Councilmember Mike O’Brien took a stroll through a new solution to homelessness and the city’s lack of affordable housing.
It was a short walk — the length of a long trailer. At just a couple hundred square feet, the tiny cottage has enough room for a small table for two — maybe three — people, a downstairs queen-sized bed and an upstairs loft where children could sleep. It has a kitchen, indoor plumbing, and electricity, but it sits on a trailer hook up that is secured to the ground in the backyard of a home in Kent.
The Northwest Daily Marker published an article by Jason Paulus arguing that these shanty towns that have been popping up all over the city are breeding addiction and killing addicts. He argued that we must ban addicts from housing, requiring sobriety and enrollment in treatment to be housed.
Because we are approaching the cold and rainy seasons, Jason, it seems like you are the one trying to kill addicts. Paulus takes the stance that people experiencing houselessness must hit rock bottom before they can get clean, because that is what he needed.
by Alexander Froehlich and the Seattle Architecture Lobby
The Seattle Design Festival comes downtown every year to celebrate “how design improves the quality of our lives and our community.” This year the Seattle Architecture Lobby will be conducting a Hostile Architecture Tour to explore who has the power to design, who doesn’t, and which communities are affected by design choices. Through a 10-stop tour we will examine design as the result of deliberate processes that serve some and not others. We will also discuss our role as designers with power and complicity in those processes which shape our city.
There have been rumblings that the City of Seattle may fine local shelters that don’t move enough clients into permanent housing. When it comes to homelessness in Seattle (which has one of the most expensive rents in the nation), our city leadership must have better solutions than charging struggling nonprofits that are working diligently to house clients in a city with no available affordable housing.
When the Olympia-based Freedom Foundation—a conservative group that has spent the bulk of its energy over the past decade fighting against health care workers’ right to organize—filed a lawsuit to stop a Low Income Housing Institute-run “tiny house village” for homeless people from opening in South Lake Union, it raised some eyebrows.
At 8:30am today a press conference was held by the City in front of “The Jungle”, one of Seattle’s biggest homeless encampments, before clearing it and destroying it. The Jungle, also known as the East Duwamish Greenbelt Encampment (EDGE), is one of the most well-known encampments in the City of Seattle. It is an informal community under the I-5’s greenbelt going through SODO. Continue reading Jungle Residents Forcibly Relocated as City “Sweeps” Homeless Encampment→
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