vigilante: a member of a volunteer committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law are viewed as inadequate)
Seattle business attempts to clear homeless camp, backtracks after advocates step in
A Seattle business is facing heat from homeless advocacy groups after they attempted to clear out an encampment off of Lake City Way.
I have walked past this growing encampment for a couple of weeks. I expect it’s a lot of folks who were cleared out of the one in the mini-park at 30th and 125th, just a few blocks away.
“Apparently the people from Pierre decided that they didn’t want this anymore,” says Karen Whittle, an advocate for the homeless.
An attorney for Bill Pierre says his business, along with other businesses and residents in the community took matters into their own hands to clear out the encampment.
At least they admitted to it.
Their attorney sent this statement to KIRO 7, which reads in full; “The Pierre Family have been contributing members of the Lake City community for 74 years, the love for their community is generational and runs deep. They along with other community members made numerous pleas to the City and Police Department to help address issues like the vandalism, theft, property damage and threats of violence coming out of this encampment and were told that something like a shooting needs to occur before the City will respond. After hearing this several members of the business and residential community made the hard decision to come together and help clean up a non-permitted encampment filled with human excrement, rodents, criminal activity and used needles that were unsafe for everyone. The Pierre’s support was driven only by the love they have for the community in which they live and work.”
Not sure what contributions they refer to…I suppose they have paid their taxes like everyone else, and sold a lot of cars and trucks through their sprawling dealerships. I know Pierre Properties owns all of this:
And some of those lots are either vacant or abandoned, unused. The two parcels adjacent to the encampment (the two small pieces of the triangle, top right) are derelict, a few vehicles parked there but sometimes empty with no staff/employees. The largest of them, right across the street, is just under an acre in size and right on Lake City Way NE. It is assessed at $3,535,500 and taxed at just under $40,000/year. It’s empty. Not even used for commercial parking. What could a developer do with that, if the zoning permitted and the land value demanded it?
This is the solution to homelessness, not the solution that Pierre Properties felt compelled to enact by force. Land needs to be developed along busy developed roads in high commercial traffic areas. Today was the “1st annual custom car and motorcycle show” just a couple of blocks away from the scene of this incident (I wonder if the imminence of the show was part of this…) and it would be great if that land and the other disused parcels there were developed into something useful.
“If they’re allowed to get away with it other people will do it to other homeless encampments,” says Whittle. “Do something constructive rather than destructive. Give us a chance to show you that we can be neighbors.”
Opening up that land for development would be better. Do what the Seattle School District does with its disused parcels and rent it out: lower the cost to acquire the land and get some project underway.
Setting the rent might take some thinking. It’s not downtown but it is on a busy state highway in a commercial district surrounded by established neighborhoods. But surely we can expect more than $40,000 a year. The highest and best use of that land could be ten times that. The apartment building behind it pays $50,000/year for 1/4 the land. So why not set a ground rent of $200,000/year with a 1% annual increase? That would bring in $67,121,339.78 over the 99 year term, $677,993.33 annualized.
This is where Seattle’s progressive bona fides (legal weed, LGBTQ rights) aren’t enough to carry Seattle as a “progressive” city. It’s still, at heart, a propertarian city, where property rights outweigh human rights and land value is more important than land use that benefits all.
What the news reports don’t tell us is what exactly the propertarians did here. Did they physically move the belongings of the people in the encampment? Did they put their hands on people? Seems like anyone deeply concerned or committed to property rights would have a hard time squaring that kind of action with their beliefs. I never saw any reaction to the cars that have been parked along that street in the Before Times or the RVs that preceded the tents.
Again, if the issue is with tents — not necessarily people being reduced to living in those circumstances — housing is the solution. Social housing alongside market-rate housing could be built right across the street from where this mob decided to act on its worst impulses.