RC Blog

Nickelsville plans standoff with Port of Seattle—after sleep-out at mayor’s

posted by Cydney Gillis on Monday, September 28 at 6:17pm

Tonight, as I write, homeless people organized by shelter and tent-city operator SHARE—the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort—are making their way to Mayor Greg Nickels’ house in West Seattle for an uninvited overnight on his sidewalk.

They’re unhappy because SHARE has run short of money to buy the bus tickets that the poorest of them depend on to get to and from their often-remote tent cities. Last year, SHARE asked the city for an extra $50,000 to fill the bus-pass gap it saw coming in its budget and the City Council wrote it down as an allocation. But, in a still-not-quite-explained turn of events, the allocation dematerialized somewhere between the doors of budget chair Jean Godden and the mayor’s office—likely, some assume, because SHARE and its fellow travelers at the tent city called Nickelsville annoy the hell out of his honor.

The sleep-over at the mayor’s house is to call attention to the fact that SHARE has now run out of bus tickets. It’s also a well-planned media lead-in, if you will, to the standoff that residents of Nickelsville are planning Wednesday when Port of Seattle police are expected to come and evict them from Terminal 107 Park.

The media blitz started Saturday with a birthday party at which the Nickelodeons celebrated the year that has passed since Sept. 22, 2008, when they first pitched a small sea of tiny pink tents in a state-owned field not far from their current site. Like all the sites the campers have moved to since, the port has told Nickelsville it has to go, giving it a final, incontrovertible deadline of Wednesday.

What happens then is anyone’s guess. At Saturday’s birthday party, the Nickelodeons said that they have no new site to move to this time and plan to stand their ground, which could mean another slew of civil-disobedience arrests like the ones that took place at the original site last October.

They are asking supporters to gather at the park anytime after 1 p.m. on Wednesday to stand with them—or help them move, as the case may be. To drive to Terminal 107 Park, take the West Seattle Bridge west to the Delridge exit and stay to the right for Spokane Street. Turn right onto Spokane Street and head to the Terminal 107 Park sign on the left at 4700 West Marginal Way S.W.

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