The chain-link fence blocked a sign at Seven Hills Park on Capitol Hill. “WELCOME TO SEATTLE PARKS,” it reads. “This park is yours to enjoy.”
But not today, or tomorrow. For the next 53 days, this park is supermax. By the time the fence comes down, all sales at Spirit Halloween will be final.
The city put up the fence without notice on August 28, a response to “bouts of negative park activity,” writes Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation spokesperson Rachel Schulkin. The park, which is next to the “Sanctuary” condominiums in the former First Church of Christ Scientist, is getting “possible amenity changes,” she says. They “could include: removal of various park elements, adding surrounding park fencing, addition of new amenities such as lighting, garden beds, or new planters.”
To translate, “bouts of negative park activity” is spokesperson slang for encampments, and “possible amenities” possibly means infrastructure hostile to sleeping, sitting, and being. It’s a typical anti-homeless policy. To celebrate Labor Day weekend, the city also placed fences in Lake City Mini Park and around the pavilion at Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park in the Central District, and it might not stop there. Depending how community meetings shake out, Parks might close Broadway Hill and Tashkent Parks for similar modifications, Schulkin says.
The city didn’t say more than that, though The Stranger asked whose idea this was and why residents didn’t know about it. City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth’s office told The Stranger to reach out to parks for answers to our questions, which included if she, as an elected official, thought this strategy addressed homelessness in a meaningful way, and what it would even solve. So we went to the people, the streets, for answers.
The corner of 16th and Howell St. is busy, even at 10 a.m. Five tourists pass by. One of them, Leah, didn’t care for the fence.
“Tell them Atlanta, Georgia said ‘fuck that!’” she says, and whips out her middle finger.
The shout grabs Liz McCarty’s attention, who met us on the street. She’s rented here for 10 years. She wanted to talk; so did her cat Leaf, who meowed loudly from an open window. Her partner soon brought him out, cradled in his arms, manipulating Leaf like a balloon animal. They balked at the city’s improvement plan.
“They’re talking about upgrading the park,” McCarty’s partner says, pointing to a withered tree. “That tree on the corner has been fucking dead for three to five years.”
“We’ll see if they work on that for the reset,” McCarty says. “I’m guessing they won’t.”
Over the weekend, McCarty and her partner planned to walk Leaf to the park. They opened their front door and saw the fence. There was no communication, no signage, only a phone number for the contractor. Her partner immediately reported the fence on the city’s Find It Fix It app.
“Litter in the park,” he shrugged.
The couple is heavily involved in their community, which consists of apartment buildings, several condos, a smattering of mental health facilities, an assisted-living facility, and a retirement home. Everybody uses the park. It’s where bike rides end, seniors play music, and people sit smoking cigarettes. It’s a third place, McCarty says.
And a place where people sleep. There were six tents before the fence went up, where a group of people and two dogs lived. They were “chill,” she says, and clean. They strung their garbage bags in the trees, so animals wouldn’t get into them, and disposed of their waste in cat litter. The neighbors’ habit of “off-leash dogging,” was a bigger nuisance, McCarty’s partner says. (The dog poop outside their building has increased tenfold, they say.)
McCarty says her partner, who works in the medical field, regularly administers narcan when people overdose. He’s also performed CPR. In 2021, a person was stabbed near the encampment, Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reported. In 2022, the city swept the park. McCarty says that once, a gun went off in one of the tents. Cops swarmed the area, but nobody got hurt, or arrested (the Seattle Police Department did not respond to The Stranger’s request for confirmation before publication). Beyond emergencies, the two of them interact with the homeless people across the street like neighbors would. They are neighbors, they say.
“We bring water out, we talk with folks,” she says.
Tents have cropped up in the park regularly over the last few years, peaking during the pandemic. Since then, the city has regularly swept the park, pushing people to grassy medians on nearby blocks, she says.
But she couldn’t remember a fence. (Parks did not say whether it had closed Seven Hills before. Really, they didn’t say much.) McCarty says homeless people in the park have been the talk of the neighborhood. People she’s been friendly with have talked about them like pests.
She is uncomfortable watching people suffer, too, but it’s been “viscerally upsetting to me to see sort of the inhumanity of people that I otherwise have really lovely [interactions with],” she says, her eyes watery.
In a blog post last month featuring We Heart Seattle’s Andrea Suarez, far-right blogger Jonathan Choe described Seven Hills Park as a “human dumping ground.” Suarez called the group “service resistant.” In a text, Suarez said she was last there on August 16 or 17, “engaging with everyone” by offering Payday candy bars and her card.
“Lots of codependency (couples, pets, groups) travelling as a group from sweep to sweep,” she wrote, claiming without proof that many of the people there had tiny homes they hadn’t moved into. As The Stranger reported when Suarez was running for the state Legislature last year, Suarez has numerous far-right connections and rejects evidence-based housing first policy (house people first, then treat mental illnesses and substance use disorders) for less effective treatment first programs (residential drug treatment and housing contingent on sobriety).
Choe was there that morning, sticking a camera in people’s faces, McCarty said.
There’s chatter about the city installing a playground and bright lights to keep people out. Ironically, most of the fervor is coming from the people living at “Sanctuary,” the former church turned luxury condos, who’ve posted photos of the tents on Nextdoor, McCarty and her partner say. It’s brought out the neighborhood’s renter, owner divide. Renters don’t care nearly as much, they say. (Sanctuary’s building association did not return a request for an interview).
“I never see those people in the park,” McCarty says of the luxury condo owners. “They yell at people out the windows of their cars.”
“Owning property is a type of psychosis,” McCarty’s partner says. “It makes you believe the property is part of your body. So it feels like a violation is a direct harm.”
Kaylon is wrapped in a purple blanket and smoking a cigarette. He pitches it and hesitates when asked his age.
“I’m 40,” he says. “I think I’m 40.”
Kaylon says he’s homeless and points to a bench behind the fence. He’d laid down there, hung out and smoked cigarettes. “And done drugs,” he says with a smile.
Seven Hills Park is a decent, beautiful place, he says, and really, even if we disagree, we all have a common goal to “relax in our own spaces.” He says he’ll find somewhere else to hang out.
“Whatever my spirit guide says I try to do,” he says.
A woman shuffles by. Her name is Joann and she’d read about park closures up north that morning in The Seattle Times, but didn’t know about this. The story confused her. At first, she thought “bouts of negative park activity” meant “lack of use, not overuse by the wrong people.”
An older woman texting on the corner says she didn’t like drug use, but obviously, she’d like to use the park.
“Do you think this is a solution?” we ask.
“No,” she says. “Do you?”
I thought fences were just for parks with naked people?
The tl/dr of this article is that The Stranger is mad that wherever there are tradeoffs the city is not prioritizing the homeless, those engaged in antisocial behavior, and criminals over residents, those engaged in prosocial behavior, and the law abiding. It’s a positive change for anyone who is rational but considering The Stranger once wrote an article ripping the shit out of parents who wanted their kids to be safe while walking to school near a homeless encampment where there was ongoing rampant criminal behavior (including a shooting) it’s not surprising.
“City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth’s office told The Stranger to reach out to parks for answers to our questions, which included if she, as an elected official, thought this strategy addressed homelessness in a meaningful way, and what it would even solve.”
Let me answer this for you. It does not address homelessness at all because this policy is not about the homeless, its about everyone else that wants to use these spaces but can’t because our unhoused neighbors are trashing them, using picnic tables as their living rooms and otherwise making public spaces unusable for everyone else. Being homeless does not give you a right to confiscate public spaces for your own use…period. These two things are also not contradictory. We should provide help for homeless while at the same time ensuring that parks and other spaces remain free to use by everyone and are not getting trashed.
You know what else doesn’t address homelessness in a meaningful way? Using them as political pawns by letting them rot out in the open so you can pass massive tax increases and carry on about abstract ideas like late stage capitalism. We had 10 years of a council dominated by progressives and the only thing they did was make the problem worse and use homelessness as an example of how the system needs to be burned down. If you think electing Wilson is going to change this equation you are naive. Once she is sworn into office you can look forward to more tents and more sanctimony about meeting people where they are at.
Treatment first is great. Housing first is crap. And Kaylon can go to treatment or go to hell.
It’s a shame the park doesn’t feature a swimming pool, so the city can punctuate their message by filling it with dirt.
“Cap Hill”? When did Nathalie and Vivian become tech bros?
Back in May, if someone had put up a fence around Cal Anderson Park on the overnight before the traveling bigot show arrived, the Stranger would still be running articles about how great a piece of civil disobedience it was, and making heroes out of the persons who did it.
Good fences make good neighbors.
things so apparent in this article.
1. The Stranger will constantly crap on residents who are tired of vagrant drug addicts taking over parks, trespassing on private property and who are just being horrible neighbors to the community.
2. The writers granted more “air time” to cover interviews with residents who basically side with their narrative of how they want to portray what the ideal Capitol Hill resident should be, home-owner-hating DSW aligned residents, preferably renters.
3. The Stranger basically is saying “f off” to Capitol Hill residents, like myself, who haven’t signed up for late stage capitalism.
@2, @3, @9, @10: Let’s accentuate the positive, shall we?
‘Kaylon says he’s homeless and points to a bench behind the fence. He’d laid down there, hung out and smoked cigarettes. “And done drugs,” he says with a smile.’
The Stranger actually admitted that a homeless camper — and not just any homeless camper, but one camping in a park on “Cap Hill” — had, on at least one occasion, taken drugs.
Baby steps! All cheer the baby steps!
@11
one might think
from old Wormtongue
our East Coast Deadender
Here to harass our Homeless
who’re merely
yet Another Symptom of
the Sickness of Massive Wealth Accumulation
that only those
on the Bottom of
the Food Chain do
fucking Drugs
his
smugness
knowing no bounds.
“Owning property is a type of psychosis,”
McCarty’s partner says. “It makes you
believe the property is part of your
body. So it feels like a violation
is a direct harm.”
when
Housing
is Commodified
and the Citizenry here
Solely to be Stripmined
to
the
Glee
of All the
Wormtongues
we’re
on an
Unsustainable
Path ~ so enjoy your
Gleefullness whilst it Lasts
cadet
Bonespurs’ll
soon enough
be Coming for
YOUR Arse Too.
@12 – dude…
@12 thanks for proving my point about rambling on about tired concepts like late stage capitalism.
@11 great point. Of course TS will pivot and tell us we need to give him his own apartment to use drugs and that taxpayers should pay for them. Remember this famous quote from Amber Tejada of the Hepatitus Education Project from her council testimony in 2023.
“I know it can be a little controversial, but one of the key tenets of harm reduction, that I see, is that we want to be able to facilitate and champion autonomy of people who use drugs,” Tejada said. “And so, you know, there are folks who don’t want to stop using drugs. There are folks for whom abstinence is not something by which they measure their success in life.”
This will be one of the features of the upcoming Wilson administration.
@13 — Thanks!
LOVE your House over the Waterfall!
are you Familiar with Wright’s
use of ‘Cowboy Concrete’?
he made his Students
build it For him
the Fucking
Genius.
14.
Enjoy
your Slide in-
to the Fucking Abyss
whilst you swim so
Gleefully into
de Nile.
@15 — Oops!
forgot the link:
https://kirstenalana.com/destinations/usa/taliesen-west-scottsdale-arizona-franklloydwright/
@14: Thanks for the quote. We should always recognize the extreme cruelty in it, dressed-up and presented as compassion:
“And so, you know, there are folks who don’t want to stop using drugs. There are folks for whom abstinence is not something by which they measure their success in life.”
Once addiction has reduced a human being to wallowing in filth, existing only to service the addiction, we can –and indeed must — stop talking in terms of “want,” and solely in terms of “need.” That human being needs help, full stop. Addiction has completely robbed that person of agency, and our pretending that person still has agency amounts to a huge case of our victim-blaming him for his continued miserable existence. Addiction results from faulty brain chemistry, not from any fault of the addict.
We can argue about how much and what kind of help to mandate for each such person. We must balance our effort on his behalf against our obligations to everyone else who resides near him. But we should never, ever indulge in the cruelty of pretending he still has a choice, and we can do nothing but wait for him to make it. Even if, as the Stranger always pretends, there cannot possibly exist any person (or any possible combination of persons) in Seattle more important than a homeless addict, then we would still need to mandate treatment. Anything else is cruelty.
(And if he does still have a choice, then maybe getting rousted from one dismal encampment to another to another to another, with precious little time to service the addiction, will help him to make that choice.)
“(And
if he does
still have a choice,
then maybe getting rousted
from one dismal encampment to
another to another to another, with
precious little time to service the addiction,
will help him to make that choice.)” –@wormmy
because
Attacking the
Symptoms is Always
the Fucking Cure. do NOT
LOOK Up.
fucking
ever.
@20 it may not be a great solution
but it’s better than enabling and encouraging the symptoms. You continually ignore the alternative you are promoting is literally to let them wallow in their own illness.
Seven Hills Park covers a quarter of a city block. If it’s had a population of campers for any length of time, then it needs a rest. We all know it’s far beyond futile to ask the Stranger to consider the effect of illegal camping on a park, but the city should consider such issues, and the park’s need for recovery may have been one of the city’s drivers for closing the park. (On this topic at least, the city clearly considers talking to the Stranger to be a complete waste of time, and the grand manner in which the city blew off the Stranger made for excellent reading.)
@20: Just as ignorance is his greatest strength, cruelty makes for his most sympathetic compassion.
@21 as Coolidge Dollar (IIRC) recently mentioned, kristo’ can make for an excellent foil. Use sparingly, though, and only when the Stranger, or its dwindling number of other supportive commenters, have temporarily had enough of trying to defend the indefensible.
@6 Only one of them could be a tech bro.
this
Just In
from our
reich wing
East Coast*
AIPAC representative
sent here to ensure nutnyahoo
and his Buddy Cadet Bonespurs
KEEP THE FUCK OUTTA PRISON:
“Just
as ignorance
is his greatest strength,
cruelty makes for his most sympathetic compassion.”
–@tensorna on September 5, 2025 at 4:20 AM
“The
Cruelty
IS The Point! ;)”
–@The Wormtongue on Jan 1 – Dec 31, 20XX at ALL Times
[thnx, for the ‘vile,’ Catalina!]
*our
Master of the
Vile Projections
@21, Emulating
its Master. feel free
to feed it its Favorite:
Shite Sammies,
on Avacado Toast
One of Our Unhoused Neighbors broke into one of our housed neighbors’ garage and stole three bikes. The housed neighbor went down to the homeless camp and retrieved the bikes. This is the same encampment where another neighbor’s special needs son was lured into and given fentanyl (He recovered after being in a coma for three weeks).
This is why people don’t like the encampments.
Encampments
SUCK. having Homelessness
SUCKS ASS. Having a few people
with nearly Immeasurable Wealth who
Can and DO BUY O U R ELECTIONS Will
ALWAYS RESULT In THIS horrific OUTCOME
until we can recognize this
NOTHING WILL CHANGE
so, Yeah
let’s just Keep
Bitching about it
cuz there’s NOTHING
We can Do.
right?
homeless
people are
Human Beings
too, tho with the
Wormtongues out
there, one’d NEVER
know it.
Has The Stranger officially been taken over by straight people? Who allowed a headline to be published with that icky gentrifier term for the gayborhood?
“Right-wing Rage
gave us the KKK. Left-
wing Rage gave us the Weekend.”
Think, people.
When the Stranger publishes pieces like this one because they actually believe this paints a good portrait of encampments and the homeless that trash the city’s parks. In reality, it just highlights how out of touch The Stranger and the far left are on this issue. Those quotes are freaking gold.
Newsflash: the city has to close the parks because the campers trash the hell out of them. They trash the hell out of everywhere they go. Want some sympathy from the general public? Have some respect for yourself and don’t live in a pile of filth and garbage.
Kristo is so triggered
Everyone is now realizing
We’ve been scammed by the homeless industrial complex
Most of HOMELESSS are drug addicted criminals
The TRUTH
will
Set US FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
But Kristo’s Bleeeeeeeding heart isn’t ready
awww, sniff sniff,
Hand him a
TISSUE
MORE Than
ONE THIRD OF
our Homeless are
Veterans. have YOU
served, ‘right’ wing Haters
of our Homeless? your Utter
Lack of Compassion is Duly Noted.
The parks in question probably face Nuisance suits (See Denny Blaine Park) from surrounding property owners or renters.
I.e. The City as a property owner may not take a common problem (homelessness) and concentrate it’s impact on property owners that live next to City property.
30: Where’s your compassion?
My compassion
is for NATURE
the trees
the vegetation
the grass
in the park that will finally
have a chance to heal.
Don’t you have
COMPASSION
for that?
To clarify this article’s sub-heading: the Stranger’s preferred approach of doing nothing about homeless encampments is in fact a “no parks for anybody” policy.
Probably because they understand that a policy of “instead of parks we’ve decided to have human dumping grounds where the parks used to be” would be unpopular when stated in those terms, they instead advocate a course of inaction that prior experience has shown will lead to that outcome.
Is this passive-aggressive plan of turning over any and all public spaces to the unhoused by simply standing back and letting it happen also The Stranger’s favorite candidate Katie Wilson’s policy?
Let’s ask AI (which is never, ever, wrong about anything):
The origin of the name Cap Hill is disputed to this day, but many historians trace it to the once-common practice of wearing one’s baseball cap with the visor pointing backward — a street-fashion trend which originated in the neighborhood circa 1987 and soon became a core element of youth culture around the world, popularized by a diverse array of celebrities such as Tupac Shakur, Fred Durst and Ken Griffey Jr. But the name didn’t become official until a 2009 mayoral proclamation, which formally defined Cap Hill as the area east of Interstate 5, south of the Lake Washington Ship Canal, west of 23rd Avenue and north of Madison Street. Since then, Cap Hill has become the vital center of Seattle nightlife, artistic innovation and high finance.
is that the wind?
nope
just coolie
our resident dope
Thanks for that laugh, CKathes dear. I never would have guessed that Capitol Hill didn’t become “the vital center of Seattle nightlife, artistic innovation and high finance” until 2009 (still not sure about that high finance claim. More like high rent or high credit).
2009 was during Mayor Nickel’s second term of office. He may have issued such a proclamation, but it sounds more like smarmy real estate marketing to me. I think I first learned of it when The Stranger through a hissy fit, advising us about it
https://www.thestranger.com/new-to-town/2017/01/18/24804988/new-to-town-advice-to-seattle-newcomers-from-seattle-newcomers-part-1
@38 I should have added that the backwards-cap craze ultimately lost its cool factor when Vice President Dan Quayle famously sported the look during his nationally televised “family values” debate with renowned journalist Murphy Brown (surely, you remember). Sadly for him, his awkward bid for hipster cred only succeeded in alienating his most fervent supporters — a fashion faux pas that most political scientists believe led directly to the Bush-Quayle ticket’s 1992 election defeat. But the storied Cap Hill name, and its residents’ deep affection for it, has endured to this day.
Oh dear, that should be “threw a hissy fit”
Mrs. Vel-DuRay regrets the error.
@35, @38: A decade ago, when Amazon started growing very rapidly, Capitol Hill suddenly experienced a large influx of tech-bros, some indeed wearing their ballcaps backwards. This came as a surprise to the old gayborhood, and during a visit to the Elysian (back when Dick Cantrell still owned it, I was one of their most regular of regulars) I saw their bartenders had jokingly renamed their Capitol Hill Beer to “Bro Hill.” This made for a fine Gen-X sardonic laugh, but in the end, it showed Capitol Hill’s days as an inclusive fun spot were numbered. Dick’s partners sold out, and shortly thereafter, my spouse and I departed Pike-Pine for Belltown.
@41: The name of the Elysian’s founding brewer is, of course, Dick Cantwell. I apologize on auto-correct’s behalf.
Satirical fun and games aside, “Cap Hill” is defensible at least in the headline (and wasn’t used in the actual story). Headlines have a style of their own which prizes brevity and succinctness over strict usage, spelling or grammar conventions, originally owing to the need to fit in a limited space on the printed page. And who’s to say what’s an acceptable abbreviation for a place name anyway? I’m sure there are longtime Central District residents who blanch every time they hear their neighborhood referred to as “the CD” but it’s safe to say most Seattleites nowadays — probably even most current “CDers” — do so without hesitation.
And to the point of the article, if the city wants to make changes to this park they should have drawn up a plan and shared it with the neighborhood BEFORE putting the fence up. That’s the order in which such things are generally done, so as to limit public use no longer than necessary.
@40: No need to issue correction comments for obvious homophones as our brains automatically correct them.
The Vel-DuRay standards will be maintained, Colllidge dear!
7 Hills is a tiny park and when there’s 1 tent, there’s 3, then 7 then …it’s not pearl-clutching, its not NIMBYism (there’s almost no single family homes around 7 Hills, not to let the facts get in the way of a good Stranger entirely made-up load of horseshit)- it is a PUBLIC PARK. It’s not a campground. Broadway Hill (another micropark) should be next and should be closed. With APC on the corner of Broadway and Republican, it, along with the now vacant lot on the the southwest corner of Federal and Republican, means the park has been occupied more than not since March of 2020. The community gardens in both parks have often been inaccessible to those with plots there.
The dumpsters in front of Broadway Court and El Cantina are routinely ransacked with trash strewn all over the road and sidewalk, leaving residents of BC and staff from El Cantina to clean up the area multiple times daily.
Also, again, not to let the facts get the way of a good load of Stranger crap, but there are also very few single family homes near Broadway Hill. Its in a neighborhood of renters, not execs in the Chamber, who would just as soon not have to spend $230-$370 a pop to replace a window when their cars get prowled.