I spared her the blame for the one acre plus sized hole across from City Hall that could have been developed…but maybe we should call it Durkan’s Folly after all.
the school district has asked the city not to sweep the encampment without providing outreach and access to shelter to the dozens of people living there. Durkan has responded that the since the school district has made it clear they don’t want the city to remove the camp, it’s up to the district to “stand up their own process” for providing outreach and shelter to the people living there, using their “billion-dollar budget” to do so.
Why is this the school district’s problem to solve? The school district, for all its issues, is a lot smarter about the city about disused land: it doesn’t sell it. The school district owns parcels all over Seattle under ground leases, something Durkan’s city government has never figured out (or her predecessors, come to that, but she is the mayor now) where the city sells them to speculators and never wonders why they don’t get developed as long it gets its taxes paid on time.
Does every land owner in Seattle have to shoulder the cost of encampments or does the cake topper think the school district is special somehow? Does she not know how government accounting works? The article explains some of what she missed, that school districts don’t have surpluses that cities can plunder to make up for their bad decisions.