Tag Archives: mayor mcginn

News, Politics

Home of REI, Seattle Wrestles With Urban Tent Cities

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Slightlynorth found this encampment under the West Seattle Bridge, and dropped it into our Flickr pool.

Seattle-based outdoor outfitter REI has a logo that includes two mountain peaks that could also double as tents, pitched on top of its logotype. Camping outdoors is a symbol of autonomy, self-sufficiency, living close to nature.

But camping outdoors in Seattle is a civic headache that’s become chronic as the recession’s effects drag on. The longer it takes the city’s leaders to decide how best to help the homeless families who aren’t well-served by shelters, or homeless adults who bridle at shelter rules and regulations they have little input on, the more entrenched a nomadic tent-city lifestyle becomes.

Last week, just as Mayor McGinn and City Council members Nick Licata and Mike O’Brien announced one practical and one policy fix–proposing the ongoing use of the Lake City’s old Fire Station 39 structure as a shelter, and passing an ordinance to let churches host encampments on their own recognizance, as it were, “while providing standards and guidelines for hosts and peace of mind for neighbors”–Nickelsville moved back to West Seattle, saying they were tired of being strung along by the city. From their site:

Last May, 2010 we were advised to give the new Mayor a chance. Last August the Mayor’s Encampment Panel got started and recommended giving us a permanent site. 7 months ago we were told that the Sunny Jim site would be ready in 5 months. Now Council President Conlin says he’ll decide what to do by the fall. We think this fall Council President Conlin will say maybe something will be ready next spring.

You can sympathize with the residents of Nickelsville–they were promised a semi-permanent location south of downtown (SoDo). Because of mild industrial-use contamination at the site, though, readying the location for human habitation was going to cost money, and the City Council (not unwisely) stopped to reflect whether the money might be better spent on, perhaps, rental vouchers, rather than a homeless campground.

On the other hand, this is a stunningly obvious solution, and yet Nickelsville has been tramping around since fall of 2008. So some part of this is not that simple. At issue is the homeless activism behind Nickelsville’s existence–you get the sense that in their view, they are a community looking for a home, whereas government sees a social ill that needs to be ended. (It should be noted that while Nickelsville is a tent city, not all tent cities argue Nickelsville’s brand of self-determination.)

There’s public resistance to “institutionalizing homelessness” if the city or county creates a permanent encampment (which has lead to linguistic contortions such as a “semi-permanent home”)–or even rents housing.

But the homeless know that programs end, whether or not homelessness has, so the alternative is to institutionalize urban nomadism, which, in the absence of productive reasons to move, can become the self-fulfilling purpose of tent city life. Instead of a barren plain of joblessness and homelessness stretching into the future, the view is broken up by quarterly relocations that give everyone something to do. This is the most important facet of a tent city–its self-organization is evidence that its inhabitants are capable of looking after themselves in ways that many other homeless people are not.

It’s a fact of history that Seattle’s Hoovervilles (which sprang up during the Depression in the SoDo area, ironically enough) were difficult as a blackberry patch to get rid off, even when the economy began to improve. The shacks were burnt down, and popped back up, just as today “homeless sweeps” often raze illegal encampments, trashing tents and belongings.

Seattle’s largest Hooverville took up nine acres and lasted ten years, until 1941, when it was doused with kerosene and burnt to the ground. There was a war on, and the land was needed. There are many things you can learn from that history, but one salient lesson is that permanence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, not in city limits, anyway.

It’s a trying situation, but Seattle can’t tell Nickelsville what to do, really, until the group has something they don’t want to lose: a home. So far the city has been unwilling to risk making that offer, even if that would provide the foundation for future negotiations. Maybe the word “home” is simply too fraught with associations and expectations. A previous era generated the term “residence hotel,” which strains to sound posh. How about, after REI, a residence cooperative?

Environment, News, Transportation

Local Environmental Groups Can’t Find Environmental Angle on Transportation Megaproject

Mayor McGinn

The Seattle Times has a story on Mayor McGinn’s opposition to the tunnel that, refreshingly, casts him as a Machiavellian power-broker able to sway the national levels of environmental organizations: “Sierra Club digs into tunnel fight; too cozy with McGinn?”

This provides balance to their view that he’s completely incompetent.

But much more interesting than that is the conclusion of the article, which contains a roundup of the environmental groups that either support the tunnel or haven’t taken a position.

Not all environmental groups in the region share the Sierra Club’s view that the tunnel is the worst environmental option to replace the viaduct.

Several point out that tearing down the viaduct allows the city to create an appealing green space along the waterfront, reduces surface-water runoff into Puget Sound, eliminates a huge source of noise pollution, and combats sprawl by making the city a more desirable place to live.

Traffic avoiding the tunnel toll will switch to surface streets (original image: WSDOT)

I would suggest that if you support any of the following organizations for actual environmental reasons, you might want to rethink that support, or at least ask them to rethink their responses to the media: Washington Forest Law Center, Washington Conservation Voters, People for Puget Sound, and Washington Environmental Council.

The Times quotes Clifford Traisman, lobbyist for Washington Conservation Voters and Washington Environmental Council, saying, “It’s not a black-and-white environmental issue.” (According to WSDOT’s SDEIS, only the I-5/Surface/Transit option helps lower greenhouse gas emissions, which in principle is a top priority of the state.)

For a rebuttal to that position, visit the policy wonks at Sightline for their extensive analysis of what the tunnel’s impacts are. This vociferousness isn’t like them, by the way–it’s just that they can’t find a worthwhile benefit the tunnel provides for the cost. It could hardly be less black-and-white, unless you’re of the opinion that single-occupancy vehicles are greener than transit.

Note the benefits, above, which are not at all exclusive to the tunnel, though they are presented that way. Certainly a waterfront green space and reducing surface street run-off are not. (I want to take issue with “eliminates” a huge source of noise pollution, as the tunnel would exhaust both car exhaust and tunnel noise into the city above.) The notion that the tunnel “combats sprawl” (what an active verb!) is new to me, and I note that there are no data points associated with this startling claim.

In short, it’s simply intellectually indefensible to suggest that the tunnel is a green option, or that it is “as green as” an option that seeks to shift capacity concerns from vehicles to people. I expect tunnel proponents to elide the difference, but theoretically environmental organizations would know better.

Speaking of intellectually indefensible, the Seattle Chamber’s Tayloe Washburn has penned an op-ed in which he asks readers to use their imaginations when planning traffic flow for transportation projects: “Now close your eyes for a moment and picture your commute on a rainy Friday evening if the mayor got his way and 110,000 additional cars and trucks were forced onto I-5 and city streets.”

Washburn hasn’t gotten his statistics right: it’s 110,000 vehicle trips, not different cars and trucks, unless he’s imagining–and it occurs to me this is where the problem might be–commuters driving off from home each day and never returning. But I think we can agree that, in general, we don’t want to leave transportation planning to a large group of people standing around with their eyes closed.

Health, News, Politics, Real Estate

City Council to Homeless: Hang in There, Guys!

City Council President Richard Conlin, who sleeps inside most nights

The boldness of our City Council sometimes leaves me breathless. Recently they announced that, having failed to address the existence of the roving homeless camp Nickelsville, they plan to “review alternatives to the Sunny Jim site” suggested by Mayor McGinn as a temporary encampment, which plan has since bogged down due to concerns about site contamination, which, you know, as a former Sunny Jim products consumer, I’d like to know substantially more about.

You may remember that Nickelsville’s patience was bought off last November by the promise of the Sunny Jim resettlement:

Last week, the 100 to 150 inhabitants of the roving homeless camp Nickelsville were grumbling that the good news about a semi-permanent SoDo site, at the former Sunny Jim factory, was not great news, as there was still a winter to get through before the SoDo site would be ready for campers.

So: YOINK! Instead, the homeless can live comfortably in a review of alternatives. After all, here it is spring, and if the homeless have made it through the winter, then why not wait until July to make recommendations?

“The council is rehashing legwork that’s already been done by proactive homeless advocacy organizations and the mayor’s office over the past year (and beyond),” reports Cienna Madrid for The Stranger. She quotes Reverend Bill Kirlin-Hackett, director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, as saying: “This is a series of seemingly meaningless statements that could’ve been said last October.”

That makes a good segué to this post written by the Council’s Richard Conlin, between what I imagine are crippling bouts of smugness. It’s like epilepsy, except he’s mainly in danger of choking on his self-regard. He begins with this assertion:

Over the past two years, homelessness in Seattle has decreased by 15 percent – an extraordinary achievement in the face of this recession, and a testament to the success of the Seattle community’s ‘Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness’.

That would be something, if true, but Conlin has no hard evidence of that. What he refers to is a 15 percent difference between One Night Counts in 2011 and 2010. I have no problem with the awareness-raising of the One Night Count, but as a reliable sampling method, it seems dubious to me. A quick glance at past counts show that 15 percent swings aren’t unusual, and that the count may also measure other factors.

Conlin goes on to count, himself, the ways in which the Council was not consulted about the Sunny Jim site. (In Seattle, the primary duty of the mayor is to consult with the City Council about their wishes.) Then he goes on to describe the ways in which the Council will do nothing substantive over the next several months:

In considering these alternatives, we will examine the legal and policy constraints for each as well as feasibility and costs.  Our goal is to approve one or more options by the end of July.  In the meantime, the Council will hold the proposed legislation regarding the Sunny Jim site, since it is not legally permissible to approve it before the environmental review is completed.  The Council will review the legislation concerning the $2.4 million proceeds received by the City in the settlement from the fire at the Sunny Jim settlement.  We will decide whether funds should be spent on environmental remediation at the site, used for other shelter purposes, or reserved for other priority purposes in the light of continuing concerns about the budget.

Finally, he closes with this gem, in case your head has not exploded yet:

As HL Mencken noted, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that we can solve issues around homelessness without putting in the energy to figure out what really works.

Absolutely, Mr. Conlin. When it comes to finding a temporary place for homeless people currently living in tents to stay–an issue never before studied by the City, I gather–there is no real rush. Nothing was done last winter, or this spring, and come summer, the weather’s nice. However, I do encourage you to reread that Mencken quotation while keeping in mind your support for the deep-bore tunnel.