In their own words: “It doesn’t make Seattle look bad, it makes the system look bad”
At 65, Michael has seen a lot. He grew up in Connecticut, where his Irish family hosted a lot of interesting visitors from overseas.
“I grew up with IRA bombers hiding out in our house. Shit like that. Wake up and you never know, there’s some guy in the backyard drunk as a skunk and he just blew up the Thames bridge or whatever in London,” he said, referencing the Irish Republican Army, which fought to make Ireland independent from Britain.
His godfather, Louis “The Barber” Franco — an actual barber, among other things — was Italian. When Michael was a little kid, he’d spend Sundays riding around in the backseat of Franco’s enormous Cadillac, stopping at various bodegas to drop off packages wrapped in brown paper.
“He’d say, ‘Okay Mike this one’s a two.’ We’d go by these bodegas and he’d roll the window down and I’d throw the two packages out. The guy would be out there catching them like footballs. We’d go to the next one and he’d say, ‘Hey Mike, this one’s a big, he come to the window,’” Michael said.
When he was 17, Michael finally found out what was really in the packages: heroin. To get away from the colorful life that almost surely awaited him in the family business, he joined the Navy.
After that, he was back on the East Coast for a while, where he learned carpentry. Then, he and his girlfriend at the time decided to help his dying mother relocate to Cancun, Mexico, where the pair had done a good bit of vacationing. That didn’t really pan out, and his girlfriend decided she didn’t like Mexico. Michael did, though, and he stayed there on his own for three years, leaving only when an American couple he’d met there convinced him to come remodel their house in Orange County, California.
At some point during his time in Mexico he lost his ID, so his new friends had to get creative to get him back into the United States. He crossed the border at 2:30 a.m., tucked under a blanket in the backseat of an SUV. He finished the remodel, reconnected with his girlfriend, married her and carried on working as a master carpenter, specializing in the very complex task of building staircases.
Eventually they split. In 2018 he was lured away to help a friend who ran a salmon boat in Alaska. His friend’s son had hurt his back in a crane accident, leaving the boat short-handed.
“Him and I lobstered together back East when we were kids,” Michael said, specifying that he was more motivated by loyalty than money. “I’m 65, I can count my friends on less than one hand, and he’s one of them.”
It’s a good thing he wasn’t in it for the money, because the season was a particularly bad one. He came back a bit early and, like so many other people who have ended up in Seattle after a fishing season, he ended up staying. But not exactly by choice. He arrived with $200 cash, no cell phone and a check for $7,000 from the Taiwanese owner of the vessel his friend captained. To make matters worse, it was fleet week, so there wasn’t a hotel room to be found in the city.
That’s when his slow creep towards homelessness began. He found out about the Emerald Motel on Aurora from a Lyft driver, who took him there, where he got a room for $70 a night. The hotel didn’t last, for a variety of reasons, but luckily his Lyft driver friend had given him his contact information. His driver friend agreed to let Michael crash on the couch for a bit, which brought him to Third Avenue and Bell Street in Belltown. One night, his friend forgot to leave the key out, and Michael ended up sleeping on the roof of the building. This, apparently, was the one thing he was not supposed to do, and his friend instantly kicked him out.
“Now I’m stranded. I don’t know anybody’s phone number because I lost my cell phone between Alaska and here. I’m borrowing people’s phones to Google to find businesses in Southern California where I knew friends of mine would go for coffee or tools or whatever. Of course, nobody got back to me,” he said.
That left the shelter system.
“I stayed at the Mission place on Main or Washington, whatever it is, for one night,” he said. “Couldn’t take that. Went to the one down by the Coast Guard station and did that for a little bit, about a week. And then I got bit by bed bugs and I was like, ‘Fuck this.’ I’d rather sleep on the street; at least I can see the rats coming and fight ‘em off. Bedbugs, there’s nothing you can do about it. Plus, you’re sleeping on the floor next to 200 people. Nasty.”
From there, he started sleeping in city parks and on late-night buses. One day, he heard about a day labor agency, where he figured he could get some decent money, given his carpentry skills. Turns out, you need your own tools, at least basic ones, so he ended up doing a lot of laborer jobs at $13 an hour. On the plus side, he said, he got paid daily — about $109 — allowing him to upgrade from the night bus to a bunk in the City Hostel on Second Avenue and Bell Street. After food and the two beers he had to buy to cash his paycheck at Joe’s, a dive bar across from the International District light rail stop, he had enough leftover to save for tools. He got the cheapest ones on the shelf at Lowe’s, went back to the day labor agency and got his first carpentry gig, making $23 an hour on a project for a major local construction company.
“By the end of the day, they bought out my contract with the labor service and hired me and started paying me $43 an hour. It was great. Everything went uphill from there,” he said.
After bouncing around a couple less-than-ideal housing situations, he ended up in a house in White Center. He said he was mostly happy with it. He kept working hard at the construction company, bought himself a truck and eventually struck out on his own, meeting a growing demand for residential construction work in West Seattle.
The arrival of COVID-19 changed everything. When the eviction moratorium hit, one of his two roommates stopped paying rent. The other one kept paying but moved in with his girlfriend a few months later. The landlord, a snowbird who lived in Arizona for most of the year, decided it was less trouble to just sell the place. The news that he would have to leave came at a particularly rough time for Michael, who hated not being able to work and support himself.
“I couldn’t do anything. I’m used to doing things. My whole life I worked. My old man was always like, ‘You can walk — you get your ass out of bed and go to work.’ I’ve been working since I was 13,” he said. As for unemployment, he said, “I probably could have filed because of working for those companies, but I’ve never collected unemployment a day in my life. [...] I just wasn’t brought up that way.”
While he probably could have scraped together some money for another room somewhere, he said, he decided that it wasn’t worth it. Instead, he decided to go back to the street, moving into his friend’s encampment up the hill from Little Saigon. When workers at Yesler Terrace told the campers that they needed to dig up the area to install underground pipes and wiring, the group packed up and moved across the freeway. The camp is well appointed by street standards, with several 50-gallon water drums and a few fully enclosed cabins nestled amongst the tents.
“We had been doing a little research, and we found this spot. It used to be a camp years ago, and nobody has been there for years. It’s the best camp in the Jungle, hands down,” he said, referencing an extensive network of encampments that was swept in 2017.
His decision to return to the street turned out to be prescient, actually, as he wouldn’t have been able to support himself for much longer.
Michael was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer shortly after moving to the encampment. While his lung capacity has left him — at his last doctor’s appointment they said he was down to 40 percent — his humor hasn’t: He joked that he was happy in a tent, because he wouldn’t be around long enough to need an apartment. His energy levels are so low, he said, that if “I put my head more than 45 degrees to the side, I’ll fall asleep.”
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t build the cabins, but he did lend his expertise to the project. While some of his friends’ building methods cause him to question how they still have fingers and hands, he said, he’s let his own perfectionism go when it comes to street structures.
“Stuff that gets built in the Jungle is pretty amazing garbage, but it’s functional for what they need and they’re happy with it. I think they kind of realize that this is all disposable anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.
“That’s the sad thing,” he said.
He’s not wrong: someone from the city came by a week or two ago to say they’d be sweeping the camp soon. It’s a shame, he said. He doesn’t feel like they’re causing anyone any problems.
Besides the person who told the campers they’d be swept, Michael added, he hasn’t interacted directly with any outreach workers and he definitely doesn’t have a caseworker. The city’s HOPE team comes by sometimes with sack lunches and blankets and will walk up in the camp to say they’re parked nearby, but that’s it.
“To hear the powers that be tell it, it sounds like there’s all this availability for housing and there’s all these funds available or whatever, but it’s not getting to the people who need it. Where is it going?” he asked. From the Starbucks patio where he’s enjoying a Camel and coffee — no reason not to at this point — he points out all the vacant apartments in a new building next to Uwajimaya, asking, “Why are people living in the street?”
He suggested that the city could set up a one-stop shop where homeless people could get help with everything they need, from food stamps to new IDs to housing. He did not say how to provide that housing but hinted that building more market-rate housing wasn’t going to do it.
“There’s a glut of inventory here in Seattle, but yet rents haven’t come down,” he said, suggesting that it was time to do something with the city’s vacant units.
His previous bit of black humor aside, would Michael want housing, if he could get it? The camp, he said, is better than any shelter, even one with cubicles. But, while the camp is “working out okay,” it’s not where he wants to spend the rest of his days.
“I’ve managed to hang in there for a year. But I’m tired. Besides just not feeling good, I’m tired. I need to just… I need to rest,” he said. It’s not easy though, which is his chief complaint about the city’s homelessness services. He got his birth certificate, thanks to Catholic Family Services, but still can’t get an ID. He has a working phone and has tried calling 211 a couple times, but all they do is connect him to third parties for assistance.
“They refer you to whatever corporation or whatever. Then you’ve got to deal with the corporation, and it’s this constant grind. It shouldn’t be a grind,” he said. While he isn’t a huge fan of the VA’s medical system, Michael said he’s heard good things about the homeless veterans assistance programs and is just about ready to give it a try.
“I’m thinking about it this week,” he said. “Just because this sweep thing is overwhelming. You move enough times, or your friends move enough times and you’re helping them. I don’t want to move any more. I want to move one more time and just be somewhere. Get up and take a shower instead of having to boil water. I mean, I wash my ass every day! I live in the Jungle, but you don’t have to be an animal, you know?”
He said the city did get one thing right: putting a mobile shower truck at King Street Station. He had less kind words for the decision to take it away. Either way, he pointed out that there’s a lot more to do. In the meantime, he said, sweeps serve only to highlight the failure to do that.
“We live near a park: we help the Parks Department people keep it clean. We keep our place clean and keep away from anyone enjoying the park,” he said. “Who cares if people can see us on the way to and from work? It really ‘makes Seattle look bad’? No. It doesn’t make Seattle look bad: it makes the system look bad.
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue was the associate editor at Real Change through October 2023.
Read more of the June 29-July 5, 2022 issue.