Portland Dispatch February 1: Gormless

In Olympia Washington a newly organized Soros subsidiary calling itself Oly Housing Now, which appears to be an offshoot of Tacoma Housing Now, another brand new outfit, took over a Red Lion motel and was forcibly removed by police

Police in Washington state on Sunday night were evicting homeless people and activists from a hotel in downtown Olympia, after a group moved into the site and refused to leave until they were given shelter.

Police received multiple 911 calls from employees at the Red Lion around 11am on Sunday saying numerous individuals were entering their lobby armed with batons, knives and axes, King 5 News reported. 

One employee was assaulted as they tried to close the doors and the rest fled to the basement, according to an Olympia police spokesperson. 

The city has already conceded somewhat

Deitz said her group wants Thurston County to apply for funding that’s being offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay for ‘non-congregate’ shelter for people who are aged over 65, and vulnerable to COVID-19.

Oly Housing Now also released a list of demands for the city of Olympia that include providing sanitation, restrooms, and other ‘resources to meet the COVID-19 CDC hygiene recommendations.’

The city currently supplies several encampments with port-a-potties and dumpsters.

They also want additional ‘impact fees’ on luxury and commercial properties in the city, to fund the homeless programs.

Keylee Marineau, the Homeless Coordinator for Thurston County, told the paper she went to the hotel on Sunday and talked with organizers.

She said the county is looking into the federal funding program.

‘We’re actively pursuing avenues to understand how the homeless-specific funds for FEMA work,’ she said.

The activists, or the organizations behind them, have done their homework, and the city hasn’t. It will be a huge win and precedent if activists force this strategy on the city. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibility this is all kabuki coordinated with state and/or local politicians. In either case even partial victory for the anarchists here makes them a player.

The group released a statement

Two-month old Tacoma Housing Now couples its homeless advocacy with police abolition. The Red Lion action is part of a coordinated national movement to pivot away from Black Lives Matter advocacy into homeless advocacy with the vague but all-encompassing “Land Back” theme on behalf of the “Indigenous” overlaid over everything now, an invocation they see as negating all opposition.

The city has shelter beds, and as everywhere long-term housing comes with sensible strings attached regarding drug use and criminal behavior. Oly Housing Now et al reject these options as insufficient and overly restrictive.

Their long game appears to be to make themselves the responsible party for housing an endless stream of homeless, building a power base around that. Perhaps they envision eventually being responsible for free housing for a broad section of the population; a power-base that would make them formidable.

Meanwhile in Portland anarchists are organizing to prevent the clearing out of a 5 year-old tiny-house homeless encampment known as Hazelnut Grove. The city says the site is unsafe and wants to move them to a new tiny house village in St Johns (the site was vandalized recently). As with the Red Lion siege, homeless “advocates” won’t accept any city authority or action short of their own demands. Their aim is to wrestle this function away from the city and to expand it, along with their power. Activists demand housing on demand without restrictions. Upon the creation of camps like Hazelnut Grove, which the city has been trying to close for over two years, anarchists then step in to demand their preservation as such. The city isn’t outfitted to move entire camps about, and establishing that as a precedent would make it impossible to clear the streets of homeless campers, which of course is fine with our Axis of Anarchy–either the city capitulates and turns over its homeless policies to the anarchists or it’s forever framed as brutally clearing the streets of whole “communites”.

Gresham taco shop gets some BarStool Bucks

Uly’s Taco Bar gets the call. #BarstoolFund pic.twitter.com/G2UoNbTmHo

— The Barstool Fund (@BarstoolFund) January 31, 2021