The Power of Millennials

 So I have watched a lot of millennial prank videos, stumbled on a lot of feel good ones. Originally I had expected a bunch of those really messed up pranks that my generation was and is quite popular for, and was so pleased to see none of that.

What I did discover was a few wealthy millennials with a lot of money and time, bored because they're rich, pranking people and giving them a lot of money and stuff in the end just to thank them for being a good sport. These videos show much more than that, and that in itself was really uplifting.

Big Daws TV is one of the groups doing these pranks, and they do some old fashioned pranks as well. So of course I saw those as well, and what stood out for me was that they were completely harmless.

Then I noticed a disturbing trend, something that shocked me to the core: of all their marks the millennials had the best reactions. Not best as in "most shocking of all time", but best as in laid back, so laid back.

Of course they get a bit shocked and surprised, but they don't swing, scream, or start attacking the pranksters. So these millennials that everyone else calls "entitled" or "weak" are really giving and laid back.

So if "entitled" means "giving money to people who need it when you have more than you need", then I hope they continue to be entitled. If being "weak" means "not attacking someone because they catch you off guard" then I hope they continue to be weak.

What we're seeing is our species finally becoming more humane, and these are a generation inheriting a pretty fucked up world. From allowing climate change to get out of hand to allowing our law enforcement to become tyrannical, and these youth are doing what they can to help fix the problems we started.

I'm embarrassed to be middle aged, not because I'm "old" but because others in my generation are insulting and attacking people who are doing the right thing.

Compass Housing: Archaic Trogolodytes

 So we finally get a forward thinking manager for The Karlstrom. One would think that was awesome news, however for us who live here it's like nothing changed.

The reason is that Compass Housing Authority won't even listen to the people they hire, instead they choose to do the same bullshit. So here is a list of things they do wrong, and all of them could be so easily corrected if they'd just embrace new technologies.

1. No Communication

If you send anyone an email, and you are lucky enough to get a response, it's no less than 7 days before you get said response. It's as if none of them check their messaging systems but for the two hours they spend in the office.

There are several possibilities as to why, from really inexperienced tech department to plain old laziness. There is no department email address system either, it's all to individuals using predetermined email addresses which the staff have zero control over.

This is straight out of the handbook of "how to handle this new thing called the internet" from the 1980s. Given today's environment, checking email should be an hourly thing and the staff should have a mobile app available to check it on the go as well.

2. Bad Web Design

Their website is generic, bland, and something that could easily be thrown together from a Wix template in about five minutes. Ironic given that they claim to have an IT department.

So it makes you wonder if they are even receiving emails. A short time ago it was discovered that their email system was filtering out most of the emails that were being sent to them.

3. No Modern Payment Methods

This one makes them seem suspicious as well as inept, given that the most secure and accessible payment methods are with credit card systems. These are inexpensive and easy systems to setup, and yet they are insisting on using the archaic, insecure, and often very slow methods of payment for rent while pretty much every other organization which manages low income housing offers a credit card payment system.

The new manager has been trying to convince them to implement such a system, which can be setup overnight by any competent technology or financial professional. Yet nearly eight months later no such system has been employed.

4. No Accountability

Often companies they employ for any task are unheard of, almost not internet presence and sometimes their office location on Google points to a residential house. Then when the residents file a complaint about the services, CHA tells us to complain to that company, then that company tells us to either complain to CHA or fuck off.

We have a laundry facility that can't even wash sheets well, and then whenever new residents move in with bed bugs we end up with a massive infestation. These are new problems, relatively, that started when they sold off the expensive laundry machines that were installed in the building when it first opened.

The machines we had were not prefect, mind you, but they were functional and didn't require cash to operate. The company they replaced it with not only remains elusive and avoids all contact with residents, their machines are from the late 1980s and are designed for low and infrequent use.

When attempting to discuss this issue with them, the best we can hope for is occasional access to their better facilities used for cleaning the laundry from the shelters. If the company they contracted cannot provide machines which could work for shelters, what makes them think it would work for an apartment building?

5. Retaliatory Practices

A few of their staff will watch the social media of the residents, thankfully they don't know how to do this well because they do response to any criticism with anger. Given they are also constantly looking for things to hang over the heads of the residents as threats for eviction, this is really bad practice and looks suspiciously like they are attempting to silence any criticism.

Several residents have mentioned as much, many too paranoid to even complain to the authorities which are supposed to hold CHA accountable for their actions. When a resident mentions anything to them, CHA will hold onto that and blow it out of proportion, even making up complaints from "some neighbors" even when no neighbor has made any official complaint.

Now it is possible the neighbors are just too afraid to talk to each other, but this would be in response to the fact that CHA has created such an environment by ignoring legitimate complaints, delaying repairs, and blaming some residents for the damage caused by other residents who have routinely flooded the building. When pressed on any issue, the staff complain about their insurance rates increasing while defending the very people who caused it and moving more such people into the building.

As I write this, the residents in the apartments above mine are smoking marijuana, which they have done almost daily since the COVID lockdown. These are the residents responsible for so much damage to the building, and the property of those of us who have caused no damage to the building.

Instead of even considering compensating us who have lost property, then making things right by fixing out broken services, they defend and protect the ones who actually caused the damage. To make matters worse, they blame those of us who have been harmed by these incidents for the results of the damage.

My newest neighbor has brought with him bed bugs, which would not have been a problem if we had functioning laundry facilities which were easily accessed. As it is, there is no way to launder the linen so I have to spray poisons almost every day to keep up with the invasion.

There is also a resident selling drugs out of their apartment here, and though I don't know who it is nor how valid that accusation is, it would not be surprising if that was true.

Compass Housing Alliance is one of the most dysfunctional and archaic organizations in the system, a far cry from the original Compass Center that maintained the building to high standards, kept very strong relations with the residents, and took responsibility for their role when things did go south.

You can't complain about insurance rates increasing when you remove amenities that helped maintain the building and protect those who are flooding units regularly.

Fuck Washington, Especially Seattle

So my problems when I was young, growing up in western Washington (mostly Covington), I had no support from anyone. My mother was psychologically abusing me, even the teachers knew something was wrong but back then no one thought psychological abuse was a thing.

So instead of getting me the help I needed, they would just punish me for my odd behavior. I had no one to turn to, being trans and atheist for as long as I could remember.

In school I avoided the popular kids, even though they often wanted me to hang out with them. Most of the time I was far more happy with cats, dogs, pretty much any other species by my own.

After turning 18 I was lost, no aim, no goals, because I didn't even know who or what I was. All I could do was strive to survive, and that I did well.

I picked up a set of skills, which would better serve some super secret agent in a fictional movie than any real human. After having helped many people and a lot of cats, I was diagnosed with disability and locked into a system that does what it can to keep you there, no matter who is in charge.

The only thing I could look forward to was that one day I could get some surgery and feel happy about my body. Then a medical doctor who was a bastard in Virginia Mason decided to lie and remove my hopes of getting that surgery by having me declared suicidal just because I disagreed with him on something unrelated.

So now I had only one thing to live for, a single cat who I would raise from a kitten and have for their entire life. A cat who I could say "I remember when he/she was so tiny."

That cat was going to be Rhodey, a wonderful black cat with a shady past who got really lucky. Healthy and happy, friendly to everyone, and I was forgetting all my problems focusing on taking care of him and his sister.

I looked so forward to the next twenty years, I probably won't live much longer after that because of a few health related problems and the mistake of smoking tobacco. But at least when I died I would be happy to have had this one thing.

Then, only a year after I had brought him home, our home was flooded and Compass Housing Alliance did not follow through with the repairs, forcing us to live with mold, no kitchen, and exposed insulation. Rhodey lost two pounds in about six months, scared I took him to the vet.

Everything seemed okay, and the vet assumed it was his teeth. I took that diagnosis because it was something I could directly help with.

Brushing his teeth regularly, I hoped he would regain the lost weight and start growing again. But he didn't, though he didn't seem to lose anymore weight.

A few years later, last year in fact, I took him to renew his vaccines and have him checked on. I was correct, he had not gained weight, so they did a full blood work on him.

It was expensive, but I was desperate now, I was worried, tense, scared. A few days later I got the email back, everything looked perfect, as in perfectly healthy, as in what I was doing was great for him, except ...

That except was kidney disease, when I read it I felt numb, fear, rage, hatred, washing over me, all at once. It was obvious who was responsible for it, a disease caused by environmental toxins, a thing which he was only exposed to during the time of the flooding.

Seattle had taken the last two things I loved from me. This vampiric city that masquerades as "environmentally friendly" and a place for equality.

Seattle, the city where everyone will tell you they care about you, as long as you don't rock the boat. Seattle and Compass Housing Authority, the people that claims to be animal friendly while complaining about the extra strong urine small caused by a cat who suffers because they poisoned him.

The last good employee for Seattle Housing Authority, the one who demanded that Compass Housing Alliance actually finish the repairs for the flooding that was caused by a drunk who passed out, retired the same day he did that wonderful thing. The last person who cared about the poor, the needy, the ones truly in danger, retired with one last loving act, though too late, I will always remember that he was the last good person in the Seattle government, perhaps in all of western Washington, perhaps in the entire country of the USA.

Rhodey, My Baby Boy

Three years ago I brought home this tiny ball of fluff. At six weeks old, he was covered in ringworm and looking for a loving home.

Typically I only adopt adult felines, ones which don't have any annoying phases of development that I have to deal with. But Pepper would not accept an adult so my options were limited.

Pepper was still unsure of me, and I needed to bring her out of her shell so I took a chance. Bringing this little adorable boy home did just what we needed, and Pepper is now a very loving and trusting cat because of it.

But one year after I brought him home our apartment was flooded, and Compass Housing Authority did nothing to complete the repairs for a very long time. During this time Rhodey lost two pounds, but was otherwise looking quite healthy.

The vet said it might just be the stress, which kept me at ease and I just tried really hard to find a treat he would love enough to eat all up. But a year passed and no change, so we went in for a checkup last month and they decided to do an in depth check.

Everything came back as "normal", except one thing, his kidneys were not functioning correctly. The vet found he was suffering chronic kidney disease.

Usually caused by exposure toxins, it reduces their life expectancy significantly. Toxins like mold and mildew caused by massive flooding of an apartment which we were forced to live in during his development.

I have been fighting my own brain to accept this, the tiny runt I had come to love so much, the runt I had hoped to get at least twenty years with, I will have no more than five or six years in total. Thanks to the vile monsters who run Compass Housing Alliance, the monsters who dragged the name Compass through the toxic mud.

Since I got the news I struggle every day to do anything, I struggle to keep a smile on my face, I struggle to get out of bed at all. I struggle to live. I will never forgive Compass Housing Alliance for this, may they all suffer long and painful deaths on the streets, forgotten and alone.

Fuck Musicians

I will never spend money on musicians again, ever. The reason for this is copyright trolls who act on behalf of these musicians, who only encourage the trolls.

This problem is destroying YouTube, and YouTube can't do anything about it. The only people who could do something about it are the musicians, yet as I stated before, they encourage the trolls.

To make it worse, things like parodies and using snippets in a vlog or some other video is free advertising, and yet rather than be grateful for this free advertising they attack people who do that for them. Since I lost monetization anyway, every video they claim I remove, no exceptions.

I will not give free advertising to a musician who employs these trolls, nor will I buy any more of their music. I have even gone a step further and started selling the CDs of the music from these musicians for a much higher profit than they got when I initially bought them because they are all collector items.

My favorite musicians are the ones who do not employ these trolls, the rest of you can just fuck right off.

Why Agencies Are Bad For Non-Profit Organizations

A non-profit's income should be very near zero, of course this is after administrative costs. For housing this is a very challenging point to get, maintenance alone can bring an apartment complex into the red and devastating failures caused by lacking maintenance can drop that even more, not to mention actual damages done by the residents.

There are many issues residents will face that will cause damage to units, often without intent from the resident but by the very nature of the medical problem. Let's take the example of surgery, a very common occurrence for vulnerable members of society.

The wounds caused by surgery will take time healing, during this time blood will be likely to come from the wound. This blood will get onto lots of surfaces, which inevitably cause stains which cannot be cleaned up.

Often surgeries will add even more challenges, and more sources of refuse which will inevitably cause damage. Now a good organization will have a manager on site for the majority of the week, and said manager would know what was going on at all times even when not on site.

All residents would know who said manager is as well as have multiple ways in which to contact this manager. Transparency would be nearly complete, communication lines would never be blocked or severed without notice, and whenever an issue arose it would be well documented and taken care of without anyone getting put out or harmed.

A management agency is a for profit business, they want their employees to move their company into the green as much as possible, and there is no obligation for them to take a profit loss even if they are hired by a non-profit organization. So they make promises to reduce costs, and you hire them for that.

Well now the costs include their administration, the business owners, share holders, CEO, etc. As well as their employees, all of them.

So how do they "cut costs"? They reduce the number of hours the manager is on site, and it's reduced to an insane amount.

Given a typical business, you will want a management staff or team on duty for at least 2 more hours per day than the business is in operation. An apartment is, essentially, a business that is open for 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.

That's 168 hours per week, which is the same as saying 168 hours work that needs to be done. Apartments are a laid back business, often the manager is only necessary for about half that amount of actual work, however to accomplish that they must be on call and ready to show up at the property every hour of every day.

Agencies do not accommodate that cheaply, for the typical landlord they can increase rent a bit to help pay for better services and most renters are more than happy to accommodate that increase. But for public housing, non-profit, such a method is not viable nor supported by the state.

So the management agency will reduce the number of hours a manager is on site to level which forces these managers to accomplish at least 80 hours work in about 2 hours. This saves the agency plenty of money, they are in the green because of the contract, but the organization which has hired them is suddenly dealing with major damage caused by neglect, tenants being unable to contact a manager when necessary, and a manager who often sells off the organization's property to cut even more corners.

The agency will stay in the green, earning a profit as that is what they are suppose to be doing, while the non-profit organization is in the red so much that they face having to declare bankruptcy. Regular maintenance is so vital to an apartment building, even if something as simple as pipe inspections are neglected can result in massive flooding damage which cascades into neighboring units all the way to the ground floor.

A simple pipe leak, which would be detected and repaired with simple inspections, can explode into millions of USD in expensive repairs. Without a reliable manager on site capable of ensuring such inspections occur unhindered, the massive damage becomes inevitable.

Ultimately not only are the residents made to suffer what is essentially a slum, the organization begins to collapse under all that debt, and the end result is more people back on the streets with nowhere to live. This is what we are seeing happen in real time at Compass Housing Alliance, and the management agency is pushing the blame onto the residents to add insult to injury.

Seattle Housing Authority is unwilling to step in to correct this, the city turns a blind eye to this volatile situation, and Compass is trying to pretend they still have everything under control when they clearly do not. If we want to fix homelessness, this is one of those practices that needs to end as it does not help anyone involved.

The Long Tale of Corruption

How has Compass Housing Alliance changed for the worse? A question that is not asked often enough, it seems.

As Compass Center they were the pinnacle of social services, one of the best that all others could look up to, where those in need found someone who actually cared. This resulted in them getting the bulk of donations from local businesses, enough to fund reconstruction of their offices and a new apartment building fully furnished and ready for occupancy.

But now they struggle, trying to make ends meet and getting no donations to replace the amenities they sell off to pay for office parties and new chapels. That statement should make their mistakes very clear, but the repercussions are long standing and cut much deeper than you'd expect.

Local businesses were already reluctant to assist most social services due to the corruption and the fact that almost everyone they supposedly helped was still unable to meet even basic sanitary standards. But Compass Center residents were clean and presentable to a point that we always blended in with the other customers.

So when the earthquake hit in 2002, the organization had to get money for extensive reconstruction. To get the support of local businesses they offered to turn half of the building into apartments which would be run less like a shelter for the more stable clients using their services.

The result was the Karlstrom, which had all amenities and personal living spaces and very few restrictions on the residents. We were treated like people, and it was managed by a no nonsense manager who took regular maintenance so seriously that she would schedule maintenance inspections monthly to come in and ensure everything was working.

It was great, a wonderful apartment and the residents left good impressions on those who had donated to this project. Seattle had known of no low income apartment building with a better track record for keeping pretty much everyone happy and cooperative.

The Karlstrom was supposed to be a flagship building, a new standard to which all others could be compared to so that when the bulk of staff left Compass Center for retirement, schooling, or new careers those who took over would have the standard already set. Sadly their dream of helping people was destroyed by those hired to take their place.

For the first few years it was just a small amount of chaos as we awaited a new manager to be assigned, so we could get everything back on track. What we got was the beginning of a nightmare, Peter Madril was first appointed, and with him came several new residents which we can only surmise he hand picked from his other program.

Fine, we got some new neighbors, but these were not the same class of neighbor the rest of us had become accustomed to. One on my floor was abusive toward several residents to the point that we had to file complaints of assault on him, he died a few weeks ago and is not missed, but that's a story for later.

Then they sold off the laundry facilities that one of the businesses had donated specifically to this building. Suddenly they were struggling for money to the point of having to cut corners everywhere, including essential maintenance in the building, delaying repairs caused by flooding for years at a time, and having almost no staff present at any given time.

There were no emergency staff to contact, no organization, nothing left but an apartment building lacking basic essential amenities and maintenance which the organization was slowly taking over by storing their old files and supplies in the rooms now vacant after removing the amenities. Carpets with mold growing under them, walls with mold growing in the insulation, and toilets breaking from wear and tear because they have not been replaced in over a decade.

Now to add insult to injury, they remodeled the chapel in the building and hired some new preacher in place of taking care of the people who relied on their organization. Makes you wonder why a religious chapel would take priority over people here.

Our fire alert system has not been updated in over a decade either, wall heaters have not been cleaned or maintained in about that same time, and sinks are routinely clogging at the base of the building. To get any response from them requires many attempts to contact the staff, and most times we don't even know who to contact.

Then the belligerent neighbor dies, which was a huge drama as he was in the hallway attacking another neighbor while suffering what appeared to be a stroke. Others say it was more than a stroke, but I like to give the benefit of the doubt.

He had a cat living with him, a female the same age as my Rhodey. Now Rhodey is slightly underweight at 7.4 lbs because he has a kidney disease, he should be around 9 lbs if he was healthy.

Six days after he died, during which time two of the neighbors were trying to contact the staff over and over again to get the cat from the apartment, they finally got her to safety and she weighed five lbs. Now when I contacted the only person I can get hold of, Kelli Hurley denied that all this happened, all of it except the death that is.

Then she added that someone else had died and made a snarky remark about me not caring. Here's the thing, I don't care, they're already dead and living people take priority over dead people every time.

Using dead people as an excuse to ignore living people is a huge problem and one that many rumored to have started the whole mess. Remember Peter Mardil, they had informed us that it was the death of someone in one of the other buildings he managed that caused him to simply lose his interest in doing his job.

Assuming what they told of us Peter, which I doubted until tonight, it appears there is a big problem with them wanting people to die in their care so they can use these deaths politically. The problem is that this kind of tactic actually works.

People will donate a lot of money to help the organization deal with the dead person but no one cares at all for the living people who the organization now wants to die. If you see the problem then please do me a favor and contact Compass Housing Authority on every website you can to let them know how fucked up this is, or contact Seattle Housing Authority and let them know you don't approve.

https://www.compasshousingalliance.org/

https://www.seattlehousing.org/