Their activities include organizing homeless people, negotiations with property owners, coalition building, publicity and direct action takeovers of buildings. Homestead is motivated by the tragedy of homelessness and one bitterly ironic fact: Seattle has between 3,000 and 5,000 homeless people, yet the city that prides itself on recycling harbors over 3,000 abandoned apartment units.
This three part history of their campaign to save the Pacific Hotel will be published over our next several issues.
We wanted a highly visible, large apartment building in sound condition. After obtaining a list of abandoned buildings from the Seattle Department of Construction and Land Use, we made several site visits to check the condition of selected buildings.
Most visits occurred at night, with flashlight inspections of the major systems. We looked up ownership information, tax records, sales histories and all other public information found at the King County tax assessor's office.
After a month, we chose the Pacific Hotel, a 106-unit residential apartment building in the heart of downtown Seattle's business district. It's owner at the time was Martin Selig, Seattle's version of Donald Trump. Where others saw housing, Selig saw opportunity.
Housing activists in Seattle had known that it would only be a matter of time before the hotel closed and was marketed for redevelopment. Due to the City of Seattle's poor record on housing preservation, we knew that our city government would do little to prevent the loss of affordable housing at the Pacific.
The Pacific had closed in December 1991. Soon after, a "For Sale" sign appeared on the building. The property was listed with Colliers International Hotel Realty and a marketing portfolio entitled "The Pacific Hotel, A Hotel Redevelopment Opportunity," was circulated to prospective buyers. The slick portfolio announced that the Pacific Hotel was "an excellent long-term investment opportunity" and could capture the luxury hotel market downtown.
The Pacific Hotel was built in two phases, 1906 and 1943, and provided affordable housing to Seattlites. Residents paid rent by the day, week or month. Rent receipts revealed many long term residents had lived in the building.
We never found out precisely how Selig closed the building, but he certainly violated the Seattle Housing Code. In Seattle, it is illegal to evict tenants without good cause. It is also illegal to abandon good quality, affordable housing in downtown.
Selig broke both those laws and there is no record of intervention by city code enforcement officials (the Housing Code file we obtained from the Seattle Department of Construction and Land Use was unusually thin and contained no information about the evictions).
The file did show that the building was in excellent condition, with functional plumbing, electricity and heat. Tax records showed that Selig owed over $100,000 in property taxes on the Pacific.
The marketing portfolio we obtained for the Pacific Hotel listed a sale price that made purchase by a non-profit impossible. Selig was deeply in debt to Seafirst Bank and was no doubted pressured to sell for a hefty sum.
We chose September 22, 1992 as the date to occupy the building and began weekly planning meetings. We planned a pre-takeover rally at Occidental Park. We organized a free breakfast to begin at 7:30am, followed by a march to the building.
Our poster advertised the event as a "Non-Violent Direct Action," but did not reveal the site. We mailed announcements of the action to over 1,500 people and posted notices all over town, in community newspapers and at homeless shelters. A few days before the action, we sent out press releases.
Three days before the takeover date, we hit our first snag: Martin Selig deeded the Pacific Hotel to his mortgagor, Seafirst Bank. To prevent foreclosure, Selig gave Seafirst the building. With our flyer already mailed and over a dozen planning meetings under our belt, we were stunned by the news.
We held an emergency meeting to decide if we should change our strategy. Two viewpoints emerged. Some people favored giving Seafirst a chance to sell before proceeding with the takeover. Others thought that we should go ahead as planned because of Seafirst's role in driving up the sale price on the building and was no more likely to negotiate in good faith than Selig.
After discussion, we decided to go forward with the takeover as planned. We spent the next few days scrambling to research Seafirst Bank. We learned that Seafirst is a subsidiary of BankAmerica Corp., the United States's sixth largest multinational corporation. In early 1992, Seafirst had completed a merger with another local bank, making Seafirst Washington State's largest bank.
In response to pressure from Community Reinvestment advocates, Seafirst had committed a percentage of their loans to benefit low income persons. The bank's commitments to affordable housing for homeless people, however, were minimal. We obtained a management flow chart identifying CEO Luke Helms and the decision makers in the bank's real estate holdings.
Given our goals for the takeover, we needed our entry to be sudden, dramatic, non-violent and to involve as many people as possible. If at least 50 people entered the building, and at least 25 refused to leave, the police would have difficulty evicting us.
After scouting the building and studying floor plans, we created an early entry team. Three people, equipped with walkie-talkies, crowbars and flyers, would enter the building before dawn on the morning of the takeover. This group would prepare the building by unlocking windows and doors so that when the march arrived at the building, people would have many easy entry points.
Shortly before dawn, they gave up. Driving downtown to the rally, an OH member named Amy and the early entry team drove by the Pacific for one last look. Amy looked up and noticed a hole in the upper pane of a second floor window. The hole was the size of a fist and three inches away from the sash lock.
In order to reach it, we needed a ladder. Another option was hack-sawing the chain wrapped around the inside of the front door. By now it was light outside, so we no longer had the opportunity for a clandestine entry. We would have to try to enter the building when the march arrived at the site. After someone volunteered me to climb up the ladder, two OHers went to get a ladder and a hacksaw.
Before long, we were marching in the street, blocking traffic and chanting, "Housing Now" and "Tear Down The Boards." Several people carried the "It's Alive" banner from the Arion Court occupation as well as an "Operation Homestead" banner. A few bicycle cops followed the march but did not interfere.
When the march reached the Pacific, a group of people formed a human wall around the front doors while others went to work with the hacksaw. Because the chain was on the inside of the double doors, they had to pry the doors open enough to slip the saw inside. Another group followed the ladder to the highest corner of the building, near Fourth Ave.
Two people set up the ladder beneath the second story window with the hole. I arrived there just as they put the ladder in position and went up. At the top of the ladder, I grabbed the metal grate around the window and pulled myself up and sat on a horizontal metal bar.
I reached through the hole and unlocked the sash lock. I pried open the bottom sash, and, with both palms on the lower glass pane, I pushed upward and the window flew open. I hopped in and was soon followed by Harold, another OH member and a man named Chris.
As more and more people came in through the window, we scrambled around the building armed with boltcutters and searching for the front door. So excited about getting in the building, we couldn't remember the layout well enough to go directly to the front lobby. At one point, we separated, only to run into each other at the end of a dark hallway. We laughed at ourselves.
Eventually Harold found the doors and cut the chain to the sound of cheers from the people outside. With the double doors open and the fire alarm screaming, the march entered the Pacific.
At first, people entered cautiously. As time passed, however, curiosity prevailed and more and more people crossed the threshold. Explorers opened doors, windows and brought light, air and life into the Pacific. Chris and I tied a banner to a second floor window grate.
Many people leaned out of windows and looked at the crowd below as if to say, "Hey, look I'm on private property!" The more adventurous media entered the building. The cautious stayed on Marion St., which the police closed to traffic due to the crowd in the street.
Almost everybody raved about the building's nearly perfect condition, as if the walls had ears and the more we praised the building the closer we would come to saving it. Within 10 minutes, we had accomplished our first goal: there were enough people in the building to give us power to prevent an immediate eviction.
We formed an agenda by suggestions from the group. Someone gave background information on OH and explained why we targeted the Pacific. The group established a set of demands to Seafirst concerning selling the building to a non-profit who would provide housing for the homeless. We decided to create a committee structure and established committees to work on Media, Negotiations, Clean-up, and Food.
The group adopted a set of basic house rules, borrowed from the occupation of the Arion Court Apartments: No Alcohol, No Drugs, No Violence, No Weapons and No Harassment. A lawyer gave a summary of the laws we were breaking and the consequences. A non-violence training was set for 6pm that night and another general meeting for 8pm.
While we entered the Pacific, this group delivered a letter to Seafirst CEO Luke Helms demanding that the Pacific be reopened or sold to an affordable housing provider.
They also delivered a formal complaint to the Seattle Department of Construction and Land Use and Mayor's Office demanding that Seafirst be cited for a violation of the Downtown Housing Maintenance Ordinance (DHMO). The DHMO is the Seattle law that requires owners of affordable housing downtown to keep the units open.
After the first meeting, the community representatives suggested that the new Negotiating Committee, composed of six occupants, assume responsibility for the inevitable talks with Seafirst officials. We agreed and set a 2pm meeting with Seafirst executives.
On the sixteenth floor of the Columbia Tower, owned by Seafirst Bank and Seattle's biggest skyscraper, the Negotiating Committee presented the group's demands to Seafirst representatives Hal Greene and Brian Friend. Before the conversation focused on our demands, we listened to the Seafirst representatives trumpet their commitment to affordable housing. It was as if they were saying, "Why are you picking on us?" As for the issue we cared about, the bank agreed to bring us a written response the next day at 11am regarding our demand of a sale to a non-profit housing provider.
One group planned a meal and served it in the lobby at 6pm. Another group made flyers: some listed rules for within the building and others targeted the public, asking for telephone calls to Seafirst CEO Luke Helms and Mayor Rice.
An architect inspected the building and certified that it was safe and sanitary. That afternoon, we passed a Fire Code inspection by fire marshals. A group of residents compiled a list of who was in what room and distributed keys. Chris, wearing a blue "Pacific Hotel" apron, became the keeper of the unclaimed and duplicate keys. Self management was underway.
With Tico, a bilingual man from Argentina, translating, residents reported on negotiations, food, flyers, media and legal information. We announced that Seafirst's Hal Greene would come to the building at 11am the next day to respond to our demands.
Department of Construction and Land Use Director Rick Krochalis agreed to come to the building at 1:30pm to respond to our complaint that the building was in violation of the DHMO.
Before the meeting ended, we formed a Security Committee. That night 10 residents worked on a press release and made telephone calls to our supporters asking for donations and calls to Luke Helms.
Chris, the key keeper, had entered the Pacific through the second floor window in the first few minutes of the occupation. When I learned that Chris and his wife Elissa had been recently barred (for "fooling around" in a storage room) from the Downtown Emergency Service Center, Seattle's largest shelter, I began to understood Chris's enthusiasm for the takeover. He and Elissa had nowhere else to go.
Attendance at the 11am meeting with Seafirst, however, was good. At least 150 people crowded into a freshly cleaned lobby to hear Hal Greene and Brian Friend respond to our demands. Hal Greene read the bank's response from a one page letter. The bank only promised to "negotiate in good faith with a non profit" who is interested in buying the Pacific.
Although Greene wanted us to agree to leave the building, we told him that we needed to discuss his letter with all of the residents and we could not do that until evening. With some reluctance, but easily outnumbered if the question were put to a vote, he agreed to wait until the next morning at 9am for our response.
At the meeting, the residents decided to make a counter offer to Seafirst: We would peacefully vacate if Seafirst agreed to reopen the Pacific in two weeks and allowed OH to enter into a partnership with a non-profit to co-manage the building as a shelter. We felt reasonably secure that we could convince a local non-profit to join us.
After the meeting, residents telephoned OH supporters and asked them to come to the building in the morning to defend the occupation. Another group made flyers announcing the impending eviction and distributed them at homeless shelters.
We also sent out a press release announcing our offer to Seafirst. In case of eviction, we made flyers in English and Spanish announcing the time and location of the next OH meeting. We circulated around the Pacific a hand written version of our offer to Seafirst and it received 200 signatures. Although Seafirst was not offering much as far as our demands, we had exploited the negotiations enough to win another day. That security was a victory in itself.
It was apparent that Friend had been instructed to refuse any offer we presented. He squirmed uncomfortably in his seat as he claimed the bank had already given us commitments.
Seafirst needed the building vacant, he argued. Refusing to explain why, he then looked at his watch and said, "It's past 9am." We left the meeting and went back to the Pacific to report the unfortunate news to the larger group.
The outreach of the night before and early morning brought large numbers of people to help defend the occupation. The news of Seafirst's refusal to negotiate prompted anger among the residents.
Since Seafirst had only offered us a promise, chants of "Stay, Stay, Stay!" rose from the crowd when asked how they wanted to respond to Seafirst's demand that we vacate.
In front of the biggest media turnout of the occupation thus far, we denounced Seafirst for refusing an offer that would have sheltered hundreds of homeless people in a safe, functional building.
In just two days, a sense of pride had formed among the participants in the action. We had given life, value and spirit to a building that others had neglected. Pride, combined with the desperation of many of the homeless in the building, made the group unwilling to settle for anything short of their demands.
Later that morning, the Negotiating Committee met and decided to focus more of our pressure on the Mayor's Office. If we could not persuade Seafirst to negotiate, maybe we could convince the Mayor that a negotiated solution was better than police dragging scores of people from an abandoned building.
Furthermore, the Mayor could hold back the police which would give us more time to organize greater support. A delegation of residents went to see Bob Watt, the Deputy Mayor, and asked him to delay eviction while we looked for shelter space. They asked Watt to use the city's power to help us locate such a space.
He gave no concrete commitments and he received a barrage of questions (many of which he could not answer) from an increasingly angry group of nearly 200. We eventually asked him to leave so we could discuss our next steps. It was clear that neither Seafirst nor the Mayor had met our demands.
We took a break and then got back together to decide what to do. After much debate, the group decided that we had nothing to lose by remaining in the building. If the police came (many wondered why they had not come already), some people would get arrested and the rest of the group would sleep in front of City Hall.