Site Report #4

A homeless encampment at University Playground, taken September 20 2016. ("Homeless Encampments: An Update").

An October 4, 2016 blog article by Seattle City Councilmember Tim Burgess responds to proposed legislation to create the right to camp on public property, including Seattle's public parks ("Homeless Encampments: An Update"). He opens with this photograph from University Playground on my block to illustrate what to him would be an unsightly consequence of the right to camp. Councilmember Burgess then refers to a report on homeless campers at a Seattle park obstructing and using drugs near children's sports practices.

Police officers give Field of Dreams residents notice before they sweep the encampment. ("Field of Dreams: A Missed Opportunity")

A week after his post, the homeless encampment known as "The Jungle" was cleared out by Seattle city workers with police present to prevent protestors from interfering ("Officials Clear The Jungle"). City workers reportedly told Jungle residents to relocate to another encampment that came to be known as the "Field of Dreams," but this March, the city cleared that encampment out as well ("Field of Dreams: A Missed Opportunity").

Another post by Tim Burgess in the week after the Jungle sweep expresses earnest interest in humane and tested measures such as opening city-sanctioned encampments and placing people in homes as a first priority ("Homeless Encampments: A Better Solution"). Despite this, he presents homeless people largely as a public safety and public health issue for other citizens, covering up the intense dangers to personal safety and health that homeless and drug-addicted people face.

The 2015 University District Parks Plan addresses issues including homelessness with a bullet point on "natural surveillance", which "...occurs when places are open to view by the public and residents." This phrasing exposes the built environment's role in supplementing the city's official criminalization of homelessness with unofficial community self-policing. This requires individual members of the community to adopt attitudes, which Councilmember Burgess reproduces, that frame the homeless more as problems than as humans suffering from problems.

Globally, the need for constant expansion of profits has been well-served by "immaterial" sectors of the economy, such as the software sector. Much of that sector's growth has been based in Seattle, and the resulting influx of high-earning tech workers has contributed to skyrocketing rents. The resulting displacement has been justified by rhetoric about innovation and work ethic, which complements the moralism that encourages everyday citizens to surveil on the homeless and look the other way when state violence lands on them.

A University District that truly centers itself around students must recognize that many students in primary and secondary education suffer from homelessness in this region. If planning values students only to the extent that they pay rent and eventually become productive workers, the city's violent treatment of the homeless threatens to press on and expand its reach to students, thwarting its honest efforts towards relieving homelessness humanely.