is fairly lean for the size of the operation.
Harris reflects, “From the beginning, I was very clear that the newspaper was a vehicle for organizing.” Now, with a 20,000-paper circulation and over 1,300 annual donors, Harris has built the organization from a one-man show 16 years ago into “a network of relationships that translates into political power,” he says. “I think that is part of the reason why elected officials don’t want to cross Real Change. No matter what people think about me, Real Change, or our organization’s priorities, they are not going to openly attack us. We are too popular.”
