Sometime this summer the mayor of Seattle will have more than expensive condominiums and fancy office towers to grace the view from City Hall. In a press release sent out last week a group of homeless people announced they're setting up Nickelsville, a stationary community of between 250 and 1,000 people, somewhere within the city. According to the announcement, it will have simple homes, not tents, and healthy solutions to the sanitation and safety issues the city had criticized in what it called "unsanctioned" homeless encampments. Nickelsville, a practical and creative fix for the city's severe shortage of shelters, comes in response to the harmful policies the city likes to disguise as necessary to protect the public’s health and safety.

On April 11 the City of Seattle released its revised protocols for clearing homeless encampments. Loaded with trivial changes like increasing the warning time before a clearance from 48 to 72 hours, it fooled few in the homeless community. No matter how much you dress it up, there simply isn't anywhere for homeless people to go, and chasing them from place to place is unconscionable. Last June Isaac Palmer was killed when a Washington Department of Transportation mower's blade hit him in the head as he slept underneath I-5. A couple of weeks ago Bernard St. Clair was struck by a car as he tried to cross the interstate to get to an encampment. In 2007 forty-six homeless deaths occurred outside or through violence in King County, and so far this year there have been eleven. The creation of Nickelsville is a matter of survival.

Since last summer the city has stepped up its sweeps of homeless encampments, destroying and confiscating property and displacing homeless people at a time when the One Night Count of the Homeless in King County found over 2,600 people living on the streets, a 15 percent increase from last year. Mayor Nickels answered critics of the sweep protocols with a ludicrous offer to provide an additional 20 shelter beds. So much for the failing Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County, now in its third ineffectual year. Sadly, the Committee to End Homelessness, responsible for turning the plan into action, has yet to protest the city's encampment sweeps or the shortage of shelter space. Ignored are words in the introduction of the plan which specifically note the need to support "interim survival mechanisms" until there's enough housing for everyone.

There's money to provide more emergency shelter if the city will eliminate the wasteful "Safe Harbors" homeless information computer tracking system, which cost eight hundred thousand dollars to implement and will cost five hundred thousand dollars a year to maintain. This Orwellian program requires homeless people to divulge personal information for input into government-owned computers and be tracked in order to access services. Social service providers who want to get contracts must agree to use the system when they submit a proposal to the city. It's costly for taxpayers, time-consuming to use, and provides nothing remotely useful to those it tracks.

Given the circumstances, it's no surprise that Nickelsville is in the works. With the subprime mortgage crisis, shrinking availability of affordable housing, and the recession in full swing, Nickelsville doesn't seem so far-fetched an idea. The representative decision-making bodies of Seattle Housing and Resource Effort and the Women's Housing, Equality, Enhancement League (SHARE/WHEEL), the operators of 14 self-managed indoor shelters and two tent cities, have already voted to support the construction of Nickelsville.

Criminalizing homelessness by putting cameras in parks, adding park rangers, and making exclusionary park ordinances is further evidence of the city's attitude toward the homeless community.

Downtown, in Westlake Park, the city recently tore up the pavement to install bright spotlights beneath the park benches where homeless people sleep. The new lighting illuminates, with all the intensity of a supernova, the shameful behavior of Mayor Greg Nickels and the City of Seattle's Department of Inhumane Services.