West Coast Cities Losing Patience With Homeless Encampments

At the end of September, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat wrote about how “West Coast cities start to confront the limits of the liberal dream,” the liberal dream being able to “compassionately” deal with homelessness and growing encampments without arrests. Both extremes on the debate around encampments get it wrong; illegal drugs like fentanyl really are making the problem worse, but harm reduction is a critical part of solving the encampment problem, not mass arrests. Westneat points to a series of legal briefs being filed by big blue cities – Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco – asking for changes to a ruling in the Johnson v. City of Grants Pass decision that has left those cities, they argue, with few options but to allow encampments to continue.

The problem of encampments isn’t anything new. When I worked at the City of Seattle back at the turn of the century there was an encampment in the Beacon Hill neighborhood there. This and other encampments ran afoul of neighbors and local business and law enforcement would act; the encampment would shift to some other location. City struggled with the claim by residents first, that this was their only shelter option, and second, that the encampments were a form of protest. Eventually, Nickelsville, named derisively after the mayor at the time, became an institution, an actual sanctioned camp.