The city continues to conduct smaller sweeps and camp clearances around Seattle including a scheduled “remediation” Friday on Nagle Place west of Cal Anderson.
Notices went up about the planned clearance of a few tents near the park earlier this week. The typical City of Seattle process includes placing outreach workers in the area in the days running up to announced clearances to inform encampment residents of shelter and service options.
The smaller sweeps including this effort in August to clear tents from Belmont near the Capitol Hill Goodwill have followed a period of larger clearances as Seattle emerged from pandemic restrictions. The Cal Anderson notice arrived as Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell pushed this week for support for budget support for his Unified Care Team plan “to make neighborhoods and public spaces clean and accessible” with a new centralized resource dedicated to managing sweeps including outreach and clean-up.
The plan includes a $38.2 million budget “to maintain and improve current levels of service for clean city, trash mitigation, encampment resolution, and RV remediation initiatives.”
“This will ensure communities do not see a reduction in service levels by providing ongoing funding, and replaces current temporary jobs with permanent, full-time roles,” the mayor’s office says.
Nagle, meanwhile, remains far from some visions put forward during the construction of the nearby Capitol Hill light rail station to better integrate the street with the park, the transit facility, and surrounding development but it remains a mostly underutilized area for people to park, and, yes, camp.
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When the sick, lost souls and unhoused are included in the list with trash mitigation, I wonder what that breeds/reinforces. /s
Seattle needs a camping ban. Even Portland is going to pass a camping ban. The current situation of centering our society around drug addicts to the detriment of everything else is not working obviously.
BS! we center our society around profit and greed to the detriment of everything and everyone else which is why so many people are struggling with mental health issues and forced to live in tents. clearly this is not working.
I have personal experience.
Cheap fentanyl is the main reason for the New Age of homelessness. And yes, it also causes mental illness.
Please Google it.
For real, people are out here acting like not having omnipotent dominion over the aesthetics of the city is somehow them being disempowered despite every single effort being in the service of putting a pound of makeup over an abscess and calling it good.
There’s nothing you can do to convince people they’re being myopic and clutching their pearls into diamonds, they really are that basic brained in thinking pretty city = healthy city. It’s all optics and aesthetics and feels to them, like they want to live in an amusement park iteration of a city, not be neighbors to all within it.
While I agree for the most part with Emma, if you actually think people are complaining simply because of the aesthetics, you haven’t been paying any attention. I live near an encampment and work next to two, and I’ve had my boob grabbed and been lunged at and screamed at and threatened by so many men from these camps that my walk to work has become like being in a video game where I’m constantly maneuvering to get out of the path of the man screaming his head off at people.
My husband’s been punched and called the f-word because he made the mistake of making eye contact with one of these guys.
My office building windows were shot out and women were followed into the building by men from the encampment next door who were threatening them with sexual violence. We’ve found naked men wandering the lobby. We’ve had so many public safety issues, the police had to come do a Q&A about the encampments and we had to hire extra security.
My friend had a rock thrown off the overpass that crashed into his windshield, and the police tracked that back to a camper.
I’ve seen two guys publicly masturbating while watching women walking by.
The reality is that these unsupervised camps are not safe for us nor for the people living there. If you want to be taken seriously, you need to acknowledge that.
Awesome name to use!!! And person to voice… You do justice by her!
The current situation isn’t helping those living in the tents either.
Portland did not pass a camping ban, and you really don’t know what you’re talking about
You are just plain wrong.
He didn’t say they passed it, he said they planned to, which is true:
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/10/26/portland-oregon-leaders-start-process-to-ban-homeless-camping/
Actually, he does know what he’s talking about… He didn’t say they have passed one, only that they are going to. OK, that might be a bit prematurely optimistic, but they certainly do have a camping ban on the table. We should definitely do the same here.
https://www.kuow.org/stories/portland-considers-a-plan-for-sanctioned-tent-camps-an-at-large-camping-ban
So where do you suggest these people be relocated to?
Well, as Portland is considering, large open aired city sanctioned camp sites with rules and expectations of behavior. If you dont meet those rules, you’re out. If you dont like the idea of rules and want to live unfettered, too bad, because camping would no longer be tolerated anywhere in the city. If you do it or engage in illegal behaviors beyond just camping you’ll be charged, and either convicted or entered into supervised alternatives to incarceration. That’s how we get our city back.
It’s up to themselves to find out. The other 99.99% of the society managed to do it.
Just like people have to live within the boundary of the Law wrt to collecting income, paying tax, what kind of drugs is legal, what kind of activities are criminal.
That site as marked is west, not east, of the park.
Sorry I am not sympathetic.
Enough is enough.
Thanks — fixed
Seattle needs a camping ban, stat.
Kent, Auburn, Mercer Island, Portland, Tacoma are all now making encampments illegal. If Seattle remains open-armed and welcoming how many campers do you suppose will come this way from those places? Without addressing this reality the city stands to become the encampment Capitol of the West Coast. How is that going to work, letting potentially tens of thousands of people camp in the streets and parks while we try, to build free housing for all of them in the third most expensive housing market in the country? I would suggest that for every thousand units of free housing built another thousand people will appear. If you had no job and a debilitating drug addiction that you chose not to face where would YOU go if you were kicked out of Tacoma and Portland?
Perhaps if the new housing came with restrictions on substance use and commitments to behavioral standards (enforced) it could be a different scenario. Perhaps if we did not excuse all anti social behavior on the basis of being “marginalized” or “unhoused” and activated enforcement of the laws already on the books we could get our public safety back.
People don’t live in encampments because it’s legal. Poverty and drug addiction are a waste product of industrial consumer capitalism. Can’t have your next day Amazon deliveries without rvs and tents popping up around the neighborhood. It’s called a compromise. A race to the bottom is our fiduciary responsibility.
I honestly don’t see how homelessness flows from industrial consumer capitalism or how amazon deliveries lead to rvs and tents and fentanyl addiction.
I understand. This is fundamentally the problem.
So we make camping illegal and then give them tickets that they can’t pay? Arrest them and put them in jail? In that case we’re still going to pay to house them, how about we just build decent housing 🤷🏻♂️
Let’s work on addressing the reasons people are getting into the situation, rather than only focusing on the outcome.
I want to look upstream and address the root cause, the inflow of drug addicts from across the country into Seattle because we are absurdly tolerant of drug use, drug dealing, encampments, and crime. Once we address the upstream cause by banning camping and getting people into congregate shelters and drug treatment, we can then focus on housing.
Perhaps if the people and companies moving to Seattle displacing many and making the housing market explode had put some money aside (perhaps a small percentage of their income, we could call it an income tax…) to so that our communities could address these issues. Instead, most seem completely oblivious to this, and rather sit behind keyboards or at their overpriced restaurants/bars complaining about how the city is going downhill. There’s plenty you can be doing about it, on many levels, but most of what I see is just unhelpful complaining about the optics and impacts on individuals, rather than actually trying to work towards a solution.
Have you heard of the Amazon tax? The housing levy? These are taxes levied here in Seattle intended to address the shortage of affordable housing. We pay them. So we have earned the right to complain.
The problem is the city isn’t dealing with the problem. They are creating a false narrative on what the problem is and if you can’t admit what the problem is you’ll never solve it. It is drug use and mental health issue not affordable housing. When you are addicted to opiates or other strong drugs your life is about the drugs, everything else is insignificant and you have no money for food or rent unless you started out well off and even then many lose everything. Until the city says, this is a drug and mental health issue and we are going to deal with it as such nothing will get better for the city or the homeless. Additionally it attracts people here because there are no repercussions which just helps them destroy their lives.
We need to pass a camping ban as quickly as legislatively possible. No other way around it.
Nagel needs more traffic. The way to make more traffic is to remove the do no enter sign at e Denny way. Two way traffic there would lead to heavy use of Nagel and a safer street
Nagel needs more people traffic, not car traffic. The problem is that the only active space on that entire 2 block stretch is a small restaurant, otherwise it’s the back of buildings on one side and a retaining wall on the other.
Making more cars would make it much less accessible to pedestrians. Ideally, you would incentivize more pedestrian traffic by allowing fewer cars and adding more development around the area that attracts law-abiding citizens. The best way to mask (not solve) the homeless problem is to crowd a particular area with people to make it less susceptible to open-air crime. Take a look at Belltown, for example. The lack of people going to Belltown for recreation directly correlates to today’s high crime rates. Same with Pioneer Square: beautiful neighborhood, but not enough people visit it.
To solve it, the answer is simple: build more apartment buildings. The city is so focused on temporary remediation (hotels, temporary housing, large shelters), that they don’t know that if you simply give people permanent housing, it will be a step closer to treating the drug problem. Seattle has a “treatment first” approach that sucks. They have social workers on the streets trying to “rehabilitate” junkies when in actuality, they’re not in a position to seek rehabilitation. I read a fantastic opinion piece in the Seattle Times that talked about this, and they noted that if someone is drowning in a pool, the first step to help them would require us to immediately remove them from the pool, not teach them how to swim as they’re drowning.
Giving addicts and the mentally ill housing often just leads to destroyed housing and people continuing to kill themselves out of sight…. There’s a great documentary by Frontline/Propublica that shows the pitfalls – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B-okvAO1tM
Yeah, drowning people need to be pulled out of the pool, but pulled out and and given CPR, not just yanked out and left on the locker room floor…
We need more inpatient treatment that isn’t optional to stabilize people to the point where they have the ability to live on their own first. We also need to accept that there will be a portion of them that will never be able to be fully independent.
You’re dreaming if you think even a tiny percentage of the fentanyl smokers will ever be “fully independent”.
Some of us would argue that the “drowning” problem is actually the drug and mental health problem. And the “teach them how to swim” problem is the housing issue.
Thank you for the constructive comment!
it was constructive…