The City of Issaquah has issued a permit to SHARE/WHEEL and the Community Church of Issaquah for Tent City4 for a stay beginning Saturday, August 11. Tent City4 is a self-managed homeless encampment of up to 100 people which moves around the eastside every 90 days. This will be Tent City4's first visit to this city, which supported the church's efforts to host the camp.

Tent City4 does not have an invitation to a new site along the I-90 corridor for mid-November, but supporters are working toward implementation of an "I-90 strategy," making several stops along the I-90 corridor before moving north. Short moves cause less disruption to the participants than long moves due to their dependence on public transportation to get to jobs and appointments, and because it's difficult to adjust to drastic moves away from familiar local services every three months.

The Mercer Island Clergy Association recently voted to invite Tent City4 to the island. The City of Mercer Island website acknowledges that other municipalities' attempts to stop religious organizations from hosting Tent City4 have failed in court because such groups have a constitutional right to practice their religion by doing so.

The refreshing attitude of the Mercer Island City government stands in contrast to the City of Bellevue's, which spent several hundred thousand dollars of taxpayers' money on Seattle attorney fees two years ago when Tent City4 was invited to Bellevue's Temple B'Nai Torah, in an apparent attempt to create a prohibitive homeless encampment ordinance. SHARE/WHEEL, (Seattle Housing and Resource Effort, composed of homeless and formerly homeless men and women, and Women's Housing, Equality, Enhancement League, working with homeless and formerly homeless women), later reached a mediated agreement with the City of Bellevue in federal court which allows Tent City4 to stay there once every 18 months in exchange for the City of Bellevue relaxing some of the more onerous conditions found in the original ordinance. --Peggy Hotes