Earlier this year, as the Seattle City Council found itself suddenly unanimously in favor of new city-sanctioned homeless encampments, there was one wrinkle that divided them: Should those encampments be allowed in residential areas?

Mayor Ed Murray didn't think so. In the encampment law he sent to the city council, the camps were only allowed in industrial and commercial parts of the city.

Council Member Kshama Sawant disagreed, so she introduced a plan to have the city study what it would look like if camps were allowed in residential areas. After some sneaky maneuvering from her colleagues, the study idea finally passed. New camps would only be allowed in commercial and industrial zones, but the city would study a possible future expansion.

Now that study is in. It shows 1,500 potential new locations for homeless encampments, but the mayor has no plans to change course.

The report from the city's planning department shows sites in residential areas that could be used for homeless encampments. The sites include things like parking lots and vacant lots and 46 of them are owned by the city.

The map of available sites doesn't take into account whether they follow requirements in the encampments law, like being close to transit stops. But it does prove that there are plenty of places in the city that could be home to new encampments if politicians wanted to take on that fight.

As KING 5 pointed out this morning, considering all the neighborhood outrage over allowing encampments in non-residential areas, you can imagine the shit show that would follow an effort to allow an encampment in a single-family neighborhood.

It's not much of a surprise, then, that the mayor says he has no plans to allow encampments in residential areas. It's unclear if Sawant has any plans to push for a change, though she probably wouldn't find enough votes on the city council to approve it. (Sawant and her staff are out of the office and largely unavailable until November 30.)

That means the city will press forward with the plan to allow three encampments only in commercial and industrial parts of town. Two of them opened this past weekend.

In a letter to the city council, Murray says he'll "remain focused on addressing our efforts to find permanent solutions to homelessness." (Murray recently declared a state of emergency on homelessness and dedicated new one-time money to the cause.)

One more thing about that letter: Murray writes that he plans to send the city council any proposed locations for a third city-sanctioned encampment for their approval. That's interesting since the last time he tried to pass that controversial decision on to the council they said "yeah, no thanks."

Here's the full report on allowing encampments in residential areas and here's the full downloadable map of available sites.