City Council Delays Decision on Homeless Camp, Explores Alternatives
The Seattle City Council introduced a resolution yesterday that will allow the council three additional months to review alternatives to the proposed homeless encampment at SODO's Sunny Jim warehouse site.
The resolution - the latest in a series of developments regarding the fate of both the Seattle homeless community and the Sunny Jim site itself - would give the council additional time to review a comprehensive report on the city's shelter system due out May 18th. It would also states that the council would begin to review possible alternatives to the shelter system "on or after July 31st." The resolution also outlined several specific proposals, including purchasing a motel for transitional housing and providing rent-reduction vouchers.
The resolution has been criticized by homeless advocates and other community members as a move to further delay the possibility of a Sunny Jim encampment. It also leaves the current encampment - located in an old fire station in Lake City - in a predicament, as their permit to stay expires May 15th.
The idea to use the site was initially proposed by Mayor McGinn in October of last year, but met with resistance from council members, who raised concerns about taking action before a full zoning and environmental assessment of the site. The Mayor's office responded with skepticism over the council's motivations, noting that the council had taken action on the much larger and more expensive deep-bore tunnel project without a full environmental impact assessment.
The council's resolution marks the most recent development in the site's long and storied history. The warehouse was initially built as a manufacturing and storage center for Sunny Jim brand peanut butter, a locally-owned business which at one point supplied almost one-third of Seattle's peanut butter market. The building was known as a local landmark due to its large red sign advertising the brand. In 1997, however, the sign was destroyed in a fire, and the building laid vacant until early 2010, when it was used as the site of an art installation called tomb.
Sunny Jim has also served as a place where city officials and the homeless community have become increasingly intertwined through recent events. On September 20th of 2010, the warehouse was completely consumed in a four-alarm fire - the cause of which would later be determined to be a cooking stove used by squatters living within the building.
The city's Department of Finance and Administrative Services, which had purchased the building in 1997, had sought funding to demolish the building several years before, but was denied. The City of Seattle received approximately $300,000 insurance money from the warehouse's destruction, which under McGinn's proposal, would be used to fund the Sunny Jim homeless encampment. However, the city council may direct the money towards "other priority purposes", according to the resolution published yesterday.
