The Inside Story from Seattle Street Campers: June 2022

Dad and I went and talked to some street campers and a bail bonds lady in Seattle. One guy and his wife from the other side of the Cascades were camping with car and tent because he has multiple hospital visits for a leg thing over several weeks. Another guy moved here from Georgia after his mom died. He was on the street for a while. Then he moved into a shelter and now he helps maintain the shelter. They all warned us to steer clear of the dense encampment by the courthouse. They also said being homeless in Seattle was getting scarier because of tweakers.

We talked to them about the general homeless scene, and the Black Lives Matter protests, and none of them mentioned the lack of nice $600 apartments as an issue for anybody. So I just don't buy that, and all the expert sources I can find online agree that affordable housing is not the main issue for primary homelessness (squatting or sleeping outside.)

I also don't buy the story that "they aren't coming from out of state." For starters, Seattle isn't the whole state. People from Central and Eastern Washington aren't local. The South Sound isn't local. Maybe most of the criminal lowlifes camped out in front of the courthouse are local, but it looks to me like a lot more people are migrating to or through the city because camping is allowed and the city does help them - and of course because there are many luxuries to living in the city - but a lot less if it is overrun with open air drug markets and meth zombies.

I did learn that the ordinary campers aren't the problem. Some of them are actually making dangerous alleys safer. Most are only passing through, or working their way up to a place in a shelter and then a job and paying rent. However the policies which allow them to camp outside while minding their own business also allow crazy and bad people to camp outside, dying in despair, terrorizing everyone, including their fellow street campers. It's not viable.

And it's got almost nothing to do with the cost of housing, except that nobody's going to buy any of those places, build more condos and lower rents under these circumstances.