UPDATE 6:45 PM: A crowd awaited the park tour but the mayor’s office was a no show. We’re checking in to find out more about the situation.
Neighbors credit KOMO reporting with getting the mayor’s attention
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s director of public safety will be among officials joining area residents Friday night for a tour of Seven Hills Park as the city says it is preparing for a “scheduled removal” of tents, belongings, and accumulated refuse from the park atop Capitol Hill.
“The Harrell administration is committed to meeting with communities across the city to learn firsthand about the issues facing Seattle neighborhoods,” mayor’s office spokesperson Jamie Housen tells CHS but did not offer more information on the timing of the tour.
UPDATE 6:45 PM: There was no tour — or, at least, none that CHS or the crowds that assembled at the park around 5:30 PM saw. We’re asking Housen for more information.
A Seattle Parks spokesperson confirmed that a clearance is being planned and said city outreach workers will be increasing their efforts around the park before any sweep.
“Seven Hills Park is a priority site for the City’s encampment related services and will be receiving intensified outreach prior to a scheduled removal,” the parks spokesperson said. “We do not share encampment removal dates as they are rescheduled very frequently.”
People have been living in the park for months and residents in nearby buildings including the adjacent The Sanctuary townhome building, an overhauled, 1906-built church turned into a condo development in the 2000s, have steadily complained to City Hall about the situation as other encampments on the Hill were cleared.
Harrell has promised his administration will do more to address issues of public safety and clearing encampments. During the campaign, his homelessness plan called for more housing and “a capital campaign” supported by charitable giving from the private sector, not new taxes. Harrell said parks and streets should be cleared of encampments with increased outreach effort from workers to provide shelter and services.
New methods show King County’s homeless population is likely larger than previous estimates with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority saying there were more than 40,000 people here who experienced homelessness in 2021. A Seattle moratorium on pandemic evictions is set to expire on Valentine’s Day, February 14th.
UPDATE: Harrell announced Friday the moratorium will be lifted at the end of the month:
Today, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that residential and commercial eviction moratoria will expire at the end of the month of February. Mayor Harrell will issue an Executive Order extending the residential eviction moratorium from February 14 through February 28, after which the moratorium will not be renewed.
The mayor’s office says recently appointed public safety director Andrew Myerberg will be attending the tour. Myerberg is the former head of the city’s Office of Police Accountability.
UPDATE x2: We’re told Myerberg has, indeed, met with residents in the area about the situation at Seven Hills.
KOMO television reporter Jonathan Choe reported on the situation at Seven Hills this week. Emails notifying neighbors of the Friday night tour credited the media coverage, in part, for getting Harrell’s attention after the 2020 and 2021 pandemic restrictions on clearances and Jenny Durkan administration’s lighter responses on the matter.
“We have the momentum on our side; however WE NEED TO STEP UP AND SPEAK AS A GROUP in order to make an impact,” one email about Friday’s tour reads. “Both Jonathan (Komo) and Andrew (mayor’s office) expressed participation by more members of the community would carry more weight to see a change.”
The park visit and planned clearance comes amid an escalation in City Hall responses to public safety concerns, worries about homelessness, and, yes, media coverage. Last week, Harrell pledged a crackdown on Seattle crime in a mix of “hot spot” policing, more arrests, and more efforts to address core problems of poverty, addiction, and mental illness.
Meanwhile, new City Attorney Ann Davison unveiled her “Close in Time” plan to prosecute more of those who are arrested in a faster process and dig her office out from a pandemic-bogged backlog of misdemeanor cases.
Seven Hills Park is located at 16th and Howell. The relatively tiny .40 acre park opened in 2010. The city purchased the lots where the park was built for $1.4 million.
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Can they please deal with Tashkent Park also?
Tashkent is a mudhole that nobody uses. Always has been. Unless they’re moving these folks into housing then they should just leave them alone.
I frequently used the park up until June 2019.
I spent time reading at the park on nice days.
I live in a dense part of the hill without green space at my building and used this park to get a bit of fresh air.
I used this park to destress from a stressful working class job that barely allows me to stay in the neighborhood.
I USED THIS PARK. I USED THE TABLES UP TOP. I USED THE SITTING BENCHES.
More have move into the park this afternoon.
They’ve been there so long that UberEats delivers to the lower and upper park.
Others can’t use it too? Me, me, me. Wah wah wah. Enjoy feeling “so mad” with all your food and heat and shelter.
Yes, me me me. Me with my food, my heat, and my shelter would like to use a park that’s not engulfed by people camping, dealing, or partying. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request. Seems like you do.
Eat a snickers, maybe you’ll feel better.
You going to let them move in? Exactly. Public land is the default solution if no one has a better one.
I live half a block from Tashkent and walk past it at least once a day and have not experienced any impact from the campers there.
Ah got it. So it’s not against your bedroom window so it’s not a problem… you only walk past “once a day” and don’t have to hear the arguing, the fighting, smell the fires, see the dealing, or see anything of it. Glad it’s not in your backyard. Please feel free to invite a few tents to your courtyard. Thanks!
Agree. There have been a number of tents in that park for many months now, including one which completely engulfs the arbored patio/bench in the upper segment….a clear example of homeless people taking over a public amenity. Is any “outreach” being done there? If so, it’s been totally ineffective.
Maybe they should give them a home????
It’s been well-documented that outreach workers try to connect the people living in the encampments with resources for shelter. The article above even mentions that the city is stepping up outreach before the sweep, which is something they usually do.
The issue seems to be that a number of people in the encampments refuse service because for whatever reasons they might have they don’t want I give up what they would call their freedom, for lack of a better term. For some it’s freedom to live outside of society, for others it’s freedom to do drugs (which you typically can’t do in a shelter as a condition of housing, I believe). The list goes on.
It’s been well documented that this ‘outreach’ is done by people who admit that they don’t have enough shelter spaces allocated for everyone in the camps before they get swept. Another issue seems to be that a number of people in the encampments actually don’t believe that they would be better off if they let someone take all the gear they have collected to survive outside in exchange for up to 7 nights in a shelter, and then returning outside to start from scratch. They are weirdly attached to their freedom to not freeze to death.
Sources please.
That of course is everyone’s end goal. This encampment specifically is unsafe for campers because there are no bathroom facilities in this small park, resulting in constant biohazards. In addition, campers have not accepted housing/shelter resources offered during outreach in either the heatwave of the summer or the snow during the holidays. It has been an unacceptable response by the city to simply allow people to suffer in biohazardous conditions and camp indefinitely through extreme weather.
Maybe you should?
If I should, could you?
I’m glad our councilwoman has been on top of this issue! Oh wait…
She needs to be championing the explicit transformation of public parks into campgrounds to house people because literally no one else has a solution and homed people are a bunch of babies that just seek to run amok on stolen land in a capitalist fantasy.
Glad our councilwoman has priortized her electorate rather than all the money in North East Capitol Hill. Looking forward to re-electing her!
If the land is stolen why don’t you file a lawsuit to get it back? Oh wait, you can’t because it’s not.
The only babies I see are in district 3, living off their mommies and daddies while they cosplay revolutionaries wearing Che Guevara t shirts, drinking overpriced craft cocktails, espousing ideas that failed in Russia in the 80s and are currently failing in genocidal China.
Here is a little secret for all of you who some how haven’t been able to figure this out, Seattle is expensive, always has been and mostly likely always will be, and no one is entitled to a home here. If you want to build a future for yourself there is boundless opportunity in this city. There are countless programs to help people find jobs, build skills, and provide free or low cost community college education. When I showed up here in 1997 with not even a high school diploma and was sleeping in my car you know what I did? I worked my butt off to get and AA from NSCC, then a BA from UW then and MBA from UW all while working full time jobs and taking on student loan debt and leveraging pell grants. Then spent the next 20 years working my butt off to make money and moving through numerous apartments and eventually to a condo until finally buying a house.
Seattle is accessible to all who WANT it but it takes work, years and years and years of hard work. Why is a junkie that hasn’t lifted a finger to help themselves entitled to what all of us that worked hard and sacrificed for?
This stuff just isn’t hard. Take two people, the one who sits in the park putting a needle in their arm whining about how unfair everything is will never get anything. The one who puts in work and effort to make their life better will see rewards and their life will get better.
No more sympathy for entitled whiners that think everyone else owes them something. Take a stake in building your future or get the hell out of our parks.
My story is similar to yours and I agree with everything you said. I made it on my own because I had to and because I wanted to.
If one is “homeless” because they can’t afford to live in Seattle there are plenty of other places near and far that are affordable. There are choices to be made. Either do what it takes or live in one of the countries most expensive cities or move to one that is affordable.
This is the exact type of mindset that keeps the poverty train running full speed toward the cliff we keep finding ourselves standing at. How American of you.
Poverty fuels drug addiction, crime, homelessness, apathy, mental illness, etc, etc, etc.
The “pull up ur bootstraps” mentality is the most boring non-sense you can possibly spew when the actual reality of the poverty, actively created by how we choose over and over again to regulate (or not) our economy and “crime”, remains exploding all around you.
The single biggest issue preventing any relief from the pressures of our modern capitalist consumer fantasy that creates this poverty is the pervasive attitude among our citizenry that people in poverty are simply too lazy to overcome it.
Americans are obsessed with greed and wealth and do not care what so ever who gets the short end of the stick while it literally sinks our entire society. Look at “your park” and “your city”. You can blame others all you like but you’re certainly reaping what you sow with this mentality.
It’s extremely frustrating and difficult to wrap my head around the way we continue to do these cruel and inhumane sweeps without being able to offer anything substantively different to the people there. We need more shelter, more permanent supportive housing, easier access to resources to get out of homelessness. Until we do that, these sweeps are just needlessly tossing people around and they will absolutely be back. What is the point!?
We apparently will be continuing to do ineffectual sweeps with no plan while ending the eviction moratorium which will throw more people out onto the street. What a telling way to begin an administration.
Perhaps so the addicts face consequences for assaulting multiple neighbors and causing Hilltop Manor residents to relapse.
Maybe it’s time for a new experiment. Ban camping in all public parks and right of ways. Enforce this. Enforce all existing laws. Arrest people for using illegal drugs. Make them stay in jail til sober and then offer jail based supervised drug treatment. Homeless problems and crime will diminish.
It’s public land and literally no one has any better ideas during a global catastrophe. “Wah wah wah” – people with everything that still want more including a clear view of a park they don’t use.
How do you know people don’t use the parks? Do you personally inspect each and every park in the city on a hourly basis to determine if they are being used? And, yes, it’s public land but we’ve made specific regulations around the use of said public land. One regulation is no camping. Just because it’s a public park doesn’t mean that one citizen has the right to claim as their personal own by squatting.
Also, there are literally better ideas for the homeless than having them suffer outdoors which is why outreach workers visit the encampments before they are cleared.
Humans and their silly “regulations”. The outreach programs are a joke people barely accept any of that help and just shuffle along to the next park this has been going on for years and years pay attention.
This is a FANTASY. Our pretend world of fossil fuel, electricity driven madness where we just park in front of a screen all day is an absolute fantasy. A big nice clean city only with people that follow all rules and regulations is a fantasy.
So whats the plan when it doesn’t shake out the way completely out of touch rich people who made all these “regulations” intended? “Oh nothing to see here shuffle along to the next park” Oops, office involved shooting suspect down. We are actual animals expected to fit into a rich persons fantasy.
#TeenageAngst
The encampments are almost entirely the result of a drug crisis not a housing affordability crisis. It is also a crisis of leadership in the city. Why do we have encampments in our parks? Because we allow them and other places do not. It is pretty obvious that Seattle is a magnet for drug addicts because we have essentially created a right to privatize the public realm. I don’t believe that is a right, nor a sustainable policy for the city. We need to focus on congregate shelters and drug treatment like NYC as the first step in addressing the crisis and getting people stabilized.
Thank you, finally a comment on this thread grounded in reality.
Both this article and the KOMO video lack any mention of the P-Patch garden in the park along the Sanctuary building and how this effects community members ability to grow food.
The p-patch at best provides small supplements of food for folks who participate. No one is starving because some people have no other choice but to camp in a park. The p-patch has been tended during the time the campers have been present, so I’m not sure what the problem could be for p-patchers. I live a block away and walk by almost daily at various times of the day and night and the worst thing that I have witnessed is that now and then there’s a lot of garbage strewn around. It usually gets tidied up pretty promptly. NB that a parks employee backed into the park’s sign many months ago, so the worst damage done to the park to date was self-inflicted by the city.
At another P-Patch garden, gardeners have to be careful about used needles left onsite. Gardeners volunteer to pick up and properly dispose of used needles every day. One gardener I know got stuck by a needle tossed into their plot last summer.
I should correct myself: something did happen to the rain collector at the p-patch in the last couple of weeks, but I don’t know how/what occured.
Guy,
Tashkent Park is not a “mudhole that nobody uses” but one of the few green spaces in the neighborhood. It has been turned into a disgusting, unsanitary trash heap populated by drug addicts.
Homelessness is a genuine problem but the answer doesn’t lie in allowing public parks to be destroyed.
Maybe the city should focus funding on fewer, but larger parks.
If you look back on the arguments that were against having so many small parks, you will notice that the outcomes they predicted have turned out to be true.
If they were simply needy people without a place to stay, they’d find a lot of neighborhood support for their continued presence. But they’re not. They ANGRY needy people who are constantly lashing out, often dangerously, at the people and neighborhood around them. If I were in their shoes, I’d be angry at the world too. But we’ve endured them long enough & it’s someone else’s turn now.
Why not move them to Volunteer Park? You know, the place that actually has bathrooms? It’s long past time that the fancy mansion people got to deal with a little disruption in their lives.
The policy should be: no camping in the Parks.
I suspect we will get there soon… once Covid is over (if it ever be), people get out of their apartments and actually see the disgusting-ness and hopelessness of the druggies, then their Progressive utopian bubble will be pierced for at least >51% of population of Seattle voters and this fake-compassion debacle will be over.
People’s mind don’t work properly during Covid… they start to think all Black criminals are prosecuted by systematic racism, all thieves are stealing to feed their children and all homeless are fallen angels who will become the next Bill Gates when they get that free housing.
Well…if this mess keeps up, I know how I’LL be voting on the next parks levy.