Of course most English speakers would consider sweeping and cleaning up synonyms.

However you refer to them they sure are necessary. It is astounding how much filth accumulates every night. I see the workers bagging it and hauling it off every morning from City Hall Park yet without fail the next morning there will still be multiple trash bags, stuffed to the brim, with ever more trash.

I question the city's definition of "quick". Perhaps the WSDOT needs to clear out the encampments below the freeway as it's state property, but at least along the Express Lanes, camps will be set up for weeks, and the cleanup takes weeks after that.

So much for the 5-year Plan.

Ed is just having his cake and eating it too. This is not a surprise to me since earlier this year the city successfully removed the requirement to need to have a state employee present when homeless encampments are removed.

It's entirely possible to clean a camp without forcing the occupants to go (and as Tim Harris says, there's usually nowhere for them to go): Provide trash bins or dumpsters. Consider how much trash you'd accumulate if you didn't have garbage service.

It would be nice if the city could assign some priority to the camps that are obvious bicycle chop shops. No way homeless folks own many bikes, some obviously well beyond their means. Spread the word that there's no tolerance for bike theft, accumulating shopping carts, and other behavior that makes life worse for the rest of us. Use limited resources on the folks that can't play nice and give the folks that just pitch a tent while keeping a clean camp a bit more latitude.

What happened to the "Building Boom" of Seattle?

By now supply should have caught up and exceeded demand.

Homeless could be put in all the vacancies as prices drop to the floor.

If the "homeless" in Seattle are tired of being booted, tell them to clean up their mess!

Well said, Tim Harris; ""There’s this perennial issue whenever the city does sweeps," Harris said. "They want to pay for more outreach workers… but the reality is the pipeline for services is so overwhelmed they don't really have anywhere meaningful to get people to. The shorthand for that is 'outreach to nowhere.'"

@9: that's been anecdotally common for a while now - i remember a mother and daughter who'd driven here from the midwest for that reason, and that was 20 years ago.

seattle offers more homeless services (food, laundry, showers, tolerance) than most cities, and it's climate is survivable, so it's become a magnet. "we" (seattle) won't solve our problem until the nation solves it's problem. which is to say, we won't solve our problem. the 5 year plan was doomed at the start.

with half the nation accusing the other half of wanting "free stuff", there is no political will to spend the money needed to rescue the recoverable and shelter the addicted.

If trash is a problem then provide trash pickup to established encampments. Any of us who are housed expect no less.

If public defecation and urination is a problem then provide access to toilets where people can relieve themselves. Those of us who are housed have our own bathrooms and would not live without them.

Where criminal activity occurs, that becomes a law enforcement responsibility and should be addresses by focusing on the individuals committing those criminal acts. Sweeps do nothing to solve the problem of crime.

PLEASE homelessness is a crisis but it is NOT a crime. People may camp "illegally" when there is no other option. The Emergency Proclamation on Homelessness makes it clear that there are not sufficient options for people without homes in our city.

The US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) August 6th statement in a Boise, ID court case states that camping bans where there is no other option may well be unconstitutional and violate the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” (http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-de…)

@10, please cite the data you have that makes you so certain that Seattle offers more homelessness services than most cities. Which of those "most cities"? All I'm certain is that we found more than 2,800 people outside with no shelter in Seattle this past January, but according to yesterday's edition of the New York Times, there are only about 3,100 people without shelter in New York City. I think you would agree that New York City is rather bigger and more populous than Seattle, yet it has only 200 more homeless people without shelter than we do.

So much for what Seattle offers its homeless citizens.