Welcome to Nickelsville

With a wink and a nod, they call themselves the Nickelodeons. And for the past 10 weeks, they’ve been coming in growing numbers Wednesday mornings to the lobby of the Josephinum, a low-income housing building in downtown Seattle. 

Over Fruit Loops and Honey Smacks eaten from small Styrofoam bowls, the Nickelodeons, who are homeless, strategize about building a modern-day shantytown. They'll name it after Mayor Greg Nickels—a sort of backhanded tribute to the man whose administration has been kicking them out of the city's parks and greenbelts with increasing vigor, while at the same time hesitating to create new shelter space.

The meetings are run with such attention to process that this could just as easily be a gathering of city bureaucrats, save for the participants' disheveled appearance and the fact that sometimes someone will fall asleep at the table. The group is broken up into various subcommittees—public relations, legal, logistics, site selection. Each gives its report, and there's a sheet of white paper on the wall on which ideas are catalogued with a black Sharpie. Votes are taken, but only after a proposal's been moved and seconded. And anyone who speaks before they are recognized is gently reprimanded.

Today's discussion is about the importance of having Nickelsville emerge overnight as a community, one complete with its own barbershop, church, medical personnel, and social services. The idea is that the more self-sustaining it appears, the harder it will be for the mayor and his henchmen to bulldoze it.

One man asks if the place is going to be built to code, to which Craig Corey, who's leading the meeting, answers: "Code is the farthest thing from our minds. Code rhymes with cold, and we're against it." This elicits affirmative nods and some knowing chuckles around the table.

Corey, the Nickelodeons' stern yet affable chairman, often injects a goofy, grandfatherly brand of wisdom into the planning. He looks the part of spiritual guide, with round, wire-rimmed glasses, a Santa-length salt-and-pepper beard, and long black hair gently tucked into a ponytail. He came to Seattle six years ago from Kansas when his ex-wife moved their daughter here. He's been homeless most of this time, and lived for a while in West Seattle's Lincoln Park, where he says those with homes nearby would often offer him food. At 54, Corey suffers from emphysema and can't work because of a disability exacerbated by 30 years of driving truck. He walks with a cane and often coughs violently.

Today, the fundraising subcommittee reports good news. They've managed to raise some cash—about $200—from a car wash held in a parking lot on Aurora Avenue the previous week. Another organizer reports she's found a nonprofit, Veterans for Peace, to share its 501(c)(3) status with the Nickelodeons. But the trickiest task is finding a place to put Nickelsville. The site-selection process is a closely guarded secret, because the element of surprise is critical; it's one aspect of the plan that's rarely discussed openly among committee members. The effort was also stymied early on by the inability to secure a vehicle for scouting.

The energy behind Nickelsville is as much political as practical. "The purpose is to relieve the constipation of the political process," says organizer Caleb Poirier. With shaggy brown hair and an oversized checkered shirt, Poirier looks like your average kid a couple years out of college. He says he moved to Seattle from Ann Arbor, Mich., two years ago after severe depression landed him on the street and he no longer wanted to run into friends and family. "I wanted to go where no one knew my name," he explains.

Poirier describes himself and the other Nickelsville organizers as "high-functioning" homeless because of their ability to see beyond the basic needs of daily survival. But the shantytown isn't going to be limited to them. They're hoping for hundreds of people to help build and settle it on an unannounced late-summer night.

For now, Poirier, like many of the organizers, lives in one of the tent cities—roving, legal encampments run by the homeless and organized by Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE) and Women's Housing and Equality Enhancement League (WHEEL).

"There isn't a perfect solution to poverty," Poirier says. "So imperfect solutions [like Nickelsville] need to be entertained."

Though it took root this summer, the seed for Nickelsville was planted years ago with the creation of the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness. The idea, as the name suggests, is to end homelessness by building more permanent low-income housing, and to lead people toward self-sufficiency by weaning them (and cities) off stopgap measures like shelters. It's an idea that Nickels has bought into—and one that is arguably not working.

Spawned by the Bush administration, the initiative gives local governments that have adopted 10-year plans a better shot at McKinney-Vento dollars, competitive federal funds named for the late Reps. Stewart McKinney (R-Conn.) and Bruce Vento (D-Minn.). Most local jurisdictions rely on these funds to pay for transitional and permanent supportive housing for the homeless. King County in 2007 received more than $20 million in McKinney-Vento dollars. The objective is to build 9,500 new affordable and low-income units by 2015.