That squatter encampment directly across from the PAC Science Center on the pedestrian island was a crowded & disgusting open sewer and the City should be thanked for clearing it. All other issues aside.

Slurring with Soccer Moms, O'Brien? Really? You keep digging a bigger hole with your constituents. Dolt. Last time a bigger politico than you (google Arne Duncan) started in with the Soccer Mom callouts, he and his cause went down in flames.

Let's spell it out again realllllllllll slow: Anti-piss-poor-legislation is not anti-homeless.

Well OK then do nothing until the Justice Department forces us to stop the sweeps. Seattle is too selfish to self govern without trampling the rights of the propertyless.

Federalism 1, Cascadia 0

2CV dear I was actually thinking about Memorial Stadium this morning. The football season will be over soon, and it will presumably be empty for the next few months. There's bathrooms under the bleachers, it's flat, has good drainage, controlled entry and exit, and adequate lighting.

The anti O'Brien crowd seems to be growing up here in the North. It was a very vocal minority before but I think this might be getting closer to a tipping point especially if there were to be a decent challenger for the next election.

@4, @5

You mean like this?

I think you might be slightly underestimating the maintenance and staffing (and thus budget) requirements of your proposal, even without on-site counseling and services, or, you know, food. You're not going to lock people in there and then starve them, are you?

A functioning refugee camp needs a bit more than a volunteer sitting at the entrance with a clipboard.

Oh robotslave. Sweet, dear, binary, robotslave. Of course, we would need support staff, food, social workers, etc. At Memorial Stadium, you are right in the middle of one of the more underused parts of the city's real estate portfolio. A facility that has no shortage of prospective dining halls and commercial kitchens. Right across the street from one of the nation's premier charitable foundations, which has direct experience in this sort of thing. Right under the nose of the tourists who come to visit the Space Needle and the tacky art glass museum.

You could even take it further and let RV's park in the east parking lot of the stadium, and provide potable water hookups and dump tanks for them. It wouldn't even be a stretch to provide electrical hookups for the RV's and charging clusters for the campers in the shelters beneath the bleachers. Seattle Center has a very robust electrical system.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. And I only really came up with it as a way to get the city to rebuild the stadium. That poor facility is on its last legs.

The northside anti-O'Brien crowd always thinks it's growing. They literally measure their numbers by counting rants on nextdoor.com. Dumbshits. Wrong in 2015, wrong again in 2019.

We absolutely should move all the homeless into refugee camps. Maybe make it a little better. Add some cubicle walls. Possibly some kind of cooking area. Make them cook their own food, am I right? You could stack the units, to save space. So like a big refugee stadium, but with a system of refugee cubes. Some plumbing. Electric. Just to save our own sanitation costs. If we make a healthy refugee camp the emergency services load will be cheaper for us.

So like this.We could be the first in the nation to try this new kind of homeless encampment. The key is efficiency.

@8

The services and cafeterias near Memorial Stadium have unused capacity to handle an additional 500 people per day? Or 1000?

You're right, I'm pretty dim, I had no idea we had so much idle human services infrastructure just sitting there waiting for a use.

Really, I know your heart is absolutely in the right place, but I don't think you realize just how much cash flow would be needed to run a camp for 500 people.

Never mind a 3000 person camp.

And while we can all agree that this is a very wealthy region with heaps of private cash lying around, we also need to face the fact that we can't seem to find the tax revenue to even fund our schools adequately. This is the fundamental reason anyone is talking about tents to begin with, rather than roofs and beds.

@10 - whats the cost of 200 new police officers? I'm betting it's more then feeding 500 people a day. Share/wheel has the cost of feeding 100 people at $250 a meel (http://www.sharewheel.org/tent-city-f-a-…). So that's $7500 a day or $2.7 million a year.

Average SPD wage is $60k, not including overtime and benefits, so for 200 new police officers that's $12 million a year..

@11

Ten new police officers in Seattle would reduce costs-- the department is so understaffed that they're spending $25 million a year on overtime.

The cost of food (or other materials) is a very small part of the cost of running an effective refugee camp-- the biggest part of the expense, by far, is labor.

...or 200 officers, even. $25 million is a lot of overtime hours. And I bet police officers, like anyone else, do better work when they aren't stressed out from overwork.

Ph'nglui @ 9 - Apodments For All.

It's morbid fun watching O'Brien disembowel his own political career (if being a low-grade Al Gore impersonator is considered a career.).

"Bike Mike" is the kid sitting at the card table while the adults at the big table talk about what Seattle is doing.

An increasingly irrelevant lefty hack.

robotslave, I never said Memorial Stadium is the only answer. If you want to see a real freak out, do the same thing at Husky and West Seattle stadiums (Both West Seattle and the UW administration is a little high strung). And if you really, really want to see a freak out, put them up at Centurylink. Between the stadium, the event center and the north parking lot, you could probably handle all of the homeless.

And of course, any solution won't be cheap. But we've been throwing money at this problem for years.

@17: Note that there has been an winter shelter at Seattle City Hall since 2005.

Stop approving the overtime. We have things we could spend that on that would make a difference. Let police vacancies go unfilled. Hire people who have skills to help people in crisis and avert violence and tragedy. Cops just show up after the fact and waggle their guns around like that's going to solve anything.

More treatment facilities, please. In-patient and out patient. Keep that in the discussion, because it's a big part of solving this problem. People in recovery get jobs and apartments and become part of the solution.