They’ll Always Be With Us…

But do they have to be this close? One church’s struggle with hosting a homeless encampment.

By Kathryn Robinson

On any given night last winter there were 2,600 more homeless than county shelters had beds. The city’s Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness prioritizes the creation of permanent over emergency housing, but it’s a policy that doesn’t address the immediacy of the need. “When you’re homeless you can’t wait for a 10-year-plan,” argued a supporter. “It’s about where you’re going to lay your head tonight.” The long-term solution certainly didn’t address the perfect storm of condo conversions, home foreclosures, and freefall recession that was transforming more Seattleites into homeless persons by the day.

Moreover, from the perspective of most of the residents, simply being without a tent wouldn’t even be the worst outcome if Nickelsville disappeared. They would lose the relative safety of their self-policing society and the emotional security of a group where residents knew and watched out for each other. They would lose one of the few shelters in Seattle that allows families to bunk together and couples to cohabit. They would lose their community. This, to a group of hospitality-happy Christian lefties, turned out to be unthinkable. “We are a Christian church, in Christmas season,” offered one congregant. “We’re going to tell these folks we not only have no room at the inn…we have no room in our stable?”

The vote came down two to one in favor.

And so the Nickelodeons, as they called themselves, spent the harshest winter in recent memory in our church parking lot. They were respectful guests who played by the rules and thanked us incessantly. Just like housed populations, they came in all types. Some worked hard around the encampment. Others were layabouts. Still others worked for pay, like resident Al Farr, whom the church hired to shovel snow from its front steps when it mounded in two-foot drifts up the sides of the Girl Scout–issue tents. Farr was a big, quiet guy who was saving his money to see family in Greece. Until he had enough money, he had Nickelsville. When he died of a chronic health condition in his tent several months later, he was mourned and memorialized in short order. Less time, no doubt, than it takes many homeless dead to be found—much less identified.

“Hey look, guys! There’s Spike!” My daughter and a few of the warm overnighters were watching the cold overnighters through the windows of the church lounge, when she spied the gentle, funny Vietnam vet I’ll call Spike. She and her friends had served him turkey at the Thanksgiving feast the neighborhood churches had laid out for Nickelsville, where the kids served and cleaned and cracked up at Spike’s knock-knock jokes.

Standing next to Spike was a guy I recognized from a talk he’d given to my daughter’s Sunday school class. A mechanical engineer, this man had found a job to which he -commuted from Nickelsville on foot, an hour-and-a-half each way. His home was a Winnie-the-Pooh tent. And yes, he told the kids, it was home. “I’ll bet you kids think homeless is a word for people who don’t have a building to sleep in, right?” he asked them. “To me, homeless describes anyone who doesn’t have a place where he is welcome. When I was your age, I wasn’t wanted in my own home. Then I was homeless. I’m not at Nickelsville.”

I wonder where that engineer is now, if he could possibly still be shoe-leathering it from Nickelsville’s current unauthorized encampment, a piece of Port of Seattle land in West Seattle. That’s where they are as I write this, anyway. In a couple of weeks, days after celebrating their one-year anniversary, the encampment will be “swept”—the city’s term for forcible removal—unless they find another site first. By the time you read this, Nickelsville might have disbanded altogether. It might have become the thorn in the side of some other municipality.

Or it could be causing some other church community to lie awake at night overturning its comfortable assumptions about what “getting to the root of the problem” really looks like.