Tent City Showdown

Only a week before Seattle was faced with the prospect of three new homeless encampments popping up in city parks—and an inevitable battle among hundreds of homeless, homeowners, and Seattle police—something strange happened. The city of Seattle blinked. Or, more accurately, it punted.

It was a strange outcome and perhaps only a delay of an even stranger showdown between the city and the politically brazen group SHARE/WHEEL, organizer of the area's current two tent cities. At issue was a city promise to cut off $270,000 in city funding for the group's 14 indoor homeless shelters, which are scattered throughout the city, on April 1. Separate cuts would have also hit several other shelter providers in the city.

Late last week, city officials painted SHARE/WHEEL as a rogue organization that wouldn't cooperate with new city funding requirements for a computerized "homeless management" system and, thus, was bringing the cuts—or revenue shifts, as Mayor Greg Nickels' office spins them—upon itself.

But on Monday, March 20, the city extended SHARE/WHEEL's funding for another month—along with that of other shelter providers—and avoided what would have been a political mess for Nickels and the City Council. It would have been an odd move on the city's part, implementing the region's 10-year plan to end homelessness by going after the very group that, in essence, forced local politicians to find the will to end homelessness.

The fracas isn't the result of anything SHARE/WHEEL has done wrong in running its 14 small homeless shelters and two tent cities. It's because of what the group won't do under new city funding rules: provide clients' identities to the government.

Both sides have valid points—and both sides are taking turns being equally strident and equally foolish. SHARE/WHEEL houses 250 people a night in indoor shelters, according to the group, and the city has no answers for where they would be housed once SHARE/WHEEL is cut off.

The city wants to create a computer tracking system, required under federal regulations, to determine whether the city's $6.6 million investment in shelter and transitional services is producing results. The move is at the heart of the city's shift from providing the homeless with mats on the floor of a traditional shelter to providing the homeless with transitional and permanent housing.

But for members of SHARE/WHEEL, the regulations smack of an invasion of privacy and, more broadly, an assault on their model of the homeless solving their problems through self-management.

"To give up my civil rights if I want to have any housing or health care, that's not right," says Leo Rhodes, a SHARE/WHEEL member.

Such talk may sound odd to citizens accustomed to handing over identifiers like their Social Security number for each visit to a doctor's office. But Rhodes and others claim they've lost jobs once employers found out they were homeless.

"A lot of homeless people don't want to be identified as homeless," he says. "If you are struggling to get out of homelessness, then you don't want to be stereotyped as being drunk, a druggie, mentally ill, or lazy."

"SHARE/WHEEL leadership is making a big mistake," says City Council member Tom Rasmussen.

But SHARE/WHEEL has always been a different organization, one that has long been willing to battle homelessness on its own terms even if it means being forced into the cold. As for the city, it's defending a computer system that some shelter providers say isn't fully functional and won't be until later this year.

Founded in 1990, SHARE/WHEEL was begun, as were similar groups across the nation, to address the lack of shelter beds in cities like Seattle. The homeless still die on the streets of King County. In 2004, 82 died, according to the King County Medical Examiner. SHARE/WHEEL claims that 56 homeless died last year.

The group's leaders believe that if the homeless are given consistent shelter, they can transition into their own long-term housing. The group also contends that it offers members the dignity, individuality, and anonymity that is missing from human-service agencies dominated by professional social workers.

Organized by Scott Morrow and Michele Marchand, the group's first forays were low-tech. In the early 1990s, the group ran a shelter in a SoDo warehouse. But SHARE/WHEEL is best known for a series of tent cities—housing and political statement all in one—that the group has run over the years, often at odds with government officials. In 1998, Tent City 2 on Beacon Hill was bulldozed by the city. Two years later, the group was back in the tent city business, openly defying the city's ban on public camping. This time, the city went to court. In 2003, SHARE/WHEEL and the city reached an agreement that allowed the group to operate one encampment as long as it wasn't in a city park.

For a time, there was peace between the city and SHARE/WHEEL. The group gained a reputation for running the largely trouble-free Tent City 3, which moved every three months between vacant fields in the city and suburbs like Shoreline. Even the Seattle Police Department and King County Sheriff's Office admitted that they were impressed with the operations.