Seattle Squatters Evicted
by Joe La Sac
The Tent City known as Nickelsville, named after Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, was evicted today around 1:00pm.
A post on the website for Tacoma Students for a Democratic Society reads,
“Several hundred homeless and allies were present to demand their right to safe temporary housing while media outlets from a half dozen outlets flocked around police spokespeople. Cops and journalists commiserated and joked with one another while homeless residents of Nickelsville worried about whether they would sleep in jail tonight or risk sleeping exposed and alone elsewhere in the city.”
Meanwhile, opinions from corporate media say the City should support the eviction. Via SeattleTimes:
“Comparing Mayor Greg Nickels to President Herbert Hoover, organizers have called their encampment, “Nickelsville.” But Nickels is no Hoover. Seattle is as liberal in its provision for the homeless as any city we know.”
The SeattleTimes wastes no time pointing out that the city’s Tent Cities are facilitated by “the activists”, as if to suggest that the homeless problem has been exaggerated or over-politicized through organizing. But according to the Nickelsville website, Seattle does not have the resources or beds necessary to shelter all of its homeless, thereby justifying the existence of a Nickelsville:
“During the One Night Count of January 2008, 8439 people were homeless in King County. 5808 had shelter through existing programs but 2631 were without, a 15% increase over last year. 34 homeless people have died outside this year alone.”
September 27th, 2008 at 10:40 am
So what I’m getting was that Seattle had no plan to take care of the homeless better than what they could do for themselves, but what they could do for themselves was not pleasing to people with homes, so Seattle destroyed the only solution they had.
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September 27th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Obviously tent cities aren’t the solution, so how can we pragmatically address the issue of homelessness in the Seattle area?
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