RANGE

Continuing our housing series with a dash of sprawl containment, farmland preservation, racial equity and environmental impact (not to mention crawdad fishing in Elk!), this week we talk with Kitty Klitzke, Spokane Program Director for Futurewise, an organization that works throughout Washington state to encourage healthy, equitable and opportunity-rich communities, and to protect our most valuable farmlands, forests and water resources through wise land use policies and practices.

We talked about the WA Can’t Wait campaign, supporting three new state bills that update the long-in-the-tooth Growth Management Act. The GMA, which was passed in 1990 and has been a core tool for communities statewide to curb sprawl, has concrete loopholes in need of closing and also needs some additional protections for racial equity and environmental impact not included in the original legislation. It’s additive work but essential if we want to put stronger controls on land use to ensure we build dense, vibrant urban clusters while preserving our wild spaces and farmland.

Because of the political dynamics of Spokane County, it’s been a historically vital piece of legislation and the bills currently before the legislature in Washington will close a loophole that has been especially destructive to native habitat and generational farmland on places like Five Mile and the Moran Prairie.

Plus, Kitty is just fun as hell to talk to.

We can almost guarantee it’s the most fun you’ll ever have talking about progressive land use policy.

And once you’re moved to act, you can do so here:

TAKE ACTION

Tell your reps to:

Close the vesting loophole

Create climate targets for greenhouse gas emissions and vehicle miles traveled

Require cities and counties to plan for

A diversity of housing types to meet the needs of families at all income levels, especially our extremely low to moderate-income families;

Provide emergency shelters, emergency housing, and permanent supportive housing

Implement policies and strategies to prevent community displacement from market forces

Implement policies to address the impacts of racially-biased, exclusionary, and discriminatory housing and land-use policies on our BIPOC communities.

If you like your RANGE, you can support it:

Edited by Connor BaconRecorded at Speak Studios. Check ‘em out.

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Hey y’all, it’s been a few weeks of pretty relentlessly depressing topics here at RANGE HQ so we thought we’d do something a little lighter.

Not like, light light, but still light-er.

Doing another film ep, this time talking about the Spokane Jewish Cultural Film Festival — which begins TONIGHT AT 7 PM! — with festival director and head of Spokane Area Jewish Family Services, Neal Schindler.

It’s a virtual event, so you can watch some great films and help a worthy local cause all without putting on pants, just the way we like it in 2021.

All film trailers, discussion schedules and details for buying tickets and passes can be found at the festival website.

Thanks, as always, to Connor Bacon for a tight, timely interview edit and to Simmental for our theme music.

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

This week on the pod we talk to Virla Spencer and Camerina Zorrozua of The Way to Justice, a newish non-profit that helps people get their lives back after run ins with the criminal legal system.

Cam works primarily in post-conviction relief — helping people who have been locked up — while Virla runs the re-licensing program, helping poor folks who have lost their drivers license due to an inability to pay fines or other reasons to create a path back to just having the basic mobility most of us take for granted.

These two are larger than life personalities separately. Together they’re pretty close to a force of nature.

If you like what you hear, you can support their work at www.thewaytojustice.com

Further Study

HOW IT STARTED: Blueprint for Reform | Creating an Efficient and Effective Regional Criminal Justice System

HOW IT’S GOING: Blueprint Status Report (not great tbh) 

Spokane County incarceration data - updated frequently

Senate bill that would end suspension of licenses for failure to pay fines.

and links to comment/support:

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The conclusion of our interview with the inimitable Terri Anderson, Spokane Director and Policy Lead for the Tenants Union of Washington this week on the podcast.

If you haven’t listened to PART 1, I really recommend you do so before diving in here. You’ll thank me later.

Things have not miraculously become perfect in the week since we posted the first episode, so it is still vitally important that you:

TAKE ACTION

Contact your state senator about:

SB 5160 | Offramp from the moratorium that helps tenants stay housed

SB 5169 | Prohibits rent increases for six months after the moratorium & limits increases to no more than CPI from six months to one year.

Contact your state reps about:

HB 1236 | Just cause evictions

HB 1300 | Damage deposit reform.

Contact the Tenants Union

Call 509-464-7620

Email Terri at [email protected].

FURTHER READING

“We’ve got a clock ticking”: Calls for help grow as end to Washington’s eviction moratorium inches closer | Spokesman-Review

GOOFS

It’s getting hot in here

If you like your RANGE, you can support it:

Edited by Connor BaconRecorded at Speak Studios. Check ‘em out.

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

Even after we manage to contain the public health crisis brought on by Covid-19, the danger isn’t over in Spokane. The economic crisis has left thousands of people without steady employment and, as a result, thousands of our neighbors are behind on their utility bills and behind on rent.

This almost exclusively affects the poor, and because of our nation’s legacy of white supremacy and Spokane’s history of redlining, that burden disproportionately impacts people of color.

It’s not a good scene.

Washington state has a temporary eviction moratorium in place but that’s like a finger in the dike. It’s holding back disaster for now, but unless we take serious action, there’s no stopping a flood of evictions.

The good news is, there’s a path to mitigating the short term crisis while also creating a fairer and more just legal and support system for renters from here on out.

We talk about all of this and more with Terri Anderson, Spokane Director and Policy Lead for the Tenants Union of Washington this week on the podcast.

TAKE ACTION

Contact your state senator about:

SB 5160 | Offramp from the moratorium that helps tenants stay housed

SB 5169 | Prohibits rent increases for six months after the moratorium & limits increases to no more than CPI from six months to one year.

Contact your state reps about:

HB 1236 | Just cause evictions

HB 1300 | Damage deposit reform.

Contact the Tenants Union

Call 509-464-7620 

Email Terri at [email protected].

FURTHER LISTENING

EPISODE 20 | House Money feat. Ben Stuckart

FURTHER READING

The impending rental tsunami | Spokesman-Review

GOOFS

It’s getting hot in here

If you like your RANGE, you can support it:

Recorded at Speak Studios. Check ‘em out.

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

In this week’s episode we take a brisk 30-minute jaunt through some new polling data that confirms, yep, the rest of Spokane County wants a jail about as badly as we do — which is to say: NOT. AT. ALL.

It’s encouraging news for everyone from reformists to prison abolitionists to get this sort of poll result in a Republican-leaning county like Spokane.

But the real kicker is when the pollsters asked people if they’d vote to raise their taxes in order to fund addiction treatment and homelessness services.

For the answer to that question, you’ll have to listen.

Past No Jail Content

Spokane let people out of jail. Crime went down | RANGE

EPISODE 010 | Independence Day feat. the Bail Project | RANGE

EPISODE 011 | Independence Day (cont) | RANGE

Further Perusing:

Spokane County officials revisit plans for a new jail | KREM

Change Research | The pollsters

Fuse Washington | The org that paid for it

Goofs

Fetch!

Cool people support RANGE

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

Listen now | Hey y’all! Amazing conversation about cooperatives this week with Joel Williamson, one of the co-founders of LINC Foods and the Grain Shed. We talk about coops as an organizational and business structure that is not just inherently more ethical for the workers who work within that system, it also more effectively traps capital in our communities, building resiliency through the entire system.

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

Listen now | Friend of the pod and Gonzaga professor Joan Braune — noted critical theorist and Nazi disliker — joins to talk about how language shapes the way we view reality and how the blanket usage of words like “terrorism” and “extremism” — even when explicitly describing right wing violence like last week’s attack on the Capitol building — might actually do more harm than good by incorrectly and unfairly lumping the emancipatory struggle of the left with the oppressive projects of the far right.

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

This week on the pod we zig a little into our first film crit episode, and chat with local filmmaker Benji Wade about Hillbilly Elegy, a movie that has been on everyone’s lips since it came out in time for the election.

It’s the not-so-riveting story of how a poor white kid from Southeast Ohio overcame generational trauma through nothing but his own pluck and grit (or so the film would have you believe), attended Yale Law School, went to work for Peter Thiel — one of the great monsters of recent American history — and eventually moved back to Cincinnati to start a non-profit that helps, like, train unemployed coal miners and steelworkers how to code, or something.

Seems a little far-flung to what we usually talk about on RANGE, but the plight of poor people in extractive economies in Appalachia is pretty similar to the plight of poor people in extractive economies in the Inland Northwest, and this movie is a masterclass in blaming the poor for their plight.

So yeah, a topic ripe for RANGE. 

The movie is bad, but the conversation is good, and Benji and I took the time to cobble together a mountaintop worth of other actually good coal-country (and coal-country-adjacent) content for you to remove into your ear- and eye-holes.

That was a coal mining joke. You’re welcome.

Referenced in the episode

Review: Ron Howard's Rust Belt Saga Is Yokel Hokum

Review: Everything about Netflix’s Hillbilly Elegy movie is awful

Slavoj Zizek explains Ideology

What is “White Trash”?

Better things to watch than Hillbilly Elegy

Harland County, USA

Matewan

Coal Miner’s Daughter

Junebug

This Boy’s Life

Justified (prime Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins content)

Better things to listen to than Hillbilly Elegy

“Listen to Dolly Parton Instead”

Anything Loretta Lynn

Death in the West podcast

Better things to read than Hillbilly Elegy

Educated by Tara Westover

The Enchantments of Mammon by Eugene McCarraher

Goofs 

Bar none the best TV theme song ever

Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard

Get full access to RANGE at www.rangemedia.co/subscribe

Got some hot pod-on-pod action this week. We were joined for this very special Christmas-adjacent podcast by Chris Bovey and Bryce Neusse of the Broken podcast.

We talk about how the dudes lost their respective churches but rediscovered their faith in the wake of George Floyd, and how they feel like their calling now is to slay the biggest hypocrisies in the evangelical faith while considering themselves evangelicals.

For them it comes down to trying to live a life that is less like Joel Osteen and more like one Jesus Christ (For our unreligious listeners: he was the guy on the cross).

Luke also opens up about his childhood in the evangelical church, the traumas that pushed him out and his hope for more people like Chris and Bryce. Friends, it’s A LOT.

GET INVOLVED

Chris and Bryce feed houseless neighbors on Pacific and Division Sundays at 11

FURTHER STUDY  

Broken podcast

Spokane Vintage Prints

Background on the Halabja Massacre (BBC, Wikipedia)

GOOFS

“God Bless us every one” (OG version)

“This is how Michael Caine speaks” (the Trip)

“A large, absent-minded spirit”

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