For several years I was King County’s “Tobacco Tzar,” charged with creating, explaining, and enforcing rules and laws intended to limit the deadly effects of the leading preventable cause of death, cigarettes and tobacco. Even with all the controversy that swirled around the issue and me, we overcame opposition both within King County, public health, and from many people who thought eliminating second hand smoke was the vanguard of a puritanical purge of local culture. At a minimum, they said, banning smoking in most public places would put bars out of business (it didn’t). Through all this, there was one moment of breakthrough that stands out in my mind, something missing from todays endless fight over housing in Seattle.

One day one of my inspectors came to me with a warning notice he had issued to the Downtown Emergency Service Center’s (DESC) shelter on third. Someone in the shelter had complained that there was smoking going on in the shelter. The process, as yet untested, was that we’d issue successive notice and order documents and then eventually file an action in superior court against the business violating the new state law. Challenging smoking in the shelter was the right thing to do, and we knew this because our data pointed clearly to the fact that smoking was increasingly concentrating among the poor and especially among homeless people. We knew that meant they’d own the death and disease of the addiction as well.

It wasn’t long before the muckety-mucks were hurriedly convened and I was called on the carpet for trying to enforce the law in a homeless shelter. People from all parts of King County Government were at a big table looking at me like I was insane: homeless people smoke, they said, and there’s nothing we can or should do about it.

That was just plain ridiculous. But these people were worried about headlines and politics, the Executive at the time was on the hunt for higher office and we couldn’t have a headline that read, “County Shuts Down Homeless Shelter Over Smoking Ban.” Of course, they didn’t think about the other headline at all, “County Ignores State Smoking Law, Allows Addiction to Flourish Among Homeless.” That’s not how those people’s brains worked.

I had an idea, let me go talk to Bill Hobson about the issue. Hobson was the now legendary leader of DESC, and organization that revolutionized how homelessness, addiction, and mental health are confronted in Seattle. Before he died last March, Hobson was a leader and guru on harm reduction in the city. Hobson and I talked for a long time, well over an hour, about all kinds of things including our own lives and what brought us to our meeting. Finally he asked, “What are we going to do about this smoking thing?”

Hobson explained that he had to allow smoking in the shelter. He’d been under constant pressure from businesses and the City of Seattle to keep the shelter doors closed after a certain point. Allowing people in and out at night created problems on the street and in the shelter. Once someone was in the shelter, she was in, and going in and out to smoke would create a safety issue and more heat from the City and business about noise and activity on the street. It was an operational necessity, and Hobson said he’d pay the $100 a day fine if he had to in order to keep things as is. He had even spent money on a ventilation system. He’d just pay for the status quo, which was, at the time, better for people in the shelter than making them choose between smoking and shelter.

I didn’t want DESC’s money. I wanted people in his shelter and everywhere to stop smoking. That was our goal, and the notice and order was the hammer that had brought us together. What I proposed was that we kept enforcement in abeyance (the County never backed me up on enforcement, so it was kind of a bluff) and we’d try offering training for staff on cessation counseling and free Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) to clients who wanted to quit. Hobson liked the idea, and his staff was excellent in their work helping us design a database and protocol for training, offering help to clients with non-confrontational conversational counseling, and offering nicotine patches and other forms of NRT.

That was the easy part. But how would we train providers working in the shelter and throughout DESC about this new intervention? After all most of them smoked, and most of them likely held the same view people in public health and the County did: smoking is one of the last pleasures these people have. My staff and I started putting together the training. We’d point out that wealthy and affluent people and those with jobs and insurance were quitting in record numbers. We’d point out that the smoking ban and other incentives for people who were housed and employed were making it easier to quit. We’d show them that for poor people, the corporate world provided no help, no incentives, and in fact assumed poor people would smoke. We’d show the data that if the trend at the time continued, almost all people with money and jobs and housing would quit, and their clients would own the majority of the addiction.

Then we showed them this video:

I can still remember one tough looking caseworker at the back of the room who was, in my memory, standing with her arms folded and her jaw set as I spoke at the front of the room. After the video I always kind of got a little, just a little, choked up. I saw her and the whole room relax. I explained that the tobacco industry manufactures a product that is designed to addict, keep people addicted, and generate huge profits for publically traded companies. I think we even showed stock prices and Warren Buffet’s advice to investors about buying tobacco stocks.

The tension broken, our health educators then instructed about how to intervene, offering help to clients who wanted to quit. In the next few years I did dozens and dozens of these trainings in King County and from Alaska to West Virginia, and the rhythm was almost always the same. We’d start with tension and skepticism among providers to a realization that helping their clients break a corporate driven addiction wasn’t a take away, but a compassionate addition to their efforts to improve the health of their clients and save them precious dollars and cents.

It was a satisfying thing to be part of. It felt good to lead people to a realization that what they thought was an effort to clamp down more rules on their clients — to hurt them — was really an effort of compassion for them, a real and honest attempt to fight back against a corporate effort to profit from the addiction of their clients. And there was something they could offer and do to help.

A long story, I know. But here’s the thing: I don’t see or feel anything like this in the housing discussion. And it isn’t me or the other messengers about why building more housing will lower prices. It’s because the argument about prices is a red herring, offered as feint by entitled single-family homeowners to protect the equity in their investment. You see, we’re not really arguing about economics. If we were, the argument and the fight would have been over a long time ago. It’s about money.

Honestly, there are days when I become emotionally and intellectually exhausted by this whole battle we’re engaged in. I feel like I’m living in a Swiftian satire or in a Vonnegut novel. Like with the tobacco fight, this is made worse by the fact that people that should be firmly in alignment with our fight are busy trying to compromise with the enemy. The housing fight in Seattle defies plain logic and common sense; simple and tested solutions are discarded in favor of byzantine schemes with winners and losers. And there is precious little real compassion for people who are struggling to make ends meet; various groups make their point that building more housing makes life worse for poor people by using poor people as props. Statistics and anecdotes about people struggling are used to advocate for policies that will make the lives of those very people worse.

Anyway, I had to get that off my chest. I guess the good news is that only a few people have even read this far. For all the words and discussion of this issue, it all comes down to headlines on social media. Click! Click! Click! Like! Like! Like! And the Trump obsession seems to be growing, not fading.

Gimmicky, grass roots approaches won’t turn this around. I’m still thinking through what we must do next. I’m not very good at giving up. So I’ll let you know when I think of something.