Comments

2

"Because demand is so high and supply is so low that it is hard to be picky about who goes where."

Yet that won't stop the Stranger from making a big deal about it.

6

@4 You sound like Travis Bickle practicing badassery into a mirror. You should go down there and yell at them personally. Straighten them right out.

9

Hannah Krieg…. Champion of the Irresponsible. If you work and pay your bills she and everyone that writes columns here hates you. The reason that the council is allowing this and other measures like adding to the police department is because they know the voters have had enough. This site has lost its way.

11

LIHI have a habit of telling neighborhoods where they want to put their shelters that the shelters will be for people from the neighborhood. Nope.
Three shelters on MLK in predominately Black/Asian neighborhoods and ofc they want to throw a bunch of what I can only assume to be young white men from the nice uptown parks down to the South end with all the "poors" and "coloreds".

12

If the tiny house village opened this week shouldn't there have already been a backlog of people to put into it? Were the north Seattle homeless in the queue for these south Seattle tiny homes weeks ago and we only just found out?

13

Not sure where people get the idea the US is a rich country. Take all the assets and subtract all the liabilities, I'm pretty sure it is a negative number. That certainly doesn't scream rich to me.

And I echo the other sentiments, these people aren't our neighbors. If you don't pay tax, don't contribute to society in some way, you're not a neighbor, you're a nuisance.

14

Oh My God... The world isn't fair and politicians will play games.

Holy Moses! What a revelation. This is slog reporting at its finest.

In-depth, Hard Hitting...Impactful. I smell a Pulitzer in the winds.

15

The naked display of raw entitlement by Seattle's Homeless-Industrial Complex never ceases to amaze:

'"The City does not give a fuck about referring people within their neighborhood. They only care that someone is camping in a rich, white-person neighborhood. They want to control every opening and decide who goes everywhere. They don't want us to fill one single opening anywhere with anyone local,” Constantino said,'

So, the entity providing the money (Seattle) gets to call the shots? Horrors! If Seattle keeps doing that, they'll have a homeless policy which actually serves the interests of the city, not the interests of the Homeless-Industrial Complex, which has failed miserably to solve the problem it supposedly exists to solve.

As noted by other commenters, the belief that homeless persons from god-knows-where deserve to live in whatever Seattle neighborhood they illegally pitched their tents just defies the beliefs of ordinary voters: "...down the road more than 10 miles from where they had previously planted roots." They hadn't "planted roots" in the Woodland Park neighborhood; they had illegally occupied and trashed the park, preventing the people who actually have "planted roots" in the adjacent neighborhoods from enjoying the city's park -- a park which should be open to all residents, not just the unhoused ones.

Buried under all of this poutrage by LIHI bureaucrats is the reality: "Castle said many of these Woodland residents will be temporary, and LIHI will shuffle people around."

So, the huge deal the Stranger and LIHI bureaucrats are making over five -- count 'em, FIVE -- shelter spots isn't even real, because once the Stranger is done carrying LIHI's water, LIHI's bureaucracy will do whatever it damned well pleases with these people. (If the people who get shuffled around complain, will the Stranger even care?)

"The ideal would be a more permanent housing option built where people want to live."

Go ahead, ask Seattle's voters if they're willing to pay for that. Do tell us what answer you get.

18

Hot take: Northend campers are most likely not living in the park by their old house. They are more likely to not be from Seattle in the first place. Contrary to progressive ideology, they are not stupid, and will go wherever they can pitch a tent or park their RV in proximity to good they can steal to fund their junkie lifestyle and not be harassed by things such a laws.

20

I don't see the need to get territorial r.e. helping people who are houseless. Assigning them a location where they were first encountered, clashes with the essence of their generally nomadic lifestyle. Pitting neighborhoods against one another due to their tolerance or intolerance is worth discussing, and how potential clients get prioritized for service. Zeeo tolerance in one zone vs. another should not be tolerated. Pretending folks west of the Duwamish or north of the Cut need to stay ~1 kilometer of where the City had their first encounter, seems incredi ly naive, and argument for the sake of those speaking andnot the needy 'clients'.
Could you flesh out how folks get introduced, referred, evaluated, and accepted into the cracker boxes, or other bare bones structures these folks are pretending are "homes"?

21

Came here to see people jumping to the predictable assumption that one's acknowledged existence in a community depends on their attachment to a piece of property or money given to a bank/government/landlord rather than say, their connection to other human beings occupying the same physical area over a period of time. Depressingly longstanding encampments are in fact connected to support networks within the community that they depend on for all kinds of survival resources. These connections are severed when people are forced to move across the city, weakening the support networks. You can throw all the nasty, mostly statistically inaccurate labels on them and tell them they don't deserve to belong anywhere if you choose, but the physical reality of their being a part of a community within a specific physical area is not made untrue by doing so, it just means you're shitty neighbors.

22

@21: If you'd actually read the comments you claimed to come here to read, starting with the very first one, you would have seen that your assumption was completely false. No one here claimed "that one's acknowledged existence in a community depends on their attachment to a piece of property or money given to a bank/government/landlord..." The comments all regard behavior of the persons who had illegally occupied and trashed Woodland Park. It was this behavior which violated the community's standards, and thus justified removal of the encampment.

Camping in Seattle's parks is illegal. Seattle is a democracy, and this law reflects Seattle's community standards for behavior; therefore very the existence of the encampment demonstrated the campers' utter disrespect for the standards of the community into which they chose to move. The campers' continued occupation of the park denied use of the park to all other residents of Seattle, which, again, is a violation of Seattle's community standards for use of parks. Likewise, the campers' illegal dumping of waste into the park also violated Seattle's community standards. These are all behaviors in which the campers chose to engage; they had nothing to do with the straw-man reasons you gave.

"Depressingly longstanding encampments are in fact connected to support networks within the community that they depend on for all kinds of survival resources. These connections are severed when people are forced to move across the city, weakening the support networks."

Feature, not bug. The continued enabling of "[d]epressingly longstanding encampments" is itself a problem to be corrected. What good purpose is served by "support networks" which enable continued illegal behaviors in violation of long-standing community values? Getting the former campers into actual support networks, such as provided by Seattle via LIHI, is an intended benefit of removing the encampments.

Removal of encampments increased exactly because voters elected candidates who promised to do it; removal of encampments thus shows Seattle's actual community values in action. If you have a problem with Seattle's laws against camping in parks, or with officials who were elected to enforce those laws, then you have a problem with Seattle's community values, as expressed by real Seattle voters in real Seattle elections. Your name-calling of a few commenters here will accomplish nothing toward changing any of that.

23

Oh, NO! Homelessness politics CATASTROPHE! AGAIN!

24

@22
See 1, 5, 8, 15, 18, and especially 13 if you'd like to retry your reading comprehension test. I'm not under the impression that calling out randos on the internet will overturn elections won by a very slight majority, I do that just for me.

And yes, I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that doing something cruel and ineffective becomes acceptable if it is codified into law or is carried out with the blessing of the government or its cheerleaders, especially as a person aware of US history. I think it's important to examine the spoken and unspoken intent behind a law and what material affect it has on the people it's enforced upon as well as its effectiveness in its stated intent. A city with a years-long self-described homelessness state of emergency enforcing laws that forbid sleeping outside (like someone suffering the most direct effects of such a state of emergency must) raises red flags in my head and also does not reduce the number of people living outside (most swept parks are closed off for a while afterwards so claiming it makes the park usable again is also questionable). Some will say that it works because a few of those violently displaced people are stuffed into some tiny houses miles away from where they've been living for months or years, but it turns out building housing and then housing people does not at any point require blowing money on endless sweeps to work, and that's a fact. You can talk about what people "deserve" based on what victimless property crime and eyesore sins they violate all you want, but my community values do not include harassing and displacing the members of my community who have it the worst just to assuage the inflated and mostly unfounded fears of people with a place to live and little actual experience interacting with the people they so confidently describe.

25

Tiny house village finally open. Yay! But not after paying something like half a million bucks to the Homeless Industrial Complex for "services". This is what needs to be fixed.

26

@24: “… elections won by a very slight majority,”

I apologize for not spelling it out more carefully for you. I was referring to the large majorities won by Mayor Harrell and City Attorney Davison, the latter being the first Republican elected by Seattle voters in decades. Those elections clearly expressed voters’ desires to have encampments swept and laws enforced.

“…doing something cruel and ineffective becomes acceptable if it is codified into law or is carried out with the blessing of the government or its cheerleaders,”

If the goal was to help homeless persons, then yes, Seattle’s policy of allowing camping in parks was both exceptionally cruel and utterly ineffective, and I agree that no amount of blessing from then-CM O’Brien, CM Sawant, or their cheerleaders at the Stranger made it acceptable. Again, that is what Seattle voters clearly said with the large majorities given to Mayor Harrell and City Attorney Davison.

Along with many other commenters here, I also fundamentally disagree with your assertion that merely occupying a piece of ground automatically turns a group of otherwise unrelated humans into a community. Actual community requires standards of behavior, created by, and enforced upon, all members. Appropriation of community resources for indefinite private use does not make for acceptable behavior, and sweeping of encampments represents community standards in action. (You implicitly recognized this lack of community when you claimed that the persons already living around Woodland Park had “little actual experience interacting” with the park’s occupiers.)

“… years-long self-described homelessness state of emergency…”

Ah, I recognize your confusion now; you’ve mistaken cause and effect. Seattle does not have persons illegally occupying parks because it has a homelessness crisis; it has a homelessness crisis because persons moved here to occupy parks. After spending $100M annually to help these occupiers get housing, Seattle voters’ patience has expired, and the laws against camping are now being enforced.

“…it turns out building housing and then housing people does not at any point require blowing money on endless sweeps to work, and that's a fact.”

Aw, too bad your one and only chosen “fact” turned out to be wrong:

“Lolë has an apartment in Bellevue through the legal system diversion program LEAD, but says she can’t stay there because she was asked to get rid of her dog, Ragnar, who she’s had for two years.

“She said the city’s outreach workers did not offer her a different housing option.”

(https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/seattle-clears-woodland-park-homeless-encampment-after-months-of-trying-to-place-people-into-shelter/)

So, “building housing and then housing people” still required a sweep to get one of those people out of the park. Better luck next time with your “fact,” should you ever attempt to bring one again.

“… violently displaced people…”

Examples of whom would include?

“…most swept parks are closed off for a while afterwards so claiming it makes the park usable again is also questionable…”

Yes, why can’t you just go to the very spot where an encampment just sat, spread out a picnic blanket, and chow down? I believe you should do just that. Please. (After all, what had happened there was merely a “victimless crime,” and an “eyesore,” correct?)


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