Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
Serving up bowls of hypocrisy

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If you fear the homeless then you are ignorant, we said to our suburban neighbors. If you won't help people in need, you are cold-hearted. So now comes the news that the city of Seattle has banned church groups from feeding nighttime dinners to the homeless in a Pioneer Square park.

"They told me I was attracting 'undesirable elements,' " said Kay Abe, 77, who runs The Lord's Table, a group that until this week served 300 meals a night in City Hall Park.

So much for Seattle compassion. While the city historically has done its part to help the homeless, canceling 300 meals a night as the number of people on the streets is soaring doesn't really make the heart well up with love, does it?

The mayor's office says the dinner lines have been marred by fist-fighting, a knifing and other rowdiness. The decision to cancel the meals at night, but not in the day, is to get a handle on safety in the park.

That sure sounds reasonable. Public safety ought to be a top city priority.

But this park, dubbed "Muscatel Meadows," is filled with the homeless whether they are being fed or not. Without dinner they will still be there. They will just be hungrier.

We obviously need cops there, so why not post a few and let the people eat? Or at least help find another place for the dinners.

Now some are saying Mayor Greg Nickels is as heartless as those Bothell residents who showed up at a meeting with signs that read "No Hobos."

I'm not sure he deserves that. But his move was as clumsy as it was unimaginative. And it does make one wonder about his priorities.

For starters, the city has a $25 million budget gap — probably not the best time to cut a volunteer program that costs the city almost nothing.
 
Abe, 77, and her husband, Art, live off his pension while devoting her $1,000-a-month pension to the homeless.

She does it because she knows what it's like to be homeless. When she was a girl, she lived in a shelter after being released from the Minidoka Japanese internment camp.

So here's a woman who was persecuted by her own country but who has nevertheless dedicated her life to helping its neediest citizens, at her own expense. That basically makes her a saint.

City government ought to be falling all over itself to help her. Instead it has chosen this moment to thwart her.

"Here he is spending hundreds of hours on things like a streetcar to South Lake Union, and yet he can't solve a basic human problem right outside his front door," said Bill Hallerman of Catholic Community Services.

Tonight at 6:30, a church group intends to defy the mayor and serve dinners at the Third and Yesler park.

Unless Nickels wants to be known as the honorary mayor of Bothell, he ought to join them. And then help figure a way to get Kay Abe back in business.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com