Tent City Headed For Population Surge

We're skeptical over here at Seattlest that tent cities are really the best option for providing zero cost housing. Well, "providing" is not actually the right word. An empty lot is all that is "provided," but even empty lots are not so easy to come by when the prospective tenant is a tent city. They have to move from place to place, often for unclear reasons. They provide minimal shelter from the elements. There are no nearby community services. There are rarely employment opportunities nearby and access to mass transit is sometimes available, but by no means a given. Even if land could be found for something more permanent there would have to be money and a will to build structures that wouldn't be catastrophic in the event of a mild earthquake. Is it better than the street? Of course. It's not a long-term solution, though.

Despite that, Puget Sound tent city populations promise to balloon after one of the city's emergency shelters closes its door in March. The Seattle Housing and Resource Effort / Women's Housing Equality and Enhancement League (SHARE/WHEEL) is losing half of its funding (about $274,000 a year) due to a disagreement over its client data. The city wants it in a city-controlled database called Safe Harbors. If our years in IT have taught Seattlest anything it's that there ain't nuthin that can't be solved with a properly contructed database. A collection of homeless identites and social security numbers controlled by the government strikes many people as a shade Orwellian, though. SHARE/WHEEL have an issue with the cost associated with collecting that information and are uneasy about how it will be used.

If the stalemate continues and the funding is actually withdrawn from SHARE/WHEEL as claimed, the group insists it will resort to illegal tent cities to compensate for the nearly two hundred indoor beds it will lose. From the Seattle Times:

SHARE/WHEEL staff members declined to be interviewed, but Leo Rhodes, a homeless man and spokesman for the group, said that a loss of shelters is why the organization is already looking for sites the size of half a football field in and around Seattle. Locally, 39 homeless people died outside this year, and there are shelter beds for only about one-third of the estimated 8,200 homeless people in the county, he noted.

"We don't want to, but if they're not giving us space inside, we need to take it outside," said Rhodes, who has lived in tent cities off and on for a year.