This fall's World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting could turn downtown Seattle into a dangerous place to be homeless. The WTO meeting is a major media event, and when Seattle's city fathers see themselves as actors on the world stage, they respond by making city streets off-limits for the homeless. During the 1990 Goodwill Games in Seattle, homeless activists organized to resist "street sweeps" by holding their own Goodwill Gathering for the duration of the Games, an action that led to the establishment of a tent city at the Kingdome. For this fall's WTO meeting, the homeless advocacy groups Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE) and the Women's Housing, Equality, and Enhancement League (WHEEL) aim to build on the lessons of 1990 by again setting up a tent city for people who risk being "swept" out of downtown.

In a letter sent to Mayor Schell, Police Chief Norm Stamper, and other city officials on August 31, some activists expressed their concern that "some who are embarrassed by the dramatic disparities in wealth and living standards in Seattle will attempt to use 'law enforcement' measures to make these disparities less visible during the WTO conference." While the Seattle Police Department (SPD) has not responded to the letter, police spokeswoman Lisa Roots was quoted in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as saying that increased citations were merely the effect of having "many more officers out on the street" during special events. Applied to arrests, the SPD's invisible hand theory works like this: increased numbers of Seattle police officers, acting in concert, but without any directives from above concerning the targeting of particular groups, will arrest homeless people during the WTO meeting. Those arrested can take comfort in the fact that the SPD wasn't particularly targeting them.

Back in 1993, the SPD also denied doing sweeps during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Seattle. However, in the days before the APEC meeting, the King County Jail population reached a record high of 2,310, which quickly dropped in the days after APEC. Many activists anticipate that this November the SPD will do what it calls "emphasis patrols," in which "lawbreakers" with outstanding warrants will be detained.

Because activities associated with living in public (urinating in public, sleeping in a public park, having an open container of alcohol, or sitting on a public sidewalk) have become citable offenses in Seattle in recent years, many homeless people receive citations. These citations in turn often become outstanding warrants for failure to pay fines or failure to appear in court. This leaves homeless people vulnerable to arrest and perhaps less likely to resist a police officer's demand that they "move along."

Whether it's called a street sweep, an "emphasis patrol," or merely the side effect of increased police presence, such treatment of the homeless underlines their unmet need for a safe place to go. The number of the homeless in Seattle is already double the number of available beds in shelters, leaving approximately 2,500 people sleeping outdoors in Seattle every night. Two recent murders of homeless men (a highly publicized case in Ravenna and a less prominently reported murder in the South End), as well as last year's serial killings of homeless women, are just some of the crimes that highlight the need for safe shelter. In addition, the parks exclusion law has restricted the places where homeless people can camp in numbers sufficient to ensure their safety. The groups SHARE and WHEEL have been trying to persuade city officials to approve a tent city since August 1998, when the tent city on Beacon Hill was torn down. Just as the Goodwill Games acted as a catalyst for the first tent city in 1990, the WTO meeting may provide the necessary impetus for the establishment of a safe, self-managed encampment for the homeless.

While Seattle police are busy making the streets safe for emissaries of the "Emerald" corporations (those corporations that have donated $250,000 or more to the Seattle Host Committee for access to WTO representatives), what takes place within the convention center could worsen the situation of the poor and the homeless in Seattle and around the world. The key tenet of the WTO--free trade--contributes to the increase of poverty and homelessness. Free trade, at least as envisioned by the WTO, means that transnational corporations are free to challenge a country's labor laws and other standards on the grounds that they are barriers to trade. Likewise, tariffs designed to protect domestic workers, farmers, or producers are also deemed trade barriers. As capital freely chases cheaper and cheaper labor across national borders, the resultant lowered wages, worsened working conditions, and lost jobs push more people into poverty and homelessness.

The exclusion of the homeless from downtown during the WTO meeting is emblematic of their exclusion from the wealth that stands to be made from free trade. Even many of those who have homes today are similarly excluded, and may be less secure in those homes, as global trade sets working conditions on a race to the bottom. If SHARE/WHEEL succeeds in setting up a tent city during the WTO meeting, its first goals will be to ensure the survival of the homeless and offer safety from street sweeps. But the mere existence of a tent city could serve as an object lesson to those with homes. As Paula Rozner, a homeless woman and member of WHEEL, says, a tent city reminds the people who see it that "we were them yesterday. They will be us tomorrow."

Real Change and the National Lawyers Guild are presenting a training on Nov. 6 to help prevent removal of homeless people from Seattle streets during the WTO. See the calendar for details.