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Dispatch from the Seattle Homeless Scene
For months, residents of Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood have been lodging complaints with the city about a homeless “camp” by the side of Interstate 5 near an onramp. More than one fire has occurred at that location and nearby businesses have been threatened by “campers.” KOMO News has a story on the cleanup of the camp [emphasis mine]:
Seattle’s Navigation Team spearheaded the cleanup with help from WSDOT crews and Seattle Police. They arrived at 9 a.m. Wednesday and cleared the lot by the early afternoon, offering resources to the campers who were forced to leave.
“I have a lot of anxiety,” Benjamin Eddy said. He’s been living in the Northgate encampment since it started. He’s been homeless for four years, battling drug addiction.
“I’m used to this,” he said. “They come here and they sweep the camps, and then we squish like a ketchup packet, and then we somehow come back together again. They need to find some better solutions, I know that.”
But many neighbors were excited to see the cleanup.
“It’s a big relief,” Jessie Singh said. He owns the Chevron across the street and says campers trespassed, harassed customers and one even threatened him.
“I asked him to leave, but instead of leaving he pulled a knife on me,” Singh said.
Neighbors complained to the City for weeks, some feeling ignored. But the City says planning a cleanup like this takes time. They had to bring in several agencies and special crews to clear needles, hazardous waste and trash. They even scraped the soil to clear waste.
…Under City rules, the Navigation Team had shelter beds available to every person cleared out of the encampment. They say, as of Wednesday afternoon, only one person took them up on that offer.
Some neighbors are concerned the campers will come back to that empty lot or another nearby. Eddy agreed, saying he would join them if the tents return.
“Not right away,” he said. “But I probably would if I knew I could get away with it.”
The main reason this got cleaned up was that it was on Washington state DOT property.
Very polite, those members of Seattle’s Navigation Team. If a vagrant does not agree to go to a shelter, he cannot be made to. No consequences.
Published in Culture
It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Tax something? You get less of it.
Spend money on something? You get more of it.
@Susan in Seattle
That is an excellent article.
“the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, and child in King County”
Proof that private charity beats government assistance 100% of the time (let’s just be nice and pretend that 90% of the homeless wouldn’t spend that money on booze and drugs anyway).
And the proof in the pudding is that if you offered them free food and housing in exchange for staying clean, they’d turn it down 99.9% of the time.
Which begs the question: why?
“Throw money at it” fixes all problems!
It certainly avoids the question.
(So do one way tickets to Seattle, but that just me being difficult.)
I live in Bonney Lake, a community east of Tacoma. We have a forested area within the city limits which used to be a University of Washington experimental site. Some of the original land has been used for a new Costco, but enough remains for a active homeless community to thrive. I haven’t ventured into the area, but several people have posted photos of the needle strewn encampments and spoken of groups of “campers.” There is a shopping center anchored by Safeway and Fred Meyer adjacent to the forest area, so the vagrants are frequently seen at entrances and exits with their signs begging for handouts. There have also been a number of reports of women shopping after dark being accosted by these people. Other reports have spoken of small groups of these people wandering through streets adjacent to forested area. So far, I haven’t seen any evidence that local police have done anything about this situation. This is a far less accepting environment than Seattle being traditionally a republican redoubt. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. I had a friend who used to walk his dog on trails in the UW Experimental Forest. There was also a Ropes Course area that was used by numerous groups. There was never any mention of the homeless during those times. I big windstorm several years ago made the forest hazardous by damaging trees. It was off-limits for a couple of years because of the dangers. I think it was during this period that it started being homesteaded by the homeless. Being a relatively rural area we have had our share of meth labs in the area which may well have been an attraction for the homeless addicts.
And we’re looking for a one-way ticket out of Seattle as soon as it’s feasible. Family and business obligations keep us here for the time being.
Yes, Spin, mostly lurking!
Ditto with Portland.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
I’m curious about the direction of causation when it comes to drug abuse and homelessness. Hypothetically, if I was reduced to living in a makeshift camp in the woods with a bunch of mentally ill drug users, I wager it wouldn’t take long for me to become a drug user as well.
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
If you’re not already a mentally ill drug user, it’s hard to see how you’d be reduced to that.
I suppose if you don’t have the social capital of friends and family, or church or other social agencies, you might be reduced to camping somewhere, but you’d still probably avoid the mentally ill drug users.
My sense is that they start out as drug users, and this, ultimately, drives them into homelessness as they use all of their available resources to pay for drugs. The ones I have seen out panhandling are both men and women. The women are generally older, 50+, I would estimate. The men I have seen run the gamut, age wise. Since I have never had any interest in drugs, it is difficult to comprehend how anyone who isn’t mentally deranged to start off with could be drawn to something as physically damaging and mentally deranging as meth. I love “roughing it”, but there is nothing appealing about sitting in a suburban forest in a wet, cold environment. I do remember when I worked for Merrill Lynch in Seattle that there were a number hard cases who camped below the concrete awnings of the Eddie Bauer store in downtown Seattle surrounded by their garbage bags of possessions. I would have called that a hardcore bivouac . One in particular stood on the corner outside of my building surrounded by her garbage bags, drinking a Starbuck’s coffee, blathering continuously or writing in a notebook of some sort. I suppose by the current standards I am hearing about in Seattle today, that that was probably the “good old days.”
I have seen any number of tweakers who look to be 60-70 yrs old, then the newspaper article states “Jane Doe, 23, was arrested for…”
I have a niece who has been living with us since April. She was on an episode of that show Intervention once…it was painful to watch. Yesterday my wife spent 12 hours in the car taking the niece back to detox and treatment. She had started using again, and it was either go back to prison and have your son in the custody of the state, or treatment. So she’s gone as of yesterday, leaving her 7 year old boy in our home. Last night he was a little teary eyed and sad saying “I don’t know when my mom is coming back.”
I remember when my niece was 7 and we took her to the swimming pool. Now she’s 30 and she is physically and mentally changed forever. She may get and stay clean, but she won’t ever be the same.
Drugs destroy people and families. It’s heartbreaking.
I have seen that, but the women I have seen are undoubtedly older, not just damaged by drug exposure. The younger men I have seen are better illustrations of the above. It is a hideous drug.
Oh my – prayers for your niece, her son, and you.
Thanks. We all need it!
If a person were to suffer from a severe enough life event that reduces their economic circumstances sufficiently, I imagine they’d be more susceptible to mental illness as well. Like, hypotetically-speaking, a person’s spouse leaves them cuz they lost their job and then their social network abandons them because the now ex-spouse is spreading lies about them? That could be pretty triggering. I imagine that correlation vs. causation in these sorts of situations can be really hard to nail down.
Seattle has always (since the 1960s) had an active drug culture, along with its punk rockers and other rock and rap musicians. Then you add legalization of recreational pot and what do you get? Druggies everywhere. King County and Seattle are looking to open legalized drug dens, where heroin addicts can shoot up all day, under the supervision of nurses. [how is that not a felony under federal law?] And our active progressive court system ruled that the People are not competent enough to ban them via Initiative (the po folks is too stupid to make public-health policy). Is it any wonder that we avoid Seattle whenever possible?
And now with the viaduct closed it’ll be even worse. I gotta go down to Ballard on Monday. I simply cannot wait!
I had plans to go to the Seattle Center tomorrow, after picking up someone in Ballard. Fortunately, the plans fell through so I don’t need to get entangled in traffic! Good luck on Monday!
Hubby goes to Seattle most days now to work out at the Seattle Athletic Club by the Pike Place Market. He isn’t playing squash, but he bats balls around the court by himself, and works out on the bicycle and weight machines.
Aha! I now have a further reason (as if I really needed one) to not go up to Seattle ever again.
He goes all the way from your house to Pike Place Market? Why?
But there are several reasons right here on Ricochet for you to come up to Seattle.
Hubby is recovering from knee-replacement surgery, and he is a member of the Seattle Athletic Club. He works out there to assist in his recovery, and get back into playing squash gradually.
But surely there is a closer place?
Most athletic clubs do not have squash courts, and he has been a member of SAC Downtown for over 20 years. He has “squash buddies” there, so he remains a member. He has discussed joining the ProClub in Bellevue, but the traffic on I-405 is almost worse than I-5, and it’s a lot more expensive.
Gotcha. That makes sense.