The largest homeless encampment remaining on Capitol Hill was cleared by city crews Thursday.
CHS reported in late July that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office had identified the Belmont at Denny camp “a priority site” for clearance after ongoing public safety issues including shootings and assaults at the cluster of tents set up on the parking strip and sidewalk along Belmont.
A mayor’s office spokesperson said the decision on clearing the camp after months of growing complaints was based on “resource capacity and a variety of factors” including shelter availability, impact to public space and the natural environment, pedestrian access, pending construction, public safety incidents and verified SPD and SFD data, “and more.”
The city says it documented 20 people at the site last week with 28 tents, seven “living structures,” and two vehicles. Out of the 20 “offers of shelter,” the city says 10 people accepted referrals.
With a faster response to deploying shelter and housing outreach teams and clearing even small camps on Capitol Hill under the Harrell administration, most campsites in the neighborhood now include only a few individuals or solo campers.
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Finally. Thank god.
Thank god! Good job Bruce.
Yay?
What about Broadway Hill Park
It is currently free of campers. Let’s hope it remains so.
Time to put in place a city-wide camping ban by initiative like other cities.
Exactly! Those totally work lol.
Ridiculous how long these things fester before anything is done about it.
Yeah, it’s almost like we’re not in complete control of everything and some things just happen and we can’t control them.
Anyone missing Mark Sidran as city attorney, especially when he proposed a No Sitting Ordinance?
I sure do. That was a major fork in the road for Seattle. With his leadership we could have put in place common sense policies to get people the help they need and maintained a functional public realm. Instead, we let homelessness activists, affordable housing grifters and the Socialist Alternative define the drug and mental health crisis as a housing affordability crisis. They used the tents as props for fundraising and for political leverage. As a result we pissed away billions of dollars to make Seattle a destination city for drug addicts, creating the worst drug/encampment crisis in the country, leading to degraded quality of life for residents and hundreds of needless drug deaths. For every person we house, two more junkies from Texas arrive on the greyhound and set up tents in the park. Why do they come here? Because other places don’t tolerate and enable this crap.
I agree. I used to ride the bus twice a day for many years, U district to the Hill, and I heard so many conversations between “rough sleeping“ people, saying that Seattle was “so much better, so much better” than where they came from, and I guess I developed a definite perception, that at least half and probably more of the people we are trying to house aren’t even from here.
I get that they don’t need to be “from here“, but I also don’t think we can afford to house and care for way more than our fair share of the nation’s ill and needy. That’s not gonna work.
Yeah…I voted for him. He lost…I forget to whom…Nichols maybe?
GOOD – keep going until there is literally 0 people in tents on the streets
Unfortunately, a portion of the unsheltered end up in Chinatown/International District. I feel badly that the residents and shop owners in the CID get little consideration from the City.
This was a terrible place for an encampment, being right outside the windows of low-end rental housing. What a nightmare it must have been for those residents. And they had to put up with it for three months! I truly feel their pain.
But as usual, the phrase “offers of shelter” in this article and others like it, with no specifics, gives me extreme pause. I hope those “offers” were options that would actually better their situation (i.e., actual housing, sanctioned campground, hotel room or at least a tiny house) and not just invitations to a congregate-shelter covid party. I wouldn’t accept that myself if I were in their situation, so if that was in fact the case I can’t blame them for just finding another place to put up a tent, which I suspect most of them did.
The least-bad immediate solution, at least until this pandemic is finally over, is to set aside portions of the larger city parks where camping is tolerated, with certain sensitive areas such as playgrounds being clearly marked as off-limits and subject to summary removal. Not great, not good, but certainly better than camping on a curb strip, just outside people’s windows.
A better, albeit unrealistic option, is for people who are mentally ill and/or addicted to substances that impair their functioning to get the help and treatment that would actually be effective.
Thanks for a humane response to this situation! The lack of public commons is a relatively new feature in society and I don’t think it will ever fully exist. Until we realize a certain subset of our population will not fit in with what we consider “normal society” and that our response cannot be to eradicate it, but to learn from it and try to help each other grow.
Please don’t equal “fatal fentanyl addiction”, “raping and stealing and defecating in public” with “not fit with normal society”. We are not talking about Van Gogh here…
How did they get to that point? They weren’t born like that, and how do you know that with a little care and compassion from their neighbors that these people couldn’t be the next Van Gogh? You have a very elitist attitude, these are still humans and members of our society.
Please provide data that show living in a shelter has actually resulted in increased risk for contracting covid. This possibility is often cited by homeless people who refuse such shelter, but I’m skeptical that it actually is a problem.
I do agree, though, that the other options you mention (hotel rooms etc) are preferred, and the City has been offering more of these in the past year or so. A big “NO!” to allowing camping in our parks, though.
A quick Google search can do that, but please demand others do your work for you while complaining about those going through the worst experiences in their lives…
https://globalhealth.washington.edu/news/2020/05/01/studies-show-covid-19-can-spread-quickly-homeless-communities
thats from 2 months into the pandemic. thats when we still thought we should be just washing our hands.
Spread of COVID in congregate settings is well documented, do you really need them to have a study in every type of establishment?!? I’m sure a shelter specific study exists but I am not going to do your homework for you.
The CDC’s guidelines still state that encampments generally shouldn’t be disturbed at all. I don’t 100% embrace that idea — the Belmont camp in particular was very poorly located and needed to move. But yes, I would mostly leave park campers alone for the time being. I’m aware of the arguments against this (we all pay taxes to support the parks, we all should get to use them, etc.) and I agree they have merit, but we’re in an emergency situation right now and patience is called for. We can certainly rethink our approaches to this problem when the pandemic ends.
Why hasn’t the market solved this problem yet?
We banned the building of congregate housing? SROs, boarding houses, etc. The market could certainly help here if we’d let it.