Nickelsville needs community support for permanent solution

IN the past month and a half, while we have listened to reports of continuing grim financial news, watched California issue IOUs in place of cash, and heard Congress wrestle with the desperate national health-care crisis, our governor has been steadfastly making a difference in the lives of about 100 homeless men and women of Seattle.

These are the folks who are living together in a tent encampment they call "Nickelsville." This community formed over nine months ago in an effort to provide safe and sanitary shelter for those who could find none in our city. They have a dream of providing such shelter for up to 1,000 homeless people.

They do not lack vision nor determination, but simply a place to stay for a while and let their dream mature into reality. While searching for a such a place, and looking for allies in their project, they have moved or been moved seven times. On June 6, they relocated once more, this time to state Department of Transportation-owned land on Marginal Way.

As a minister of a congregation that hosted Nickelsville for three months, I have followed their story with great interest. The people who live in that community have become more than "the homeless." They are men and women with names, whose stories I have heard, whose hopes I know, whose strength and capacity for creatively addressing their own needs for shelter and safety I have come to admire.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and her senior adviser Ron Judd should be commended for providing at least temporary space for people without houses to be together in a safe and secure way, for listening and responding to the needs of the poorest among us, and for opening up a dialogue that can keep us all working to find creative solutions to the problem of homelessness, most especially in these troubled times.

It is too easy to stereotype the residents of Nickelsville, instead of recognizing that a genuine partnership between those who know homelessness firsthand and those who care about people without housing could lead to genuinely creative solutions here in our city.

But the fact remains that while Nickelsville is finding new allies, it does not yet have a settled home. In fact, Thursday, the community had to move again to Port of Seattle land, but that is only a temporary solution.

This community, which has been working well for almost a year, needs a place where its members can build simple, safe, sustainable shelters to bridge the "survival" gap in our city, while our larger community's 10-year plan to end homelessness continues its hard work of providing more affordable housing.

They need voices joined with their voices, and raised on their behalf. They need our city, county and state leaders and all of us to join with them in finding solutions to our current housing shortage. They need partners with skills to help them make their dream a reality.

And they need the wider community to remember that we are all a part of the human family and what we do to (or with) the most vulnerable among us, we do to ourselves.