Homeless to build own Nickelsville

This Wednesday, a group of four men plan to pile into a car in Pioneer Square and head off on a unique Seattle real-estate tour.

They will be shopping for some of the largest undeveloped lots left in the city. Their wish list: flat, vacant, hopefully remote.They aren't looking to buy. They're looking to squat.

They are the "site-search committee" for Nickelsville, a planned Hooverville-style shantytown of wood shacks the homeless hope to build here later this summer.

Says James Lucas, 38, one of the leaders: "Everybody knows there is a screaming need for low-cost housing, not just more fancy condos. So we're going to do something about it."

Something illegal, apparently. Unless a private landowner miraculously gives them permission, the group will try to put up a guerrilla shantytown on public land and then dare officials to tear it down.

"We know they're going to fight us tooth and nail," says Lucas, who lives in a work-for-rent transitional house. "What else is new?"

Seattle once had a Hooverville in the 1930s on Port of Seattle land near the current sports stadiums.

Twice the city burned the wood and tin shacks, and twice the residents rebuilt. In the mid-'30s, a census counted 639 people living in 479 shacks.

This is what it has come to: The homeless in 2008 are looking to go back to the 1930s.

"It's hard to argue that a shantytown is progress," says Bill Kirlin-Hackett, director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, a church-based group. "But the level of frustration is extremely high. Homelessness is soaring, and all we're seeing is a crackdown.

"So people are saying — 'I'm homeless right now. What's happening tonight?' If you've got nowhere to go tonight, then a wood shack starts looking pretty good."

Especially if the shelters are full. Which — I know I'm repeating myself here, but I thought maybe City Hall and the editorial board of my own newspaper just missed it the last time — they are.

We had a day last month when a single shelter turned away 42 people. In two weeks, the network gets tighter, as the SHARE Safe Haven shelter in South Seattle is getting kicked out because someone bought the building.

I went back to the encampment along Interstate 5 that I wrote about two weeks ago. The crowd has grown from 19 to 27, with eight cardboard-box houses, tents or tarp huts added in that time.

Anyone who pokes around the city, for even an hour, can see it's getting worse.

Many readers had constructive ideas. One suggested setting up shipping containers as housing with strict rules for their use. An architect said we should build transportable tiny houses, as small as 70 square feet, using scrap materials.

"What's wrong with the old SRO-style rooms, with a toilet down the hall?" wrote one reader. "If you want to house poor people, you have to do it frugally."

Reader Thomas Williams suggested a "carrot-and-stick" approach, "to separate between those that need and want a hand up versus those that just want to wallow in the gutter."

OK, let's try that. How about we ban panhandling — a flash point for many of you — while, in return, dramatically expanding, by several thousand at least, the number of temporary places to sleep?

Instead, the sides are hunkered down while a war escalates. The city's doing its sweeps. The Seattle Times ed board last week derided the church-backed Tent Cities as "pointless" and "tiresome."

On the other side, Nickelsville is coming. It's people going back to Hooverville because they believe, in modern-day Seattle, that will be a step up.

As illegal and in-your-face political as that is, maybe that's what it takes to open eyes around here that we have a major problem.

Saying it again and again sure isn't working.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.