The head and heart of the Eastside

The departure of Doreen Marchione from full public view marks a moment of pause on the Eastside, as it should in metropolitan Seattle.

Marchione has been president and CEO of Hopelink — a human-services agency — for 14 years. Before that, she was mayor of Redmond, when it was on the brink of turning global, for eight years. I've known her for much of that time, and spoke with her a couple of weeks ago when she announced her retirement from Hopelink. After the blitz of news reports about her retirement, we are left with a legacy and some thoughts about places of the heart and places on the map.

Hopelink is a $40 million-a-year agency that offers things like 24-hour transportation, emergency housing and food banks to a growing clientele on the Eastside. The land of manna has, it turns out, a constant demand for services for the poor, the indigent and the out-of-luck.

Standing with her some years ago on the food line in the Redmond offices ofHopelink, I noticed the flow of donated rice, beans, powdered milk and cans of meat was more of a rivulet than a stream. But it grew each year during good times or bad, as the Eastside grew in richness and poorness.

Now, the complicated vein of domestic strife and itinerant lives flows through each community, no matter its per-capita income. On the Eastside, the poor are rarely out on the streets, but they sleep in their cars and calculate the cost of finding a day's work against the price of a gallon of gasoline.

"To be able to live here, that's the key," Marchione said. "Housing is so high, it drives everything. At the same time, I'll say tent cities are not the answer to the homeless question. The chronically homeless need something more. They need the strength of families. And I keep reminding myself, 'We are not here to fix them, we are here to help them.' "

Now, with Hopelink aiding 50,000 people a year and not the 20,000 it did a decade ago, the need continues to rise. Marchione says the idea that the Eastside is rich is an old idea, one that probably never was true.

In truth, there are no safe havens, not by a long shot.

Marchione's Eastside looks a lot different than the image, since it is not measured in wealth but in efficiencies. Hopelink has administration costs of 8 percent — the 92 percent left goes to services, much of it early and quick.

"If a family gets evicted, the idea is to get them into an apartment for transitional housing," she said. She has a long list of those who made it out of their crisis, and probably a private list of those who didn't.

Within the realm of bleeding hearts, there is also a place for the practical and the hard-headed. Defeated out of public office, Marchione did something else. What that was turned out to be a definition of the Eastside. Hopelink crosses the invisible divides of the Eastside, from town to town and high-rise to immigrant community. The walls inside the Eastside have to be studied hard before they are seen, but they exist as in every place where there is a stepladder to success and one going down to an eviction notice.

Once, I wrote a column on why I thought West Seattle and Kirkland are essentially the same, and got hooted for it. The reasons are so obvious why the Eastside and Seattle are different places, different hearts and minds. But they are not. Just ask Doreen Marchione.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com